Katherine Sullivan

That's just over a tenth of the number officials hoped for.

Today, there are 94.

So what happened?

Victor Galinsky is a nuclear physicist.

He worked on nuclear policy under Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter and Reagan.

He first started working in government in 1971.

His job was to review licenses for new reactors.

He said there was a lot of pressure to approve reactors quickly.

A New York Times investigation in 1974 found that in just the previous year alone, the government found over 3,000 safety violations at nuclear power plants.

But they only imposed penalties eight times.

Critics, like consumer advocate and future presidential candidate Ralph Nader, said that the government put the commercial interests of the industry over safety.

When we come back, the accident that nobody thought could happen, happens.

On March 28, 1979, Victor Galinsky arrived at his office in Washington, D.C.

He'd been appointed as a commissioner of a new independent government agency called the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or the NRC.

The NRC's job was to oversee the safety of the country's nuclear power reactors.

Operators at Three Mile Island had called in an emergency around 8 a.m.

that morning.

The plant was home to two reactors operated by a company called Metropolitan Edison.

And that day, something went wrong.

Galinsky wasn't getting a lot of information from the workers on site.