Nuclear Hotseat

Plutonium pits - the trigger for nuclear weapons:  Congress has mandated that this country produce new plutonium pits at a rate of 80 per year by 2030... but nobody's done the proper Environmental Impact Surveys to determine what this manufacturing push will mean to people and the environment.
(graphic by Nature; used courtesy Tom Clements and Savannah River Site Watch)

Plutonium pits are the triggers necessary to detonate nuclear weapons.  The United States currently has an estimated stockpile of approximately 3,800 active warheads -- 1,800 deployed with approximately 2,000 held in reserve. Additionally, there are approximately 1,750 retired warheads are awaiting dismantlement, giving a total inventory of approximately 5,550 nuclear warheads.

Congress has mandated that we begin producing 80 new plutonium pits per year... though it begs the question:  WHY???   And how have they gotten away with not yet performing a comprehensive Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) on the full project at both sites where the pits are to be manufactured - the Savannah River Site in South Carolina near Georgia, and Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico.  This PEIS would comprehensively analyze the full range of health, safety and environmental justice impacts of splitting the production of pits at two sites across the country.

To learn more about this situation and the complex set of issues it entails, we spoke with two of the principals in this lawsuit:

• TOM CLEMENTS serves as the Director of Savannah River Site Watch and has worked on nuclear issues for Greenpeace International, Friends of the Earth, the South Carolina Chapter of the Sierra Club, and other NGOs.
  EMAIL: [email protected]
• LESLIE LENHARDT is Staff Attorney for the South Carolina Environmental Law Project.  Previously, from 2007 to 2018, she was in private practice with her focus on environmental and administrative litigation as well as regulatory matters.

"Health" and "exposure to radiation" don't usually go hand-in-hand... but then, with some of the other crazy things people are believing these days, is it any wonder that in some places, people think it's a good idea?

• World Nuclear Survivors Forum 2021
• Kings Bay Plowshares 7
• Code Pink petition asking for the elimination of nuclear weapons from the Biden Budget.
• Where Do We Stand with Radiation and Fracking? 
• Nuclear Weapons and Reproductive Justice
• Vox video on the Church Rock uranium tailings pond spill on Navajo Nation land on July 16, 1979:

https://youtu.be/ETPogv1zq08

Nuclear-Free Earth: Is such a thing even possible?  Listen to veteran, award-winning environmental journalist Karl Grossman explain not only why it is possible and necessary, but how we can get there.

• Nuclear-Free Earth – can we achieve it?  Karl Grossman provides the vision. He is an author and journalism professor at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury, and host of the television program Enviro Close-Up with Karl Grossman. Karl is the author of six books – so far – and writer of numerous magazine, newspaper, and Internet articles.  He has been covering nuclear issues for more than 50 years; in terms of knowing how things came about and where the bodies are buried – that’s a metaphor, we hope – nobody does it better.  Karl has been an important early and consistent supporter of Nuclear Hotseat, and here he puts forth the need to make Earth a nuclear-free zone.  We talked on January 12, 2020.

Karl Grossman’s important, clear-eyed, classic book on nuclear energy: COVER UP: What You Are NOT Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power

WANT AD:  UK town in Cumbria spends taxpayer money to hire a “Nuclear Engagement Coordinator” to help site a Nuclear Waste Pit Toilet (aka radioactive waste dump) in their own back yard.  Judas goat, anyone?

• New video with marine biologist Tim Deere-Jones on the proposed release of radioactive tritium-contaminated water at Fukushima into the Pacific Ocean.  Tim was most recently heard on Nuclear Hotseat #534, September 14, 2021;

https://youtu.be/wHQqwXKe1_M

• https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2131/ML21316A057.pdf - Vogtle report from Fairewinds.
• NIRS petition:  Speak Out! Tell Congress: No Backdoor Authorization of Illegal Nuclear Waste Dumps 
• PLOUGHSHARES FUND 2022 REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS
• This next-generation nuclear power plant is pitched for Washington state. Can it ‘change the world’?
• Nuclear power plant operators want to run for eight decades, but a federal lab in Washington state found ‘critical gaps’ in knowledge about how reactors age 
• I Gave My Baby Tooth to Science: Project Sunshine's role in the Limited Test Ban Treaty and Cutting-Edge Pollution Research
• Nuclear Power Won’t Save the World. It Won’t Even Help.
• The Setsuko Thurlow Rose: 

The Setsuko Thurlow Rose

Nuclear Disarmament - The Priests, The Nuns and the Bombs, a film by Helen Young.  It focuses on the Plowshares movement and two key protests - the break-in at the Y-12 highly enriched uranium stockpile site at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the Trident nuclear submarine facility at the Kitsap-Bangor U.S. naval base near Seattle, Washington (participants pictured above). 

