An evening with heroes of our movement is a moment to savor as we celebrate the 2025 recipients of the Nuclear-Free Future Awards, writes Linda Pentz Gunter

The 2025 Nuclear-Free Future Awards honor the largely unsung heroes of the Nuclear Age who work to end uranium mining and rid the world of nuclear weapons, nuclear power and uranium munitions. At the ceremony to celebrate these achievements there is always a special magic in the room. Without the laureates of the Nuclear-Free Future Awards — and without each other — the world can never become the safe, beautiful and nurturing place it should be for all of us.

The 2025 Nuclear-Free Future Awards will be held on Tuesday, March 4, 2025 at The Great Hall at Cooper Union in New York City (7 E 7th St. NY NY.) A reception at 6pm will be followed by the awards ceremony starting at 7pm. Both events are free admission and open to the public.

The Awards are being held in conjunction with the Third Meeting of States Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons March 3-7 at the United Nations. We encourage all those in attendance to take the short subway ride down to Cooper Union for the Awards.

For those of you around the world who cannot be there, the event will be video recorded and available later on YouTube. You can watch the previous awards ceremony in full here or a short 15-minute version here.

This year we honor individuals from Brazil, Germany, India, Navajo country, the United States and Zimbabwe for their achievements in working for a nuclear-free world. The Award laureates are chosen by an international jury of their peers and are offered in three categories: Resistance, Education and Solution.

The 2025 laureates are: S.P. Udayakumar (India) for Resistance; Márcia Gomes de Oliveira and Norbert Suchanek (Brazil) for Education; and Edwick Madzimure (Zimbabwe) for Solution.

Honorary Lifetime Achievement awards will be given to teacher, author and anti-nuclear activist, Joanna Macy, and posthumously to Native American activist and musician, Klee Benally (headline photo).

The Nuclear-Free Future Awards were founded by German journalist, filmmaker and activist, Claus Biegert, in 1998 and were first held in Salzburg, Austria. Since then, the Awards have traveled the world,

The event is a co-presentation of Beyond Nuclear and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, Germany, an affiliate of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization IPPNW.

There is still time to co-sponsor the event! Starting sponsorship is $150 open to organizations and individuals with sponsors’ names listed in the event program. Please contact linda@beyondnuclear.org for details.

About the laureates:

S.P. Udayakumar is the convenor of the People’s Movement Against Nuclear Energy in India and a committed advocate for environmental and social justice, with a focus on protecting vulnerable communities from the adverse impacts of nuclear energy. At great personal risk, including two years in hiding, he helped galvanize and lead a grassroots movement in 2011 that involved thousands of local residents, fisherfolk and farmers, who challenged the construction of the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant in Tamil Nadu, India. Since then, he has worked tirelessly to raise awareness within communities all over southern India about the dangers of nuclear power, including radiation risks and ecological degradation.

Márcia Gomes de Oliveira and Norbert Suchanek are the co-founders of the International Uranium Film Festival which began in Rio de Janeiro in 2010 and has to date presented more than 300 films in over 40 cities around the world covering a wide range of nuclear-related issues including uranium mining, nuclear waste, nuclear war and nuclear accidents. The festival offers prizes and serves to connect filmmakers with each other and to other activists. Norbert Suchanek is a German-born journalist on human rights and environmental issues, a writer and filmmaker. Márcia Gomes de Oliviera is a Brazilian-born social scientist, educator and filmmaker.

Edwick Madzimure of Zimbabwe campaigns for the voices of women to be heard, especially in areas of militarism, nuclear weapons and climate change, given that women are disproportionately harmed by wars and colonialist practices. Emerging from poverty and a family of artisanal miners, she became in 2016 the founding director of the Zimbabwe chapter of Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, a feminist centered organization now more than 100 years old. She participated in the First Meeting of States Parties to the TPNW in Vienna in 2022 and has also spoken and led workshops at the COP conferences.

Joanna Macy, a deep ecologist and Buddhist scholar, began her anti-nuclear activism in the 1960s, leading to her hopeful 1983 book, Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age — published at the height of the Cold War. More recently, she has written, “The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world—we’ve actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship with our world, with ourselves and each other.”

Klee Benally was a Navajo activist and musician and member of the Navajo Tódich’ii’nii Clan and the Nakai Diné clan. In addition to a musical career with his siblings in the band Blackfire, Klee was a passionate campaigner and filmmaker exposing the colonialist legacy of uranium mines and working for the cleanup of the more than 1,500 abandoned uranium operations that continue to contaminate Dinétah, the land between four sacred mountains. A month before his death on December 30, 2023,  Klee published his book, “No Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred.” Klee’s award will be accepted on his behalf by his mother, Berta Benally.

Headline photo of Klee Benally, courtesy of Berta Benally.

Linda Pentz Gunter is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear and writes for and edits Beyond Nuclear International. Her forthcoming book, Hot Stories. Reflections from a Radioactive World, will be published later this year. linda@beyondnuclear.org.