Dr. Robert Dodge of PSR-LA

• The 37th annual 2026 Nuclear Weapons Programs Tax Calculator, released by Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), demonstrates exactly how much every woman, man, child and even infant in the United States pays in annual tax dollars to support nuclear weapons - whether we want it to or not.
  
  PSR-LA's  Dr. Robert Dodge (Bob) has authored this report since its inception. He is a family physician practicing in Ventura, California who serves on the board of Physicians for Social Responsibility Los Angeles, and as co-chair of the Committee to Abolish Nuclear Weapons of National Physicians for Social Responsibility.
  
  Physicians for Social Responsibility is the US Affiliate of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War which received the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize, and is a partner organization of ICAN, recipient of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. He also serves on the Back from the Brink (www.preventnuclearwar.org) steering committee. 
  
  As Bob Dodge says:  "Learn how 'your tax dollars at work' really means 'your tax dollars usurped to line the pockets of the nuclear industry, AI, and the war machine while giving you nothing that sustains and supports your life.' Then - get to work to change it!" (For how to do this SEE: LYNDA WILLIAMS REPORT BELOW.)

LINKS from interview: 

• PSR - 2026 Nuclear Weapons Programs Tax Calculator
• BACK FROM THE BRINK
• Nukemap
• PSR Nuclear Famine Report
• NH #596:  Nuclear Reactor Radiation Health Impact on Kids – New Baby Tooth Study – Joseph Mangano - More on the baby tooth study that revealed Strontium 90 in baby teeth and led to the founding of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW). 

Physicist Lynda Williams:  NRC COMMENTS DUE NOW!

• Physicist Lynda Williams goes over pending NRC regulations changes and the tiny window of opportunity to respond, why each response is so important, and suggested language you can copy and past is at:  nuclearfreehawaii.substack.com. 

• Lynda Williams substack w/all her articles. NuclearFreeHawaii

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness):

On Lawrence O'Donnell's cable show The Last Word, former Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz states that Iran already has uranium enrichment levels that could be used to make a bomb (info Nuclear Hotseat presented on Episode #732 from July 3, 3025 in an interview with Dr. Gordon Edwards of Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibililty) -- but O'Donnell's segment disappears when the show is posted!  Censorship, clumsiness, sabotage, or ???

Radiation warning sign in Palomares, Spain, where a U.S. bomber plane crashed in 1966, releasing four hydrogen bombs, two of which scattered radioactive plutonium over 200 hectares (@2-1/2 acres each) of farmland and residential areas.  It's still not cleaned up.

This Week's Featured Interview:

• Dr. Michael Ketterer has a PhD in Analytical Chemistry and has worked for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Enforcement, at University of Denver, and he is Professor Emeritus of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Northern Arizona University. Since 2000, Michael has been conducting studies of plutonium in the environment and has analyzed samples from locations worldwide, including in soils near the former Rocky Flats facility in Colorado and fingerprinting off-site contaminants near the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in southern Ohio. He has also uncovered previous unknown areas of radiation contamination by U.S. weapons in Palomares, Spain, and two counties in California.
  
  Here, he goes over which areas have been excluded, including Piketon, Ohio; two counties in California; and Palomares, Spain.  He explains why they need to be included and what is being done to push for additional compensation for the victims.
  
  I spoke with Dr. Michael Ketterer on February 9, 2026.
  
• CONTACT FOR DR. MICHAEL KETTERER:  Michael.e.Ketterer@gmail.com.
  
• Veterans for Peace - Uranium Weapons Working Group - Arthur S. Ratcliffe Mobile Community Laboratory.

It may only look like a trailer to you, but this is the Mobile Community Laboratory Dr. Ketterer referenced, where he's testing for radiation in water and soil.

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness):

Nuking the moon?!  No, no, it's gonna be safe -- really!  (The "experts" say so!) <g>

Links:

• IPPNW Global Classroom Sign-up

Los Alamos Study Group's Executive Director Greg Mello holding the group's medal (l) and sticker to promote its message. 

• Greg Mello is Executive Director and one of the founders of the Los Alamos Study Group, based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The group has worked for nuclear disarmament, environmental protection, social justice, and economic sustainability, with actions including policy research, environmental analysis, congressional education and lobbying, community organizing, and litigation.
  
  Recently, Greg took himself to the belly of the beast – the DC Nuclear Deterrence Summit 2026, where front-line purveyors of nuclear weapons components, self-serving justifications, and lobbying opportunities lay plans and made alliances to grab mountains of taxpayer money while preparing the means to obliterate the world.
  
