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Women, Water, and the Radiation Threat at Three Mile Island
In March 1979, the most serious accident in the history of nuclear power in the United States occurred at the Three Mile Island plant in South Central Pennsylvania. The overheating of the reactor’s core threatened the release of radiation into the region’s air, soil, and water. On day two of the crisis, the utility company that operated the plant dumped wastewater contaminated with small amounts of the radioactive gas xenon into the Susquehanna River, which supplied water to residents living downstream. My talk explores how local women—many of whom had been either neutral or supportive of nuclear power prior to 1979--responded to the radiological threat to the river. I argue that the constellation of health risks posed by radiation exposure—miscarriage, infertility, and fetal disability—thrust local women into the center of the political struggle over both the contested health consequences of the accident and the ultimate fate of the reactor. After the accident, many local women drew on homegrown elements of the region’s political culture, including its traditionalism, its Christianity, and its patriotism, and combined them with a skepticism vis-à-vis the “official story” that had its origins in the protest cultures of the 1960s. Meanwhile, state officials responded not by tightening regulations over the nuclear industry, but instead by invoking what would become a neoliberal approach to risk: it would be up to citizens themselves whether to determine whether water was “safe enough” for consumption.