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(tense music)

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(dog barks)

(tense music)

- Hey, folks.

Right now it's 3:47 a.m., okay?

In about five minutes, six minutes is the actual time

of the accident, so just to go over,

we sort of gather in a circle here each year

for the past 38 years.

We actually should be over that line,

but you can't see it.

This is the line that we crossed many years ago.

- [Speaker] We got arrested, this line.

- I think most of the people here have been arrested

and taken away.

And what we're gonna do is take a moment of silence at 3:52

and we'll go from there, okay?

(train horn blares)

(train clatters)

- She wants the mothers.

- Oh, we're the mothers.

- I want to tape you guys.

Tell us about how you formed this group.

- Sure, sure.

- In early 2018, I was contacted by a woman

who had been following my writing

on women and nuclear disasters.

She said, "My family and I lived through the meltdown

at Three Mile Island.

Please come for the anniversary of the accident."

And that's how I came to meet Linda, Beth, Paula, and Joyce.

(solemn music)

(birds chirp)

Can I ask you something?

I mean, I've never heard all these stories before.

I mean, I knew there was an accident at Three Mile Island,

but really, until I met you all.

- Yeah, I know, we were here at the beginning.

- I didn't hear what it was like for the people

and for mothers with kids and just-

- You didn't hear it because they squashed it.

They denied.

They denied full access of the information to people.

- Well, that would humanize the problem

and they did not want that.

We were human.

We were being human.

- They would say, "Go home and bake cookies,

and you know, we're taking care of business."

But it was that whole idea that we would not let go

because it was that gut instinct that we knew better.

We knew better.

- Before the accident, were you worried about the plant?

Did you think about it?

- I knew nothing about a nuclear power plant.

- I knew the plant was there, but as I washed my dishes,

out of my kitchen window,

I could see the tops of the towers.

I knew it was a form of energy,

but I had no idea, not a clue.

- We were typical middle America.

- I can remember- - Mom and apple pie, we were.

- I can remember going to ball games that summer

after the accident,

being pregnant and just crying all the time.

I went to church, I just cried all the time.

And it was like, okay, I can't keep living like this.

I need answers.

- [Heidi] If you go to the website

of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, also known as the NRC,

you'll find an official statement that says,

"In spite of serious damage to the reactor,

the actual release had negligible effects

on the physical health of individuals or the environment."

But negligible effects is definitely not how Linda,

Beth, Joyce, and Paula would describe the impact

of the accident on their families.

And neither would the others that the moms led me to,

a former plant worker, a lawyer, and a journalist

who was one of the first to report on the accident.

- I was a young reporter.

I had been hired right out of college to WKBO in Harrisburg

to co-anchor the morning news.

Mike Pintek was my boss.

So we went through our newscast

and our traffic reporter, Captain Dave,

contacts us on the CB radio and says,

"Mike, I'm hearing something on the scanners

about activity at Three Mile Island.

And by the way, there's no steam coming out of unit two."

Mike meanwhile gets the phone number for Three Mile Island,

and the operator was so flustered,

she patches him in directly to the control room.

And the guy picks up the phone,

Mike says, "I understand something's going on."

He said, "This is an emergency, I can't talk.

You need to call Reading."

'Cause Reading was where the office

of Metropolitan Edison Company was located.

So Mike did verify

that a general emergency had been declared,

but there was no immediate danger to the public.

It was the first word to the general public

about what was happening at Three Mile Island.

- [Mike] This is Mike Pintek in the KBO newsroom.

Met-Ed company officials had to shut down

their Three Mile Island nuclear power station

unit number two this morning, after an accident occurred

within the plant's turbine system.

Officials have been saying

that there is no danger to the general public

and that the situation is under control.

- Once the accident happened,

we started getting phone calls early that morning,

asking if we had heard about Three Mile Island yet.

And these were my friends who were my ex-coworkers.

And I said, "No, I hadn't heard this."

And they said, "You have no idea.

You gotta turn on the news, check this out.

It's melting."

And I went, "What do you mean it's melting?"

He says, "They're having a meltdown."

- A few hours in there,

they start getting temperature readings in the containment.

They were getting 2,500 degrees.

That immediately told them serious core damage.

Then, that afternoon there was a hydrogen explosion.

They heard a thud,

they saw on their control panels a pressure spike.

There's only a hydrogen explosion in a plant like that

when there is serious core damage.

We're talking about the core melting down

through the bottom of the containment.

It was already pretty close

to it blowing the radiation sky high.

That would've rendered I don't know how many square miles

with hundreds of thousands

or millions of people being contaminated.

Within a half hour,

they travel to the State of Pennsylvania's offices

to meet with officials.

Don't tell 'em anything.

Don't tell 'em about the hydrogen explosion,

the temperature readings,

that there's any risk to the public.

- If that had been brought to the attention

of state and federal government officials,

that it is very likely they would've ordered the evacuation

of a significant part of Pennsylvania.

- [Heidi] Wow, that's extraordinary.

- It is extraordinary.

And they were very lucky

that they didn't have a total meltdown.

- What we've seen here is the fuel failure,

something that's possible with an operating reactor.

And the safety systems were designed to take care

of this kind of an accident as our safety systems did.

- We didn't think that we were getting the truth.

They kept saying everything is fine,

but the reporters weren't buying that.

- Why was the radiation allowed

to escape into the atmosphere?

That seems to be what frightens the public the most.

- Radiation is allowed to be released from the reactor plant

in the course of normal operation.

- It was the first step in a nuclear nightmare.

As far as we know at this hour, no worse than that.

- Radiation inside the plant was a thousand times normal,

but those outside were said to be in no danger.

- I believe at this point that there is no cause for alarm

or any reason to disrupt your daily routine.

- The biggest releases were on that first day.

And no one knew and you weren't being told?

- No, no, actually I was being told

by my brother-in-law in Boston,

and an ex-neighbor in Texas calling and saying,

"Get out of there.

Get out.

There's a terrible accident that's on..."

And I'm like, the media's blowing it up.

- Out of proportion.

- Because that's what they told us, yes.

- Don't question authority.

- No, because they have our best interests at heart

and they're going to do- - They'll take care of us.