  To even walk into such an environment, Greg Mello shows himself to be a braver soul than I. We spoke on Feb. 16, 2024.

Links from the Interview:

• Link to sign up for Los Alamos Study Group email
• Melissa Parke, Executive Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nucler Weapons on why there's no such thing as nuclear "deterrence" - Nuclear Hotseat #37 from August 12, 2025
• Steven Starr's Nuclear Hotseat interview: Nukes in Space and the EMP Threat
• Steven Starr's book:  Nuclear High-Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse: A Mortal Threat to the U.S. Power Grid and U.S. Nuclear Power Plants - This is a non-Amazon link for purchase.

Additional Resources:

• W80-5 “just came up,” will go on SLCM-N, weapons directors say, Sarah Salem, Jan 30, 2026
• https://www.exchangemonitor.com/nnsa-no-2-committed-to-a-two-site-solution-for-pits-needs-srs-support-2/, Jan 30, 2026 " class="text-nh underline hover:text-nh-dark">https://www.exchangemonitor.com/nnsa-no-2-committed-to-a-two-site-solution-for-pits-needs-srs-support-2/, Jan 30, 2026 (paywall)
• NNSA shifting to a “culture of urgency” and “production mindset”, Exchange Monitor, Jan 30, 2026
• With study done, Wyka says Los Alamos working with tribes, Exchange Monitor, Jan 30, 2026
• Director says LANL exceeds pit production objectives, Exchange Monitor, Jan 29, 2026 
• USAF considers modular missile silos for Sentinel, Cramer says new silos “well settled”, Exchange Monitor, Jan 28, 2026

Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz Gunter

Linda Pentz Gunter

Nuclear nations should disarm first before telling other countries such as Iran they can't have the bomb.

This Week's Featured Interview #1:

Anna Rondon on government's push for uranium extraction disguised as a "clean up":

• Anna Rondon is a dedicated lifetime advocate for the rights of Navajo Nation and all Indigenous people. For the past 40 years, she has worked in various leadership positions, including for the Navajo Nation government, the Eastern Navajo Agency-Local Government Office, the Navajo Nation Chichiltah Chapter, and the Navajo Nation Department of Health. She is currently with the New Mexico Social Justice Equity Institute.Here, she explains the current push that calls itself a "clean-up" of abandoned uranium mines, but is really a scheme to extract commercially-viable uranium to be sold for corporate profit. It’s a money-grab for extractive resources that will leave the Navajo people stuck with more waste, no clean-up, and all the responsibility.I spoke with Anna Rondon on January 31, 2026.

Links:

• Anna Rondon - Contact
• LINK to John Trudell song Anna uses for inspiration:

https://youtu.be/rHQnEyEv3gY?si=IF29ZtfQSpfsp6v0

Featured Interview #2:

Kevin Kamps and Holtec's Planned Palisades Nuclear Restart in Michigan:

• Kevin Kamps is the Radioactive Waste Watchdog with Beyond Nuclear and our go-to source on a wide range of radioactive waste issues. Here, he brings us up to date on the problems with Holtec’s planned restart of the shuttered Palisades nuclear reactor in southern Michigan, on the shores of Lake Michigan.
  
• I spoke with Kevin Kamps on January 16, 2026

ICAN Update with Alistair Burnett:

Alistair Burnett, Head of Media for the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) provides a look back at issues from 2025 and a summary of where we are now, including the latest on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, or TPNW. He reports directly from ICAN's headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. It includes an interview w/Florian Eblenkamp, ICAN’s Advocacy Coordinator.

The Nuclear Resister w/Jack Cohen-Joppa

Jack Cohen-Joppa, co-coordinator of the Nuclear Resister, presents another story about activists who stood their ground, taken out of our shared nuclear past - with this one still active in our present: the ongoing and still current tale of Mordechai Vanunu in Israel.

This Week's Featured Interview:

The 2024 film NUKED presents the story of the US nuclear betrayal of the people of the Marshall Islands after WWII. The film  won several awards, including Best Documentary at 2024 International Uranium Film Festival and has been picked up for international distribution by the Al Jazeera Media Network.

March 1 marks Marshallese Remembrance Day, formally known as Nuclear Victims' Day and Nuclear Survivors' Day. It’s a national holiday in the Marshall Islands which honors the victims and survivors of nuclear testing done in the area in the 1950s. With March 1 just around the corner, we thought the timing was appropriate to bring your attention to the issues as told through this film.

