Radiation Nation

by Natasha Zaretsky

  MAKING THE CASE FOR PHYSICAL INJURY

  At the heart of the effort to shutter the reactor was a dire claim, that if the plant were put back in operation, it would pose a radiological threat. This argument placed a heavy evidentiary burden on restart opponents, who had to prove that the plant, if reopened, would be dangerous. Part of what made this burden challenging was that the state’s assessment of the accident’s health effects had been so reassuring. While radiation levels within the containment building soared and the reactor core sustained severe damage, monitoring devices indicated that radiation releases beyond the plant had been minimal. While much of the public interpreted the accident as an exposé of the technology’s dangers, nuclear industry supporters were in one respect heartened by what had happened: a reactor core partially melted down but did not breach containment. The state’s initial findings were bolstered after 1979. In April 1980, the Pennsylvania Department of Health and the Centers for Disease Control released a study indicating that neither fetal mortality nor infant mortality nor birth defects had risen within a ten-mile radius of the plant in the six months after the accident.64 The state’s health department also conducted a cancer study within a twenty-mile radius of the plant between 1974 and 1983 and found that rates had remained unchanged. A subsequent study between 1982 and 1989 among people living within a five-mile radius of the plant came to the same conclusion, and a follow-up study conducted in 2000 affirmed the earlier findings. The cumulative data suggested that while the accident had been frightening, no one had been physically hurt.65

  Thus one aim of restart opponents was to debunk the official findings about radiation releases. They argued that radiation monitoring had been inadequate during the crucial first seventy-two hours and that dosimeters tracked certain kinds of radioactive isotopes and not others. They insisted that the NRC underestimated individual exposure levels and that a radioactive plume from the plant touched down on some communities where there had been no dosimeters at all.66 These claims were meant to cast doubt on official findings by insisting that the crucial question about the accident remained unanswered. As a TMIA-PIRC flyer from 1985 put it: “TMI’s neighbors still have no answer to the major question surrounding the accident and its aftermath: How much radiation was released into the environment and what does that mean to our health?”67 Fliers like these circulated widely throughout the community and suggested that the accident had consigned residents to a permanent state of uncertainty. As one man explained, “The residents of this area continue to live with a life-threatening situation not knowing which experts to believe or not to believe. Will they get cancer in twenty years? If not them, what does the future hold for children growing up in this area?”68

  But restart opponents needed to do more than cast doubt on the official story. They also had to advance an alternative account. Between 1979 and 1985, local residents provided testimonies, granted interviews, and wrote letters in which they documented the accident’s effects on the animal life, plant life, and people of the region. Along the way, they challenged the monopoly of experts over scientific and medical knowledge, questioned the ties between scientific authority and state power, and participated in what sociologist Phil Brown has called “popular epidemiology,” a practice by which laypeople gather knowledge and draw their own conclusions about the causes and prevalence of disease.69

  By cataloguing the accident’s physical and biological damage, local residents were challenging its defiance of the senses, especially its invisibility. Some echoed Mary Osborn’s courtroom argument by claiming that they had experienced physical symptoms of radiation exposure the morning of the accident, before they even knew of the crisis at the plant. These included a metallic taste in the mouth, dryness in the throat, sunburns, tearing and burning of the eyes, diarrhea and nausea, tingling sensations, and skin rashes. One man recalled that “there was a taste of metal in the air,” and a woman remembered that a wave of heat had engulfed her as she stood on her farmhouse porch that morning.70 Ruth Hoover, the wife of a dairy farmer in nearby Bainbridge, described what she called white fallout—“it looked like fine snow, real tiny.”71 Others recalled that the air had turned orange that day, while still others remembered a grayish or bluish haziness in the sky.72 Radiation released from the plant, it now turned out, had been tasted in the mouth, felt on the skin, and seen with the naked eye. This counternarrative cast local residents not only as victims but as witnesses of an ecological disaster.

