You need a graphic understanding of a situation to make a complete judgment and we didn't have that.

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.

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.

My time inside there was very short compared to the amount of time it took to take on and take off this suit and to test me for how much radioactivity I have.

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

You need a graphic understanding of a situation to make a complete judgment and we didn't have that.

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