Radiation Nation Read online

  This erosion of trust hinged on one question: Had residents been exposed to levels of radiation that threatened their health? For federal and state officials, the answer was an unequivocal no. After analyzing data gathered from a range of monitoring devices, officials were convinced that while radiation levels had soared inside the reactor’s containment building, they had never reached dangerous levels beyond the plant perimeter. The full-body counting of over seven hundred citizens showed no internal contamination. The USDA and the FDA found only minute traces of radiation in the hundreds of food samples they collected throughout April. The Department of Agriculture detected Iodine-131 in only a small number of the two hundred milk samples they took from farms within an eighteen-mile radius of the plant. And those few samples contained levels three hundred times lower than the level at which the FDA recommended removing cows from pasture. This finding was particularly reassuring because of milk’s status as an indicator commodity. As one Department of Agriculture official explained, “milk is one of the first places you are going to see it [Iodine-131]. If you don’t find it in milk, you’re not going to find it anywhere.”114 The cumulative data was so reassuring that in May 1979 a team of experts projected that statistically, off-site radiation exposure would lead to approximately one case of fatal excess cancer and approximately two cases of excess health effects (including fatal cancer, nonfatal cancer, and genetic injury) among the population living within fifty miles of the plant.115 They concluded that in the worst conceivable scenario, an individual had received a radiation dosage of less than one hundred millirems, a figure significantly less than the five hundred millirems considered the permissible annual dose.116

  The community’s response to these findings ranged from acceptance to wariness and skepticism to outright rejection. On one end of the spectrum were those who insisted that they were more likely to be killed by an oncoming car than by a nuclear reactor. On the other end were those who accused the state of a whitewash, contending that the monitoring had been inadequate (particularly during the accident’s first forty-eight hours) and that radiation exposure had been far worse than officials claimed.117 But most residents found themselves somewhere in the middle. Neither wholly dismissive of the radiation threat nor convinced of a cover-up, most believed that no one knew what the accident’s long-term health effects would be.

  This uncertainty stemmed from several sources. First, it emerged out of radiation’s dormancy, which made it impossible to assess injury. As one study observed, “people did not know whether they had been harmed; they were aware that the effects of radiation may be delayed many years and are uncertain.” If residents chose to leave the area, the study continued, they feared that “they might be taking personal damage with them rather than leaving it behind.” Residents thus found themselves confronting an ambiguity that conjured the experiences of veterans who had been exposed to chlorine gas during World War I and Agent Orange during the Vietnam War.118 As one woman put it, “It’s like having those time bombs in your body. Not knowing how long it will be before you pay the price … I think we all have, to some extent, that time bomb in our bodies.”119 Industry critics like Helen Caldicott pointed out that it is the “latency period that allows the industry to say no one died at Three Mile Island. We don’t expect anyone to have died yet.”120 Locals produced posters and T-shirts that read: “I Survived TMI, I Think.”121

  Uncertainty also stemmed from the fact that the scientific debate about low-level radiation remained unresolved. While some scientists continued to insist that low levels of exposure posed little or no health risk (a claim embraced by the nuclear industry), others remained convinced that there was no safe threshold. As Harvard biologist and nuclear industry critic George Wald warned on the second day of the accident, “Every dose of radiation is an overdose. There is no threshold. A little … radiation does a little harm, more of it does more harm.”122 Compounding this uncertainty was mounting controversy surrounding disproportionate cancer rates among populations who had lived and worked at nuclear facilities. Only ten days after Thornburgh lifted the evacuation order in Pennsylvania, several members of Congress traveled to Salt Lake City to hear testimony from NTS residents who had either fallen ill or lost loved ones to cancer. Central Pennsylvanians followed the hearings, expressed their identification with downwinders as fellow “guinea pigs,” and voiced their fear that they would confront the same fate.123 Reports coming out of Utah and Nevada raised doubts about whether people could trust the official account of the accident. As an editorial in the Washington Post asked: “who could trust a government that in the past had—perhaps knowingly—allowed members of the armed forces and citizens of Utah to be exposed to clearly dangerous levels of radioactivity?”124 Was this yet another case, asked one mother, “of the traditional cover-up elaborately maneuvered against the local ranchers’ complaints in Utah and Nevada?”125 Growing doubts were apparent in the TMI region, where residents, no longer convinced that they could rely on official reports, began buying their own radiation monitoring equipment and government-surplus Geiger counters.126 One woman wrote President Carter in July 1979, bitterly informing him that she had given her husband a dosimeter as a Father’s Day gift.127

  Mistrust of the state exacerbated the uncertainty. The governor’s precautionary advisory struck some residents as inadequate and arbitrary. People questioned why the governor limited the order to pregnant women and preschool-aged children within the five-mile radius. What if you lived within the five-mile radius but had children who were six, seven, or eight? What if you lived six miles from the plant, but were pregnant or had children under the age of five? A local dairy farmer explained her confusion: “They advised that preschool children and expectant mothers get out of the area but how could they know the radiation wouldn’t harm the eight year old son when they were concerned with kids six and under?”128 And what about women who only learned they were pregnant after the accident? At a public hearing in May 1979, one man recalled a woman who had not evacuated and later learned that she had been pregnant when the accident occurred. “Now she is scared to death that her child is going to be a genetic defect [sic]. Now how are you going to tell her to have that child and take a chance on having a genetically defective child?” The fact that the evacuation was voluntary rather than mandatory placed an unfair decision-making burden on this woman, he maintained. “They didn’t demand that we leave,” he recalled. “You talk to the mother about it, and she starts crying. She breaks right down, because she doesn’t know whether to have this child or whether to have an abortion.”129