I interviewed NUKED director Andrew Nisker and Rhea Moss-Christian, a Marshallese Islander interviewed in the film who is executive director and former chair of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) She previously chaired the Marshall Islands National Nuclear Commission and advised the Marshall Islands Government on oceans and trade.

I spoke with Andrew Nisker and RHEA MOSS-CHRISTIAN on January 16, 2026.

• LINK to view NUKED

Doomsday Clock Jumps Down to 85 Seconds to Midnight

Doomsday Clock jumps four seconds to 85 seconds to Midnight and planetary annihilation.

Atomic scientists set their "Doomsday Clock" closer than ever to midnight, citing aggressive behavior by nuclear powers Russia, China and the United States, fraying nuclear arms control, conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, and AI worries among factors driving risks for global disaster.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the clock to 85 seconds before midnight, the theoretical point of annihilation. That is four seconds closer than it was set last year. The Chicago-based nonprofit created the clock in 1947 during the Cold War tensions that followed World War Two to warn the public about how close humankind was to destroying the world.

Links:

• Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Doomsday Clock Statement
• Video of the January 27, 2026 announcement and speakers

Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story w/Linda Pentz Gunter:

In trying to focus on nuclear issues, we need to melt ICE... but not reactors!

Demonstration in New Mexico against the High Level Radioactive Waste Dump

This Week's Featured Interview:

• Last week, we learned that the US Supreme Court has refused to hear a petition by Beyond Nuclear to block the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) license approval for construction and operation of Holtec International’s highly radioactive waste consolidated interim storage facility (CISFs) targeting southeastern New Mexico.
  
  Despite the federal court rulings, hard-won state laws in both New Mexico and Texas block the opening of these environmentally unjust CISFs, by prohibiting the issuance of state permits needed to break ground, unless the state consents. Still, the way to maintain this block to creating these nuclear waste dumps has been made more difficult, and an outcome that supports and maintains the current situation is not guaranteed.
  
  To learn more, we spoke with Kevin Kamps, Radioactive Waste Watchdog - some of us think its more like bulldog - with Beyond Nuclear. He’s a veteran of this battle, knows where all the nuclear bodies are buried, and keeps trying to bury more of them… metaphorically speaking, of course.
  
• We spoke with Kevin Kamps on January 16, 2026

Award-Winning Greenland Film on Uranium Mining/Rare Earth Battle - Kuannersuit / Kvanefjeld

Screen shot from the film Kuannersuit / Kvanefjeld, on mining in Greenland.  Local resident shown in front of
Kvanefjeld mountain; site of one of the richest rare earth mineral resources deposits in the world.

• Professor Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway made the 2017 film Kuannersuit / Kvanefjeld, exploring the divisive debate over a proposed uranium and rare earth mine at Kvanefjeld mountain in Narsaq, Greenland, highlighting the conflict between potential economic independence and threats to traditional farming and culture, with the film acting as part of a larger art project to encourage dialogue on nuclear and mining impacts in the indigenous community.
  
  Narsaq is located next to the pristine Kvanefjeld mountain (above0; site of one of the richest rare earth mineral resources deposits in the world, and one of the largest sources of uranium. For generations the farming near Kvanefjeld has been Greenland’s only agricultural industry. At the time the film was made, this way of life was in danger of being threatened, as Greenland considered foreign investments in an open pit mine that could become the fifth-largest uranium mine and second-biggest rare earth extraction operation in the world.
  
  Autogena and Portway’s film portrays a community divided on the issue of uranium mining. It explores the difficult decisions and trade-offs faced by a culture seeking to escape a colonial past and define its own identity in a globalised wdorld. While this film was released ten years ago, it is one of the few resources we have for actually hearing from the residents of that country, what they valuem and the threats their mineral resources have already put them through. While the dangers expressed specificallty in this film have passed, current events are bringing it back into play.
  
  Audio is from the 2018 International Uranium Film Festival, with co-director Lise Autogena reading a letter from a Greenlander.  Pardon the sound quality.)

Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz Gunter

Even worse news at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as environmental oversight is set to be weakened.

Numnutz of the Week (For Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness)

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. 

Military personnel at an Army base in Alaska responsible for protecting the U.S. homeland from nuclear missile attack has struggled to feed its soldiers in recent months.  Troops at Alaska's Fort Greely - which controls 40 of this country's 44 specialized missiles designed to shoot down nuclear missiles targetting the United States. - are getting shorted on food!  Why?  Because of the Trump administration's efforts to shrink the federal workforce,.  Nuclear deterrance on an empty stomach/. low blood sugar?  The Grumpies/. Sheesh! 

