As promised in my interview post with Yuki Miyamoto to mark the 80th anniversary of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima, I’ve recorded some extracts from the following book, which I purchased from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum when I visited in 2004.

Please take care listening as these testimonies feature graphic and extremely distressing descriptions. But the first-hand memories are vital for the world to hear - and even more so as the events recede further and further into history.

The survivors’ appeals - that nuclear weapons must be abolished and no nuclear strike ever allowed to happen again - can not, must not be ignored.

If you missed the interview with Yuki, you can read it here:

I was also very interested to come across this piece by Kjeld Duits which includes the very photo taken on Miyuki Bridge by Yoshito Matsushige, one of the survivors whose testimonies I’ve read out here.

In my ignorance, I hadn’t realised quite how significant the photo Matsushige describes taking is and I’d highly recommend taking a look at the full piece, which goes into a lot more detail on this photo as well as many other rare and important images.

It’s been a little while but I’m back with another video book report for your delectation and this time I’m looking at Chain Reactions: A Hopeful History of Uranium by Lucy Jane Santos, published by Icon Books in the UK and Pegasus books in the US. It’s still a pretty new book - it came out in hardback last year and the paperback version is out at the end of this month (July 2025).

You can get it from Bookshop in the UK here, and in the US here. And if you’re based elsewhere, as always the internet is your ally 😊 Here’s the publishers’ blurb:

Tracing uranium's past, and how it intersects with our understanding of other radioactive elements, this book aims to disentangle our attitudes and to unpick the atomic mindset.

Chain Reactions looks at the fascinating, often-forgotten, stories that can be found throughout the history of the element. Ranging from glassworks to penny stocks; medicines to weapons; something to be feared to a powerful source of energy, this global history not only explores the development of our scientific understanding of uranium, but also shines a light on its cultural and social impact.

By understanding our nuclear past, we can move beyond the ideological opposition to atomic technology and encourage a more nuanced dialogue about whether it is feasible - and desirable - to have a genuinely nuclear-powered future.

A couple of quick show notes.

I talked a bit about the Linear No-Threshold model for assessing cancer risk from radiation exposure, which forms the widely accepted basis for radiation protection in almost all countries around the world. But I forgot to mention that it hit the headlines again recently when the Trump administration issued several executive orders relating to the nuclear industry, including one directing the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission to ‘reconsider’ its use of the model. You can read more on that here: To boost nuclear power, Trump orders controversial rewrite of radiation safety rules

And I’m afraid I suffered an embarrassing menopausal brain freeze over the title of Richard Rhodes’ classic tome on the American nuclear weapons programme. It is of course The Making of The Atomic Bomb.

Lastly, if you’re interested in Lucy Jane Santos’ earlier book on radium that one is called Half Lives: The Unlikely History of Radium.

I’m still finding my feet doing videos like this so if you enjoy this one, you can really give my confidence a boost by letting me know you liked it - by clicking the ❤️ or commenting or replying if you’re getting this over email.

This is a deep, deep dive into the true £££ numbers behind my independent feature documentary, 'The Atom: A Love Affair' released in the UK in 2020 - breaking down exactly how much it cost to make that film, how much money I raised up front and how much income the film has made since it was released.

You can find the full written version of the piece at https://open.substack.com/pub/vickilesley/p/i-sold-my-film-around-the-world-but-im-still-in-debt

Welcome back gang. Trying something a little different today.

After experimenting for the first time with Substack video last week, sharing a short animated film from my archives as a producer…

…I’ve decided to step completely out of my comfort zone by recording myself actually talking to camera for you. And here it is!

The prompt for this was that I finished reading a wonderfully vivid, impressionistic atomic memoir - about a 1980s childhood spent in the shadow of the US nuclear weapons programme at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. I really enjoyed it and felt moved to tell you about it and try to give you a little flavour through reading some of my favourite extracts.

A video book report if you will.

The book is This Atom Bomb in Me, by Lindsey A. Freeman, and it’s published by Redwood Press, an imprint of Stanford University Press.

You can get it from Bookshop in the UK here, and in the US here. And if you’re based elsewhere, then the internet is your friend - just search and I’m sure you’ll be able to find yourself a copy 😊

I really hope you enjoy this. And if you do, PLEASE let me know by clicking the like button - those little hearts truly make my day and give me the confidence to keep showing up and creating different things that I hope will resonate.

And comments, re-stacks and shares all really help with getting my work out to more people too. Thanks!

Watch my film on Netflix & Disney+ (UK/Europe only) or Vimeo-on-demand - or see trailer, reviews & bonus content HERE

Find me on Bluesky & at LinkedIn

Hello there friends,

I hope you’ve had a good week and that you enjoyed reading my interview with Cornelius Holtorf. If you didn’t get a chance to check it out yet, here’s the link again:

As well as personal memories from around the time of the Chernobyl disaster (which had a particularly profound social impact in Germany, where Cornelius is from), it’s packed with ideas and insights from his work as an archaeologist into the monumental challenge of safely storing the high-level radioactive waste material produced by both nuclear weapons and nuclear power, over an almost unimaginably long timescale.

One of the things he references is the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico and the work done by a panel of experts at the Sandia National Laboratories, including social scientists, historians, archaeologists, futurists and climatologists convened to try to come up with a warning system to alert people many thousands of years into the future to the presence of this radioactive material.

The resulting report, first published in 1993, included a warning text and images of possible physical warning markers that could be left at the eventual waste repository (on the basis that language might have changed or even disappeared over such a vast time frame).

And back in 2010, I produced a brief animation inspired by this report, which I’m sharing with you here today.

It was the first time I’d ever worked directly with an animator and one of the earliest films I produced independently outside of my TV work and there are definitely things I would change about it if I made it again today. But it was a fascinating piece to work on. And fun fact (which will probably only make sense to readers of a certain age) it was narrated by none other than… the Man from Del Monte!

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Here’s the text of the Long Term Nuclear Warning Waste Message in full:

This place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it!

Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.

This place is not a place of honor...no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.

What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.

The danger is in a particular location... it increases toward a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us.

The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.

The danger is to the body, and it can kill.

The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.

The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.

Do let me know what you think of the video and I’ll look forward to being back in your inbox with more guests sharing their atomic experiences with you very soon.

And don’t be shy in clicking on the ❤️ or re-stacking in Notes if you enjoyed this - it really does help others to find it too.

Read More…

Watch my film on Netflix & Disney+ (UK/Europe only) or Vimeo-on-demand - or see trailer, reviews & bonus content HERE

Find me on Bluesky & at LinkedIn