  Residents extended this cataloguing of injury to the landscape. They culled their backyards for evidence, reporting flowers with doubled blooms and freakishly long petals, weeds with thickened and leathery stems, dandelion leaves as long as one’s arm, raspberry bushes twenty-eight feet high, mushrooms one hundred times their normal size, a four-foot-wide cabbage, and trees whose leaves were experiencing all four seasons at once.73 Reports of such botanical oddities became frequent enough that Johnny Carson poked fun at them on The Tonight Show in November 1979, joking that the Thanksgiving dinner table at Three Mile Island featured a fifty-pound cranberry.74 “Before TMI,” one reporter observed, “such giant vegetables were saved for the farm show, or they at least merited a picture in the local paper. Now they have become fuel for the health effects controversy. Mutated plants, the theory goes, are precursors of mutated people.”75 A local paper even featured a story on what it dubbed “Boy George corn,” a reference to the gender-fluid singer-songwriter who headed up the 1980s new wave band Culture Club. “[Normally] the tassel is the male organ,” the article explained. “The ear is the female organ. The tassel sheds pollen on the ear, and the ear makes baby kernels.” But now the male tassels were changing sex and producing their own miniature ears with kernels. It appeared that the region’s corn, like Boy George, had undergone some sort of mutation.76 An article from 1985 described how Mary Osborn’s garden, once a source of pleasure for her, had become an unnerving laboratory of radiological damage. Convinced that officials had underestimated radiation releases, Osborn routinely went out to her garden in search of proof. She found mutated flowers, which she placed in Tupperware containers with a drying agent, and grotesquely oversized maple leaves that she pressed between the pages of newspapers. “I don’t really like to garden anymore,” she told a reporter, “because I’m afraid to see what comes up.”77 “There are many intangible losses such as peace of mind and the pleasures we once had in our gardens and trees,” Charles and Helen Hocker of Etters, a town twenty-five miles from the plant, wrote to the NRC. “The berries and bushes that we planted for the enjoyment of our whole family are now a source of worry. We ask ourselves if it is really safe for our grandchildren to be picking and eating fruit. Should they be visiting us at all?”78

  And then there were the animals. In the months after the accident, farmers reported animals born with missing limbs and eyes, as well as higher rates of stillbirth, miscarriage, and spontaneous abortion among livestock. One woman reportedly discovered dead rabbits in the bushes around her house, and a man claimed to have found dead birds on his front lawn the morning after the accident.79 Jane Lee compiled a long list of illnesses she had observed among the cattle, cats, rabbits, and guinea pigs on her farm since 1979. It included arthritis, bone fractures, brittle bones, muscle deficiency, blindness at birth, missing eyeballs, sterility, premature births, spontaneous abortions, hermaphroditism, stillbirths, and a failure to dilate during labor. One farmer recalled the deformed calves born the spring after the accident. “The calves’ heads hung to one side until they were six months old. Their necks appeared twisted.”80 These reports of mutation and deformity could become fodder for gallows humor, as in one editorial cartoon that featured a turkey from a regional poultry farm with a third drumstick.81 But for the region’s farmers, cattle were valuable commodities, and sickness among animals was serious business (the cost of a good dairy cow averaged between eighteen hundred and two thousand dollars at the time). As Mary Osborn had done with her plants, Lee sought to chart the damage among
animals. “I am not a qualified scientist, and I am aware that my work lacks scientific credibility,” she explained in an interview, “but somebody must keep track of these events. I have sent my report to the governor of Pennsylvania and to my representatives, both state and federal; I have sent it to the NRC and to the president of the United States. But not one word, not one single word has leaked out about what is going on with these animals.”82

  FIGURE 3.2.  Illustration of Sex Reversal in Corn. Copyright held by Mary Osborne. Courtesy of Dickinson College Archives and Special Collections.

