The concrete cooling towers looming eerily in the dusk on this week's cover belong to the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant complex outside Harrisburg, Pa., site of the most serious accident in the relatively brief history of nuclear power. TIME dispatched three correspondents and a staff photographer to the stricken area, and their reports and pictures, along with files from our bureaus across the nation, were woven by Senior Writer Ed Magnuson into a story that not only reconstructs the accident in detail, but also assesses its consequences for the future of nuclear power and for U.S. energy policy as a whole.

First on the scene from TIME was Peter Stoler, who wrote for the magazine's Science and Environment sections before he became a New York City-based correspondent in 1977. Accompanied by Photographer Bill Pierce, Stoler began the assignment with an early-morning high-speed drive on a rainswept turnpike to Harrisburg. For the next three days, Stoler interviewed plant workers, area residents and protesters, and visited the Pennsylvania Governor's offices, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission vania Governor's offices, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission control van parked on a knoll directly across the Susquehanna River from the plant and a refugee center set up in an amusement park. "I don't know how much radiation I've absorbed," says Stoler, "but I was standing across the river from the plant while, unbeknownst to me, it was emitting radioactive gases into the environment."

For New York Bureau Chief Donald Neff, who arrived a day later with Correspondent John Tompkins, it was a troubling journey. "As a child," he explains, "I used to spend my summers in Goldsboro, a small town just across the river from Three Mile Island, and I remember roaming the island in search of Indian arrowheads and swimming from its shores. My mother, sister and other relatives still live in the area. For the first time in years, I was gazing at Three Mile again, sensing now more than just its mystery. For the first time the island, with its cooling towers, was ominous and frightening--something it had never been before."

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