• Nuclear Disarmament:  Helen Young is an Emmy award-winning broadcast journalist who has forged a career as a filmmaker and writer by blending a passion for investigative reporting with a commitment to illuminating critical issues of the day.  She was a staff writer and producer for CBS News and NBC News for twenty years and has also produced for MSNBC and Al Roker Productions. Helen has won one National Emmy news award and three New York Emmys for her work, as well as awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, United Press International, the National Commission on Working Women, and the Red Cross.
• LINKS:
  WEBSITE:  nunspriestsbombsthefilm.com
  FACEBOOK:  www.facebook.com/nunspriestsbombs/ 
  MARY OLSON WORK cited in the interview:  GenderAndRadition.org. 
  

Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) needs to “repair” corroded tanks containing radioactive materials at Fukushima… and they can’t even pop for duct tape???

Clear tape used by TEPCO to “repair” corroded, leaking radioactive waste tank
at Fukushima. 

More TEPCO “repairs.”  With thanks to SimplyInfo.org for use of these photos. 
TEPCO “repairs” corroded, leaking tanks of radioactive waste at Fukushima
with transparent tape?!?!?!!!!  

• Women Transforming our Nuclear Legacy: Indigenous Wisdom, the Nuclear Ban Treaty and Activism – Zoominar by nuclearwakeupcall.earth.
• Follow-up to support MSNBC for their airing of IN THE DARK OF THE VALLEY, the award-winning documentary on the radioactive Santa Susana Field Lab site, only 30 miles from downtown Los Angeles. 
• November 22, 7 PM Eastern Time – Peace Action Maine follow-up on COP 26 – sign up for zoominar HERE.

New York Times lies of omission at the dawn of the Atomic Age are the reason why we don’t understand radiation and its dangers.  Front line Vietnam war correspondent Beverly Deepe-Keever spells it out in her essential, rigorously researched book,

• New York Times Outed on Radiation Lies of Omission:  Beverly Deepe-Keever is an American journalist, Vietnam War correspondent, author and professor emerita of journalism and communications at the University of Hawai'i after 29 years teaching and researching there.  She is author of the essential nuclear reference book, NEWS ZERO: The New York Times and the Bomb.  From 10 years of extensive research into the New York Times and the bomb at the dawn of the Atomic Age, she reveals the source of the resistance we face today in trying to warn about nuclear radiation dangers and why nuclear must never be considered “green” energy.

Beverly Deepe-Keever in her Vietnam war correspondent days

Beverly Deepe-Keever

NOTE:  The play I'm writing, ATOMIC BILL AND THE PAYMENT DUE, was inspired by information I learned from Beverly Deepe-Keever's research and writing.  It tells the story of William L. Laurence, science writer for the New York Times, who was embedded in the Manhattan Project as their on-site "historian" (read: propagandist).  Laurence had unlimited access to the Manhattan Project in its waning days, witnessed the Trinity and Nagasaki blasts, and just missed out on going to Hiroshima.  His resulting stories in the Times mentioned nothing about radiation or radioactivity, though he understood the subject from his years of reporting on front line science.  The play will be completed by the end of 2021.  Contacts to theatre companies will be greatly appreciated. - Libbe.

Greenland uranium mining ban links:

• Kuannersuit/Kvanefjeld - CLICK ON TITLE to access free Vimeo film.
• Nuclear Hotseat #390 - Interview with Kannersuit/Kvanefjeld filmmaker Lise Autogena, recorded at the International Uranium Film Festival at Window Rock, New Mexico in 2018.

COP 26 Videos:

• No Radioactive Waste Dump into the Pacific:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeYw634c9Ew

• Dr. Ian Fairlie on Tritium Dangers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uku27rAy4R0

Santa Susana Field Lab Fallout from Woolsey Fire Study of Radioactive Releases - Melissa Bumstead (above) of Parents Against SSFL.
This Week's Featured Interviews:

• Santa Susana Field Lab - the push to clean up the 2,680 acre site continues in the wake of findings about the Woolsey fire releasing radioactive micro-particles into the surrounding Los Angeles neighborhoods.  One of the ongoing people helping to lead the fight is Denise Duffield.  She serves as Administrator for Physicians for Social Responsibility-LA’s (PSR-LA) and directs its nuclear threats program, which advocates for health protective policies related to nuclear weapons and nuclear energy.  Denise also works on environmental health and justice issues, addressing the needs of local communities who are impacted by toxic contamination and the failure of regulatory agencies to protect them. She leads PSR-LA’s efforts to ensure a full cleanup of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL).

