Radiation Nation

by Natasha Zaretsky

  Of course, part of why women at Three Mile Island were able to do this was because the unborn had begun its political life as an atomic creation and never stopped being one. Throughout the 1970s, this figure routinely shuttled between the prolife and antinuclear movements. The abortion war was fueled by the horrific image of the fetal body made into trash, but it hardly had a monopoly on that image.156 Antinuclear activists often portrayed the human fetus as the industry’s most vulnerable, voiceless, and defenseless victim. Helen Caldicott carried a baby casket at antinuclear marches—a symbolic act that might have just as easily appeared at a prolife rally.157 The shadow of endangered or discarded fetal life hung over both movements. This helps to explain why at Three Mile Island, the unborn could play such a capacious, flexible role. It was a symbol of injuries that could play out across long time horizons, a cord that tethered the atomic age to the ecological one, a synecdoche for collective suffering, an accusatory weapon against the nuclear industry, and a political lubricant that eased the transition of some conservative Christians in their turn against nuclear power. The political power of the unborn was decades in the making. Before it animated the abortion war, the unborn had embodied questions about reproductive futurity that haunted the Cold War nation.

  Yet there was no question that when women at Three Mile Island spoke of God’s most precious gift, they were borrowing rhetoric from the prolife movement. But even as they did so, they drew on the feminist movement, propelled by the view that what happened to women’s bodies—including assaults on health from invisible streams of toxicity from a debased environment—had political meaning. But contra feminists who often critiqued the family as a locus of patriarchy, these women positioned themselves as defenders of the family. They thereby crafted a hybridized conservative ecological politics in which a prolife championing of the fetus, a feminist attention to the body, and a defense of the traditional family coexisted in sometimes uneasy but unmistakably powerful accord. During the 1950s and 1960s, mothers had cultivated this proto-ecological figure in order to push back against Cold War repression. Now, it would help propel the pendulum toward the political right.

  Ultimately, what made this politics conservative was that it routed the decade’s politicization of the body into an incipient biotic nationalism. This nationalism was structured around the conviction that the United States, while it might have still appeared strong, had sustained a series of wounds over the 1970s that left it weakened, not unlike an irradiated body. These included military defeat in Vietnam, growing dependency on foreign oil, a slowdown in economic productivity, and energy shortages, along with the challenges to patriarchal authority embodied in feminism and gay liberation. As the conservative movement gained momentum, its leaders responded to this perceived weakness by calling for the reinvigoration and restoration of American power, both on the world stage and at home. Meanwhile, the protest movements of that decade had placed the human body at the center of political, cultural, and social revolution. From the women’s health movement to the feminist movement against sexual violence, from black power’s condemnation of police brutality to the Afrocentric slogan that “black is beautiful,” from the gay liberation movement’s cataloguing of homophobia’s depredations to its demand for sovereignty over sexuality, these movements all identified the body as a site of discrimination and violence and as a locus of liberation and pleasure. But conservatives folded the body into a discourse of decline and betrayal, creating a body politics of their own. Bringing together somatic suffering, environmental risk, and national injury, biotic nationalism reinvigorated post-1968 conservatism in a deeply affective way.

  At Three Mile Island, women injected something crucial into this new nationalism: the theme of imperiled reproduction and the devaluation of young life. “Nuclear power is downgrading and shortening human life,” one local woman told legislators. “We can buy other forms of energy but where are we going to buy a human life?”158 If nuclear power continued to spread, another wrote to the commission, then “we are as expendable as German Jews.”159 For the subaltern and dispossessed, this insight about expendability was not new. But for the largely traditional, patriotic, white, middle Americans who lived near the reactor, it was the televised Vietnam War that made it tangible. South central Pennsylvania was no hotbed of antiwar mobilization, but its residents had watched as the war remade bodies into fodder. For them, the war revealed that those in power could lie to the public, that the bodies of patriots could be cast aside, and that they could die meaningless deaths. The accident brought these insights home, rerouting them from the martial to the reproductive arena, displacing the soldier for the unborn along the way. As one man pleaded with public officials, the plant should be shut down because “an unborn child is more important than those towers over there.”160 Riffing on the antiwar term cannon fodder, TMI residents feared they had been remade into the “radiation fodder” of the nuclear age.