  Lee believed that what she was seeing among the animals was a harbinger of the accident’s eventual human toll. “As far as I am concerned, this is the key that is going to open the door. Because what is happening to the animals is going to happen to us—it’s just going to take longer.”83 This predictive logic cast animals as augurs. Antinuclear activist Helen Caldicott recalled that a veterinarian had told her to “watch the animals. They will manifest signs first, because their noses are closer to the ground.” Disease among animals, Caldicott speculated, “may mean something more to come in the human population. We don’t know.”84 Others mobilized animal metaphors in order to depict local residents as involuntary subjects of a nuclear experiment. “My four year old son and my baby will have to be the guinea pigs,” one mother lamented.85 Oblivious to the nuclear danger before the accident, another woman recalled, the people who lived near the reactor had “been led like sheep to the slaughter.”86 At Three Mile Island, animals played a triplicate role. They were commodities owned by humans, predictors of future disease in humans, and metaphors for radiological experimentation among humans.

  While some catalogued animal illness and deformity, others reported the disappearance of animals that had populated the valley. One dairy farmer contended that the local birds had gone away after the accident: “we saw only one robin last summer. No blue jays, hummingbirds, finches, cardinals, or red-winged blackbirds; and I saw only six swallows. And the starlings, which have always plagued the area by the hundreds of thousands, never showed up at all.”87 As a local Republican committeeman recalled in an interview, “it was amazing here after the accident. There were no bees or other insects, no birds for months.”88 A woman who lived in Annville, a town twenty miles northeast of the plant, described a landscape emptied of animal life. “It was like the world came to an end. There was nothing there. It’s still like that now, you’re lucky if you see a rabbit on this mountain. The hunters are really complaining about it because there’s no game.”89 No one died at Three Mile Island, but as these witnesses understood it, the crisis left the valley denuded and hollowed out. These accounts distinguished between a superficial normality and an underlying devastation. At first glance, the region appeared undisturbed by the accident, but if one looked closer, the Susquehanna River Valley had been transformed into a quasi-apocalyptic world reminiscent of Rachel Carson’s silent spring. There were trees without birds, gardens without insects, and landscapes devoid of life. As one woman from Etters explained, “So many times since the accident I’ve been struck by the incongruity of the peaceful countryside and the nightmare that hangs over it.”90

  State officials refuted these accounts of animal and plant mutation, sickness, death, and disappearance. The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture commissioned veterinarians to sample livestock feedstuffs for radioactivity and perform autopsies on animal corpses. It found no correlation between herd health problems and radiological exposure. In May 1979, the department investigated one hundred farms within a five-mile radius of the reactor. In this case, it found five farms where there were unusual health problems among the livestock but attributed the cases to viral infections and poor nutrition.91 Penrose Hallowell, the state’s secretary of agriculture, explained in an interview in 1980 that animal illness and death had always been a routine part of rural life, but that the accident “has raised the anticipation level … of farmers looking for or being on the alert for any kind of problem that they can relate to radioactivity.” Hallowell was adamant that the state had uncovered no evidence of radiological injury, but the rumors proved persistent.92 One woman told the Kemeny Commission that she had heard about the dying livestock and the mysterious animal illnesses and remained “scared to death.”93 The reports persisted because many residents suspected that officials had not come clean about the accident—either because they did not know the full truth or because they were concealing it.

  These accounts of biological injury suggested that the radiological threat was now mediating the community’s relationship to the environment. Anthropologist Joseph Masco refers to this mediated relationship as the “nuclear uncanny.” The term considers the Freudian idea of the uncanny in relation to an atomic age in which nuclear materials, precisely because they “travel an unpredictable course through ecosystems and bodies,” have the capacity to “render everyday life strange.”94 At Three Mile Island, the nuclear uncanny centered on the region’s plants, trees, flowers, and animals and their imperiled reproduction. As Beverly Hess told Senator John Heinz, “Our Eden has changed; perhaps most notably in our perception of it.”95 The accident was so grievous because it had remade home into an ominous, spooky, and unfamiliar place. One local Middletown activist wondered why his region, famously celebrated as the country’s “garden spot,” had been the target. “Why Middletown? And Londonberry? And Goldsboro? Lancaster is the richest farmland in the United States of America. In fact, in the world. And they damn near wiped it out with their machine. The big machine.”96 These appeals to an agricultural Eden indicted the nuclear industry for recklessness, but they were also shot through with nostalgia for a way of life that was sharply contracting. By 1980, just over 5 percent of Lancaster residents were still employed full-time in agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting, and the figure was even lower for the other counties surrounding the plant.97 Thus when restart opponents spoke of an “agricultural Eden” and a “garden spot,” they were talking about a world that was disappearing.

