Nuclear Hotseat

Hiroshima  second generation A-bomb  survivor, Professor
Yuki Miyamoto

• Hiroshima-born Yuki Miyamoto is a second generation Hibakusha - daughter of an atomic bomb survivor.  Her mother was in Hiroshima one mile from the epicenter of the bombing, yet survived it with what seemed like little physical damage… though other truths later emerged.  Yuki’s story of what it was like to grow up in Hiroshima, the illnesses around her, and the judgments made against her by others in Japan makes for a gripping, little-known narrative of the atomic bomb’s aftermath. 
  
  Yuki Miyamoto is a professor at DePaul University in Chicago, where she introduces a new generation of young people to the hard truths about the atomic bombing and its continuing impact on survivors – especially  women – their children, grandchildren, and beyond. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and teaches nuclear discourse and environmental ethics at DePaul. 2011’s Fukushima nuclear accident urged her to examine environmental ethics, which led to her most recent work, A World Otherwise: Environmental Praxis in Minamata (Lexington Books, 2021).  Miyamoto’s current work is on the formation of postwar nuclear discourse both in Japan and the United States.  She has taken DePaul students to Hiroshima and Nagasaki since 2005 and has been appointed Nagasaki Peace Correspondent (2010) and Hiroshima Peace Ambassador (2011).  We spoke on Friday, July 30, 2021. 

What does the Inflation Reduction Act have to do with Climate Change... and specifically nuclear? 

• MESSAGE FROM HIROSHIMA - Narrated by George Takei:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/b45XeQAI94c

• Nuke Info Tokyo - newest newsletter
• Democracy Now interview on Ukraine nuclear difficulties with Shaun Burnie, senior nuclear specialist with Greenpeace. 
• Open Letter to Bill Gates by Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Energy Education
• From Russia to Ohio... to the Cancer Ward - Dangers of the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon, Ohio
• The Harrowing Story of the Nagasaki Bombing Mission - from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

• Was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a done deal? Inevitable once the U.S.  produced the bomb?  Or were there pressures to avoid unleashing a nuclear holocaust on Japan, and if so, how did they play out behind the scenes in 1945?   Author and award-winning filmmaker Greg Mitchell recounts his findings, published annually in daily installments on his blog, Countdown to Hiroshima. 
  
  He is  the former editor and publisher of Nuclear Times; the author of more than a dozen books, with three on the use of the bomb.  One of them, Atomic Cover-Up , on the decades-long suppression of shocking film shot in the atomic cities by the U.S. military, became an award-winning film.  Another, The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood — and America — Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb tells the wild story of how an MGM 1947 drama was censored by the military (and Truman himself).  Every year, he publishes Countdown to Hiroshima, blog posts that chronicle what was going on politically behind the scenes as the decision to drop the bomb was being made.
  
  I spoke with Greg Mitchell on July 28, 2022.

Greg Mitchell LINKS:

Author/Filmmaker Greg Mitchell being zoomed by Nuclear Hotseat's Libbe

• Atomic Cover-Up film trailer:

https://vimeo.com/509903756

• Atomic Cover-Up, Greg Mitchell's award-winning film, was the subject of an interview for Nuclear Hotseat #517. 
• Countdown to Hiroshima - daily blog posts
• The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood - and America - Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

And here's a link to the film that Greg Mitchell writes about where President Truman and Gen. Leslie Groves became censors, uhr, script doctors, uhr... well, you get the point.  (SPOILER ALERT: It's awful.):

https://www.youtube.com/embed/vphTjSncp-M

• Ukraine; the madness and the danger continues.

• Aw, c'mon - do we really need itsy bitsy teeny weenie micro-mini nuclear reactors?????

• Vina Colley article on her fight to secure benefits for herself and others after radiation exposure at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon, Ohio.\
• Keeping Diablo Canyon Running Past 2025 Is Not the Answer to California’s Energy Future

• Ukraine Nuclear dangers - how many and how bad?  This week, we learn how bad it could get from Edwin Lyman.  He  is a physicist and the Director of Nuclear Power Safety with the Union of Concerned Scientists. He specializes in nuclear proliferation, nuclear terrorism, and nuclear power safety.  Lyman has published extensively in journals and magazines, testified before Congress and advised other government groups, and been cited as an expert source in news stories in most major media.  We spoke on Friday, July 22, 2022.
  
  Follow Edwin Lyman on Twitter: @NucSafetyUCS.

Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists

Greenpeace examination of Chernobyl  radiation in the face of the International Atomic Energy Agency's lowball radiation stats. 

Why do the Japanese persist in swimming near Fukushima? 

• TERRIE BARRIE Obituary -  LINK TO Nuclear Hotseat #187 from January 20, 2015, including an interview with Terrie. 

Terrie Barrie

• San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace Press Conference on why Diablo Canyon needs to be shut down:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/pE12VgbilRA

• Gender and Radiation Impact Project (GRIP) is offering short courses on Radiation, Biology and Society, led by Cindy Folkers of Beyond Nuclear and Mary Olson of GRIP.   Olson and Folkers have a combined half century + of experience helping impacted communities, members of the media, elected and appointed officials and many others to understand ionizing radiation and its impacts on the human body and our environment.  Both women have converged on looking at where radiation has disproportionate impacts--particularly impacts to girls and women.
  