  On May 6, 1979, less than six weeks after the accident, a woman named Carolyn Walborn traveled from central Pennsylvania to Washington, DC, to participate in a collective action for the first time in her life: a national antinuclear rally organized by activists who believed that the Three Mile Island accident had been a catastrophe that could turn the public tide against the industry for good. This was her first march, but “if the American Government doesn’t wake up,” she wrote to the Kemeny Commission, “it will not be my last.” She estimated that about half of the seventy thousand marchers were “first timers” like her: “They were concerned Americans. They weren’t radicals or nuts.” She described her own participation as an expression of her motherhood, her patriotism, her Christianity, and her status as a TMI evacuee. “I marched, as a mother for my children’s children; as an American citizen, because I love America, and I would like to see it stop poisoning the people, land, air, water, animals, etc, by the whole nuclear power cycle; as a Christian, because it is spiritually and morally wrong; as a TMI evacuated person with a 17 yr. old & a 19 year old along with my family members who are unfortunate enough to live in Middletown.” Walborn concluded the letter by reminding the commission of the trauma sustained by her community. Because no one really knew the effects of low-level radiation, the people in the area did not know whether “they survived without cancers or mutations.” She ended by writing in all capital letters: “WE ARE THE GUINEA PIGS.”161 The accident had left behind no death toll or visible destruction in its wake, but rather something else: the specter of future harm. Between 1980 and 1985, as a struggle ensued over the fate of Three Mile Island, this specter would hang over the Valley as residents painted a portrait of an irradiated landscape populated by the mutated bodies of plants, animals, and humans.

  Chapter Three

  CREATING A COMMUNITY OF FATE AT THREE MILE ISLAND

  On August 8, 1984, Mary Osborn, a mother of two who lived six miles from Three Mile Island, stood on trial in the Dauphin County courthouse. Almost fifteen months earlier, Osborn and nine others had been arrested for blocking traffic onto the island. Osborn justified her civil disobedience on the grounds that the plant, if reopened, would pose a public health threat. Throughout her testimony, she mobilized two strategies to make her case. First, she recalled the accident. The morning of March 30, she had been playing outside with her son when she noticed a metallic taste in her mouth, a burning in her eyes, and a reddening of her skin—all symptoms, she maintained, of radiation exposure. Second, Osborn presented the court with physical evidence of radiological damage to the local landscape. She held up deformed plants she had discovered in her own backyard, including “pinched-looking daisies with two or more heads fused and growing from one stem.” As she told the court, “I don’t want more radiation from an operating plant, especially when we’ve already had more than this area can take.”1

  This chapter traces the cultural, social, and political fallout from the accident between mid-1979 and October 1985, when TMI-Unit One resumed operations. TMI-Unit Two had sustained too much
damage from the partial meltdown to ever reopen. But during the first half of the 1980s, a struggle ensued over the fate of Unit One, the unit of the plant untouched by the accident. On one side of the struggle were the NRC and General Public Utilities (GPU, of which Met-Ed was a subsidiary). Both expressed confidence in the reactor’s safety and wanted it back in operation. On the other side were people like Mary Osborn, who had come away from the accident convinced that the plant should be permanently decommissioned. Over six years, these citizens became politically mobilized, many for the first time in their lives.