  This woman was hardly alone. While state officials were trying to gather credible information about plant conditions and nuclear engineers were attempting to bring temperatures down inside the core, pregnant women in the region were trying to decide whether to have abortions. Obstetricians later reported that throughout late March and early April they had been deluged by phone calls from pregnant women asking whether they should abort their fetuses, and the office of Three Mile Island Alert (TMIA) fielded the same question.130 One obstetrician recalled that the phone calls were so constant that routine office business was derailed.131 Although almost all pregnant women evacuated the area by Friday afternoon, they feared that their fetuses had been endangered during the early hours of the accident, when public officials had not yet grasped how bad plant conditions were. The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists and the American College of Radiology went so far as to issue a joint press release advising women in the TMI area not to terminate their pregnancies.132 Meanwhile, local nurses urged pregnant women who were planning on breastfeeding to drink powdered milk until they had determined the extent of radiation exposure.133

  One might assume that these fears were alleviated in the months that followed. After all, the government’s report in May 1979 suggested that radiation releases had been too small to cause fetal injury. A year later, the Pennsylvania Department of Health announced that it had seen no spike in inf
ant mortality, congenital abnormalities, or miscarriages.134 But because the Three Mile Island crisis had punctured a layered set of beliefs about atomic-era citizenship, the community’s fears surrounding reproductive health could not be easily assuaged. In the months and years ahead, women continued to express dread about the accident’s health consequences, especially for future generations. Some mothers focused on radiation’s carcinogenic effects, wondering whether their children would one day get radiation-induced cancers. A mother of a nine-month-old girl and an eight-year-old boy who lived a mile and a half from the plant asked state officials if her children “are going to be alright or are they going to develop cancer or leukemia as young adults?” She recalled that her son had asked her if he was going to get cancer and die. “What do I tell him?” she wondered.135 Another mother had decided to have a second child after the accident because she wanted to ensure that her son would have a sibling who could serve as a donor if he eventually developed a radiation-induced cancer.136

  Other women feared that their outwardly healthy children had sustained genetic damage that might one day manifest in children of their own, a fear that was fueled by reports of mutations among animals. As local dairy farmer Jane Lee reported at a public hearing in May 1979: “We are experiencing problems in reproduction. We are experiencing problems with fowls. We are experiencing mutations. The young animals seem to be the most vulnerable—rabbits, cats. The newly born of any size seem to be very vulnerable, including the calves.” Lee went on to detail the devastating human toll. Afraid of the accident’s future effects on pregnancy and childbearing, young women in her community had told her, “I can’t have any children now,” or “I’m thinking about having my child aborted.” “This, to me, is a horrible situation, because I am a woman,” Lee declared. “I have four children and I know what it means and how a woman feels to reproduce. This is her highest achievement and to be denied this achievement, to me, is a horrendous prospect.”137 Local women took seriously the warning that ionizing radiation was most damaging “to future unborn generations.”138 One mother queried about her children: “are they going to have damaged genes that could cause them to have defective children?”139 Another instructed her daughter to warn whomever she married that she had lived near the reactor at the time of the accident. “Isn’t it terrible,” she asked, “to have to worry about damage to unborn children from that monstrous plant?”140 Several women told the commission that the most searing aspect of the accident was the question their daughters had asked in its wake: “Will I still have healthy, normal children someday?”141 The National Institute of Mental Health interviewed over three hundred mothers who lived near the plant and found that, despite official reassurance, almost 43 percent of them believed that the accident would unleash health problems in future generations.142

  These fears projected the invisibility of radiation onto an indeterminate future. While the accident left no visible signs of damage, many local women suspected that it would wreak generational havoc by triggering runaway mutations. For this betrayal, they blamed both Met-Ed and the state. One fifty-eight-year old woman who lived near the plant explained that the accident had shattered her trust in both the utility company and public officials: “I don’t believe anything they say because they lied to us in the first place.” But her anger was on her grandchildren’s behalf. “I’ve lived my life, but I’m worried about my grandchildren.” One of her grandsons lived across from the plant, and she worried about him constantly.143 Another woman who lived eight miles from TMI told a reporter that there was always a question in the back of her mind: “In twenty years, will it affect my children?”144 In May 1979, one local woman wrote a letter to the Kemeny Commission in which she explained that she had always had faith in government leaders and what she termed “so called professionals.” But the accident changed that: “after this monster was released on us all I have is cynicism and mistrust.” Since the accident, she continued, “I live in dread of the future for my two teenage children.” She ended with a warning: “The tyranny of forever learning by trial and error will cost us our lives.”145

  This was patriotic body politics, but now centered on women and children. Patriotic body politics had often been mediated through men’s relationship to the military. Narratives recounting the suffering of injured and sickened military men indicted the state for having turned its back on those most willing to sacrifice on its behalf. The accident rerouted this insight from warfront to home front, from the martial arena to the familial one, and from men to women. At Three Mile Island, patriotic body politics centered not on the debilitated bodies of male warriors, but on the threatened reproductive female body, the child’s body, and the fetal body. More than any other constituency, it was mothers with young children who expressed both skepticism toward the official claim that the accident had done no harm and fear that radiation exposure had imperiled their reproductive futures. At Three Mile Island, patriotic body politics became women’s reproductive politics.