  For more information on the Fall, 2022 courses - online, inexpensive, really worth it - CLICK HERE.
• Nuclear strategy and ending the war in Ukraine
• How Chernobyl made Welsh sheep radioactive and paralysed some farms for 26 years
• Opinion: MidAmerican shouldn't waste money studying small nuclear reactors
• Friends of the Earth, Japan: Protest the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Approval of TEPCO’s Plan for the Oceanic Discharge of Contaminated Water from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant

• The NYC Emergency Management Office released a bombshell last week - a video PSA on how to survive a nuclear attack! …and it has generated a firestorm of its own.  It's  the 1950’s laughable Duck and Cover drill, repackaged in all seriousness for hip Millennials:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/zznmdUJbeU8

Full NYC Nuclear PSA

To counter the disinformation embedded in this PSA, I spoke with two experts in New York nuclear matters:

• Dr. Kathleen Sullivan is is a disarmament educator and nuclear abolitionist, author, and producer of documentaries.  She has been engaged in the nuclear issue for the last 30 years.
• Seth Shelden is the United Nations Liaison for the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize-winning coalition working to prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons.
• Together, they helped to found NYCAN - The New York Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, a  partner organization of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).

We spoke on Monday, July 18, 2022

• Answering PSA produced by NYCAN
• True Impact of 475 Kt. Nuclear bomb explosion over Manhattan - more than 30 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb:

Nukemap reveals what the devastation would be from an average Russian nuclear bomb blast on Manhattan.

• Destruction of 15 kt atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, August 8, 1945.  NOTE that this is 1/30th of the power of Russia's most common modern nuclear weapon.

NYC Nuclear PSA - tells you to go and stay inside, take a shower, and listen to media updates.
Where in the after picture of Hiroshima is "inside?"  "Shower?"  "Media infrastructure?"

More Accurate Nuclear Attack PSA (satire):

https://youtu.be/iw26IOPgrtw

More realistic Nuclear attack survival PSA.

• The nuclear industry is inherently racist, sexist, and ageist.

• Harvey Wasserman article: Newsom Wants to Keep Dangerous California Nuclear Power Plants Open 

"RADIOPHOBIA???" - Prof. Majia Nadesan rips this nuclear industry propaganda talking point to shreds and shows how it has been used against the people of Japan after Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and now Fukushima. She is a professor at Arizona State University and a researcher on a wide range of interconnected topics including Governmentality, Biopolitics, and Risk Cultural Studies; Autism and Bioethics; Globalization; and Political Economy, Energy Politics, and Organizational Communication.  Her books include: Fukushima: Dispossession or Denuclearization, Fukushima and the Privatization of Risk.  She recently provided a chapter on “Radiophobia and the Politics of Social Contagion” for the book, Transforming Contagion: Risky Contacts among Bodies, Disciplines, and Nations – and that’s what we’re focusing on today – Radiophobia. 

Majia Nadesan’s LINKS:

• Nadesan, M. (2018). Radiophobia and the Politics of Social Contagion, a chapter in the collection: Transforming Contagion: Risky Contacts among Bodies, Disciplines, and Nations, edited by B. Fahs, A. Mann, E. Swank; Rutgers University Press.
• “Lessons of Fukushima” presentation and draft versions of radiophobia chapter
• BOOK: Fukushima and the Privatization of Risk. Palgrave Pivot.
• VIDEO : “Fukushima’s Genetic Legacy” – Interview produced by EON – Ecological Options Network.
• BLOG: Majia’s Blog https://majiasblog.blogspot.com/

Linda Pentz Gunter busts the re-approval by the European Union to include nuclear energy as a "green energy"  - and acceptable for investment of renewable energy funds. 

• Diablo Canyon Power Plant won't stop power outages.
• Church Rock - The 43rd Uranium Tailings Spill Legacy Commemoration
  Saturday, July 16 from 7 am to 1 pm
• Tularosa Basin Trinity Downwinders: 77 Years And Waiting - Town Hall Meeting and Candlelight Vigil on July 16.

Chernobyl Radiation Lies put out by the World Health Organization have kept
the full extent of its impact on health and mortality hidden.  Alison Katz of
Independent W.H.O. cuts through the surgically implanted lies that minimize
the devastation caused by the world's worst nuclear accident... to date.  

• Chernoby Truth, World Health Org. Lies Revealed – Alison Katz is a psychologist and sociologist who heads Independent WHO. The international watchdog group draws attention to the World Health Organization’s failure in its duty to protect those populations who are victims of radioactive contamination from Chernobyl and, later, Fukushima.  The group has held a vigil in front of WHO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, five days a week, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., since April 26, 2007 – the 21st anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.  Given the visibility and popularity of last year’s HBO series on Chernobyl series – it now ranks as the most seen television program in the world, ever – it seemed the right time to reintroduce this classic Nuclear Hotseat episode to an audience that either has not yet heard it, or wishes to have their understanding of Chernobyl’s devastating impacts refreshed. Originally recorded for Nuclear Hotseat #118, September 17, 2013, the material covered has in no way gone out of date.

• Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future by Kate Brown. Superb accounting of the health devastation of Chernobyl, constructed from over three years of investigation into medical archives in eastern Europe. 
• Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higgenbotham.  NOTE: the author does a superb job reconstructing the horrors of Chernobyl, but then goes full-on pro-nuke during the final chapter, citing statistics from only the pro-nuclear WHO, IAEA, and UNSCEAR. I recommend that you skip that chapter and read the rest of the book for its narrative of nuclear lies, miscalculations, cover-ups, and destruction of people and the environment. In particular, the description of the physical devastation of high level radiation exposure is comparable to the visuals provided in the HBO series.)