  The fight to shut down the plant presented them with the same challenge that confronted Mary Osborn in court—how to prove that if reopened, the reactor would threaten public health. Establishing this would not be easy. As we have seen, a constitutive feature of the accident was its invisibility. Whatever damage it had wrought was not discernible to the naked eye. Furthermore, state and federal officials maintained that the amount of radiation released at the time of the accident had been lower than initially feared. How could local residents establish that the reactor was dangerous in the absence of any incontrovertible evidence of injury? Residents attempted to meet this challenge by constituting themselves as a community of fate—that is, a community formed through duress and social emergency.2 They did this in two intersecting but distinct ways. First, just as Mary Osborn had done in her testimony, they sought to make the accident visible by insisting that, contrary to the official claim, it had wrought physical and biological damage on the people, animals, and plant life of the region. And second, they insisted that they were victims of a psychological trauma that could only be overcome through the shuttering of the plant. Taken together, both arguments advanced a portrait of central Pennsylvania as a locus of deep somatic and psychological injury.

  This construction of a community of fate tracked closely what literary scholar Lawrence Buell identifies as a toxic discourse, “an expressed anxiety arising from a perceived threat of environmental hazard due to chemical modification by human agency.” This discourse relies on four motifs: a sense of a disrupted pastoral or destroyed Eden, totalizing images of a contaminated world, a morality play between the strong and the weak, and gothic descriptions of deformed bodies and polluted landscapes.3 This toxic discourse would be operationalized at Three Mile Island, where it would prove politically contradictory. At one level, it reflected how the protest cultures of the 1960s had extended their reach into a pocket of the country where most residents identified as rural, conservative, and traditional. But this same discourse ended up deepening rather than overturning the political conservatism of the region, which remained a Republican Party stronghold. How did this happen? After all, the community’s initial response to the accident seemed to hold out other possibilities. At first, many residents had blamed Met-Ed for the crisis and expressed their unease with a privately owned company overseeing a technology that had dire implications for public health. The accident appeared to endorse a core principle of Progressivism and New Deal liberalism, that corporations required strong government regulation and oversight. But between 1979 and 1985, local anger was redirected away from Met-Ed and toward the NRC, the federal agency that would decide whether to reopen the plant. This shift meant that the struggle over the fate of the reactor would be recast from a fight against corporate malfeasance to a fight against federal power. Along the way, core insights from the left were rerouted into an incipient conservative ecological politics that placed psychic trauma and victimhood at the center of a story about an aggrieved local community squaring off against a tyrannical centralized authority. Throughout the 1970s, this same story appeared over and over again as grassroots struggles ensued over property taxes, bilingualism, sex education, zoning, desegregation of public spaces, and busing. But at Three Mile Island, the fight for local control integrated ecological risk into the conservative counterrevolution. Critical to this integration was a shift in the enemy from private corporate power to the state.

  RELUCTANT ACTIVISTS AND THE FIGHT TO SHUT DOWN TMI

  Between 1980 and 1985, the crisis of authority that first erupted in 1979 came to center on whether the undamaged unit of the reactor should resume operations. At the time of the accident, Unit One had been shut down for routine refueling, and it remained out of commission as officials assessed what had gone so wrong in the reactor core of Unit Two. Not surprisingly, GPU was eager to get Unit One back in operation, as the company had sustained financial damage from the accident and was losing money every day that the plant remained closed. Shortly after the immediate crisis passed, the utility asked the NRC to green light the restart of Unit One, promising to implement any new safety recommendations made by the federal agency. But in June 1979, Governor Richard Thornburgh asked the state’s Department of Justice to petition the NRC for a suspension of GPU’s operating license, and in early July, the agency complied. The NRC announced that it would hold a series of restart hearings in order to determine the ultimate fate of the reactor.4

  In May 1985, six years and dozens of hearings later, the federal agency’s board voted four to one to allow GPU to return Unit One to service, and the plant reopened in October of that year. TMI had lain dormant over those six years, but in the meantime, local men and women, convinced that the plant posed an ongoing threat, fought to shut it down permanently. Once a symbol of regional prosperity, the reactor had been transformed into a symbol of danger. Rejecting the NRC’s and the utility’s promises to heed the accident’s lessons, residents now maintained that they were no longer willing to incur the risk. As they saw it, the industry had oversold the safety of nuclear technology and had lulled the community into a false sense of security, thus breaking an implicit social compact. As the Dauphin County commissioner told the NRC, “We are just plain folk from central Pennsylvania. We work hard and worship. We parent and play. We aren’t hysterical. We are quite sane and our judgment is that we would rather live without TMI.”5

