Celebrating “Unsung Heroes,” the winners of Beyond Nuclear’s Dr. Judith H. Johnsrud Award

[Portrait of Dr. Judith H. Johnsrud, by Robert Del Tredichi, from his 1980 book The People of Three Mile Island.]

Judith Johnsrud (1931-2014) was a founding board member of Beyond Nuclear. She also co-founded Nuclear Information and Resource Service, as well as the Environmental Coalition on Nuclear Power. One of her many claims to fame was helping co-lead the intervention against the building of the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in the first place, in the 1970s, years before the TMI-2 meltdown. Another was being honored, in 2012, by Sierra Club for a half-century of anti-nuclear activism. See a tribute to Judith on the bottom of the last page of our 2014 newsletter about the Three Mile Island meltdown.

The previous winners of the Dr. Judith H. Johnsrud “Unsung Hero” Award are:

2014 — Diane D’Arrigo, Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS), Takoma Park, MD;

2015 — Michael Keegan, Don’t Waste Michigan and Coalition for a Nuclear-Free Great Lakes, Monroe, MI;

2016 — Kay Cumbow, Citizens for Alternatives to Chemical Contamination (CACC) and Great Lakes Environmental Alliance (GLEA), Brown City, MI;

2017 — David Kraft, Nuclear Energy Information Service (NEIS), Chicago, IL;

2018 — Terry Lodge, Esquire, Toledo, Ohio;

2019 — Rose Gardner, Alliance for Environmental Strategies (AFES), Eunice, New Mexico;

2020-2021 — Ian Zabarte, Native Community Action Council, Las Vegas, Nevada;

2022-2023 — Karen Hadden, Sustainable Energy and Economic Development (SEED) Coalition, Austin, Texas.

2024 — Wally Taylor, attorney representing Sierra Club chapters in New Mexico and Texas in NRC licensing proceedings, in opposition to highly radioactive waste dumps, Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Wally has gone on to serve as co-counsel, with Terry Lodge (see 2018, above), representing national grassroots environmental coalitions, against those same dumps, in federal courts of appeal, including the Supreme Court of the United States, as well as opposing the restart of the closed Palisades reactor in Michigan.