Accident Critical to Fate of Shoreham Nuclear Plant

A Stony Brook University professor of environmental humanities, Dr. Heidi Hutner, along with a highly talented production team and greatly compelling facts and interviews, have put together a masterpiece of a documentary film about the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant meltdown, which has just had its Long Island premier.

The new documentary, “Radioactive: The Women of Three Mile Island,” which has already received many film awards, had its area premier on April 29th at the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington.

The 1979 accident was critical to the fate of the Shoreham nuclear power plant in Suffolk County, thereafter stopped from going into commercial operation by a groundswell of grassroots and governmental opposition. Further, the plan of the utility for this area, the Long Island Lighting Company, to build a total of seven to eleven nuclear plants here, was subsequently abandoned.

“That was a pivot point,” Patrick Halpin, a member of the Suffolk County Legislature at the time of the TMI accident and then county executive, would later say about the TMI accident. Halpin pointed to the evacuation in the face of the radioactivity released. “And,” he related, “the people who were leading the opposition to Shoreham said, ‘Look, this could happen here on Long Island.'"

Suffolk County Executive John V. N. Klein, two months after the accident, led a group of Suffolk officials on a visit to the communities around the Pennsylvania plant. The Shoreham plant was scheduled to open the next year, in 1980. The visit caused the county to change its position in governmental licensing proceedings on Shoreham to opposition.

And those officials only learned about a fraction of the impacts of the accident. “Radioactive: The Women of Three Mile Island” connects the proverbial dots—doing so brilliantly.

Resident after resident are interviewed and tell of the widespread cancer that has ensued in the area in the years that have followed the accident—a cancer rate far beyond what would be normal. Accounts shared in the documentary are heartbreaking.

A whistleblower who had worked at the nuclear plant tells Hutner, the documentary’s producer, writer and director, of the deliberate and comprehensive attempt by General Public Utilities, which owned TMI, to cover up the gravity of the accident and its radioactive releases especially of cancer-causing Iodine-131.

Professor Heidi Hutner conducting an interview during filming. File Photo

An attorney, Lynne Bernabei, involved in litigation in the wake of the accident, says the Three Mile Island “cover-up was one of the biggest cover-ups in history.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission which is “supposed to protect the public” has then and since been just “interested in is promoting the [nuclear] industry. This is corrupt,” says attorney Joanne Doroshow, now a professor at New York Law School and director of the Center for Justice & Democracy. Many examples of this are presented.

The documentary’s focus on women includes women being far more at risk to the effects of radioactivity than men. Mary Olsen, a biologist and founder and director of the Gender & Radiation Impact Project, says in the film that those setting radiation standards in the U.S. from the onset of nuclear technology in 1942, based impacts on a “25 to 30 years-old” male “defined as Caucasian.” She said, “It has come to be known as the ‘Reference man.” However, Olsen cites research findings that “radiation is 10 times more harmful to young females” and “50 percent more harmful” to a “comparable female” than it is to “Reference Man” whose “more resistant” to radioactivity than a woman.

After the screening of the film, there was a panel discussion involving Hutner, four women featured in the documentary, and its editor Simeon Hunter, who is also a producer.

The discussion was moderated by Kelly McMasters, a professor at Hofstra University and author of “Welcome to Shirley, A Memoir of an Atomic Town.”

From the audience, Catherine Skopic of Manhattan, who journeyed to Suffolk for the premier, said the film “is going to make waves.” She related the link between the TMI accident and the Shoreham nuclear plant and contemporary nuclear issues. These included the plan by Holtec International, now the owner of the closed Indian Point nuclear power plants 25 miles north of the city, to “dump a million gallons of radioactive water” into the Hudson River from which “seven communities get their drinking water,” and similar dumping planned in coming months by the Tokyo Electric Power Company from its 2011 accident-struck Fukushima Daichi nuclear power plants into the Pacific Ocean.