Radiation Nation

by Natasha Zaretsky

  While researchers identified clusters of behavioral and somatic symptoms, local residents drew on popularized psychological language to describe their condition. In their words, they had been the victims of a trauma. As TMIA member Joanne Doroshow wrote to Governor Thornburgh in August 1982, “the people in this area … have experienced the trauma of the worst commercial nuclear accident ever. They have read and studied the documents telling what really happened that day, and remember the misleading press statements issued by the utility and the state. They have no confidence in the company at all. They are alienated by the NRC and have lost confidence in government’s concern for their health and safety.”133 The accident had been a nuclear nightmare, explained a local advertisement: “Over 140,000 of us fled our homes. Our children still have bad dreams. We’ll never forget the terror of that time.”134 In his public statements, Governor Thornburgh also characterized the accident as a trauma.135 A woman from Mechanicsburg recalled that before March 1979, she had never had strong feelings about nuclear power and had taken her children to the plant’s observation tower. But seeing the cooling towers for the first time after the accident had been distressing. “I guess the closest analogy,” she wrote, “would be the feeling inside the rape victim when she comes face to face with the attacker.”136 Even the acronyms for local organizations—PANE, ANGRY—were meant to convey deep emotional and psychological distress.

  What made the language of trauma so powerful was that it introduced a temporal horizon. The psychoanalytic concept of trauma is bound up with the idea of repetition—if a traumatic wound does not heal, it can fester and continue to inflict psychic harm. In the unconscious of its victim, an unresolved trauma repeats itself over and over again. The claim of collective trauma thus amounted to a prediction that if TMI remained open, the traumatic experience of the accident would be repeated ad infinitum. Larry Hochendoner warned the NRC that the restart of Unit One would consign the community to a permanent state of suffering. “Our judgment,” he wrote, “is that we don’t want to live with TMI. If you make the wrong decision, our nightmare will go on and on. We will literally be perpetual victims.”137 Radiation could not be confined by space and time. No evacuation plan could outpace a radioactive plume, and there was no statute of limitations on when a radiation-induced cancer might appear. Like a true trauma, then, the accident had “never really stopped.”138 As a TMIA pamphlet from 1980 presented it, “The accident is not over. Our lives are still in great danger. We face another spring knowing that our children may be irradiated when we go out to play. We do not know whether our air will be safe to breathe, our water safe to drink, our land safe to farm.”139 The accident was ongoing and could only be stopped with the permanent closing of the plant.

  FIGURE 3.4.  Protesters Carrying a “Thank You, Met Ed” sign. Copyright Held by SHAD Alliance. Courtesy of Swarthmore College Peace Collection.

  The concept of trauma also established an affinity between residents and war combatants. This was because at the time of the accident, the term trauma was associated with the new diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The term PTSD was coined in the mid-1970s and first appeared in the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of Mental Disorders III (the DSM-III) in 1980. Although the diagnosis of PTSD would become increasingly diverse in its applications, in the late 1970s its primary association was with war and specifically with the conflict in Vietnam. While reports of battle-associated stress reactions (for example, shell shock) had existed as long as modern warfare, US soldiers returning from Vietnam were the first to receive a formal PTSD diagnosis, and their struggles with trauma became a synecdoche for the national struggle to come to terms with the failed war. The ubiquity of trauma in discussions of the accident invited a host of military analogies. Residents compared themselves to prisoners of war on the grounds that, like POWs, their predicament could remain unresolved for years. The ambiguity surrounding radiological injury also invited comparisons to chlorine gas victims and Vietnam veterans who had been exposed to Agent Orange.140 One researcher argued that TMI residents were suffering from “radiation response syndrome,” a condition seen in atomic veterans convinced that they were suffering from radiation poisoning (regardless of whether they were or not).141 Taken together, these analogies suggested that the accident had remade central Pennsylvania into a kind of combat zone, and that its civilian residents were suffering in ways—in both degree and kind—normally confined to war.

  FIGURE 3.5.  Have You Forgotten About Three Mile Island? Courtesy of University of Pittsburgh Special Collections.

  Residents used one final analogy to convey the suffering of the residents: the hostage. The accident had been the biggest news story of 1979, but it was superseded the following November by the Iranian hostage crisis. That crisis began when sixty-five Americans, most of them State Department officials, were taken hostage by Iranian students who hoped to foment a break between the United States and Iran in the wake of the fall of the shah. Thirteen of the hostages were freed within weeks, but the other fifty-two remained in captivity for 444 days. The hostage crisis emerged as a media obsession and unleashed feelings of American nationalism that had been suppressed over the previous decade.142 It also became a vivid point of reference for local TMI residents, who insisted that, like the hostages, they had been consigned to a state of permanent uncertainty. On the accident’s one-year anniversary, a local TMIA activist who stood vigil at the plant told the crowd, “I stand before you as a hostage. There are not fifty of us, but a million of us … and no one is negotiating for our release.”143 “We feel like hostages,” a woman who lived in Hershey told an interviewer in March 1980, “People are very concerned about the hostages in Iran, and nobody is concerned about us at all.”144 References to the hostage ordeal conveyed both identification and frustration. There was a feeling of kinship with the hostages on the grounds that, like them, their situation remained painfully unresolved. But there was also a sense of frustration that their own story had been eclipsed by the dramatic plight of the captives in Iran.

