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The 2025 Nuclear-Free Future Awards

Rainbow serpent magic filled the air at the Great Hall at Cooper Union, writes Linda Pentz Gunter

 April 7, 2025 by beyondnuclearinternational

The Rainbow Serpent has been the symbol of the Nuclear-Free Future Awards (NFFA) since the event first began in 1998. In Indigenous cultures, the serpent offers an ominous warning to be left undisturbed in the ground rather than unleash its vengeful powers. This has been taken to mean, in particular, uranium. But the NFFA’s friendlier serpent also seems to release a certain magic into the air, enveloping those who breathe it in joy and optimism when they attend an NFFA ceremony as it travels to different cities around the world.

In 2025, the Awards were held in the Great Hall at Cooper Union, in New York City, a historic and atmospheric venue where a certain candidate for US president, Abraham Lincoln, made what would remain not only his longest speech but arguably his most important and one that would send him on his way to winning the White House……………………………………………………………

Courage is the first word that comes to mind when describing the 2025 recipient in the category of Resistance. For standing up to the Indian authorities in opposition to the construction of the massive Russian nuclear power plant at Kudankulam in Tamil Nadu, S.P. Udayakumar and thousands of other villagers, farmers and fisherfolk, the majority of them women, have been hounded, persecuted, arrested and prosecuted.

Udayakumar could not travel to the US to receive his award, but his sons Surya and Satya, both of whom live in Maryland, were able to come to New York to honor their father. The video recorded by Uday, as everyone knows him, moved the audience to prolonged applause and even tears, given all he and his family have endured, including two years in hiding when he could not see his sons at all.

The exuberant promoters of the International Uranium Film Festival, Márcia Gomes and Norbert Suchanek, based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, won the Award for Education. Born as a small idea that grew into a remarkable international film festival, the pair realized that dense reports and statistics were not going to galvanize people to oppose all things nuclear in quite in the same way that pictures could, and especially moving pictures, whether documentaries, dramas or animation.

The success of the festival, which began with enormous struggles to find funding and venues, is a testament to perseverance and canny marketing skills that have brought people together to collectively advance the festival around the world.

Solutions to the problems of nuclear power and nuclear weapons are not always obvious. Beyond technical fixes like renewable energy and energy efficiency, as well as campaigning for peace and nuclear disarmament, sometimes the answer lies in changing the conversation. To get away from the macho-dynamic of nuclear weapons especially, the voices of women — all too few — were clearly needed. Furthermore, the voices of women from the Global South were even more essential, in the view of Zimbabwean campaigner, Edwick Madzimure.

This “solution” became a key to the success of of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which tackled the issue from the perspective of human rights impacts, where women are invariably disproportionately impacted in a negative way……………………………………………

The evening ended with a tribute to living legend, Joanna Macy, a Buddhist teacher, author and peacemaker and a matriarch of the anti-nuclear cause. Macy, now in her nineties, could not make the trip from California but offered her thanks in a written statement read by her longtime friend, Kathleen Sullivan of the Nuclear Truth Project and Hibakusha Stories.

Macy has been a mentor to many, both within the anti-nuclear movement and well beyond it, and is best known for popularizing the concept, The Great Turning, in which humanity makes an essential shift from an industrial growth society to a life-sustaining civilization, emphasizing a transition to a more sustainable and just world. ………………… https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2025/04/07/the-2025-nuclear-free-future-awards/

April 13, 2025 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | opposition to nuclear