Nuclear Hotseat

Posters for ATOMIC CABARET at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival

• Lynda Williams is a physicist and educator who writes and performs songs as the “Physics Chanteuse.”  This “science entertainer” has performed all over the physics conference circuit where she presents a customized cabaret show of songs and repartee to fit with each group’s specialty.
  
  Now, she is touring her latest show, ATOMIC CABARET, around Europe.  The show combines science, story, satire, and song that explores the existential risks of the nuclear age. With video projections of scientific visualizations, archival footage, and original music, Atomic Cabaret offers a powerful and immersive experience that brings complex scientific ideas to life while addressing the urgent need for nuclear disarmament and global peace. There’s an audience sing-along, too. Each performance on her 2025 European tour is a benefit for local chapters of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament or community peace organizations. Now halfway through her tour, the show opens at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland for a 9-performance run.
  
  I spoke with Lynda Williams on July 19, 2025.

LINKS from the interview:

• Website and Contact:  AtomicCabaret.com
• Youtube channel:  Lynda Lovon  - This is where you'll find recordings of the songs from the show.
• To contact Lynda about booking the show: [email protected]

Last week, we noted the dual nuclear nightmare anniversaries of July 16, focusing on the Trinity atomic test blast 80 years ago. There was no time on that show to go into the second July 16 anniversary, 1979’s Church Rock uranium tailings spill on Navajo Nation land. It happened only four months after Three Mile Island and was basically ignored by US media, a condition that continues to this day.

In 2019, I traveled to Navajo Nation to report on Church Rock and the ongoing contamination from that accident and the abandoned uranium mines. My trip was timed so I could attend the 40th anniversary commemoration of the Church Rock disaster. While there, I spoke with many who had grown up with these dangers and were still suffering from what it did to them, their families, their livestock, the land, and the water. Here are three brief interviews with members of Navajo Nation:

• Uranium miner Larry J. King
• Edith Hood
• Terracita Keyana

These are from a full-length SPECIAL on Church Rock that was originally presented in two parts, on NH #421 and 423, from July, 2019.

The Prime Minister of Japan accepts a delivery of radioactive soil from Fukushima, trying to "prove" it's "safe" by putting it in flower beds in front of his office... just in time for him to be ousted and someone else move in! 

• Nuclear power is a parasite on AI’s credibility
• Nuclear Power’s Hot Streak by Karl Grossman and Harvey Wasserman
• The first US atomic rush was a bust. Will Trump’s big nuclear-for-AI plans fare any better?
• Report:  Lack of Marshall Islands Birth Studies Hinder Understanding of Nuclear Testing Impacts

The new commemorative plaque at the entrance to the Trinity site of the world's first atomic bomb explosion finally acknowledges and commemorates Downwinders.  (l-r) Seth Shelden, General Counsel and United Nations Liaison of ICAN; Tina Cordova of Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, Melissa Parke, Executive Director of ICAN

On the 80th anniversary of the first atomic bomb blast, the test at the Trinity site near Almogordo in New Mexico, Nuclear Hotseat gives voice to the Downwinders - victims of the radiation released from the bomb. 

Award-winning author Myrriah Gomez

• Myrriah Gomez  is from northern New Mexico and author of the 2022 book Nuclear Nuevo Mexico: Colonialism and the Effects of the Nuclear Industrial Complex on Nuevomexicanos, which was awarded a Southwest Book Award and an International Latino Book Award. I spoke with Myrriah Gomez on July 15, 2025.

Beatrice Gutierrez, Downwinder and Board Member,
Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium

• Bernice Gutierrez is a native New Mexican.  She received her degree in Sociology with a concentration in Criminal Justice from the University of New Mexico, and has worked as a Probation-Parole Officer, Paralegal and Social Worker.  She is also a board member of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium. I spoke with Berniece Gutierrez on July 14, 2025.
• LINK to research on infant mortality in the immediate aftermath of Trinity by Kitty Tucker that was cited in the interview:  Trinity: “The most significant hazard of the entire Manhattan Project”

Downwinder Tina Cordova, doing what she does so well: speaking Truth to Power.

• Tina Cordova is a sixth generation native New Mexican born and raised in the small town of Tularosa in south central New Mexico. In 2005 Tina co-founded the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium (TBDC) with the late Fred Tyler. Tina has been an unstoppable campaigner for the rights of those harmed by radiation downwind of the Trinity atomic bomb blast and an honored leader for us all. I spoke with Tina Cordova on July 14, 2025.

First We Bombed New Mexico - a film by Award-winning director Lois Lipman.  The Trinity Downwinders’ nuclear legacy was exploded into public awareness by this film. Nuclear Hotseat interviewed Director Lois Lipman about how she first learned about the plight of Downwinders -- those who lived downwind of the Trinity test of the first atomic bomb. FIRST WE BOMBED NEW MEXICO, tracks not just Trinity’s history of radiation impact, but the timelines of Downwinder illness through five generations.

Former UNC Church Rock uranium miner Larry J. King (center).  He stands on land which faces
the site of the 1979 uranium tailings pond breach and spill. He explains what happened to an audience of supporters during the 40th anniversary commemorative walk in 2019.

