Radiation Nation

by Natasha Zaretsky

  This sense of endangerment was catalyzed by a post-Vietnam loss of confidence in technocratic expertise and state authority. As the disastrous outcome of that war came into view, antiwar activists had blamed a Cold War–era cult of managers, engineers, and technocrats—ironically dubbed “the best and the brightest”—for creating a misguided blueprint for disaster. Now, the same accusations were leveled against the nuclear industry. “What are they going to say a year from now about how high the level of radiation was?” one man asked. “It’s like Vietnam. Now we’re finding things out about Vietnam we didn’t know.”16 What frightened them most about the accident, residents recalled, was that the “so-called experts” were thrust into a state of confusion.17 Another resident emerged from the accident with a “skeptical point of view about government commissions, government preparedness, scientific expertise; it just goes on and on.”18 The people of the region, as the TMI Coalition portrayed it, were “confused by the conflicting claims of government officials, utility representatives, and scientific experts” and were left to “struggle virtually alone to find the truth.”19 In a newsletter of the Susquehanna Valley Alliance published in March 1980, a contributor noted that residents were being terrorized by technology. “Not even the experts,” he wrote, “can agree on how it should be handled.… no one, not even the experts or the government, has devised a clear or safe plan to handle the hot bed of radioactivity which now rests on Three Mile Island.”20 As one NRC commissioner lamented, “there was complete mistrust of anyone who was in an official position.”21 A pamphlet published by the Stop the Restart Campaign captured the mood. It showed the plant’s cooling towers in the background and crossed fingers in the foreground. The caption below read: “Do You Trust GPU to Run Three Mile Island—Again?”22

  FIGURE 3.1.  Middletown Council Meeting, June 20, 1979. Reprinted with permission from The People of Three Mile Island. Copyright held by Robert Del Tredici. Courtesy of Robert Del Tredici.

  This mistrust intensified as the community deliberated the best way to clean up Unit Two. The accident had left large amounts of radioactive water and gas in its auxiliary and containment buildings, and the reactor’s core remained radioactive.23 The cleanup effort was inseparable from the restart of Unit One, since the restart would first require the disposal of radioactive waste left behind by the partial meltdown. The accident had transformed the plant into a “hazardous waste site” and a “de-facto waste dump,” a transformation that had racial and class connotations.24 Historically, nuclear power plants were often (though not always) built in white, middle-class communities, precisely because of the industry’s overconfidence regarding safety. By contrast, toxic incinerators and solid-waste transfer stations were disproportionately located in poorer, low-income communities populated by people of color.25 The accident at TMI muddied this distinction as a nuclear power plant became a hazardous waste site. Residents had to confront the fact that there was a defunct reactor full of radioactive waste in their neighborhood. A new bumper sticker commented bitterly, “TMI: Our own Love Canal,” a reference to the infamous working-class neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, devastated by toxicity and environmental illness.26

  The response revealed a collective sense of anger and distrust. Both the NRC and Met-Ed agreed that the best method for cleaning up the plant was venting, by which krypton-85 (a radioactive noble gas) would be released into the atmosphere in a series of planned emissions. Because this process would be controlled and incremental, NRC and Met-Ed insisted, the radiation released would be lower than the amount emitted from the plant during normal operations.27 Local residents rejected the plan, in part because they recognized it as a step toward the reopening of Unit One.28 But their rejection also revealed their complete loss of confidence in the utility and the NRC. As one woman explained, “The past year has been difficult for me and my family as we struggled to find out about the painful truth of TMI. One important lesson I learned is it is absolutely essential to seek the facts rather than just accept the facts because they come from experts.”29 Many local residents simply did not believe industry assurances about the safety of the venting process. As one protest sign put it: “The NRC is sure krypton won’t hurt us, just as they were sure that there wouldn’t be an accident.”30 If the industry failed to level with the public about the risks of an accident in the first place, the logic went, how could the community trust it to level with them now about the removal of radioactive waste?

