By Karl Grossman
Radioactive: The Women of Three Mile Island is the title of a newly-released documentary feature film directed, written and produced by award-winning filmmaker Heidi Hutner, a professor of environmental humanities at Stony Brook University, a "flagship" school of the State University of New York.
With greatly compelling facts and interviews, she and her also highly talented production team have put together a masterpiece of a documentary film.
It connects the proverbial dots of the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear plant disaster--doing so brilliantly.
The documentary has already received many film awards and has had screening in recent months in New York City--winning the "Audience Award for Best Documentary" at the Dances With Films Festival--and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Sarasota, Florida; Dubuque, Iowa; Long Island, New York; First Frame International Film Festival in New York City; the Environmental Film Festival in Washington D.C., and is soon be the featured film at Kat Kramer's #SHEROESForChange Film Festival in Los Angeles and the Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose, California, as well as the Uranium Film Festival in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. And there will be tours across the U.S.
Resident after resident of the area around Three Mile Island is interviewed and tells of the widespread cancer that has ensued 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 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 and Xenon 133.
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 Olson, 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, Olson 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" who is "more resistant" to radioactivity than a woman.
There's the scientist, Dr. Aaron Datesman, who is now pursuing a major chromosomal study regarding the impact of the disaster on the health of people in the area, how people have been harmed despite the denials of the nuclear industry. This study is based on his recent ground-breaking work, "Radiological Shot Noise," in Nature.
And more and more.
After the screening of the documentary at the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington, Long Island, the showing I attended, there was a panel discussion involving Hutner, four women featured in the documentary, and its editor Simeon Hutner, who is also a producer.
The discussion was moderated by Kelly McMasters, author of the memoir, Welcome to Shirley, A Memoir of an Atomic Town, and a professor at Hofstra University on Long Island. McMasters in her book attributes wide-ranging cancer in her Shirley hometown on Long Island to radioactive releases from the three nuclear reactors that operated at the adjacent Brookhaven National Laboratory, reactors that are now shut down.
From the audience, Catherine Skopic of Manhattan, who journeyed to Long Island for the premiere of the documentary in Huntington, said the film "is going to make waves." She related the link between the TMI accident 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.
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