LINKS;

This Week's Featured Interviews:

Lynda Williams

• Lynda Williams is a physicist, educator, and lifelong anti-nuclear activist who writes and performs songs as the “Physics Chanteuse,” a “science entertainer.” She battles against nuclear greenwashing (aka lying) with public presentations, lectures, theatre, and a ferocious activist spirit, as well as serving on official panels and committees considering nuclear issues in her home state of Hawaii. Here, she discusses the latest developments in Hawaii’s consideration of nuclear power.
  
• Melissa Bumstead is Founder and Co-Director of Parents Against the Santa Susana Field Lab. Here, she provides us with a brief rundown on the history - and the recent shocking development - in the fight for Boeing to provide a full clean-up of the toxic, radioactive Superfund site.

• SIGN THE PETITION:  No More Kids with Cancer - CleanUp the Santa Susana Field Lab

Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story w/Linda Pentz Gunter

• Are Trump's "yes men" poised to license a dangerous new reactor?

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness):

Sambal goreng udang (Indonesian sambal shrimp) - radioactive???

More radioactive food warnings from the FDA.  You really don't want to have any Indonesian shrimp dishes! 

Activist Shoutout:

• Come join us as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announces the 2026 setting for thesDoomsday Clock, the symbolic masure of how close the world is to nuclear annihilation.  It will be announced on Tuesday, January 27, 2026, during a live news conference at 10 am Eastern Time/1500 Greenwich Mean Time.  You can access the Bulletin's livestream HERE.
• John Barnard, the inventive pianist heard on the Nuclear Hotseat theme, has passed away after a long illness.  We'll think of him every time we hear that jaunty memory. 

Logo for BOMBSHELL on PBS American Experience

KEYSTONE COVER PHOTO: NYTimes science reporter William L. Laurence - aka "Atomic Bill" -
with Gen. Leslie Groves at the Trinity site. Credit: U.S. Army Corp of Engineers

This Week's Special Featured Interview:

Atomic bomb "bedtime story" sold to Americans and the media manipulation it took to create it.
Having spent more than 13 years researching and writing my play about William L. Laurence, the NYTimes science reporter who was embedded in the Manhattan Project and who is a central source of the disinformation about the bomb from its earliest days, I was astonished to meet two people as obsessed with this obscure journalist as I was. Together, they have made a brilliant documentary film that covers not just Laurence, but the entire story of how the atomic aka nuclear story has been manipulated and how what we accept as gospel about the bomb and its use in WWII is a carefully constructed lie.

Ben Loeterman directed and Gaia de Simoni produced BOMBSHELL, which carries the tag line: “They created the bomb; then created its story.” It tells of not just Laurence, but other journalists, including John Hersey, whose work fed into or contradicted the government-approved atomic bomb narrative at the end of WWII. It’s an astonishing piece of filmmaking that premiered January 6, 2026, on PBS American Experience. 


I first met Ben and Gaia last September at the Westheimer Peace Symposium at Wilmington College in Ohio, where we shared a panel discussion and a lot of energetic side conversation. In this full-length interview, I was able to ask them all the questions I wanted to know about the film, its content, their process, and even how it relates to my play.

You can access the full film HERE.  Or go to their WEBSITE.

Devastation at the west end of Miyuki Bridge, Hiroshima, August 6, 1945. People suffering burns received dabs of transformer oil brought from the nearby Hiroshima Electric Railway. (Distance from hypocenter 2200 meters.)
Photo taken August 6, 1945, by Yoshito Matsushige, Chugoku Shimbun.  Credit: Chugoku Shimbun/Kyodo News Images

Libbe's Play ATOMIC BILL AND THE PAYMENT DUE Featured at the ATHENA PROJECT "READ AND RANT" January 19

Libbe HaLevy's Play ATOMIC BILL AND THE PAYMENT DUE, dealing with William L Laurence and issues of media manipulation raised in BOMBSHELL, will be offered free of charge to the general public on Monday, January 19, 2026, 8:30 pm Eastern/5:30 pm Pacific time. REGISTER HERE to access PDF of the script and to participate in the online feedback session. Once registered, you will receive an email with links to the scripts - we ask that these by read in advance of the event.

As the Athena Project explains:
Athena Project’s Read & Rant program seeks to combine the sharing of theatrical work with the wider public and the new play development aspects of our former Plays In Progress Series while also fostering collaboration between playwrights and dramaturgs. Think book club for plays! Learn what makes a good script, discuss how it affects us, and explore the ways it links to the larger world.