  Residents were also convinced that they already bore too heavy a radiological burden. As state representative Stephen Reed Carter wrote in a letter to President Carter, the people of central Pennsylvania “do not volunteer their bodies and their children’s bodies to be receptors.”31 This sense of somatic vulnerability was palpable throughout the spring of 1980 as the debate over venting escalated. At an NRC hearing held in Middletown that March, five hundred residents gathered at the town’s fire station to express their disapproval of the plan. Inside the hall, residents stood up and angrily denounced the NRC with shouts of “liar” and “murderer,” while outside others denied entry because of overcapacity banged on the doors and windows in protest. One woman told NRC administrator Reginald Gotchy, “You hurt my child.” Gesturing toward the boy in her arms, she recalled that at the time of the accident, he “was throwing up long, slimy stuff that I’d never seen come out of a baby’s mouth before.” Then she added: “The calves were throwing up! In twenty years those farmers never had calves throw up!” When Gotchy responded that a state veterinarian had investigated similar reports and found no correlation between the accident and subsequent illness in animals, the woman replied, “I don’t trust the state, as I don’t trust you.”32

  Ultimately, the venting proceeded as planned, but the angry protests illuminated how the accident had ushered new elements into the region’s political culture: distrust in the utility and the NRC, suspicion toward expert authority, and a heightened sense of somatic vulnerability. Officials, meanwhile, went to considerable lengths to pacify residents. Governor Thornburgh, for example, enlisted the Union of Concerned Scientists, a prominent group of scientists critical of nuclear power, to study the venting issue. The UCS concluded that while venting posed no radiological hazard, it would exacerbate the “psychological stress” of people living near the plant. Emotional suffering was becoming critical to the community’s self-understanding. For his part, Thornburgh recognized that the repeated assurances of neither the governor’s office nor the NRC nor Met-Ed would suffice.33 As he explained to the Kemeny Commission, “All of us in one way or another are trying to earn back that fragile connection of trust.”34

  When they challenged authority, residents were borrowing from both the antiwar and antinuclear movements. But there was a crucial difference. Conservatives viewed leftist activists as having made a free moral choice to protest for what seemed misguided, fanciful, or even perverse reasons, such as opposition to imperialism, solidarity with third-world struggles, or some pie-in-the-sky commitment to protecting the earth. By contrast, residents at Three Mile Island saw themselves as reluctant activists, driven to protest by their organic relationship to the land. The fact that they had no choice, that their activism was something forced upon them, compelled them to disavow the political left, even as they recognized its role in creating the preconditions for protest. As one York County woman recalled, “I had never protested, attended a rally, or admonished an NRC commissioner. Since the accident, I’ve done all those, and much more.”35 Or as another seventy-year-old man wrote, it was hard for him to believe that he was writing his very first letter of protest.36 As a newsletter explained it, “We really don’t like doing this. We would rather be mowing the grass, cutting the hedge, coaching boys/girls baseball, spending more time with our families, not attending TMI meetings.”37 The implication was that residents were “typical, Middle Americans,” not “crazy, anti-nuke kooks,” as one woman derisively called them.38 Local residents took pains to label themselves “conc
erned citizens” rather than activists, emphasizing that the restart was not a “pro or anti-nuclear issue” but rather one of “integrity, health and safety.”39 “I’m not a radical person,” qualified a salesman to Middletown’s city council as he demanded that the reactor be shut down.40 One woman from Mechanicsburg (located twenty miles west of the plant) later recalled that “Prior to TMI, I looked upon political activists as ivory tower intellectuals or malcontent hippies.” “I would certainly not categorize myself as an intellectual or a hippie,” she continued. But the woman was, by her own admission, now “full of anger, doubt and fear,” and she felt that protest was “the way to work those feelings out.”41 Another woman closed an angry letter to the NRC by listing all of her family members who lived within a fifteen-mile radius of the island. “I only list my family,” she wrote, “so you know I am not a professional protester.”42 The motivations of professional protesters were suspect, she implied, but her motivations were pure, because they were tethered to the community rather than to some abstract ideal. As the Philadelphia Inquirer observed in 1980, the people of central Pennsylvania were “good, solid, skeptical, tax-paying citizens without an anti-nuke activist among them.” These were people “to whom protesting does not come naturally or easily.”43