  As a consequence, the unborn displaced the soldier as the central animating figure. The unborn, already made more legible during the postwar years, became even more charged in the 1960s and 1970s, as advances in obstetrics led to both unprecedented levels of visual information about the fetus and growing vigilance surrounding fetal health. In the early 1960s, ultrasound exams were introduced as a routine obstetrics practice. In April 1965, Life magazine published “Drama of Life Before Birth,” a sixteen-page photo-essay by Swedish medical photographer Lennart Nilsson that charted the development of the human fetus. The issue sold eight million copies in its first four days on newsstands.146 This new, visually mediated attention to the human fetus went hand in hand with the growing perception that it was vulnerable to environmental assault. In 1973 the University of Washington first identified fetal alcohol syndrome as a cluster of physical and mental birth defects associated with the expectant mother’s consumption of alcohol, and in 1981 the surgeon general’s office issued its first official warning about the risks of drinking alcohol during pregnancy.147 In 1977 the American Cancer Society used fetal sonogram images to reinforce the warning that smoking endangered public health.148 If the reactor core at Three Mile Island was concealed from view, the fetus now occupied the inverse position. It was hiding in plain sight.

  This casting of the fetus as visible and vulnerable had profound political implications. This was the era of an escalating war over abortion, and Pennsylvania was home to an active grassroots movement against expanding abortion rights. As early as 1969, Pittsburgh activists started People Concerned for the Unborn Child, the state’s first prolife group. In 1970 the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference (PCC) launched Pennsylvanians for Human Life, an educational group designed to rally support for abortion restrictions. The PCC adopted the Second Vatican Council’s definition of abortion from 1965 as the functional equivalent of infanticide.149 By the early 1980s several organizations had formed the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation, a state affiliate of the National Right to Life committee. Together, these groups put the state on the vanguard of the fight to roll back abortion rights.150 This was more than a legislative battle. It was a struggle over the question of what constitutes life itself, one that hinged on a new fetal imagery. As one popular prolife slogan put it, “If there were a window on a pregnant woman’s stomach, there would be no more abortions.”151 Throughout Pennsylvania, antiabortion activists fought to gain a discursive monopoly over a term—life—that appeared to transcend politics altogether.

  How did this struggle over abortion shape the community’s response to the accident at Three Mile Island? There is no question that it was a salient feature of the Susquehanna Valley’s political landscape by 1979, as activists from throughout the state traveled to Harrisburg to meet with legislators and to protest on the steps of the capitol building. The three largest religious denominations in the region —Catholicism, Evangelical Lutheranism, and United Methodism—all condemned abortion (albeit to varying degrees). The
Republican Party dominated the area, and by the late 1970s, grassroots activists were trying to make abortion a centerpiece of the party’s national agenda. At the same time, it would be wrong to assume based on the conservative Christian complexion of the region that the women who lived near the reactor had a unified or consistent position on the issue. On the contrary, even if they claimed to oppose the practice, a sizeable number of pregnant women considered obtaining abortions when they feared that their fetuses had been harmed from radiation exposure, at least according to local obstetricians’ reports about being deluged with phone calls from expectant mothers. If anything, the searing experiences of pregnant women at TMI affirmed rather than undermined the prochoice principle that women should control their reproductive lives.152

  What is clear, however, is that after the accident, women at Three Mile Island drew on the prolife movement’s grammar of sanctified human life and deployed it against the utility that owned the plant, against the government, and—in some cases—against the nuclear industry writ large. As one woman who had been pregnant at the time put it, “I am still unable to forget the total violation I felt when I realized my trust and faith in the Government had been betrayed.” She had come to believe that her unborn baby had been imperiled by an industry that was reckless and profit-driven. “Growing inside me was God’s most precious gift,” she recalled, “and growing outside was an industry that lost sight of that precious life.”153 Her statement evokes what anthropologist Faye Ginsburg identifies as a central prolife motif: “the violation of the boundary of the impregnated womb by male figures representing the profit motive.”154 In the years ahead, local women would mobilize this motif in their fight to decommission the plant. Five years after the accident, a photograph appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette of a woman holding up a protest sign featuring a baby picture. The message beneath read, “Make a Grave for TMI, not my baby.”155 Thus at TMI, a grammar of life appealed to the figure of the unborn, not in the service of rolling back abortion rights but to condemn the profit motive and the state.