IDAHO FALLS, Idaho – A documentary explores the lives of women affected by the Three Mile Island accident – the waste from which eventually ended up in Idaho.

This year marks 40 years since the partial meltdown at the nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania.

Accidents Can Happen: The Women of Three Mile Island features four mothers left in the dark as the accident occurred, inspiring them to join the anti-nuclear movement.

Heidi Hutner, the film’s director, has visited the Idaho National Laboratory where the melted core is stored and says the reaction from Idaho women ties into her story, as folks remain concerned about the waste.

"Environmental degradation, the poison from this technology lives on for thousands of years, remains radioactive and very dangerous,” she points out. “We don't really have a safe, long-term means of storage.

“And this idea that we can take it somewhere else – there is no 'somewhere else,' really. We live on a small planet."

Hutner notes that Idaho women in the 1970s and '80s would “bear witness” to trains arriving with nuclear waste from other places, including the melted core from Three Mile Island.

Hutner plans to come to Idaho and film women here for the documentary.

Kerry Cooke is the former executive director of Snake River Alliance, a nuclear watchdog group that formed in the immediate wake of the Three Mile Island accident.

She says the group was – and still is – concerned about the waste stored at the Idaho National Laboratory and its threat to the Snake River Aquifer, which supplies water for about 300,000 Idahoans and much of the region's agriculture.

Cooke says as groups such as Snake River Alliance speak up, the government has become more forthright. But that wasn't the case in 1979.

"Midway through the transports of the Three Mile Island core to Idaho, public clear across the country – because of groups like the Snake River Alliance – were up in arms, saying, 'You cannot bring that to our communities,’” she states. “’This is extremely dangerous for all of us.' And the public felt very much like this was a decision made with no public input."

Hutner notes that women and girls are most vulnerable to radiation exposure. She says women historically didn't have a voice on nuclear issues, but they're standing up around the world.

"You find these powerful women in Idaho who have done extraordinary work on protecting the people of their state and women in Three Mile Island and women at Rocky Flats and women in Japan,” Hutner points out. “You find these clusters of frontline women doing extraordinary work, and it's very inspiring."

A Knoxville-based environmental group is voicing health and safety concerns about the development of a landfill for radioactive waste from the Y12 Uranium Processing Facility in Oak Ridge.

For six decades, Y12 has been processing and storing highly enriched uranium.

Tanvi Kardile, coordinator for the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance, said her group is raising concerns to the community and lawmakers about what it sees as the environmental hazards and public health risks that come with creating a landfill for toxic waste.

"There's been some violations with the Clean Water Act," Kardile pointed out. "Right now, a radioactive waste landfill in Oak Ridge is approved to be built, but this required waiving the Clean Water Act rules. So, there's upcoming litigation around this."

Kardile noted the landfill concerns are in addition to the ongoing threat of radioactive contamination in Oak Ridge's land, water and air due to the Y12 weapons complex activities. She stressed the issue is not new, citing a lawsuit against the Department of Energy over mercury released decades ago. Critics of the uranium-enriching process say it poses safety and health risks to the community.

According to Kardile, she has spoken directly with Department of Energy and National Nuclear Security Administration officials, raising her group's objections to the $8 billion Y12 processing facility over serious health concerns. But proponents of the weapons plant point to the jobs and economic impact it has for the local area.

"They're not concerned about environmental issues at all," Kardile observed. "They were like, 'This is necessary for our nation's security,' like building our nuclear weapons stockpile is 'necessary.' So, it's something that we have to do. And they also said that it provides jobs for people in the area."

Kardile acknowledged the Alliance does not want to see anyone lose their job, but said closing the facility would also provide employment opportunities through an extensive cleanup phase. The latest defense spending bill, approved by both houses of Congress in July, authorized $760 million for Y12's Uranium Processing Facility.

Federal officials are in Idaho to discuss where to store nuclear waste. The U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, an independent federal agency, is holding two meetings in Idaho Falls. The first is today and will feature a workshop on the siting of radioactive waste facilities. Wednesday's board meeting will focus on the Energy Department's consent-based siting process for waste.

Don Hancock, the nuclear waste program director for the Southwest Research and Information Center, said the consent-based process fell by the wayside during the Trump administration but has become a focus again under President Biden.

"They're starting off saying we think we want to come up with a consent-based process to see if we can store spent fuel for some considerable period of time," he explained. "But people would be consenting to temporary storage as opposed to permanent disposal."

Hancock added the Obama administration decided the siting process should prioritize temporary sites rather than long-term geological storage and the Biden administration has picked up there. The public can be involved in both Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board's meetings this week, either in person or online.

Hancock noted that Boise State University was selected by the Energy Department to receive $2 million dollars to study consent-based siting. However, he added it is not clear what that means for Idaho.

"An important question that I think people of Idaho would want to know is does Boise State and their partners think that what they're doing now and what they could be doing down the line is having Idaho consent to being this kind of interim storage site?," he said.

Boise State University did not respond to a request for comment by the deadline for this story.


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This summer's "Oppenheimer" movie will shine a light on development of the first nuclear weapons, but for many in southern New Mexico it is another reminder of the federal government's failure to recognize negative health effects their families have endured for generations.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, a physicist and director of New Mexico's Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II, led the research and development of the first nuclear weapons tested in the southern part of the state.

Tina Cordova, co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, said residents were unknowingly exposed to radiation from fallout, resulting in illness, emotional and financial distress, and death.

"The Manhattan Project and the Trinity bomb changed New Mexico forever," Cordova pointed out. "Instantaneously we became basically a sacrifice zone, and the people of New Mexico have never been part of the narrative."

Cordova participated in a weekend panel discussion following a sold-out showing of the film in Santa Fe, along with Charles Oppenheimer, grandson of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Cordova noted she has lost count of the number of relatives in New Mexico who have died from cancer, many within 10 years of the nuclear bomb testing.

"In my own family, I'm the fourth generation to have cancer since 1945," Cordova explained. "And now I have a 23-year-old niece who's the fifth generation, and my family's not unique. It's the story we hear all across the southern part of New Mexico, where people lived as close as 12 miles to the test site."

Cordova has spent the past 18 years trying to get areas of New Mexico included in the federal Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which provides money to people who were harmed, either from uranium mining or the atomic tests. The Act currently only offers compensation to "downwinders" who live in Arizona, Nevada and Utah.

"There was an admission of guilt on the part of the government when they established the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act but it didn't go far enough," Cordova contended. "Including New Mexico, there's a lot of the American West that received regular fallout from those tests."


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