PENNSYLVANIA For Three Mile Island plaintiffs, legal action is over, lawyers say

HARRISBURG (AP) -- Attorneys for 1,990 plaintiffs who alleged that their health was damaged by the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant say their legal action is over, nearly two dozen years after the reactor meltdown.
Earlier this month, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals refused to hear an appeal of a lower-court decision granting summary dismissal of the claims against former TMI owner General Public Utilities Corp. and related defendants.
"There's nothing more that can be done to proceed with them, essentially," said Harrisburg attorney Lee C. Swartz, who has been co-counsel for the plaintiffs from the beginning. "We doubt the U.S. Supreme Court would agree to hear the case."
No other major litigation remains from the March 28-April 1, 1979, accident at TMI. It remains the nation's worst commercial nuclear accident.
The plaintiffs said their health was harmed by radiation that escaped from the damaged TMI-2 plant for several days before the reactor was brought under control. An estimated 100,000 people fled the region during the crisis.
What officials say
GPU and Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials have maintained that not enough radiation was released to cause adverse health effects, but some doctors as well as anti-nuclear activists argued that that was unclear.
In 1990, a Columbia University study concluded that the reported exposure levels were too low to have caused increased lung cancer and leukemia cases near the plant, which is on the Susquehanna River, about 10 miles south of Harrisburg.
But a later study by Dr. Stephen Wing and others at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill School of Public Health used the same data and concluded that "downwind" areas during the 1979 accident had increased cancer rates. Wing conceded that his study did not prove more potent radiation releases, but said there was little else that would explain the higher cancer rates.
A spokesman for a watchdog group that monitors Three Mile Island vowed Thursday that the group "will continue to pursue and track radiogenic cancers.
"While this is a setback, I believe we'll endure and prevail, probably when I'm a very old man," TMI Alert spokesman Eric Epstein.
Some plaintiffs move on
Two of the plaintiffs were Terry L. Koller of Dover Township and his wife, Joanne, who was pregnant when the TMI radiation plume drifted across the Susquehanna River. Their daughter, Abigayle, was born with deformed feet Aug. 12, 1979, and they filed suit in 1986.
Koller said he and his wife have known that the case was "dead in the water." Their daughter, who underwent two operations as a child, played basketball in high school and college and now does mission work.
"We have moved on with our life," he said. "She has moved on with hers. We're not thinking about the past. The Lord gave her abilities in other ways."
GPU and its insurers settled the first round of lawsuits in 1985 for $25 million. At the time, the company was seeking permission from the NRC and the courts to restart the undamaged TMI Unit 1 reactor.