By Thursday morning, we'd gotten over the worst of it.

And if you're not going to have a clear health threat, you don't want to panic people.

The first one, obviously, was walking into my office at eight o'clock in the morning on Wednesday, and being told there was a telephone call saying that there was an incident at Three Mile Island, and that it had shut down and that beyond that we didn't know.

Another very strong image from the first day was giving my initial press conference in the morning - going down and finding out that everything I had said, the essence of what I had said, was wrong.

By Thursday morning, we'd gotten over the worst of it.

There were schools and hospitals who were ready to take people with undescribed injuries, but not necessarily ready to take people with severe radiation poisoning.

And I remember walking in there and, I must say, I was quite unnerved the closer I got to it.