The other nuclear disaster that took place on July 16 - this one in 1979 - was the Church Rock uranium tailings pond breach and spill.  This under-reported nuclear disaster dumped more than 94 million gallons of highly acidic radioactive water into the adjacent Puerco River. The contamination reached Sanders, Arizona, more than 80 miles away. The spill has never been cleaned up. 

On July 13 and 14, 2019, Nuclear Hotseat’s Libbe HaLevy attended commemorative events in Navajo Nation for the 40th anniversary of the 1979 disaster. This is the LINK to the resulting Nuclear Hotseat SPECIAL report.

https://nuclearhotseat.com/podcast/church-rock-uranium-tailings-pond-disaster/

Tim Deere-Jones is a UK-based marine biologist, researcher and consultant. He specializes in analysis of the radiation threats to our planet’s waters from a wide range of nuclear sources.  Here, he explains the radioactive orange water leak from Sellafield in the UK and the harebrained proposed scheme for excavating a radioactive waste storage facility UNDER the Irish Sea. 

• Contact for Tim Deere-Jones on Facebook
• To find his writing, google: Tim Deere-Jones Nuclear

• With the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki only a month away, here’s Alistair Burnett of ICAN interviewing project lead Tim Wright an a new program, the Childrens Peace Memorial, commemorating those killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
• ICAN Children's Peace Memorial video interview with one child survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bombing:

https://youtu.be/-ZfCY72CsKw?si=RGvxMISHtVqeqKQG

Robert "Bob" Alvarez

It is with great sadness that we mark the passing of Robert (Bob) Alvarez. He was one of the bedrock founders of the national movement to unmask the human and environmental carnage that resulted directly from the US production of a massive nuclear arsenal.

Bob helped found the Environmental Policy Institute in the mid-1970’s. He is an intrepid researcher, author, investigator, professor, and an unflagging resource to dozens of organizations around the nation. Bob always was an ally (and sometimes an accomplice) of grassroots efforts to hold the nuclear power and weapons establishment accountable. He and his wife Kitty Tucker worked tirelessly to reveal the story behind the killing of Karen Silkwood, and to seek justice for Karen and her family. He served for five years as a Senior Investigator for the U. S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, chaired by Senator John Glenn, and as one of the Senate’s primary staff experts on the U.S. nuclear programs.

There’s so much more. We will link to the recording of an Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility/NIRS event presenting Bob Alvarez with a lifetime achievement award that took place in 2022. He will be sorely missed.

• Greg Mitchell's latest award-winning film, The Atomic Bowl: Football at Ground Zero -- and Nuclear Peril Today will start streaming via PBS and screening on PBS stations as of July 12.  Last week, the companion e-book with the same title was published.  Congratulations Greg!
  
  • Listen to the Nuclear Hotseat interview with Greg Mitchell on his film and ebook: Nuclear Hotseat #726 from May 28, 2025. 

Yes, they really did play a football game at Nagasaki barely five months after the US dropped the bomb.

• Write Before Midnight, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' writing competition, is calling for submissions of short fiction.  According to their shout-out:  "Submitted stories can be about any of the existential threats the Bulletin covers: nuclear weapons, climate change, biological and chemical weapons, artificial intelligence, killer robots, doomsday drone submarines, bioengineered zombies, the gray goo of nanotechnology gone wild, and so, so much more. The stories can be dystopian or utopian; pre-, post-, or non-apocalyptic. They can be optimistic as Sesame Street or dark as Edgar Allan Poe’s basement. Entries can be of any genre: high literature and potboiler noir will vie on a level playing field; scifi, fantasy, spy, detective, horror, and even romance tales will be not just allowed, but celebrated. The tales can be comic, tragic, ironic, satiric, or any kind of -ic at all, and they can be of any length—up to 7,000 words. (And not a single word more.)  CLICK HERE for more information - and good  luck!
  
• Pathways To Peace is organizing another conference: "Nuclear Disarmament for Humanitarian Needs: Empowering Individuals and Cities" on August 4th, 2025 at 10:00 AM ET.  To register, CLICK HERE.   

Dr. Gordon Edwards

Dr. Gordon Edwards is a mathematician, physicist, nuclear consultant, and president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility. He is one of our most cogent thinkers on nuclear issues and he regularly puts together the pieces to give us a clear picture of exactly what is going on, why we should be alarmed, and what we can do about it.

Here, we discuss uranium enrichment - a “hot topic” in the wake of the US bombing of nuclear facilities in Iran. He reveals how ineffective the bombings really were - far from the “total obliteration” claimed by the Trump and echo’ed by his followers — and what level of uranium enrichment"is necessary to make a nuclear bomb.  (HINT:  It's a lot less than you've been led to believe.).  Dr. Edwards also includes a vision of how we could work create a lasting international nuclear peace and an elimination of even the possibility of creating any more nuclear weapons.

