July 2025 Featured Artist
Film Tells the Stories of Four Women and the Aftermath of the Three Mile Island Disaster
An Interview with Filmmaker Heidi Hutner
Heidi Hutner
Photo Courtesy: Heidi Hutner |
Heidi Hutner is an award-winning director, writer, and producer who is also a professor of environmental humanities and gender studies at Stony Brook University. A scholar of nuclear and environmental history, literature, film and ecofeminism, she is the winner of Sierra Club Long Island's 2015 Environmentalist of the Year Award. Heidi publishes widely as a writer and journalist on nuclear, environmental, environmental justice, and gender issues. She regularly gives public talks, and her current book project, RADIOACTIVE: Women and Nuclear Disasters, will accompany the documentary and forms the basis of the documentary project.
Heidi’s work has been published in many notable outlets, including The New York Times, Ms. Magazine, Public Radio International, and more. She produces a popular sustainability web video show in which she interviews Nobel Peace Prize winners, McArthur Genius Fellows, and other luminaries. She was the associate producer of the off-Broadway climate-change musical, Endangered. RADIOACTIVE: The Women of Three Mile Island is Heidi’s first film. Released in 2022, the documentary has won numerous international awards. It’s available on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, and on DVD. |
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The China Syndrome, a movie produced by Michael Douglas about a fictional nuclear meltdown, came out in 1979, just 12 days before an actual nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. This was the worst commercial nuclear meltdown in U.S. history. Its fallout — emotional, physical, environmental — persists to this day.
To document the effects the disaster had on four women and their families who lived in the shadow of the Three Mile Island reactors, Heidi Hutner, a professor of ecofeminism at Stony Brook University, decided to make a documentary — her first. “The public needs to know and understand how they are being lied to, how key aspects of nuclear disasters and radiation impacts have been swept under the rug, and at what cost. So we focus on buried women’s stories, and in subsequent film projects we hope to make as part of a series, we will bring in the silenced voices of black, brown, and women’s Indigenous groups impacted unequally by nuclear disasters,” she says. |
Aerial View of Three Mile Island (Near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania)
Photo Credit: John S. Zeedick—Hulton Archive/Getty Images |
Carol Lippert Gray, associate editor, recently spoke with Professor Hutner about the film, Radioactive: The Women of Three Mile Island, and her reasons for making it.
You are a professor of ecofeminism. Can you explain what this is?
You are a professor of ecofeminism. Can you explain what this is?
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It’s a philosophy about the connection between ecology and feminism, women and nature. It looks at the twin oppression of women and nature in similar ways: where they intersect and how they’re viewed by the patriarchy. The natural world has been viewed very much in feminine terms. It’s also denigrated in feminine terms.
Feminism embraces the idea that all forms of oppression, including patriarchy, should be eliminated. But it doesn’t affect just women. |
"Françoise d’Eaubonne, a French author considered a leader in her country’s feminist movement, coined the name 'ecofeminism' in 1974." ~ earth.org |
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What attracted you to the field? I’ve always been involved with women’s issues and problems of patriarchy in general. I began to see how interconnected commodification and objectification are, and how nature is seen as there for the taking for human use. But we’re not thinking about the cost to nonhumans’ use. What we do to the environment affects us. When the environment is polluted, we get polluted. We aren’t separate from nature or from each other. We need to respect the natural world and to respect each other. It’s holistic nurturing: how to take care of everyone. Women and women of color suffer the most because of climate change. Women tend to be the activists, too. I want everyone to feel that loving, nurturing connection to each other and not see it as weak. |
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My mother was an activist: anti-nukes, anti-war, for the environment and civil rights. She was involved with the Women’s Fight for Peace in the 1950s and ‘60s. She was concerned about radioactive fallout from atmospheric, above-ground nuclear tests.
At the time, there was something called the St. Louis Baby Tooth Survey. It analyzed baby teeth from across the country and found that the body takes up strontium 90 the same way it takes up calcium. The levels of strontium 90 in the teeth went up as the years went on. The Women’s Strike for Peace got President Kennedy to sign a treaty to abolish nukes. Think of all the people who were saved from this exposure.
Why Three Mile Island? I started to look at it as a story about how powerful women were silenced and the role of women in that time period. If we silence the stories, the history of what radioactive material does to us is silenced. So, it’s a story of women’s activism. I see it in my classroom. Students feel paralyzed. If you don’t know the stories of activism, you don’t know it can work. |
"Strontium (chemical symbol Sr) is a silvery metal that rapidly turns yellowish in air. Naturally occurring strontium is not radioactive. The most common man-made radioactive form of strontium is strontium-90 (Sr-90). Strontium-90 is produced commercially through nuclear fission for use in medicine and industry. It also is found in the environment from nuclear testing that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s as well in nuclear reactor waste." ~ U.S. Environmental Protective Agency |
How does radiation affect women disproportionately?
Women are two times as likely, girls are 10 times as likely, and boys are five times as likely to develop cancer and die from it. Safety levels are based on adult white males. Why are little girls disregarded?
I felt called to bring this to the public. I moved from writing for the academic world to writing for the public. I try to take complicated material and make it understandable.
And the film?
How does radiation affect women disproportionately?
Women are two times as likely, girls are 10 times as likely, and boys are five times as likely to develop cancer and die from it. Safety levels are based on adult white males. Why are little girls disregarded?
I felt called to bring this to the public. I moved from writing for the academic world to writing for the public. I try to take complicated material and make it understandable.
And the film?
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"There is a 4 a.m. vigil every year at the Three Mile Island site. My crew and I went and filmed it. We met four mothers who became the stars of the film." ~ Heidi Hutner |
The film is emotional. It tells a human story. It moves people and totally changes our understanding of what’s going on. Data doesn’t touch your heart. People aren’t collateral damage. These are real people. There is a 4 a.m. vigil every year at the Three Mile Island site. My crew and I went and filmed it. We met four mothers who became the stars of the film. That became my journey for five or six years. We did a deep investigation and got hooked. Through them, we illuminated a story that’s never been told. |
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I feel so privileged that they shared their stories. They’re still at it 45 years later. It never ends for them.
At every screening, we got a standing ovation. What’s next? I’m working on two projects about environmental issues and women. One is about Navajo nation mother and daughter activists. They address everything from mining issues to building bombs. The other is about women and horses. Where do you find sanctuary? Among horses. During the COVID pandemic, I got very involved with them. I absolutely wouldn’t be without horses, the barn and nature. |
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