Dr. Michael Lowe, a nuclear engineer and former manager of the Three Mile Island nuclear generating station, has always considered the near catastrophic meltdown a personal failure. So when his superiors offer him an unusually large financial package to supervise the rebuilding of the nuclear plant, he convinces his wife to forestall their retirement and pick up where they left off many years earlier in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. But soon after the Lowes return, a radiation biologist who has also been added to the TMI staff begins to voice grave concerns about what is really going on under the guise of reconstructing the plant. Michael chooses to ignore what he considers the paranoid ranting of a young, inexperienced biologist and continues with the operation. Only after the sudden deaths of several local residents are blamed on a mysterious outbreak of rabies, then the horribly disfigured body of a former employee is discovered in a local marsh, and finally the introduction of military security at the plant, does Lowe begin to confront his potentially fatal mistake. Then it quickly becomes a race against time to stop a biological nightmare of catastrophic proportions.