  Reports of botanical mutations, dead and deformed animals, and an eviscerated landscape raised the question of the human toll. Although impossible to prove, many residents believed that such symptoms as swollen lips, recurring rashes, burning and blistering of the skin, metallic taste in the mouth, hair loss, diarrhea, rectal bleeding, kidney problems, swollen lymph glands, and sore throats were caused by plant emissions, not only from leaks during the accident, but also by the venting being done to decontaminate Unit Two and by routine releases.98 This final charge was significant because it aimed to establish that the plant posed an ongoing health risk, even under ostensibly normal conditions. As Mary Osborn explained, “My skin burns sometimes. I don’t know, maybe the radiation is in the soil, or maybe I’m just very sensitive if TMI has a small release—they have them all the time, you know, and they always say it’s just the normal background levels.”99

  Others were convinced that there was a cancer cluster in the region. Among them were Marjorie and Norman Aamodt, a married couple who owned a farm in Coatesville (approximately forty-five miles from the plant) and who had been named official intervenors in the restart hearings. One journalist described Marjorie Aamodt as a “farmer, Cub Scout Den Mother, and housewife” whose life as a mother of three had been upended by the accident. Since March 1979, she had written thousands of pages explaining why the plant should remain closed. Along with her husband, she had gone door to door gathering data to establish that cancer rates were seven times higher than normal in communities near the plant.100 Her theory was that at the time of the accident, a radioactive plume had behaved like a tornado, randomly touching down only in some spots.101 As a result, cancer rates were normal in some areas and disproportionately high in others, a pattern, she asserted, that state and federal investigators had missed. Sickened bodies had to compensate for the state’s oversight. As Aamodt put it, “the only dosimeters left to us now … are the human dosimeters in our study.”102 The Aamodt findin
gs were made public in June 1984, and the following September, the state’s Department of Health rejected them as invalid. The editors of the Harrisburg Patriot backed the department: “It may be emotionally and, for some, financially satisfying to blame the TMI accident for life’s misfortunes, but it is also intellectually dishonest. The accident was bad enough in reality without imagining or inventing harms that no reliable and independent authority can verify.”103 Marjorie Aamodt viewed the situation differently. “We were all victims,” she wrote, “and we had to do something about it. It would be like coming onto a hit and run accident and seeing a body lying in the street bleeding. You don’t just walk away from it.”104 For her, this meant doing whatever she could to prevent the restart. “We don’t want them to ever start that plant again,” she said. “People have been very badly hurt, physically and psychologically. I don’t think people should have to live with that kind of terror.”105

  The cancer-cluster theory appeared plausible in light of the history of atomic testing. Helen Hockers of Etters wrote to President Carter that “We are old enough and sophisticated enough to know that we are no different from our fellow Americans who were given deadly doses of radiation at the same time that they were being assured that they were not being harmed.”106 The Carter Administration anticipated that residents would make the link. On the second day of the accident, President Carter’s deputy assistant, Les Francis, wrote a memo to congressional liaison Frank Moore in which he explained that a “perfect storm” was brewing around radiation, fueled by growing distrust of the government: “The revelations coming out of southern Nevada and Utah, coupled with the Harrisburg incident, are turning skepticism into open hostility. The government is viewed, by the way, not as a neutral observer in all of this, but rather as an active co-conspirator (probably with considerable justification).”107 TMI residents saw in downwinders people much like themselves—patriots who had trusted the government but who were now facing the prospect of radiation-induced illness years or even decades in the future. As one young mother put it at a meeting in Middletown in May 1981, “If I live to be a grandmother or great-grandmother and see normal children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, then I’ll believe we were lucky enough not to have been permanently harmed.… The feds probably don’t know either, but if they did, do you think they’d ever tell us the truth?”108