- Yeah, if you pay your taxes and you're a good citizen,

everything in this world is going to be okay.

And you believe them.

- It's like demolishing your belief system.

Then you find out that the government really isn't

that interested in your wellbeing.

It's very interested in making sure

that company runs well and smoothly.

Nevermind it may kill you.

- When an accident like Three Mile Island happens,

the first line of duty is to reassure the public

that it's not dangerous, that it's not bad.

That's their first line of duty.

And if they could pull that off at Three Mile Island,

then that tells me

that they could do that pretty much anywhere about anything.

- We were led to believe that everything was fine.

That, yes, there had been a general emergency,

but the system had worked as it was designed to work

and it contained the accident,

and so that's how we ended the day.

We thought everything was fine, we dodged a bullet.

- I got it in my mind.

I said, "Wow, I wonder if I could get a job there.

I wonder if I could go back."

'Cause I'd been gone for, you know,

several months from the industry,

but I'm still respected and I bet they're gonna need help.

And Joy and I talked about it that night

and she said, "Sure, why not?"

We determined that we were the only ones

who could tell the truth or not.

(suspenseful music)

The common joke, first several days, was, you know,

"Wow, never got to work at a melting reactor before."

And everyone kind of acknowledged that.

Everyone knew it and understood it.

Our favorite spot was a little office off the control room

where the copy machine was.

And every day, sure enough,

someone would make copies of a report,

a plume map, an NRC guide, a document.

But you know, people are copying in a hurry

and they would leave the original on the machine.

And I just happened to be there.

I thought, look at that.

That's how we collected a lot of our data,

was simply taking it from the copy machine.

- [Heidi] What was released that you were seeing?

- Iodine 131 was our biggest cause,

our biggest cause for alarm,

because it's the most destructive

and it gets in milk and it gives you thyroid cancer

and a lot of other kinds of problems.

The amount of iodine for the first two or three days was

practically immeasurable.

So much iodine that none of us had ever seen

that much iodine in the air

or in our filtration system or on the ground.

It was totally contaminated.

But there were also products

that were produced from the deterioration

of the reactor itself,

with radioactive particles everywhere.

- [Heidi] And outside of the plant itself.

- Of course, outside of the plant.

- [Heidi] Outside of the containment vessel.

- Absolutely.

- We may have some minor fuel damage,

but we don't believe at this point that it's extensive.

The radiation levels at the site boundary are

really only a 10th of the general emergency level

where we normally get concerned.

Very, very small traces of radioactivity have been released

from the plant.

- Everything coming out of their mouths was a lie.

And I think that has to do with what caused the accident,

how they responded to the accident,

the radiation releases,

what they knew they did to people in that community.

Everything was a lie.

- Thursday came along

and we went through our usual newscast.

I'm sure we did some sort of update

of whatever we were being told about Three Mile Island.

We felt that things were under control though,

so Mike sent me down to Middletown to talk to the people

to get their impression as to what happened.

There were a few people who still were against it

and still wondered what was going on, but for the most part,

we were back to going about our daily lives

as though nothing had happened.

It was on Friday that things changed.

- [Reporter] There had already been a partial meltdown,

but it wasn't until the early morning hours on Friday

that federal inspectors discovered it.

And by then, something totally unforeseen was happening.

A massive hydrogen bubble had formed in the reactor vessel

and pressure was building.

- If the hydrogen should explode

or if the atomic fuel should melt,

one government study estimated in such an event,

45,000 would be killed, a quarter of a million injured.

It is that possibility

that has authorities considering evacuation.

- On Friday morning,

I remember I was doing my neighbor's hair, Fern,

and I was sitting at the dining room table.

My children had gone to school

with the exception of my youngest.

And I was setting her hair and the TV was on

and it was Governor Thornburgh.

- Based on advice of the chairman of the NRC

and in the interests of taking every precaution,

we've advised those who may be particularly susceptible

to the effects of radiation,

that is pregnant women and preschool aged children,

to leave the area within a five mile radius

of the Three Mile Island facility until further notice.

- All hell broke loose.

- Yeah, it did.

- It was crazy.

People trying to get to the banks, trying to get to gas.

The phone lines were jammed. - Were jammed.

- My husband worked on the west shore,

which is across the river, and I called him and I said,

"Honey, Chrissy came home with a bag on her head.

I can't go get Tim.

They're saying don't go pick him up."

And I said, "We need to get outta here."

- Who came home with a bag on her head?

- My daughter came home with a bag,

a brown paper bag on her head with the two little eye slits

to protect her from the radiation.

- You know, the bus drivers were trying to protect the kids

and said, "Put your coats over your head and run home.

Run, don't stop.

Just run home and get in your house."

- Wasn't it your son who threw up?

- Yes.

It was a vile green.

If you've ever used Comet cleanser,

that was the color of what he threw up.

And a year later, a doctor who took care of the patients

from Hiroshima and Nagasaki wanted to talk to me

and I said I would

but he had to answer one question for me when we were done.

And I told him the story about my son and when he threw up.

And he pulled out a handful of disc.

He said, "Pick the color green."

And I did, and he said,

"Classic case of radiation sickness poisoning."

- And I was gone for 10 days.

I think most of us evacuated for at least until 10 days.

It wasn't safe. - Yeah.

- I was at my last semester of law school

and I remember very distinctly being in the state capitol

and suddenly the governor ordering all the windows

and doors shut, these big oak doors got shut.

And we were freaked out.

And we had no idea what was going on.

We didn't think anything was happening with the plant

and we wouldn't have gone.

So we hopped in the car and decided on our way back,

we would stop in to see a movie called "The China Syndrome,"

which had just come out.

And it was about a nuclear reactor accident

where officials were lying about what was really happening.

- Jack, we still have high radiation on level eight.

- It's perfectly normal.

- Feedwater flow, 450,000 pounds per hour and decreasing.

- Godell here.

- Jack, Bill Gibson in the district gallery.

- [Jack] Yep.

- We got some people here from Channel Three.

They're shooting a TV news special at the plant.

Listen, what the hell's going on down there?

- It's just a routine turbine trip, Bill, okay?

Just take it easy. (alarm rings)

There's nothing to worry about.

- [Speaker] High water level in the reactor!

