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Sister Megan Rice, an 84-year-old radical nun who broke into a nuclear weapons facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn., in protest against the nation’s nuclear arsenal, was sentenced Tuesday afternoon to 35 months in federal prison.

“Please have no leniency with me,” Rice told the judge. “To remain in prison for the rest of my life would be the greatest gift you could give me.”

The judge said he considered her age and her decades of good works and just could not give her what could amount to a life sentence. He asked that Rice use her “brilliant mind” to lead to change in Washington, D.C., and not use it to break laws in Tennessee.

Her co-defendants, Michael Walli, 65, and Gregory Boertje-Obed, 58, were sentenced to 62 months on charges of interfering with national security and damaging property at the Y-12 National Security Complex in July 2012 — the facility that once provided the enriched uranium for the Hiroshima bomb.

The activists put up banners, splashed blood and beat hammers against the walls of the storage facility in a biblical reference to Isaiah 2:4, “They shall beat swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.”

The defense argued the trio acted in accordance with their religious beliefs and did not mean to cause any harm with their action, which follows a series of anti-nuclear protests organized by “Transform Now Plowshares,” a collective of pacifist activists looking to draw attention to the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal.