William Scranton
William Scranton
William Warren "Bill" Scrantonwas an American Republican Party politician. Scranton served as the 38th Governor of Pennsylvania from 1963 to 1967. From 1976 to 1977, he served as United States Ambassador to the United Nations...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth19 July 1917
CountryUnited States of America
knew looked none power
None of us knew what this power plant looked like. We had no schematic drawing.
breach none odious
None of us are nuclear experts, but we know that if there is a melt-down and breach of containment, that's clearly the most odious thing that could happen.
coming people power
I mean, obviously, people don't like to know that somebody's venting that, but you have sulfur dioxide coming out of power plants.
coal mines public research schools trade
The public schools, trade schools and research schools, these are the coal mines of the 21st century,
donated freely front island microphone whoever
What is going on on the island is encouraging a cacophony of opinion, freely donated by whoever has a microphone in front of their mouth.
danger discern learn limits quickly tried whether
So very quickly we tried to learn what those allowable limits were and discern whether there was danger of those limits being breached.
bring creating experience knowledge table
So what I bring to the table is a knowledge and experience at creating opportunity,
oxygen protected
You're in an unfriendly, to say the least, atmosphere, so you have to be completely protected from it, from every molecule of oxygen that's there.
clearly hard insofar top
These were professionals who were clearly working hard to get on top of things and were doing that, at least insofar as they could.
anchor gather happened initially news reporters trying
So, I was in a sense like a news anchor while reporters were out there trying to gather the information. That's what happened initially anyway.
amount enormous generates plans talking unknown
We were talking about radiation, which generates an enormous amount of fear. This was unknown and so there were no plans for that.
cut government increasing instead state taxes
We need to cut taxes instead of increasing taxes and put the state government on a diet,
considered core source
Obviously, I'm not looking in the core of the reactor, but I am looking at what, at that time, was considered the source of the trouble, which was the water and where it was.
edison information needed rely
And it was at that point that I realized, in fact, our whole administration realized, that we could not rely on Metropolitan Edison for the kind of information we needed to make decisions.