(workers shout)

- Relax, everybody relax.

Got high water in the core and I'm gonna dump it.

- There's nothing to worry about.

It's just a routine turbine trip.

- We, all of us, knew that it was an important movie.

It opened and it did okay.

It was open for a little under two weeks, I believe,

and Three Mile Island happened

and rocked the country.

And everybody went rushing to see "The China Syndrome"

to try to figure out what had really happened

at Three Mile Island.

- [On the phone] Operations.

- This is Jack Godell.

We have a serious condition.

You get everybody into safety areas

and make sure that they stay there.

- [Announcer] All personnel proceed directly

to safety areas.

Caution, caution, this is not a drill.

This is not a drill.

- All their evacuation decisions were based

on this model of a five mile radius.

Well, everyone knows that smoke out of a smoke stack goes

a lot more than five miles.

And then as atmosphere happens,

it pushes that down onto the ground.

That's just basic weather, and so we all know that.

And so, but their criteria was the gamma of five miles

and anything beyond that was no problem.

So as long as you're at five miles outta town,

then you're safe.

And so Hershey became, I guess, a good place to go

because it was beyond the five mile

and maybe convenient or whatever.

But it's amazing when you think of it,

that they evacuated women and children

and pregnant moms right into the plume.

- [Reporter] An estimated 1000 nuclear experts

and technicians have now converged

at the Three Mile Island facility

to help Metropolitan Edison's operators deal

with the serious problems that lie ahead.

Dr. Harold Denton of the NRC said today,

General Public Utilities,

the firm that owns the nuclear plant,

was thin on technical talent.

- Saturday morning, I got in the car,

drove to my parents' house, which was outside Philadelphia,

but I decided how could I call myself a reporter

if I left in the middle of the story?

The thing that changed was

President Carter was coming to town.

I don't think you'd send the president

to someplace that was unstable,

so I felt that things were a little bit under control

and I went back and stayed there to do my job.

- At the present time,

all those who are involved here, who are highly qualified,

tell me that the reactor core is indeed stable.

(solemn music)

- The Three Mile Island accident happened at a moment

where the country was ready to rise up

against this technology.

I didn't even make the main rally, which was May of '79,

'cause I was taking law school exams.

Hundreds of thousands of people came to this.

- If we continue to place our health

and safety in the hands of utility executives,

then we will see more Harrisburgs, we will see more leaks,

and we will see an increase in the cancer epidemic

that is already running rampant in this country.

Every time we would come to a city or a town

and then we'd leave, and then the Truth Squad,

they were called the Truth Squad,

would follow us and refute everything we said,

demanding equal time.

I mean, the industry did not want

to have this all talked about and gotten out.

(solemn music)

- Well, I'm the one

that turned off the reactor cooling pumps initially.

- In my own mind, just the failure to recognize

that we had a relief valve that was still partially open

or open was probably the biggest event.

(solemn music)

- The first atoms that we intentionally split were

in 1942 in Chicago.

Back then, most of the people

who were working on fission were either military males

or paramilitary males.

And so it was somewhat appropriate

that the standards were set for them

for what has come to be known as the reference man.

He is between 25 and 30 years old.

He's five 10.

He's got a specific weight.

He's defined as Caucasian.

And it took digging into the original numbers

for me to be able to authoritatively say

that radiation is 10 times more harmful to young females

than to reference man

and 50% more harmful to a comparable female.

So now we have this information

and we look back over everything we know about radiation

and understand that everything we know is

about this adult male who's most resistant.

Meanwhile, it isn't just military men

and paramilitary men who are being affected.

- We are in Middletown at the,

what used to be the Liberty Fire Hall.

It's now the Middletown Volunteer Fire Company.

When we came here, it was for,

the NRC was here, Met-Ed was here,

and they wanted to tell us.

Now the accident happened in March and they needed to vent,

they needed to vent,

and they were going to do it in July

when the kids were home from school

and they'd be outside playing.

And so we went, you know,

"Listen, the kids are gonna be outside.

Please don't vent."

There's other ways to do it

that it was more expensive to do it, to contain it.

But there were so many people who came

and instead of saying,

"Look, we didn't expect so many people,

we know everybody wants to hear what's happening,"

they threatened to arrest anybody who opened the door

and tried to let anybody in.

Their whole arrogance was so...

It just set the tone.

And I remember being there and being so angry.

(crowd chants)

- The meeting really won't be very productive.

- [Reporter] The NRC's chief man at Three Mile Island was

repeatedly shouted down as he tried

to present several alternate plans for venting the gas.

- [Heidi] After this, you organized, the four of you.

- Yeah, whatever it was, it was gonna be a positive thing.

And that down the road, no matter what, we gave it our all.

- [Heidi] And that's when you organized

Concerned Mothers and Women.

- Yes, yes.

- This is the 40th anniversary

of the accident at the island.

And we are having a dinner

and Concerned Mothers are in charge

of the desserts for the dinner,

so we decided to all get together and dessert.

- And dessert.

We learned to multitask, you know?

We bake and then we also try

and respond to a nuclear accident.

- With a smile on our face.

- Yeah, when you go to meetings and they say,

"Go home and bake your cookies,"

little did they know we were baking cookies to sell

to make copies to protest what they were doing.

- Gentlemen, we live in the daily repercussions

of this accident.

Sirens malfunctioning,

incorrect evacuation plans in our tax notices,

daily ventings,

the storage of high level waste on that island,

and the total incompetence of GPU.

(audience applauds)

(passengers shout)

- Sometimes courteous, sometimes not.

- If people don't take action, I mean,

certainly not four women are gonna change the whole...

Certainly not.

- But we can annoy the hell out of them.

- Because we're all in this together.

It's a boat that we're all trying to row.

- [Speaker] Yeah, that's right.

- [Speaker] And you can't hold people at fault.

There's fear involved and there's different aspects

and that's where- - Fight or flight.

- Yeah, and that's where we apparently came

into this picture.

- It was a very difficult time, very painful.

And as a result, I had a lot of anger, a lot of fear,

resentment, and a definite violation of my trust

and confidence in the government and the NRC, the utility.

I felt as if I'd been raped.