PSR-LA’s Denise Duffield

• Melissa Bumstead lives within 3.6 miles of the Santa Susana Field Lab.  She became an "accidental activist" for the SSFL cleanup after her four year-old daughter was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of leukemia in 2014. She founded Parents Against SSFL and continues to lead community efforts for a complete clean-up of the Boeing - former Rocketdyne - site.  (Her daughter is now 11 years old and cancer-free.)

The United States doesn't know what to do with its own radioactive nuclear waste... so why did we agree to IMPORT NUCLEAR WASTE?  Let alone from... ESTONIA???

• Call the Midwife episode with strong nuclear theme (Season 10, Episode 1):
  https://www.pbs.org/video/call-the-midwife-season-10-episode-1
  (PBS link may not be available outside of U.S. The series and this episode has run in the UK and will be available on Netflix in January.)
• Nuclear power plant operators want to run for eight decades, but a federal lab in Washington state found ‘critical gaps’ in knowledge about how reactors age
• Climate Emergency Includes the Threat of ‘Nuclear Winter’
• The Push for Nukes in Space by Karl Grossman
• The nation’s last uranium mill plans to import Estonia’s radioactive waste
• Nuke disaster radiation continues to threaten traditional ways of life in northeast Japan
• Akkuyu NPP should not be allowed to start operation: In just 6 months another fire at Akkuyu NPP construction!

Anti-Nuclear nun Sister Megan Rice - seen here at the outside the prison where she was held for 2-1/2 years.  She and two other Plowshares activists conducted a non-violent protest at the Y-12 "Fort Knox of Uranium" in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.  That an 82-year-old nun could "break in" to what was supposed to be a high security facility so embarrassed the government that they charged her with sabotage - a charge that was later overturned by the Appeals Court.

• Anti-nuclear nun Sister Megan Rice passed away on October 10, 2021 at the age of 91.  Sr. Rice, who was arrested more than 40 times for her beliefs and protests as part of the Plowshares movement, is best known for her role in the 2012 break-in at the Oak Ridge nuclear complex in Tennessee. She was already 82 when she and two other anti-nuclear activists, Greg Boertje-Obed and Michael Walli, hiked through the night over a steep ridge to the outskirts of the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn.

They used bolt cutters to get through three rings of barbed wire and approached the complex’s newest storage building, a windowless white-concrete hulk that had been billed as the “Fort Knox of uranium.”  They splashed blood against the walls and spray-painted slogans like, “The fruit of justice is peace” and “Woe to an empire of blood.” They lit candles and read an indictment against the American nuclear arsenal.

The three activists were arrested and charged with trespassing and “destruction and depredation” of government property. When they refused to plead guilty, prosecutors added a charge of sabotage, carrying up to 20 years in prison.

This Nuclear Hotseat interview is from Episode #205 and was recorded on May 25, 2015, just after anti-nuclear nun Sr. Rice had been released from prison.

• Now a new film, The Nuns, the Priests, and the Bomb, chronicles the work of the Plowshares movement, which seeks to invoke the biblical injunction, “They Shall Beat Their Swords into Plowshares.”  This film follows two federal criminal cases against the Plowshares activists for their protests: the July 2012 break-in at the Y-12 National Nuclear Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee – home of the largest U.S. stockpile of highly enriched uranium – and the 2009  break-in at the Kitsap Bangor U.S. naval base near Seattle. It documents the activists’ legal efforts to justify their actions under international humanitarian law and follows efforts at the United Nations to enforce the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and negotiate the new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.  (We'll have an interview with the film's director in the coming weeks.)The Nuns, the Priests, and the Bomb is available on YouTube, Amazon, I-tunes and Sundance Now.
• New York Times obituary for Sister Megan Rice. 

• ICAN downloadable pdfs on Why NATO members should join the UN Ban on Nuclear weapons:  English   French   German
• Ramana, Makhijani: Look before you leap on nuclear
• Things Fall Apart - Dr. Paul Dorfman
• When Climate Breakown Goes Nuclear - Dr. Paul Dorfman
• To Avoid Armageddon, Don’t Modernize Missiles—Eliminate Them - Daniel Ellsberg, Norman  Solomon
• ‘Fantasy PowerPoint Designs’ Won’t Deliver Nuclear Power in Time to Solve Climate Change" - Dr. Jim Green
• Small nuclear reactors, huge costs - Dr. Jim Green
• Organized Crime Goes Nuclear - Dr. Jim Green
• Poland's Nuclear Folly
• Nuclear submarine deal needlessly raises tensions