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Dr. Gofman was chief of health research at the Atomic Energy Commission. But he discovered that regular radiation emissions from America’s nukes would kill 32,000 citizens per year, even without an accident or terror attack.

The industry demanded Gofman change his findings. When he refused, he was fired. He spent the rest of his life warning that Americans were being killed every day by the ever-growing fleet of US reactors.

Official statistics showed a huge jump in infant death rates in Harrisburg in the three months after the accident compared to the numbers for the previous two years. State statistics showing heightened cancer rates were quickly altered. The state’s tumor registry was abolished. Evidence showing downwind health effects was suppressed.

But an investigative team from the Baltimore News-Herald uncovered a massive epidemic of death and disease among the area’s farm and wild animals.

In early 1980, I reported from ground zero on a ghastly epidemic of human death and disease. Based on a horrifying series of house-to-house interviews, I found cancer, heart attacks, respiratory problems, skin lesions, cataracts, a metallic taste in the mouth, hair loss, birth defects and everything else you’d expect from a major radiation release was everywhere to be found.

With three other researchers, I spent two years investigating these and other parallel epidemics at nuclear facilities throughout the United States. Our findings were published in 1982 by Dell/Delta in a book called Killing Our Own that showed a similar death toll throughout the nuclear fuel cycle—especially at uranium mines, mills and enrichment facilities—and at weapons production plants, waste storage pools and much more.

At TMI, 2400 central Pennsylvania families filed a class action lawsuit seeking justice. But the federal courts have never allowed their case to be heard.

Studies by Steven Wing of the University of North Carolina have confirmed the TMI death toll.

I was in kindergarten in Middletown, PA on the morning of the Three Mile Island accident (well, waiting to go to afternoon kindergarten) and then lived for twenty years in Middletown (a mile down from the plant).

I’ve never seen data for the following: cancer rates for people who were downwind of the radioactive bubble (”hydrogen bubble” it was called at the time) that the plant released, and cancer rates for people who worked in the plant during the accident and, especially, those who worked to “clean up” the damaged reactor (a job title referred to as a “sponge” locally - could only work a a “sponge” for x amount of months due to radiation concerns) in the coming decade.

Anecdotally, there are a lot of workers from T.M.I who have developed cancer and/or since passed away from cancer.