In the summer of 1982 when I joined the news staff of the Philadelphia Inquirer, I was called into Jim Naughton’s office to discuss my assignments. Naughton was one of the paper’s top editors and he played a key role in making decisions about the paper’s news coverage.

“You’re covering TMI,” he said. “It’s still a very important story.”

Indeed, it was. The Inquirer had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1980 for its comprehensive coverage of the accident at the Three Mile Island Unit 2 power plant. The paper’s investigative reporting about the accident had earned for its staff and the paper a national reputation.

News about the accident and its aftermath still filled the paper and the air waves.
Almost every day there were stories about the continuing state and federal investigations, the financial impact of the accident on the nuclear power industry and the ongoing lawsuits that had been filed against the power plant’s owner, the Metropolitan Edison Company.

I decided to take an in-depth look at the $1 billion cleanup of the crippled reactor. The company was using robots and other high-tech experimental devices to enter the plant’s highly radioactive core. It seemed like a fascinating, technical story that played to my strengths as a science and environmental journalist.

It wasn’t long, however, that the cleanup became engulfed in controversy. During the spring of 1983 two of the engineers and managers involved in the cleanup publicly criticized the company for taking shortcuts, which they said violated safety rules and threatened the public’s health.

I began looking into these allegations along with another reporter, Susan FitzGerald. We drove 100 miles from Philadelphia to Middletown, PA., where TMI was located, to begin interviewing the whistleblowers, Larry King and Richard Parks. Both men made strong charges of mismanagement against the company. But Met Ed officials denied the charges. Who was telling the truth?

Susan and I filed extensive Freedom of Information Act requests with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the Department of Energy and other federal agencies involved in the cleanup. We also began meeting with unions, which represented the electricians, pipefitters, atomic workers, laborers and other worker groups.

Many of the workers were fearful of speaking publicly because they worried about losing their jobs. But privately, their tales were shocking. The talked about how workers were routinely “crapped up” — or contaminated with radioactive debris. They described how protective gear had frequently malfunctioned. They discussed how some workers had been ordered not to wear respirators and as a result had breathed in highly radioactive particles.

Susan and I were given permission to review some of the NRC’s health and safety files that were kept on site at Three Mile Island. Susan and I systematically began reading these files. An NRC inspector later told us that he expected we’d spend a few days at the most examining these files. In fact, we came back day after day for about three months.

These files described numerous violations of safety procedures at TMI. But the records contained no names because of privacy concerns. We began interviewing laborers — the workers who scrubbed down the walls of radioactive particles — and they verified many of the accounts described in the NRC files. We visited workers at their homes in the evenings and weekends. While many refused to talk to us, many others did. Slowly but surely we were able to piece together vivid stories about significant safety failures in the cleanup.

When our three-part series containing 30,000 words was published in February 1985, the articles triggered outrage by many workers and local citizens. We documented more than 600 incidents in which workers had been contaminated with radioactive debris. We described an instance in which radioactive workers were rushed to a local hospital for treatment. But because nobody told the hospitals that the workers were contaminated, radioactive debris was spread throughout the hospital.

Metropolitan Edison officials launched a major public relations campaign to discredit the articles. They attacked Susan and I and said the newspaper was being alarmist. They held press conferences and took out full-page ads to criticize the stories. They threatened to sue the newspaper for libel but disputed none of the information in the articles.

The articles brought about significant changes in safety policies at the plant, according to several TMI workers. Met Ed never sued the newspaper. And the Inquirer won a variety of journalism awards for the series, including the nation’s top prize for environmental reporting, the Edward J. Meeman Award.