  Above all, residents referenced the emotion of fear in their depictions of posttraumatic life. They contended that as long as the plant remained in operation, they were going to “live with some kind of fear.”145 According to the Harrisburg Patriot, one mother who resided near the plant “lives in fear, and every time a siren sounds she thinks, God please let somebody’s house be on fire, instead of an emergency at the plant.”146 A Middletown resident explained to the same newspaper what went through his mind every time he heard the sirens. “It may be just another alert, which turns out to be harmless,” he wrote in a letter to the editor, “or it may be the evacuation of our homes forever! What other forms of energy impose this sort of fear upon the thousands upon thousands who live in its environs?”147 Dauphin County commissioner Larry Hochendoner described a “communal convulsion” every time there was an incident at the plant. “People stop, they anticipate the worst, hold their breaths, and then they go on. And that’s one hell of a way to live.”148 A Hershey Medical Center study found a sharp increase in sleeping pill and tranquilizer use among residents.149 These accounts advanced a vision of a community in the collective throes of PTSD, with men and women on the edge, suffering from jangled nerves, self-medicating, and always bracing themselves for the next radiological emergency. Exacerbating the fear was the fact that residents could no longer turn to the authorities for guidance. As one local woman explained it, “I don’t believe anything they say because they lied to us in the first place. The people that work there, they say it’s all fine, but I think they’ve all been brainwashed. I don’t believe the government either. You just don’t know who to believe anymore.”150 For central Pennsylvanians, the story would not be over until the plant was shuttered. The reactor should be sealed up forever, in the words of one local grandmother, “as a monument to the folly of the twentieth century.”151

  But a debate about the origins of this fear reflected community divisions. One su
rvey found that Middletown was roughly split down the middle on the question of restart.152 As one person observed, there was a divide between the “people who believed that everything was under control and the people who believed that everything was not under control.”153 As residents fought to close the reactor, others—in particular those whose economic livelihoods were tied to the plant—fought to restart it. They too organized groups, wrote to public officials, and sent letters to local newspapers. They also produced TMI merchandise to promote the plant, which had the paradoxical effect of memorializing the accident within the realm of material culture kitsch. Coffee mugs and lamps were shaped like cooling towers, key chains were carved into miniature containment buildings, and T-shirts were emblazoned with the slogan “Unit One, Let It Run.”154 These pro-TMI activists attempted to counter the image of a community gripped by fear. One TMI supporter addressed Governor Thornburgh in February 1982, debunking the charge that mothers in particular had been shaken by the accident. “I am a mother,” she wrote. “I have been blessed with six fine, healthy children.… I live about one mile up the road from TMI; however, I am not afraid of TMI. I am here today to let you know that there are many, many mothers in this area who aren’t afraid either.”155

  More often, however, rather than denying the presence of fear, TMI supporters placed the blame for it on a sensational national media that had overblown the accident, exaggerated its dangers, and alarmed the public. A Middletown man asserted that it was media (rather than radiation) overexposure that had inflicted the real harm on his community. “I felt that the only overexposure to which I was subjected … was the overzealous and rude photographers, and the television people who wanted to hear negative comments from area citizens.”156 It was reporters, he argued in a newspaper guest column, who had first stoked fear in the community and then overstated its prevalence in their coverage. In her testimony before the Kemeny Commission, Anne Trunk contended that reporters had placed too much emphasis on the “what if” rather than the “what is.” Because of the speculative nature of the reporting, she argued, “the public was pulled into a state of terror, of psychological stress.” And more than any other news form, it was the national evening news that “proved to be the most depressing, the most terrifying.”157 A local reporter with the Harrisburg Evening News also discerned a difference between the local and national coverage: “I’ve had people tell me that they would go home and read the Patriot or the Evening News, then turn on the national news at 6:30 and get all scared because it sounded so much worse than it was. The farther away you got from Harrisburg, the more sensational the coverage seemed to get, the more dire the situation looked.” One resident later learned that in Germany there had been reports that Pennsylvania had been wiped off the map.158

  FIGURE 3.6.  Antinuclear and Pronuclear Protestors in Front of a GPU Meeting, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, May 10, 1979. Industry Supporters Are Carrying Signs That Read “Energy not Darkness.” Courtesy of AP Photo/Bob Donaldson.

  These critiques were not without merit. There was no question that local and national news outlets approached the story from different angles. Jeff Blitzer of WHP-TV, a Harrisburg-based local television station and a CBS affiliate, later told the Kemeny Commission that the accident had brought home to him the “old premise that a well-informed public will make the right decision.” “We were dealing with a community that was unusually hungry for any scrap of information it could get,” he remembered. “This was a case where people were making real decisions based on what they were hearing minute to minute on the radio or on TV.” With this in mind, Blitzer sought to provide local viewers with accurate information while adopting a tone that was reasoned and cool. He recalled that there had been much soul searching among staff members who felt a sense of responsibility to their local community. This differed from the journalists who flooded into the area after the accident. Blitzer, who worked alongside many of them, observed favorably that they worked hard on their reports and aimed for accuracy. But he also felt that they were pressured by their editors to produce a “harder story.” “So often, they would say on the phone, ‘But it’s just not that bad here.’ ”159 The drive among national and international reporters to transform the accident into what one journalist called “the news story of the year” overshadowed the more mundane but more vital imperative to provide news that would empower residents to make well-informed decisions.160

  But attempts to shift the blame for psychological distress away from the nuclear industry and to the news media were ultimately spurious. This constituted a form of blaming the messenger, suggesting that it was the journalists themselves—rather than the nuclear industry—that had inflicted harm. This same conflation had occurred during the Vietnam War, when journalists were accused of causing the content of their own reporting, namely, the collapse of morale among US military forces. It also neglected journalists’ good faith efforts to understand what was happening inside the reactor. Throughout the accident, reporters were spotted on the streets of Middletown, gathered around science writers who held up diagrams of the reactor’s feed water and primary cooling systems. Reporters were trying to grasp the basics of nuclear technology on the fly, what one observer called “learning in the streets.”161 Finally, the charge that journalists had stirred up fear reiterated the same accusation leveled against antinuclear activists that outsider agitators were responsible for the community’s distress.

  By constituting themselves as collective trauma victims, residents established an affinity between themselves and other kinds of national “victims,” from the hostage to the war combatant to the POW. Along the way, they fostered a broader tendency to interpret disaster exclusively through the lens of trauma. This tendency is a problem, Rebecca Solnit argues, not because people do not sustain trauma during states of emergency, but because the trauma lens obscures other dynamics that can take place in those moments, including heightened solidarity and mutual aid.162 At the same time, by mobilizing the language of trauma and psychological suffering, residents were shrewdly repurposing the Cold War security state’s own long-standing preoccupation with the containment of extreme emotions (fear, panic, hysteria) and redeploying it in their effort to decommission the plant.

  But did this repurposing work? That question would ultimately be answered in court. A broad coalition, including several local groups and the governor’s office, asked the NRC to consider psychological issues throughout the restart hearings. The NRC rejected the request, contending that such issues fell outside their purview and had already been addressed. “Congress has already decided that the country is to have a nuclear power program,” NRC chairman Joseph Hendrie explained, “even if it makes some people uneasy.”163 The Middletown-based PANE disagreed, and the group took the NRC to federal court to compel the agency to consider psychological questions throughout its deliberations. PANE made two arguments. First, it contended that the renewed operation of the plant would cause distress, anxiety, tension, and fear among residents. If the plant reopened, “PANE’s members and other persons living in the communities around the plant will be unable to resolve and recover from the trauma from which they have suffered. Operation of Unit 1 would be a constant reminder of the terror which they felt during the accident.” The NRC needed to consider these damaging psychological consequences in its Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), the study required by the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA) for all major federal actions affecting the human environment. PANE maintained that the plant’s psychological consequences on people—no less than its radiological consequences on air, water, and land—fell under the purview of environmental health as defined by the NEPA. The group’s second contention was that the accident had turned the reactor into a community liability, and that the NRC needed to consider that as well: “The perception, created by the accident, that the communities near TMI are undesirable locations for business and industry, or for the establishment of law or medical practice, or homes compounds the damag
e to the viability of the communities.”164

  In January 1982, the court agreed that health encompassed “psychological health” and ordered the NRC to take up the issue. “Americans have never before experienced the psychological aftermath of a major accident at a nuclear power plant,” the court observed, “one that aroused fears of a nuclear core meltdown and led to a mass evacuation from the surrounding communities.”165 Environmental law did not encompass economic concerns or political disagreements, explained circuit judge J. Shelly Wright. But it did extend to “post-traumatic anxieties accompanied by physical effects and caused by fears of recurring catastrophe.”166 Circuit judge Malcolm Wilkey dissented on the grounds that the ruling extended the NEPA’s reach “far beyond its intended scope.” The contention of PANE, Wilkey insisted, was not that the resumption of operations of Unit One would endanger human health, but rather that “fears of an accident at the plant, combined with [a] lack of confidence in the NRC, will lead to an extension of the psychological stress allegedly caused by the accident.”167 Instead of assessing literal risk, Wilkey argued, the NRC was now being asked to “assess how people perceive and react to the risk.”168 In his view, this was irrational. “We have thus come a long way in fifty years,” Wilkey observed, “when the president of the United States was widely and enthusiastically applauded for declaring: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Now the fear itself necessitates an environmental assessment.”169