The 2025 Nuclear-Free Future Awards will this year 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 / Germany) 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.
The 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. Media are welcome.
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, honoring 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.
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.
The 2025 Awards event takes place during the Third Meeting of States Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons March 3-7 at the United Nations.
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. In particular, 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.
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 500 abandoned uranium mines that continue to contaminate the Navajo reservation. 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.
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.”
