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Twenty-five years after the tragic runaway fission and fire at Chernobyl , tons of concrete shield workers and visitors from the dangerously radioactive puddle of melted fuel that lurks in the basement of the building housing reactor No. 4. Similarly, more than 30 years after the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, concrete shaved 2.5 centimeters deep guards a hollow reactor vessel, its partially melted down fuel rods having been taken out over the course of a decade and shipped to Idaho National Laboratory (INL) for study

The current nuclear crisis in Japan has reminded many Americans of the 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. Elaine Quijano looks back at what really happened.

By Kiyoshi Takenaka and Yoko Nishikawa TOKYO, March 19 (Reuters) - Exhausted engineers scrambled to fix a power cable to two reactors at Japan's tsunami-crippled nuclear station on Saturday in a race to prevent deadly radiation from an accident now rated at least as bad as America's Three Mile Island in 1979. [More]

* Radiation echoes Three Mile Island, but no meltdown yet * Stricken reactor dates from 1970s, newer models "safer" [More]