Everything had been taken away from me

that was my foundation.

- There was that point to all of this where it would be,

neighbors would come over and say,

"Oh my God, you know, my kid isn't feeling good today.

Should I take him to the doctors?

Do you think there's something wrong?"

- Because they lied to us so much

and lied to the public so much,

they didn't wanna believe them anymore either.

They were willing to believe us as neighbors

than to the people that were in authority.

- I told my kids early on

when they were getting so much grief at school

because their mother was fighting against-

- A crazy activist.

- Yes.

And then all I said to them was,

"You just have to trust me

that I want you to know I did everything I could do

to right this mistake."

And I said, "I will work at that until I die."

- You girls did a great job here.

I'm just gonna put 'em in plastic

and then it won't take me long.

Yeah, let me tell you something.

- And so Concerned Mothers started

doing projects ourselves,

meeting with elected officials, going to the NRC,

letter writing.

- [Heidi] So you have stored a lot of material here

from all your work.

- It's difficult.

It's difficult because you feel

like you're up against a great wall of indifference,

like that they don't wanna really deal

with the truth of this whole thing.

The only people from the government

who have been here are IRS people that did a tax,

they checked our taxes out.

- So you were audited

and you feel it was because of your activism?

- Oh, yeah, yeah, I do.

I think, I mean, I do.

(laughs) And mainly because Joyce was audited

and so was Paula in the same year.

And you, you know, you think to yourself-

- That's amazing.

What's going on?

- Yeah, yeah.

A lot of my information would be on the kitchen table

and I'd have to clean the table off, so I'd put it in a box.

So letters and actions that we took as Concerned Mothers,

postcards that we sent to elected officials,

letters that we sent to elected officials,

and documentation.

I have a lot of the regs from the NRC

and different meetings that we attended.

- If you knew then what you know now

about Three Mile Island, would you have moved here?

- No, I would not live near a nuclear power plant

knowing everything that I know now.

(solemn music)

- Three Mile Island was carefully managed

as an event in the media

so that the fact that so much radioactivity was coming off

of the top of the reactor

that the monitors on the top of the reactor were pegged.

What was happening was so much was being released

that the monitors couldn't read it.

All the information was suppressed.

Nobody who was speaking the truth was listened to

or given a stage to be heard.

The only collection of data that happened was

five years after the accident

under a court supervised process.

And happily, the scientists who did it were credible enough

to preserve the data

in a way that it could be reexamined later.

In the 1990s,

researchers from the University of North Carolina,

led by Steve Wing, examined the data.

And what Wing and his team found was incredibly important.

They found that the cancers and the radiation align,

they're the same map,

and the increase is quite remarkable.

It's a very significant amount higher

compared to people who are out in areas

where they did not get as much radiation.

But the power structure

that was supporting the nuclear industry

and supporting these regulators who've done such a bad job

of protecting the public squelch this information.

- The principal release was xenon 133 that came from a leak

of cooling water into an auxiliary building.

The cooling water contained radioactive gases

and they vented the gases into the atmosphere.

Xenon is interesting

because when you inhale it, it's a large atom.

Xenon binds to hemoglobin

and the hemoglobin carries the xenon

all throughout your body.

So beginning at 4:00 a.m. on Wednesday, March 28th,

22 million curies, which is a very large amount,

was released.

And the plume would've gone

right through parts of Middletown until it hit a hill,

which is where the moms live, as it happens.

It didn't stop there, it kept going,

but the exposures were greatest in that location.

The official story,

which actually congealed very rapidly after the accident,

was that the exposures were X and gamma rays

and there should have been no detectable increase

in cancer or other illness.

- What you're proposing is that there was harm?

- It's certainly fair to say

that there should have been concern

and there should be more research.

A wrong belief has persisted

about the effects of low dose exposures

that occur over long times.

People go and they get X-rayed,

they don't develop cancer immediately or hopefully at all,

but nobody spends 24 hours in an X-ray machine.

The people in the plume were continuously exposed for a day,

especially because xenon is dissolved in fatty tissue

and it stays for many hours.

So if you spend a day being continually X-rayed,

you will accumulate a huge dose,

and that is what happened at Three Mile Island.

If my hypothesis is correct,

then actually people in the most intense part

of the plume suffered an exposure equivalent

to maybe 50 or 100,000 X-rays.

- [Heidi] Were you surprised by these findings?

- No.

Because radiation exposure can do things, so, you know?

I mean, that's how the cancers develop,

because you're changing something in the molecular genetics.

I mean, that's how each cancer,

we know that has to have a genetic background somewhere.

So there's some mutation, some gene alteration.

That's how the cancer starts.

So maybe that is a start,

and that's when the cancer cells start.

- [Heidi] So you started with the assumption

that there was radiation exposure to the population.

- Could be. - Could be.

- That's all I can say.

- [Heidi] Okay, could be.

- Nothing can be said because we don't have data.

It's 30 years,

so who knows how will we find the radiation data.

The best radiation data is, if somebody did do the study,

like those papers who were being published at that time,

is they actually did do the study

and found the radiation exposure was actually there.

But as I said,

it's the patients who are gonna give you the real data.

(solemn music)

- We forgot that the origins of science is inquiry.

Like something happened, what is that?

And then you go and look

and you try to figure out what's happening.

- Right.

- And I felt that that was what we were doing.

And then, you know, scientists,

and of course the government wanted to minimize the issue,

but if you see the individual experience,

you can see that something really happened.

- This is Marie Holowka.

She died in 1992, but this interview was in 1986.

So after the TMI accident,

Marie was treated for thyroid problems.

She was subsequently diagnosed for cancer

and has since had several operations

and is currently receiving chemotherapy.

So she says, I, this is Marie saying,

"I went to the barn around 4, 4:30 in the morning.

We were milking cows.

And I finished a little bit after seven

and I looked outside.

It was so blue, everywhere was blue,

couldn't see the buildings or anything.

And I got scared.

I started for the house and I fell down, see?

And then I finally got myself up and I fell down again

and I couldn't get up.

You just get an awful feeling in your body,

like electricity would be going through you.

You could feel it going through your system

and in my nose and in my mouth.

And then you could just taste

like a copper taste in your mouth.

I could taste that.

We stuffed rags beneath the door, so this wouldn't come in.

But I think it was all the way in."

This is a couple talking, the Hoovers,

who had many problems with their cows

and their own health after the accident.

"Friday when my wife came back from work,

I had a red pickup truck and she looked out and said,

'It's snowing out there.'

She could see the white flakes against my red pickup truck.

But I knew it wasn't snow.

That night, we had little red spots on our arms

where we didn't have sleeves on.

Then the people from Three Mile Island came down

and said, 'No, you didn't see anything.

That's all imaginary.'

But time will tell if anything happens to us."

And this is Robert Weber, who was a veterinarian.

He was interviewed in 1982.

"The evidence of trouble came out

in sows and sheep and goats.

When the Three Mile Island thing came to a head,

we were having stillbirths,

many in sheep, goats, and pigs.

This problem spread all about 15 miles.

Also, we had troubles with sheep just being found dead.

Goats just being found dead.

Cancer is our big deal now.

We have goats coming down with cancer,

we have dogs with cancer, we have mules with cancer.

And previous to that time, I never saw it.

The animal kingdom, their lifespan is shorter than ours.

So what about the people 10 years down the road?"

- We all knew in our hearts that this day was coming.

We just didn't know who, how many, and in what form.

- [Heidi] What was coming?

- Cancer. - Cancer.

- [Heidi] Oh, the cancer, yes.

- Our first known cancer person,

it was a husband and a wife,

and they lived up on Donald Avenue

- Around the corner.

- And my husband and I were talking about it

and I said, "Hun, do you remember his name?"

And because my husband worked

with the neighbor across the street, Walter Roski,

who developed brain cancer

and died in a very short period of time.

- The neighbor next door here,

the wife developed breast cancer.

And the gentleman who had brain cancer,

I can't think of his name either,

but when she died and her husband died, they married.

Yeah, they got together and got married.

- My next door neighbor developed breast cancer.

And she was in her 30s, Linda Beard.

- Oh, I remember Linda, yes.

- And she decided no treatment at all.

- There were children with brain, there was a child,

a boy. - Brady.

- And Lenos, their daughter,

their daughter died of, was it leukemia?

I don't remember.

She had cancer and passed.

And the father got cancer and passed.

The plume went, as I understand it, towards the north.

My parents were right, they lived in Harrisburg.

And both my parents died of cancer, both of 'em.

It's the first time we've had cancer in our, you know,

in our family history.

- You start putting it all together

when you're sitting around a kitchen table.

Like if we didn't do that,

I might not know about Mr. Jones up the street having

the brain tumor, you know?

I mean, so I just think there was a lot going on there

that they probably never told us about.

- [Heidi] What did they tell you

about the amount of release

or the levels of releases after the accident?

- Oh, they said it was slightly above normal, if I remember,

was their verbiage initially.

And then honestly after that, I didn't wanna know.

It scared me to know.

All I kept thinking was hopefully I got my kids out of town

in time, you know, but I've come to find out I didn't.

- On Saturday night after the TMI accident happened,

I was coming back from San Antonio.

As I came down 441, I realized

I had some kind of a strange metallic taste in my mouth.

What is that?

You know, because they would tell you that you can't see it,

you can't smell it, you can't feel it,

you know, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

- [Heidi] You were diagnosed recently with cancer.

What kind of cancer?

- I have been diagnosed with cancer in my esophagus,

but it was very, it's been detected very early,

so I'm fortunate in that respect.

I've had a number of people

that I've worked with over the years

that have not been as fortunate.

My evening guy, Jim Roberts,

he died of cancer a year and a half ago.

My, a dear friend who I had hired 43, 44 years ago,

Chris Andre, he passed away from cancer last year.

Mike Pintek, my news director

who broke the story on the air,

he died of cancer, 65 years old.

Paul Baker, who was working at WHP, he died of cancer.

I lost my dad when he was 60.

I lost my mom when she was 57.

This is bonus time for me.

I'm...

I'm happy to be here with my family.

My family is here.

If we were to move, I'd be okay with that.

Do I feel safe?

I feel blessed that I've had a good life.

(razor buzzes)

- I'm in solidarity with my dear beloved granddaughter.

We just found out that she has cancer.

The saddest part about all of this is,

and I've had cancer myself, is that we really don't know

what was an effect from the island and what wasn't.

I wish that there were people that cared to find answers

and we would have a baseline

to know where we were going with this.

Okay.

But we don't.

Love you, honey. - Love you too.

- Yeah, so what's going on?

You came back from the game.

- Yeah, almost done.

I have like two more videos I gotta watch

and then take the test

and then I have the big final test of 300 questions.

- 300 questions.

- Yeah, and then I'm all done.

- You can do it though, babe.

You're a smart kid.

(solemn music)

- We were at the infamous NRC office in Middletown.

Every Thursday, the Concerned Mothers, the four of us,

we would meet with Lake Barrett

and he would have his answers,

none of which kind of made us feel comfortable

by the end of the meeting.

But we stayed coming almost for two years, every Thursday.

- Every Thursday. - Every Thursday,

the Concerned Mothers, the four of us would show up.

- With all of your children?

- With, no, mine were in school, Paula's were in school,

but Joyce had her daycare.

So we had 10 kids with us every-

- 10 kids? - 10 kids every Thursday.

And I have to give Mr. Barrett credit,

he was very gracious about us bringing those kids

and letting them play in a corner

while we would take care of business.

- So it looks really empty inside now.

- Oh yeah.

It's probably,

so much of this wasn't around here at the time.

It was just this little strip mall.

- What does it feel like to be here now?

- Oh, disheartening.

I deal with cancer in three of my loved ones

and I don't know if it's connected.

I can't say it's not connected

because they didn't let me protect my kids and my family

at the time of the accident.

So how could I, in good conscience,

not think maybe if I had done something differently,

if I had known about it,

that they wouldn't have the cancer today?

- I became so painfully aware

that the NRC really didn't have a handle

on what they were doing.

And that they were truly torn

between wanting to help the company and kind of protect us.

And I got to believe that, you know, the NRC was the guy

that wanted to ride two horses with one ass

and they really couldn't do either one.

(tense music)

- The case for and against restarting

the Three Mile Island nuclear plant was made today

in Washington.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission held hearings

this afternoon on a proposal to reopen the unit one reactor.

- Three Mile Island Alert was the main anti-nuclear group

in Harrisburg.

And they got a law firm to intervene in the hearings,

but they just couldn't afford it.

It was an enormous financial burden.

And so what was Three Mile Island Alert gonna do?

At that point, a waitress by the name of Louise Bradford,

who worked at night at the local coffee shop said,

"Oh, I'll do it.

I'll take over."

She put a little ad in the newsletter and said,

"Are there any attorneys out there that can help me?"

So I'm reading this ad and I thought, oh, I'll do it.

It was so apparent to me immediately

that this was completely rigged

in favor of restarting the plant.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is supposed

to protect the public,

but all they're really concerned about is

promoting the industry.

It's not unlike what we're seeing now with the FAA

and planes and Boeing.

The relationship is always way too cozy.

They had a hearing in DC in October of '81,

and it was the most terrifying moment of my life.

I was not the kind of person that was confrontational.

I was pretty unassertive at that point in my life.

And I just got up there and, I mean, I just went off.

I think that if there is any doubt in anyone's mind before

that this company should not be entrusted

to operate a nuclear power plant

and should not be permitted to restart Three Mile Island,

then this should remove all doubt.

In law school, you learn how things are supposed to go.

This is not how things are supposed to go.

This is not what you're taught.

This is corrupt.

- Much has been said about the accident

that crippled a nuclear reactor

at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear power plant

in 1979.

Today, as Chris Kelly reports, a federal grand jury charged

that missing, altered, or misleading TMI records

months before the accident were no accident.

- [Chris] Company officials are accused

of faking, manipulating, and destroying information

on how much radioactive water was leaking out

of the reactor's cooling systems in the six months

preceding the nation's worst nuclear accident.

- Their valves were all leaky

and they were falsifying the data

to keep the plant from shutting down to fix these valves.

- [Heidi] Prior to the original accident.

- Yes.

So the concern, of course,

or the real connection to the accident was

it was a stuck open valve that caused that accident.

Had the leak rate falsification not been

a systemic company policy,

and it turns out it was also probably going on at unit one,

then the operators may have been more focused on the valve.

Instead, the company covered it up, the NRC covered it up

'cause they were told about this

two months after the accident, they knew about it,

covered it up, it all came out.

Justice Department went right after them

and ultimately indicted the company for this.

And the company pled guilty.

That that company engaged in a policy

to systematically destroy documents and falsify leak rates

perhaps says more about the integrity of current management

than any guilty plea could have.

Right around this time,

all the operators had to be relicensed

because there was such concern

that they didn't know what they were doing.

But it came out that they had all cheated.

And at that point,

the NRC ordered hearings on the cheating scandal

because, I mean, it was just such an outrage.

So they reopened the hearings and Louise and I went back in

and we had to do these hearings on like the licensing exams

and cheating by these operators.

At the same time, 29,000 steam generator tubes were corroded

because somebody went in

and introduced sulfur into the cleaning solutions

and cracked all the steam generator tubes,

which was an incredibly unsafe thing to have happened.

I mean, we didn't wanna have to go through this again,

but we didn't have a choice.

I mean, we had to, there was nobody else to do it.

So Louise and I (laughs) just decided,

became experts on the physics of cracks.

What you're talking about

with a steam generator tube rupture is the possibility

of a major release of radiation into the environment.

That was all happening in 1983.

Same time, it turns out the company was harassing

and intimidating whistleblowers

who were reporting safety violations

during the unit two cleanup.

It was one thing after another after another.

And then somehow we won before the appeal board of the NRC

because of how rigged

and corrupt the original licensing board hearings were.

And they listened to us.

So they reopened the hearings

and then, so there were even more hearings.

We were able to accomplish as much as we could,

just keeping the process going

and developing the political opposition.

At the point where the NRC commissioners said,

"Mo more, no more hearings.

We're stopping.

You're in the middle."

We were in the middle of hearings,

doing more and more hearings.

They just couldn't take it anymore.

This was a company that was criminally convicted

of creating conditions that led

to the worst commercial nuclear accident in history,

taking no responsibility for it.

And the NRC said, "That's fine.

You can go ahead and restart."

- [Chair] All those in favor, indicate by saying aye.

- [Members] Aye.

- Opposed?

- No.

- [Chair] That concludes our vote.

- Murderers!

Murderers, that's what you are!

- Will you please- - Killing our children.

You are murderers!

- I think we've completed the business that we came for.

- After the company has been indicted for cheating,

for lying, falsifying leak rates, et cetera,

it's like they're saying, "Oh, we've heard enough.

We don't wanna hear any more.

But it's okay, they can still operate the plant."

- And at that point, I had brought in another attorney,

a real litigator,

because I couldn't, I knew we were going to court soon

and I couldn't do it myself.

And Louise, I think, had just broken down at that point

and she was not able to continue.

So at the end, it was just myself

and the other lawyer that I brought in.

Her name was- - And who was that?

- Her name was Lynne Bernabei.

- After a lot of pressure from a lot of different sources,

including Congress, including the community,

including public interest groups,

the NRC said, "We're gonna have a hearing on..."

Essentially the hearing was

how much information did the utility have

in the first days of the accident

and did they lie to the community and to Congress

about what was going on?

And what we found through the hearing was

the answer was yes.

They definitively lied to the public

about how dangerous the situation was.

And all the studies, all the investigations

that happened afterward were coverups essentially.

- [Heidi] And who was covering it up?

- The nuclear industry

and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,

which is basically a handmaiden to the nuclear industry.

And they did many reports.

Of course this was a major incident at the time.

They did many reports and all those reports were coverups.

- And she litigated, she argued it.

And ultimately we lost three to one.

I mean, no, it's two to one, two to one.

It was before a three judge panel

before the third circuit in Philly.

We had a really good dissent.

All we were asking at that point was

that the hearings be continued

like the NRC said they wanted originally.

It's 'cause they were in violation of their own rules.

That's when I started hearing from like the Middletown moms

and Three Mile Island Alert,

begging me to just go to Supreme Court

'cause they could not live with an operating reactor

knowing they hadn't tried every possible thing.

I didn't know what I was doing,

but I asked friends of mine

who had done Supreme Court work, "How do I do this?

How do I apply for a stay of a third circuit decision

to stop a nuclear plant from operating?"

I sat down and I wrote this thing.

And the justice dealing

with the third circuit was a very liberal justice,

William Brennan.

I walked into the clerk's office, the Supreme Court,

and I'll never forget this.

The clerk says,

"Oh yeah, Mr. Justice Brennan's been waiting for this."

And within four hours, the stay had been granted.

So this is an article

that appeared in the local Harrisburg paper

after I was able to get the ruling from Justice Brennan.

"10 members of a group called Concerned Mothers and Women

picketed outside the Capitol yesterday,

then marched to Thornburgh's office

to ask him to continue his fight against the restart.

The women carried small American flags and signs.

One of them reading, 'If TMI opens, democracy dies.'

'We're counting on the governor,

we've got all our eggs in his basket,'

Paula Kinney told Thornburgh's press secretary.'"

I got a lot of nice notes from people at that time.

This was a phone message from Paula Kinney.

"Wanted to thank you for what you've done.

They don't have the words."

So kind of makes me even cry now, you know?

It's really something.

- We were initially elated.

We were thinking, my gosh, this may be the turning point.

They may clean that up

and if nuclear power is going to exist and move on,

we will know how to clean it up.

We will set a precedent

that you cannot run a nuclear power plant dangerously.

Things will be better.

Unfortunately, that wasn't what happened.

- The court came back in two weeks,

the full court in session,

and on October 2nd, I think it was,

voted eight to one to reverse him.

And the plant started the next day.

It was devastating to think

that that company was gonna be allowed

to continue to traumatize that community.

- I mean, if they would license GPU to run a nuclear plant,

(laughs) I used to say they'd license a dog to do it

because they were the, they had zero integrity,

they only cared about profits,

and they lied and lied and lied.

So if they would, you know,

the NRC would just go along with whatever GPU wanted.

♪ God bless America ♪

- [Reporter] For these anti-nuclear protestors,

last night was their darkest hour.

It marked the end of a 6 1/2 year legal battle

to keep Three Mile Island's undamaged unit one reactor

shut down.

- Ironically, 6 1/2 years ago when I became involved,

I told my children, I have four children,

that to believe in the system and that it would work

and that we were as right as might,

and that money would not come ahead

of the public's health and safety.

- The real thing that's special

about this case is the community.

That really, really traumatized people,

but they've really kept going all these years.

They've really had the strength to keep going,

to get to the bottom of what really happened.

(tense music)

- We got so involved right from the beginning.

We just wanted someone to listen to our concerns

and you were the person.

- You know, I think I'd been there a few weeks.

It wasn't long. - Right, it wasn't long.

- And we had the Middletown office

and somebody said they're picketing

and there's television cameras at the office.

And I said, "What do you mean?

There's nobody there at the office."

And there, by golly, was Channel Eight

and you all were protesting.

It looked like people were hiding inside

and you refused to come out.

Really wrong message.

So I jumped in the car and went over there

and of course the TV cameras had gone, but you were there.

I said, well, I had a key, so come on in.

- We came every Thursday, like at 10 o'clock in the morning.

- Yeah, it was very, well, I mean,

you were all sincere people.

I mean, you weren't crazy people.

- Yeah, but I think the thing like is

because there was a little,

there was that not telling of the venting and the accident.

We'll never really know how much was radiated

on my kids two days before they came out

on that Friday and said.

Only God knows that when it's all said and done.

But you took away my right to protect them

by not being more forthright with the communication.

- But there was so many questions

that there was no answer for.

What was the worst thing that could've possibly happened?

Well, I mean, I don't know.

You know, we don't know, you know,

what that might've been, okay?

You know, if this, if this, if this, if this, if this.

You know, when is the comet gonna come

and we're all gonna die?

I don't know, okay?

Science can't tell you that.

If you'd gone in the control room, okay,

and you could sit there

and you could watch it a fly on the wall,

they didn't know that they had melted the core.

So it wasn't that we were being evasive

or trying to hide something.

Yes, there were some releases, but they were very small.

The psychological trauma

of it all was really the greater health impact.

I mean, millions of Americans through diagnostic tests,

you know, get thousands of times more radiation

than anybody at Three Mile Island ever got.

- [Speaker] How was the trip?

- Well, it started out very interestingly, because I said,

"What did you think that we got out of our meetings?"

And he goes, well, he said, "You seem sincere

about wanting to know what was going on and everything."

- See, I find that so insulting.

"You seem sincere."

We're talking about the health and safety of our kids.

Our families, our neighbors.

I mean, for God's sake, why not be honest?

Why not tell the truth?

- Well they couldn't, Paula, you know,

like there was no way they were gonna admit-

- That they didn't know what they were doing.

- So I did say-

- So they faked being honest and being there for the public.

We're gonna come

and we're just gonna hear wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.

- I did honestly walk away from there thinking

that I was healed a little bit facing Goliath.

- I don't feel healed,

but I do feel vindicated in the fact that I wasn't crazy.

I didn't make this up.

I didn't have to go home and bake my cookies

like they told me to.

- I'm with Joyce, I don't feel healed.

I mean, I don't feel like I needed to be healed.

I just feel like it's black and white.

- You two are nice, and Paula and I are junkyard dogs.

- (laughs) Yeah.

I'm afraid you're very gracious and kind.

I'm not there and I don't think I'll ever be there.

I'm sorry, I resent Lake Barrett

for his condescending attitude.

I resent it. - Yeah.

- I resent it and I resent what they did to us.

I resent it.

I'd love to be a forgiving, loving person.

I'm not forgiving.

This is my family that they played with.

- [Heidi] When we spoke to Lake Barrett,

he said that nothing significant was released

from the containment vessels.

Do you believe that?

- I don't believe anything they said

about how much radiation came out.

First of all, the monitors were off

when they weren't working, so nobody will ever really know.

But given the amount of damage that went on there

and the half the core melted,

to suspect that they weren't releasing any radiation

into the public when that was going on, it's absurd.

And obviously there was a lot of radiation

that came outta that plant at that time.

They were covering up everything.

- Can I tell you an anecdote?

- Sure. - This is,

you know, I listened to this labor series,

so they had John Sayles about the White Sox, right?

And the fixing.

So he says that coverup never holds,

you always get to the truth.

And I'm here thinking, no, that's not what happens.

Actually, the coverups work a lot of the time.

Think of Three Mile Island.

It's one of the biggest coverups in history

that hasn't been uncovered.

(tense music)

- [Heidi] How did the accident

at Three Mile Island change you?

- I was interviewed when the accident happened at Fukushima,

and a lady from Japan asked me,

what could I tell the people around Fukushima?

And I told them, "Do not believe what the company tells you

and question everything the government tells you."

That was my lesson.

- I believe I changed

because I got a relationship with Jesus Christ

and my faith in God is what empowers me

to keep moving forward.

- It was like my whole world was turned inside out,

from being the happy mom and taking care of my kids

and going to the PTAs and to...

I just didn't understand what was going on.

So I decided that I needed to know what happened.

- I had to grow a set, pull up my britches,

and figure out how I was gonna make this right for my kids.

And it was a tough battle

because it was not my nature to get out in the public.

And between the four of us,

we all developed strength and character

and integrity as growing women taking care of business

because the government wasn't taking care of it for us.

- By the end, it changed my life.

I became the person who I am today.

I became a powerful woman as a result of this case.

There's no question.

I became a completely different person

than I was when I started out.

But I feel such enormous sympathy

for everybody that had to live around there.

The traumatic experience of living through that accident

and then having a restarted plant,

but it's also actual health effects,

which they were 100% right to be concerned about that.

There were never adequate health studies done

from the very beginning.

Maybe there are some

that have attempted to do something since,

but at the time, people in the state who were attempting

to do proper health studies were blocked.

They were not allowed to do it.

And so nobody really has kept proper track

of the health of people.

- All I have ever heard was that no one died at TMI.

All the studies said

that everything was within normal limits,

but I don't think it was.

And it's just my reporter instinct is telling me

there's more to this story when I see the incidences.

There's a Facebook page,

the Three Mile Island Survivors Group.

And when you read what people are going through,

it's heartbreaking.

- If you look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Chernobyl,

I mean, people are still suffering from that, right?

So it's hard to say

that how much radiation effect persists for how long.

We can only do it by the studies

which we have found in other places.

- [Heidi] Do you wish there were more studies done here?

- Oh, there should be.

Absolutely.

- [Heidi] Do you live near a nuclear power plant?

- No.

- Would you? - No.

(laughs) Why would I take a chance in my life

if I don't have to?

- [Heidi] Your work has come out of looking

at Dr. Steve Wing's work.

What led you to what you are doing?

- In the paper he published, there is a brief reference

to some work by Russian investigators

where they looked at the blood of people

who had been affected by the Three Mile Island accident

and they found troubling levels of genetic damage.

The genetic damage to people around Three Mile Island

that the Russian investigators assert was the same

as the level of genetic damage they found

in a village in Western Siberia

that had been exposed to fallout

from the Soviet Union's first atom bomb test.

So it's like the Russians are saying essentially,

Three Mile Island blew up like an atom bomb.

I think that's sort of the bottom line.

The people affected by the accident at Three Mile Island

in many cases are still alive.

And it's possible,

using new technologies that are more sensitive,

to go back and repeat the cytogenetic testing.

And I can set about testing individuals

around Three Mile Island who are willing to be tested

to see whether the level of genetic damage

that Shachenko found actually is there.

(solemn music)

(cow moos)

- We're doing this study

to look at potential chromosomal damage

from the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant,

and we will be able to determine that

from the blood draws today.

The March 28th, 1979 accident

at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant released

large quantities of radioactive noble gases

into the atmosphere,

which were inhaled by individuals living downwind

from the plant at the time.

The research entails examination of the chromosomes

of persons who lived in that area

using modern techniques of analysis,

focused on changes to chromosomes

that persist across decades.

- And the government honestly could have examined everyone

directly in 1979.

They had the technology and the money

and they could have done it,

and I feel that they should have done it.

But at this point in time,

this is the state-of-the-art technology,

and I think this is the best that could possibly be done.

- The important thing is that it's truthful

because we've been lied to for so long.

- The truth shall set you free.

You know?

And what are we gonna be set free of?

If we can really prove that on paper,

what we have known in our hearts for years.

- Being pregnant at the time just blew me away.

And here I was for nine months,

actually concerned whether my child would have 10 fingers

and 10 toes.

- You know, my husband,

he has basal and squamous cell cancer.

We're down at Hershey every three months

for his head, his neck, his ears.

My daughter had melanoma

and now she's had basal cell again on her right breast.

So...

- [Heidi] And where was the melanoma?

- On her stomach.

Now my son had squamous cell under his fingernails

and lost the tip of his finger when he was in high school.

- [Heidi] Would you like to see the plume map?

Because-

- No, I don't.

No, I don't.

- I can respect that actually.

It's a scientific problem for me,

but for you it's something very different.

- Yeah, because there are days

that I could actually probably tell myself it didn't happen.

- Okay. - Okay.

- Alright.

- Okay, do you have a preference on blood draw,

arm, hand, or which arm you would like me to use?

- That antecubital.

- Tourniquet, it's gonna be very tight.

A little pinch.

(solemn music)

Beautiful blood draw.

15 minutes, you may take your bandaid off.

Thank you, Linda.

- You're welcome.

Thank you.

(solemn music)

- Oh, thank you. - Okay.

Yeah, now I'm good.

Well, girls, this is, we started out-

- It's like we did it together.

- All four of us together.

- Four together with babes in arms.

- These last two years, we didn't get up

at four o'clock in the morning and go to the island.

- It's our 55th anniversary just the other day.

Sunday.

When was it, Sunday?

Yeah. - Yeah.

- Oh, 55, that's right.

You're the oldest married one in the group.

(solemn music)

(solemn music continues)

(solemn music continues)

(solemn music continues)

(gentle music)

(gentle music continues)

(gentle music continues)

(gentle music continues)