A Three Mile Island Primer

• Scott Detrow
  BioRecent Stories

  

  Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.
  
  Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.
  
  Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

The Three Mile Island nuclear crisis began 33 years ago today. Since that’s not a round number, the anniversary hasn’t gotten much attention.
But if you’re looking for more information on Pennsylvania – and America’s – worst nuclear crisis, look no further. Here are five comprehensive reports about what happened at the Dauphin County nuclear reactor on March 28, 1979.

• On the accident’s thirtieth anniversary, the New York Times took a look at how the Three Mile Island disaster reshaped America’s nuclear power industry.
• The Washington Post published an exhaustive 14-part special report on Three Mile Island in 1979.
• A 1999 PBS Documentary focused on the Three Mile Island accident. You can read a transcript here, and watch the first part of the American Experience program below:

• Shortly after last year’s Fukushima Daiichi meltdown, NPR compared and contrasted the world’s three most prominent nuclear disasters: Fukushima, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island.
• Weekend Edition provided detailed coverage of Three Mile Island’s legacy on the accident’s 30th anniversary.

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