Nuclear Hotseat

Activists Getting Active - Vermont Yankee SHUT IT DOWN Affinity Group
protesting at the gates of the now-shuttered nuclear reactor.
Frances Crowe, third from left, Hettie Nessle to her left.

Activists getting active on multple fronts!

• Linda Seeley is a veteran member of the group San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace.  Here, she fills us in on how the New York article, The Activists who Embrace Nuclear (GAK!) was not researched with anyone connected with the group - meaning due diligence was not done on the article.  She has more as well.
  Mothers for Peace is asking for letters to be sent to the New Yorker:  
• Letters to the New Yorker editor:  [email protected], and per their guidelines, include your postal address and daytime phone number. Letters may be edited for length and clarity, and may be published in any medium. All letters become the property of The New Yorker.

Activist being Active and on-site at Vermont Yankee: Filmmaker Robbie Leppzer

• Robbie Leppzer is an award-winning independent documentary filmmaker with over forty years experience who directed POWER STRUGGLE (86 minutes, 2019), which portrays a heated political battle to close down the problem-plagued Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. Filmed over five years, the film follows the unfolding drama as citizen activists and elected state officials—alarmed at increasing safety violations—take on the federal government and one of the biggest power companies in the United States and eventually win. Robbie talks about POWER STRUGGLE, as well as his long filmmaking career which started at age 18 filming the birth of the antinuclear power direct action movement with his film, SEABROOK 1977 (www.turningtide.com/seabrook-1977). He also talks about his 1980 radio documentary, VOICES FROM THREE MILE ISLAND (https://www.powerstrugglemovie.com/voices-from-three-mile-island) and his 1982 nuclear disarmament film, CHOOSE LIFE.

CLICK on picture above or on this LINK for your Virtual Screening:
https://turningtide.vhx.tv/products/power-struggle-nuclear-hotseat

Here's the POWER STRUGGLE trailer:
https://vimeo.com/507977674

Other LINKS:

• For more information on POWER STRUGGLE, go to:  www.PowerStruggleMovie.com
• www.TurningTide.com
• www.BreadandPuppetMovie.com

Veteran activist Harvey Wasserman as a very young man in Robbie Leppzer's film SEABROOK 1977

Ford wanted to build a nuclear-powered car and decided against it in 1957.  So why are they now building a model for their museum? 

You do NOT want to be rear-ended in this nuclear reactor-powered car! 

Texas Nuclear's Epic Fail - Erica Gray (above), Nuclear Issues Chair of the Sierra Club, provides the damning Nuclear Regulatory Commission "event" (accident) reports online,
five days a week.

• TEXAS NUCLEAR'S EPIC FAIL - Erica Gray, Nuclear Issues Chair of the Sierra Club, checks and posts the Nuclear Regulatory Commission status (power level) and event (accidents, problems) reports on social media the five days a week that they are supposed to be issued.  Last week, Nuclear Hotseat offered a rundown on what was then known about the South Texas nuclear power plant power failure during the recent arctic cold snap which left much of the state without electricity in sub-freezing weather. More has been revealed, and to learn all about it, I spoke with Erica. This is what we know as of Saturday, February 20.
  
• Defund Nuclear Weapons Producers:  Susi Snyder is primary coordinator of the Netherlands-based program, Don’t Bank on the Bomb (DBOTB). We regularly run Susi’s two-minute explanation of the international grassroots DBOTB program as a PSA for sanity. Here, she goes into much greater detail on how any of us – all of us – can work together to cut off the money going to nuclear weapons producers. Note that this interview is from May, 2018, so her references to the American presidential administration are to President Biden’s predecessor. But the website contains updated information as of February, 2021, and everything she discusses is still accurate. Also, this interview took place before the passage of the Treaty to Ban Nuclear Weapons was ratified by more than 50 countries and took on force of law as of January 21, 2021. That means international law is on our side and strengthens our discussion with our financial institutions even more.
  List of 28 nuclear weapons-producing companies from Don't Bank on the Bomb. 

Here’s a link to a handy phone script you can crib from when you contact your financial institution.

The New Yorker Magazine goes full-on pro-nuclear for a gazillion-word article that doesn't even bother to put forth the opposing view.  My longest Numnutz rant in the history of Nuclear Hotseat because... hey, it's really more awful than you can imagine.   

