Pupils Evacuated After Warning at Nuclear Plant

In the first nuclear-related evacuation since the Three Mile Island accident of 1979, a Tennessee school district sent all 1,800 pupils home on Tuesday morning because operators at a nearby nuclear reactor believed they might have had a leak of radioactive cooling water inside the plant.

The operators, at the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant, owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority, decided around 6:15 a.m. that instruments indicated a possible leak and declared an

The school district is in Meigs County, about halfway between Knoxville and Chattanooga.

A T.V.A. spokesman, Gil Francis, said: