“All My Children Died at Three Mile Island” – Pasadena Weekly article posted here

As part of its ongoing news cycle, Pasadena Weekly no longer posts my Three Mile Island article, so here it is.  I’ve taken the liberty of using the title I originally chose instead of the one they used.  Otherwise, it is identical to what appeared in print:

“ALL MY CHILDREN DIED AT THREE MILE ISLAND” ^©

by

Libbe S. HaLevy, M.A., CAC

As I watch the ongoing nuclear horror in Japan, I’m struck with déjà vu because 32 years ago, I found myself one mile from the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island when it malfunctioned.

Four days after flying to Pennsylvania to visit a friend, I landed in the middle of an international news story.  At first, officials claimed it was “just a little problem at the N-plant.”  Second day, when they suggested that pregnant women within a five mile radius evacuate, I considered it media hype.

Third day, a police loudspeaker smacked me out of denial with the same words used in Japan: “KEEP YOUR DOORS AND WINDOWS CLOSED.  DO NOT GO OUTSIDE UNLESS YOU ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO.”  Alone without transportation, phones overloaded and dead, no basement to hide from radiation or explosion, I wandered the house counting “3-2-1…” trying to pinpoint the exact moment when nuclear holocaust would reduce me to subatomic particles.  By the time my friend got a call through, I was so far gone I couldn’t figure out how to pack a wet toothbrush.

Evacuated to a house 150 miles away, we watched TV as the PR Director of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission faced the world’s media.  With sweat dripping off his pasty face, hands and voice shaking, he announced, “There is nothing to be worried about.”  We never learned how much radiation we’d been exposed to because the device used to measure it — provided by the lowest bidder – didn’t work.

It took eight days for the Harrisburg airport to reopen, during which time I gained five pounds and wrote a musical.  Back in L.A., friends made jokes – “Do you glow in the dark?”  With a rape victim’s sense of guilt, I avoided telling people where I’d been.

On TV, nuclear activist Dr. Helen Caldecott cited research stating that after exposure to low level radiation, leukemia can show up in five to seven years, hard tumors in 12 to 15.  At these stats, the clock in my head began ticking a countdown to cancer.  Meanwhile, I suffered from post traumatic stress before we knew the term.  I drank to excess, struggled with suicidal thoughts while driving, had sex with anything that looked at me.  Only after traveling to Israel, where I met people who’d lived through worse than a leaking reactor, did I rediscover a shaky sense of normalcy.

Six years later, during a rage release workshop for women incest survivors, I beat a phone book with a rubber hose while screaming at my absent perpetrator.  Suddenly my focus shifted to Three Mile Island – and I kept screaming.  Activists define incest as a crime of power over a child that takes a sexual form.  Three Mile Island was a crime of power over my body that took a radiational form.  This awareness changed my life: I could finally name all my perpetrators.

Years passed without succumbing to cancer, so I figured I’d dodged that bullet.  But in my late 40’s, I began to experience low energy and insomnia.  Doctors could find nothing wrong.

Finally, we discovered that cumulative stress had exhausted my adrenal glands.  One diagnostic question haunts me: “When was the last time you can remember feeling completely well?”  Over 30 years ago — right before Three Mile Island.  With proper supplementation, diet and lifestyle changes, I’m regaining my health, but I will never know how much life I lost because I didn’t have the energy to live it.

Now, as Japan’s nightmare grows by the hour, I want to yell at Americans: WAKE UP!  To think that what happened in Japan can’t happen here is delusional to the point of madness.  Near San Luis Obispo, we built the Diablo Canyon reactors on top of an active earthquake fault.  Just south of L.A., nuclear reactors at San Onofre sit less than five miles from a major sub-oceanic faultline.  Politicians assure us these reactors can withstand a 7.0 earthquake.  7.0?  JAPAN WAS 9.0!  DO THE FREAKIN’ MATH!

Of course, political apologists are already spinning it.  “Let’s not be hasty, this doesn’t mean we can’t have safe nuclear energy,” they spew, then point out, “Nobody died at Three Mile Island!”  I beg to differ.  Unwilling to pass along then-unknowable amounts of chromosomal damage, I considered sterilization until I simply decided to not allow my body to get pregnant.  All my children died at Three Mile Island.

The clock now ticks for Japan.  Five-to-seven, 12 to 15.  Spent nuclear fuel rods have a half-life of 24,000 years, meaning it will take that long for them to become half as lethal as they are today.  Earth is a small, closed system: a rock in a bubble. Wind drift, rotational patterns, time – even if the current radiation plume doesn’t hit the west coast, nuclear contamination will fall into the ocean to be ingested by the algae, which gets eaten by small fish, then big fish, then us.  Radiation will settle into soil, be eaten by grazing cows, end up in the milk.  Etcetera.  As the Holly Near song inspired by Three Mile Island states, “Ain’t nowhere you can run.”

So while all those condescending “experts” keep flogging nuclear energy as necessary to America’s clean, green, sustainable energy future, I suggest you pay attention to that little man behind the curtain.  Just like the emperor, he’s naked – and look!  He’s glowing in the dark.

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