  Expressions of reluctance vis-à-vis protest went hand in hand with affirmations of the traditional family, especially as women emerged as the most visible and vocal opponents of the restart. The transformation of women into outspoken critics of Met-Ed, the NRC, and the state mirrored a national trend. Women everywhere were more apprehensive than men when it came to nuclear power, more likely to oppose the building of plants and the siting of a nuclear power plant where they lived, more worried about the dangers posed by radiation, and more inclined to evacuate their homes in the event of an accident.44 As women became involved in antinuclear organizing, they sometimes cited nuclear power as a feminist issue. At places like Seabrook and Diablo Canyon, for example, women antinuclear activists articulated connections between gender liberation and their opposition to nuclear power, insisting that the nuclear threat was symptomatic of a global pattern of masculine hubris.

  Women at Three Mile Island adopted one key aspect of this feminist critique of nuclear power: its challenging of the distinction between expert and lay knowledge. Local activist Beverly Hess leveled a charge that just as easily might have come from a feminist at the time: “[We] have been variously ignored, dismissed, inaccurately labeled as being ‘emotional’ in a pejorative sense, and characterized as being just ill-informed lay people, and as being trouble-makers, needlessly agitating about issues which had best be left to ‘the experts.’ ”45 But residents often diverged from feminists when it came to the family. While feminists emphasized how women had been constrained by traditional familial roles, Three Mile Island women proudly flagged their status as wives and mothers and linked this status to their reluctant activism. Before the accident, a Middletown mother remembered, “I was totally ignorant of nuclear power and quite content to bake cakes, clean the house, care for my family, and essentially live in my own little world.”46 A local group called Concerned Mothers and Women echoed the same sentiment. Before March 1979, their biggest concerns “as mothers were PTA meetings and baking oatmeal cookies. That is no longer true. We now have committed our energies to protecting the health and safety of our families and community.”47 Joyce Corradi, a Middletown mother of five, described herself as “a person who is very home and family-oriented (sewing, canning, flower arranging). Until the accident at TMI my biggest problem was looking for a new moneymaker at my children’s school PTA. My days have drastically changed since that time. My biggest problem now is finding the time to go to the meetings, seminars, and public hearings concerning Three Mile Island.”48 Another local woman complained that the round of hearings disrupted the rhythm of family life: “Every weekend is tied up with hearings or marches or other activities to close TMI (forever!).” But the sacrifice and disruption were necessary, she maintained: “Sometimes a little boy must sacrifice some of his childhood so he can have an adulthood. Sometimes he must sacrifice a fishing or camping weekend so he can have fish and parks.”49 An article in the Washington Post distinguished the women activists at TMI from the “usual nuclear protesters.” “They are not peripatetic intellectuals out to save the world from the mushroom cloud,” the article observed. “They are working class women who want to save their children.”50