Rebuttal to New Yorker Magazine written by Dave Kraft of Nuclear Energy Information Service - downloadable PDF. 

• March 1, World Future Day - 8th Annual World Future Day 24 hour round-the-world conversation via Zoom.  Follow the time zones around the world as youth, elders, policymakers, visionaries, artists, academics, future thinkers and ordinary people interested the future, will come together in a free-flowing dialogue designed to stimulate ideas and inspire hope.  Compelling watching!
• March 1, inter-generational dialog organized by Youth Fusion, and the launch of the Youth Fusion Elders Initiative, which you can sign up to watch.
• Happy Birthday, Peace Symbol - Here are its anti-nuclear roots:

Nuclear Biden: Disarmament strategies for the new administration and Teaching Peace with Alyn Ware (l), Global Coordinator for Parliamentarians for Nuclear Nonproliferation and Disarmament.  Pictured here being interviewed by journalist Ramesh Jaura, Editor-in-Chief & Director-General of InDepthNews at the United Nations in Vienna.

• Nuclear Biden - a primer for the new president.  Alyn Ware is a New Zealand peace educator and campaigner in the areas of peace, non-violence, nuclear abolition, international law, women's rights, children's rights, indigenous rights, and the environment. He has served as the Global Coordinator for Parliamentarians for Nuclear Nonproliferation and Disarmament since it was founded in 2002. His previous positions include Director of Aotearoa Lawyers for Peace, Executive Director of the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy (USA), Director of the Peace Foundation Schools Outreach Programme for the UN Decade for a Culture of Peace, and Founding Director of the Mobile Peace Van. He also has a long list of awards recognizing his work on behalf of people, the environment, and the planet.
  Here, we talk about the Nuclear Biden alternatives for the new U.S. president to work towards disarmament and genuine peace, based on conflict resolution.  We spoke on February 12, 2021. 

• Parliamentarians for Nuclear Nonproliferation and Disarmament (PNND)
• Parliamentary handbook - Assuring Our Common Future - free PDF.
• Youth Fusion - a world-wide networking platform for young individuals and organizations in the field of nuclear disarmament, risk-reduction and non-proliferation.
• Unfold Zero - a platform for United Nations (UN) focused initiatives and actions for the achievement of a nuclear weapons-free world

How can one trust the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to regulate our nuclear reactors when they can't even set up a webinar that works?  "Technical difficulties?"  Wouldn't that best describe nuclear reactors?

Nuclear Suicide by Embrittled Reactors:
Veteran environmental investigative journalist Karl Grossman

• Karl Grossman is an author and journalism professor at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury. He hosts the television program Enviro Close-Up with Karl Grossman, is the author of six books, and writer of numerous magazine, newspaper and Internet articles. That doesn’t even come close to describing his talents, abilities and accomplishments. Karl has been covering nuclear issues for over 50 years, and 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 we talk with him here about the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s latest deadly shenanigans and hijinks – or as Karl calls it, “baloney” - as regards nuclear reactor operations. We talked on February 5, 2021.
• LINK to Karl Grossman and Harvey Wasserman's article:  Embrittlement in Nuclear Power Plants
• LINK to Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Energy Education with "Nuclear Crack Down," a demonstration of embrittlement.
• Karl Grossman's superb book, Cover Up! What you are not supposed to know about nuclear power

• Alexei Yablokov book - Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, Volume 1181 (Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences)

So the Radioactive Olympics are not just routing the proposed torch run through Fukushima's radioactive hot spots, scheduling WOMEN'S softball games at Fukushima's Azuma Sports Stadium, and ignoring the Covid 19 pandemic... they're also flat-out sexist???

• HOW TO CHECK NRC PDFS ON THREE MILE ISLAND from Mary Olson of www.GenderandRadiation.org.
• Why Is America Getting a New $100 Billion Nuclear Weapon?
• The US Should Negotiate a Ban on Basing Weapons in Space

Oregon Nuclear Legislation - a full court press of propaganda
Podcaster/Citizen Activist Lonnie Clark on nuclear shenanigans at the Oregon State House

• Oregon Nuclear Legislation is being proposed that will knock the knees out of 1980's ballot initiative that banned nuclear reactors in Oregon until/unless they were approved by voters AND the federal government had a working long-term storage facility for the resulting high level nuclear waste.  Lonnie Clark - both a podcaster and an anti-nuclear citizen activist - brings us up to date with what those nuke-loving legislators are trying to slip under our noses. 

It's one thing for California wine to be found to contain radiation from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear triple meltdown disaster.  It's quite another for PBS to have a report on it... and include in the headline that "...it's not a bad thing!"  Say what?????

• Why a National Day of Remembrance for Downwinders is Not Enough
• Excelon Threatens to Mothball Four Nuclear Power plants unless Paid a Premium
• Traces of Manhattan Project can be found in Every Single Living Thing
• The Plundering of Greenland
  • Nuclear Hotseat #390 - includes interview w/Lisa Autogena at International Uranium Film Festival
  • Kuannersuit / Kvanefjeld, film on Greenland uranium mining issues by Lisa Autogena and Joshua Portway

Gene Stone – Long-time activist and founder of
Residents Organized for a Safe Environment (ROSE)

Video:  Nuclear Power is NOT a Climate Solution – by NEIS.org

Sealed mine shaft to Greenland's uranium mine -
featured in the film Kuannersuit / Kvanefjeld by
Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway

Hanford Downwinders truth preserved, in context,
in the powerful book, The Hanford Plaintiffs: Voices from the Fight for Atomic Justice
by downwinder Trisha Pritikin and journalist Karen Dorn Steele

Hanford Downwinders stories preserved - The Hanford Plaintiffs: Voices from the Fight for Atomic Justice, written by Trisha Pritikin, was published in 2020. She is an attorney and a Hanford downwinder who felt compelled to preserve the stories of Hanford downwinders who tried to take part in the law suit. Joining her for the interview is Karen Dorn Steele, a former investigative journalist with the Spokesman Review who broke the story of cancers and other diseases in farmlands downwind of Hanford. She also wrote the introduction for the book. We spoke on Friday, January 22, 2021.

In Fukushima Prefecture, the Prefectural Health Survey Review Committee discovered thyroid cancer in two infant survivors of the Fukushima Daiichi triple meltdown... and proceeded to try to blame “overdiagnosis” for "finding thyroid cancer that they do not have to find."  Say WHAT?????

• To celebrate the entry into law of the Treaty to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) produced a celebratory international livestream that featured activists from around the world.  Here's the link:   https://vimeo.com/504951055

Nuclear Hotseat #500!
Treaty to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons takes on Force of Law!
Lots to celebrate!

Treaty to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons passes into international law as of Friday, January 22, 2021!

An important message (above) to those countries that currently hold nuclear weapons:
United States, Russia, China, UK, France, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel

NOTE:  This is not an all-inclusive rundown of episodes, just a saunter through some moments that have stuck with me from the first 9-1/2 years of Nuclear Hotseat production:

• NH #1 - The first conference call that turned into a podcast that turned into... well, all the rest.
• NH #7 - Jon Solomon of Eden Foods on safety precautions for foods imported from Japan in the immediate aftermath of Fukushima and FDA insufficiencies.
• NH #74 - Marius Paul of the Denesuline First Nations people in northern Saskatchewan on his ancestral understanding of "the black stone" - uranium.
• NH #91 - Dr. Helen Caldicott, 2012 Symposium on the Medical and Ecological Impacts of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident.
• NH #483 - Ian Zabarte, Principal Man of the Western Bands of the Shoshone Nation of Indians with "A Message from the Most Bombed Nation on Earth."
• NH #423 - Church Rock uranium tailings dam break disaster - Terracita Keyanna of the Red Water Pond Road Community.  (Strong suggestion to listen to the entire SPECIAL on Church Rock.) 
• NH #205 - Sister Megan Rice shortly after her release from two years in prison for participating in a non-violent peace protest of nuclear weapons at the Oak Ridge Y-12 "high security" nuclear facility in Tennessee.
• NH #407 - Three Mile Island: My Trip Back.  Radiation dispersion after the meltdown with Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Energy Education, and health impact of radiation exposure with Cindy Folkers of Beyond Nuclear.
• NH #316 - Treaty to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons passage - Prof. Heidi Hutner, interviewed from the United Nations less than one hour after the passage of the Treaty to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons.
• NH ##303 – Susi Snyder of Don't Bank on the Bomb with an important lesson on how you can take an action, right now, that will remove funding from nuclear weapons producing companies. 

NOTE:  All episodes listed above are available on this website
and can be accessed through the search function.