• https://www.ccnr.org/GE_Iran_and_Uranium_Enrichment_2025.pdf - Iran and Uranium Enrichment – by Dr. Gordon Edwards, June 20 2025
• Iran’s uranium enrichment: myths, realities, and what Canada should understand - The world needs to understand it, too. By Dr. Gordon Edwards and Erika Simpson. 

Blockading the trains at Rocky Flats to protest plutonium pit production

Blocking the nuclear trains at Rocky Flats -- and Jack Cohen-Joppa should know because he was there! 

The secret provocateurs putting the nuclear triad at risk at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota:

Enemy commando at Minot AFB, North Dakota,
looking to take down the nuclear triad..

• Libbe HaLevy's play ATOMIC BILL AND THE PAYMENT DUE will be presented in a World Premiere staged reading at the Wilmington (Ohio) Peace Resource Center on September 9, 2025 at 7:30 pm.  It is an Oppenheimer-adjacent true story of media manipulation at the dawn of the Atomic Age and the New York Times reporter who sold his soul to get the story. 
  ATOMIC BILL will be presented as part of the PRC's 50th Anniversary celebration.  Attendance is free and Libbe will be there for a post-show conversation with the audience.  All are welcome!
• Trump’s Attack on Iran May Have Made the Nuclear Crisis Worse
• Trump Should Abolish This Nuclear Agency (Numnutz-adjacent)

A roundup of what is currently known about last Saturday's bombing attack by the United States on Iran nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan.  Next week will feeature an extensive interview on what level of uranium enrichment Iran has achieved and how close it would put them to being able to build a nuclear bomb in an interview with Dr. Gordon Edwards of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility. 

Kevin Kamps is Radioactive Waste Watchdog for Beyond Nuclear. He specializes in high-level waste management and transportation; new and existing reactors; decommissioning; environmental and public health risks associated with government and industry efforts to dump commercial irradiated fuel rods on Native American lands in the western United States. 

Here, Kevin talks about the ongoing battle in Texas and New Mexico over the two proposed so-called "interim" dumps for highly radioactive nuclear reactor waste - and what the recent Supreme Court ruling allowing them to move forward really means.  

Kevin Kamps, Radioactive Waste Watchdog for Beyond Nuclear

I spoke with Kevin Kamps on June 20, 2025.

New York Governor Katie Hochul thinks that a whirlwind build of new nuclear will solve the state's energy needs.  So what'll it be, Guv - a big reactor the same make as Vogtle, which took 15 years and $34 BILLION to build?  Or non-existent Small Modular Nuclear Reactors that don't exist except on powerpoint presentations, have never been built let alone tested, and are just major money pits with no end in sight?  Decisions decisions... 

Susi Snyder, Programme Coordinator for the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), gives a short lesson on how to make certain your money doesn't inadvertantly go to support companies that produce parts for nuclear weapons.   

For those who want to dive into the numbers behind the report “At Great Cost: The companies building nuclear weapons and their financiers” for 2022-2024, here's a LINK.

https://www.dontbankonthebomb.com/

Yup - 14 years and 729 episodes down.  What's the half-life of a nuclear podcast?

• Dave Kraft is Co-Founder and Director of the Nuclear Energy Information Service (NEIS), headquartered in Chicago.  Prior to becoming a full-time energy activist, Dave’s academic background and training was in astronomy and psychology at Northwestern University and Northeastern University in Chicago. Kraft’s interest in the environment moved him to found NEIS with seven other people, to provide the public with credible information about the hazards and effects of nuclear power and waste, and the viable means to replace them. 
  
  Here, he takes on the recent manipulations on the Illinois nuclear front that almost repealed a 1987 ban on building new nuclear reactors.  He also provides deep background on unexamined national security risks associated with a proliferation of these new nuclear reactors.
  
  I spoke with Dave Kraft on Friday, Jun 13, 2025.

• SMNRS AND NATIONAL SECURITY RISKS  - Powerpoint by NEIS.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcPHAjzOY0k&t=28s

From NEIS Powerpoint SMNRs and National Security Risks

• PACIFICA RADIO CLIMATE HOUR DEBATE on “Nuclear Energy”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcPHAjzOY0k&t=28s

• Uranium Uses and Dangers - webinar with Dr. Gordon Edwards:
  https://youtu.be/5OmoJ0duP4E

Susi Snyder of ICAN

Susi Snyder of ICAN parses the meanings and history of the current Israel/Iran escalating exchange of drone and missile attacks. 

Given the recent and almost daily intensification of Israel’s bombings on Iran’s Natanz Enrichment Facility and the Iran’s retaliations, we’re presenting an interview with Susi Snyder of ICAN analyzing the situation. This was originally broadcast by Al Jazeera and she is interviewed by Robin Matheson.

Tulsi Gabbard?????  Nuclear video:  Full 3:31 length (Get it while you can; it's being scrubbed.). 

Tulsi Gabbard

• Gordon Edwards webinar on Uranium: Its Uses and its Dangers:
• How Nuclear War could Start - Federation of American Scientists Op-Ed in Washington Post
• Hidden Costs:  Nuclear Weapons Spending in 2024 - annual report from ICAN