The demonstrations and mass arrests are over, and Fred Kling is sitting on the bench in front of Roth`s furniture store watching the cars roll by on Union Street.
It`s quiet now in Middletown, which is a few miles from the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant where 82 antinuclear protestors were arrested Wednesday.
About 250 demonstrators flocked to the power station in anger at a ruling by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission hours earlier allowing restart of a reactor that was shut down six years ago.
”I`m so gosh-darned tired of hearing about Three Mile Island,” Kling said Thursday. ”Start it up or shut it down, I`m sick of it.”
Middletowners get the brunt of public attention when anything happens at Three Mile Island, the site of the nation`s worst commercial nuclear power plant accident in March, 1979, when 50,000 people fled radioactive steam and gases that were released into the atmosphere for several days.
Television crews prowl the streets asking people what they think. The stress of living next to the world`s symbol for nuclear danger is bad enough, but now Middletown is becoming a battleground as protesters make plans to take a stand here against nuclear power.
”There`s more strangers bothered by it than people living right here,”
contends Kling, although Three Mile Island always has been a controversial topic even in Middletown.
The Three Mile Island nuclear plant has twin reactors. One of them is a radioactive wreck, irreparably damaged when a combination of human and mechanical errors caused dangerous overheating and a near-meltdown of the reactor`s radioactive core. Most of the controversy over the last six years centered on cleaning up the radioactivity released in the accident.
The undamaged sister reactor stood idle all that time, waiting for NRC approval to go back into operation. Now that the NRC has acted, the undamaged reactor is the center of controversy.
Beane Klaher, a local jewleer, said the undamaged reactor ”should have started the day after the accident.”
Donald Cole occupies the bench right in front of the gray stone Middletown burough hall, scene of chaotic press conferences while the 1979 accident was happening and major loss of life seemed imminent.
”You can shut it up, as far as I`m concerned,” said Cole of the station. ”It`s too populated here for nuclear power.”
Meanwhile, memories for some have faded, some residents of the area have moved and new people have moved in.
Heidi Ewbank, 20, was a Pittsburgh student in 1979. Today she is pushing a one-year-old daughter down Union Street in a stroller.
”It doesn`t bother me,” she says of the accident`s continuing echo in the public mind. ”It was in the past, and you have to go ahead.”
But not all residents are so forgiving. Brian Hunt was among the 82 arrested Wednesday and charged with obstructing a public road when he tried to block the gate to the plant. He also is a member of Three Mile Island Alert, a Harrisburg antinuclear group.
”We showed (Wednesday) that we know how to hit back,” said Hunt. ”We are now shifting the struggle from the kangaroo court of the NRC to a real court. The NRC is shown to be biased. We took off the gloves.”
Minutes after the NRC ruling, TMI Alert filed a petition asking a federal appeals court in Philadelphia to block the NRC order. The governor of Pennsylvania, Dick Thornburgh, filed a similar petition, saying the NRC action was ”premature and irresponsible.”
”We will show the courts they are dealing with an issue of state`s rights and the right of a state to self-determination,” Hunt said.
