Dauphin County, Pa. - Less than one month after shutting down operations to install new steam generators, TMI is cleaning up a radiation leak inside its reactor building.

"Obviously this was an unexpected event," said Ralph DeSantis, spokesperson for TMI.

As workers cleaned the site on Sunday morning, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or NRC, was reviewing how TMI handled the incident.

According to John White, NRC Region 1, "There's been nothing that we found that indicates that public health and safety was ever in jeopardy."

It was a different experience for workers. They were removing one of the old steam generators when a radiation alarm sounded. According to TMI, about 150 people were inside the building. The NRC said about 20 people were contaminated.

"Just a small handful of people received any contamination and the levels they did get were below regulatory limits. They were small," said DeSantis.

White said, "Based in the information we've seen today, while there were some exposures there, none of those exposures approached the NRC regulatory limit."

Local officials expressed relief that the contamination was contained to an isolated area at Three Mile Island. They did, however, voice concern that it took TMI more than four hours to notify them about the incident.

"This didn't reach any thresholds reporting, but it was a courtesy notice to us," said David Allard, Director of the Bureau of Radiation Protection. "It could have been more timely."

Middletown Mayor Robert Reid told abc27, "I think things were handled properly. We could have been notified sooner, but like I said they had to work out some things themselves to find out was going on."

TMI said their response was appropriate.

"We always look at what we do and how can improve things and we'll look at that. We'll look and see how we can improve our process," DeSantis said. "But it's important to know that last night's event was not even close to any threshold that would require us to make a notification through our emergency plan."

The NRC will continue its investigation. TMI will do the same. Investigators are still trying to pinpoint exactly what caused the leak.

DeSantis said, "Our first priority all the time is the safety of our workers for one, so we won't start anything up again until we are absolutely certain we know what happened and that we can prevent this from happening again."

abc27's Kendra Nichols was the only reporter on the scene at TMI on Saturday night.

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