  The six-year fight over the plant activated and mobilized citizens throughout the region. Antinuclear groups like Three Mile Island Action Alert (TMIA) and the Environmental Coalition on Nuclear Power (ECNP) established before the accident saw their membership rolls grow, but residents also launched new organizations. These included the Middletown-based People Against Nuclear Energy (PANE), the Campaign to Stop the Restart, the Newberry Township Steering Committee, Concerned Citizens of Londonberry, the Anti-Nuclear Group Representing York (ANGRY), and the Lancaster-based Susquehanna Valley Alliance (SVA). These groups also formed umbrella organizations like the TMI Coalition, the TMI Public Interest Resource Center (PIRC), and the Stop the Restart Campaign to coordinate their activities, which were extensive and diverse. Citizens went door to door gathering signatures on antirestart petitions, circulated newsletters, launched letter-writing campaigns, and withheld a percentage of their utility bill. Some, like Mary Osborn, trained in civil disobedience and got arrested. They kept the TMI issue in the public eye by publishing letters and editorials, protesting on the steps of Harrisburg’s capitol building and at Metropolitan Edison’s headquarters, and organizing annual vigils to commemorate the accident. They placed nonbinding referendums on three county ballots, all of which passed by a two-to-one margin in May 1983.6 Finally, they pursued litigation. In 1981, over 150 lawsuits filed by over two thousand local residents claiming accident-incurred financial and medical damages were moved to federal court, where a twenty-five-million-dollar settlement fund was established.7

  Residents crafted several arguments against the restart. They contended that the risks of radiation exposure outweighed the plant’s economic benefits, that the utility company was incompetent, and that it was citizens themselves—rather than a federal commission—who should have control over the final decision.8 Underlying these arguments was the erosion of trust between the local community and both the utility company and the NRC. This was reflected in a number of claims: radiation exposure from the accident had been worse than official reports,
GPU lacked the integrity to run a power plant, the NRC cared more about protecting industry than redressing local grievances, evacuation was an inadequate response to a radiological hazard, and the centralized nature of nuclear regulation undermined democratic decision-making.

  This erosion of trust transcended political affiliation. One study of nearby Middletown found that whether someone was “liberal or conservative” was no predictor of how they felt about the restart issue.9 In fact, one organizer described TMI activists as middle-class, predominantly Republican, moderate to conservative property-owners.10 “The majority of us are 30–45 year old family oriented conservatives,” one woman wrote to the NRC.11 This transcendence of partisanship created scenes of protest that defy the left-right polarization often ascribed to American political culture during this period. For example, at a TMIA-organized demonstration at the plant gates in 1983, Republican Party Committee women were on the front lines. And at a NRC hearing in Harrisburg in 1982, businessmen, housewives, and their children cheered when an activist warned that residents would engage in civil disobedience if the reactor ever reopened.12

  If party affiliation could not predict who became active in the restart fight, then what did? The Middletown study found that the single factor that determined whether a local resident became involved in the struggle to shut down the plant was whether he or she had children. “Parents with children at home are more likely than others to oppose nuclear power and the Unit 1 restart,” explained a news article about the study. “That cannot be said of any other group in the Middletown population.”13 Local men and women routinely appealed to NRC commissioners in their capacity as parents, explaining as one woman did that she would “worry till [her] death about the genes and chromosomes” of her children and her grandchildren.14 Men and women often brought their children to NRC hearings and city council meetings, pointing to them as flesh-and-blood embodiments of how high the stakes were in the fight over the reactor. One man held up his young son at a Middletown council meeting in June 1979. “How many watts is that kid worth?” he asked the council. “How many jobs is that kid worth? We’re here because we feel endangered.”15