  Residents also presented their protest as an affirmation of, rather than a departure from, their Christian identities. The most predictable example of this was Quakers, who had long been on the front lines of activism. For example, SVA leader Beverly Hess was a devout Quaker, and Quaker institutions provided the organization with funding and office space. “I’m filled with joy at being a member of a Society which struggles to know God’s will, and then DO IT,” Hess wrote to the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting after the organization gave the SVA five thousand dollars. “I now feel a responsibility to God’s spirit,” she continued. “I feel driven, pulled, and led to deal with the dangers of nuclear power in a struggle for the safe preservation of the earth and the human race.”51 But Lutherans, Methodists, and Roman Catholics also rooted protest in religious conviction. Lancaster resident Charlotte Dennan was one of several hundred people who traveled from central Pennsylvania to Washington, DC, in May 1979 to participate for the first time in a national antinuclear protest. “I have two wonderful children,” she wrote to the Kemeny Commission, “Jessica is thirteen, and Rick is fifteen. We all marched together in Washington D.C. in the anti-nuclear rally. We are a family who shares a belief in God. We feel we are taking a Christian stand on the issue of nuclear power.”52 It was her Christian beliefs, another woman wrote to the NRC, that “enabled me to cope and know in my heart and mind that Nuclear Energy in Middletown is wrong.”53

  Many local churches backed the protest. One pastor gave a sermon the Sunday morning after the accident in which he creatively revised Psalm 23: “Nuclear power is my provider. I shall not want for energy. It maketh me to lie down in potentially hazardous green pastures. It leads me beside potentially contaminated waters.… Even though I am constantly assured that I may walk through the valley of the shadow of Three Mile Island and fear no evil, Thy uncertainties art always with me.”54 Throughout the crisis, church offices had been inundated with worried phone calls. “I shall not forget those three hectic days,” a pastor at Trinity Lutheran Church remembered, “when young families and older people called around the clock for guidance and counsel; and those long hours of my own wrestling in prayer and critical thought concerning what counsel to give, and what to say at the Sunday services when the outcome of events remained unclear.”55 In the years that followed, area churches provided meeting space for anti-restart organizations and participated in interfaith services on the anniversary of the accident, where they led call-and-response prayers that included lines like “I ask God’s love to make us sensitive to the pain and terror which has come and will come to our brothers and sisters through the abuse of nuclear power.”56 Several Christian councils and synods formally declared their opposition to the restart of the plant until all safety concerns had been addressed.57

  Christian arguments against the restart often evoked the organic basis of the protest. Ministers insisted that God mandated Christians be stewards of the land. As the York County Council of Churches explained, the accident brought “us face to face with the question of whether our life styles as we have defined it [sic] is compatible with our stewardship responsibilities both for human life and for the rest of the natural world.”58 More often, clergy cited opposition to nuclear power as part of a broad Christian reverence for life. Human beings make mistakes, the National Council of Churches observed in May 1979, but in the case of nuclear power, those mistakes could do “irreversible damage to … the human gene pool.”59 Christians recognize that “human beings are not cheap commodities” and are called upon to “resist forces that de
stroy life.”60 Sometimes, they transformed the TMI story into a cautionary tale about the inevitability of sin. “Sin is not a popular word these days,” proclaimed Wallace Fisher, the pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church in Lancaster, during a Sunday sermon in November 1979, but the accident had exposed its ubiquity. Taking aim at the nuclear industry’s (now-debunked) claim that redundant backup systems made accidents virtually impossible, Fisher deployed the industry’s own terminology against it, concluding that “human beings are not fail-safe.”61

  Reluctant activists’ appeals to the traditional family and Christianity were often accompanied by expressions of patriotism, or, more precisely, wounded patriotism. “When your government subsidizes an industry that commits murder,” explained Sue Shetrom, “your patriotism gets bruised.”62 In May 1979, a woman who lived less than a mile from the reactor appeared before the Kemeny Commission. She deliberated in what capacity she should speak—as a mother who feared that her child had sustained genetic injury, as an angry victim who suffered from swollen lymph glands, laryngitis, and a chronic sore throat that she attributed to radiation poisoning, or as a property owner who could see the towers from a home that she feared had become a financial liability. But what was not up for deliberation was her patriotism. “I’d like to say, I love this country,” she told them. “I’m one of those minorities whose eyes still fill with tears when I hear ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ But I sit here in total loathing and disgust for the legislators, all parties.”63 Her patriotism had not disappeared, but the accident had redirected it away from the nation-state and toward a localized community of sufferers.