Senior Correspondent Peter Stoler, who wrote this week's cover story on the troubles of the nuclear industry, has a rare firsthand knowledge of the subject, including some hands-on experience running a reactor. During simulated exercises in 1980 at a training center for technicians in Morris, Ill., Stoler recalls, "I undertook a routine drill to bring the reactor back on line. It was supposed to be gradual, but I brought it along too fast and overheated it. If it had been a real reactor, I'd have melted it down."

The watershed event for both Stoler and the nuclear industry was the potentially disastrous March 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania. Stoler, who has reported or written most of TIME'S stories on nuclear power in recent years, was one of the first correspondents to reach the scene. Talking to plant officials and technicians, he calculated that the reactor had come within 45 minutes of a real meltdown. Though he was unable at that time to get independent verification, a commission of inquiry later confirmed that he had been frighteningly right. "I had been a nuclear believer," says Stoler. "I had just seen the film The China Syndrome, and called it farfetched because the chances seemed infinitesimal that so many things could go wrong and in the necessary sequence. A week later I was in Harrisburg, with a line from the film running through my head: 'If this thing melts down, it will render an area the size of Pennsylvania permanently uninhabitable.' "

Stoler's nuclear expertise was augmented last week by reports from several TIME correspondents. Los Angeles' Joseph Kane, who covered the West Coast's problems, also was on hand five years ago for the Three Mile Island accident, interviewing frightened citizens living in the shadow of the cooling towers. Barbara Dolan talked with officials at several Southern utility companies who remain staunchly pro-nuclear despite current problems. Chicago's J. Madeleine Nash interviewed officials of newly canceled Midwestern nuclear plants. Jay Branegan, TIME'S Washington-based specialist on energy and the environment, interviewed Energy Department officials and members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Says he: "It is startling to see how much the nuclear story has changed in a decade. We have gone from a state of success and exuberance to one of struggle and concern." Stoler believes the problems are critical, but not terminal. Says he: "The nuclear industry is not dead, nor should it be. We are going to need it."