January 19, 2026:  Atomic Bill and the Payment Due by Libbe HaLevy

SYNOPSIS:  The Oppenheimer-adjacent true story of media manipulation at the dawn of the Atomic Age and William L. Laurence, the New York Times reporter who sold his soul to get the story.  While researching another story for her anti-nuclear podcast, Jessie stumbles across mention of a reporter embedded in the Manhattan Project who was the source for all the earliest public information about the bomb. Through her search for long-suppressed information, interactions on the spiritual plane with dead journalists, and her own time-limited future, she embarks on a secret, deadly plan to raise visibility for nuclear issues. 

BOMBSHELL director Ben Loeterman on ATOMIC BILL AND THE PAYMENT DUE:

"In the work Gaia and I do as documentary filmmakers, we feel we’re working with handcuffs. We can only use a picture we find. And we can only use it if we find it. We can only use the written words we find. We don’t have the creative license, we don’t have the creative spirit to think about what could have been or how to break this down more psychologically. And that (your play) is astounding to me and it’s astounding to me that you did it. So I would say the same word, “audacity,” today. It was really terrific.” - Ben Loeterman

Felice and Jack Cohen-Joppa, founders of The Nuclear Resister, staying on-brand for their shared June 26 birthday.

This Week's Year-End SPECIAL: Uplifting Stories of Nuclear Resisters, Heroes, Success! with Jack Cohen-Joppa

Yes, fighting nuclear is an uphill battle - but sometimes we win!  Here, for a year-end boost of optimism, hope and community is Jack Cohen-Joppa. He and his wife, Felice Cohen-Joppa, are co-founders and co-coordinators of The Nuclear Resister, a 45 year-old newsletter reporting on anti-nuclear and anti-war civil resistance actions, with a focus on supporting activists imprisoned for their acts of conscience.

The Nuclear Resister has become a monthly feature on Nuclear Hotseat, with Jack providing stories from our history that most of us - myself included - have never heard.  So come, let's end 2025 on a hopeful note, with visions of successful actions to stop the nukesters dancing in our heads, hearts, and minds. 

• We start with the inaugural report, on NH #695 from October 15, 2024. - In a new monthly feature.  Jack Cohen–Joppa, who along with his wife, Felice Cohen–Joppa, publish The Nuclear Resister newsletter and have since 1980.  Here, Jack shares stories from their archive, bringing our shared activists history to life.  https://nuclearhotseat.com/podcast/nobel-peace-prize-small-modular-reactor-weapon/
• Fifty years ago, in a classic case of civil disobedience, a young anti-nuclear activist toppled a tower and blazed a trail through the courtroom that nuclear resisters have followed ever since. https://nuclearhotseat.com/podcast/combating-nuclear-greenwashing/ From NH #702 - Dec 3 2024.


  BTW, that farm in Western Massachusetts had among its members a very young Harvey Wasserman, who coined the term “NO NUKES!” and used what he learned from this action to fuel his activism for decades since then.
• 717 - March 25, 2025 - 35 years ago, rural communities in Western New York took nonviolent direct action to Bump the Dump, stopping the state and the nuclear industry from trashing their countryside with ‘low-level’ nuclear waste.” Jack Cohen-Joppa tells the true tale of two counties that stood up and shut the door when the nuclear industry came knocking. https://nuclearhotseat.com/podcast/three-mile-island-reactor-restart/
• 713 - February 25, 2025 - In 1980, the Plowshares Eight hammered on nuclear warhead nosecones and sparked a global movement of direct action for nuclear disarmament. https://nuclearhotseat.com/podcast/united-nations-tpnw-nuclear-weapons-ican/

And here is a link to a film starring Martin Sheen and the Plowshares 8, just prior to their sentencing. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUph8GWFupE

• Activism against nukes was hardly limited to the United States. In a legendary anti-nuclear victory, British women came together at the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, and succeeded in kicking U.S. nuclear missiles out of England. Here’s The Nuclear Resister from NH #709 - January 28, 2025. Links: https://nuclearhotseat.com/podcast/anti-nuke-eco-broadcast-network/
• 722 - April 29, 2025 - Missouri is the “Show Me!” state, and the Missouri Peace Planters did just that when they repeatedly occupied multiple nuclear missile silos in the summer of 1988, causing a furor that helped raise awareness of this hidden danger at the height of the Cold War. Here’s Jack-Cohen-Joppa with this month’s Nuclear Resister. https://nuclearhotseat.com/podcast/hb-305-new-nukes-stealth-legislation/
• 739 - August 26, 2025 - Milk and cookies time! Here’s another story of heroism in the fight against nuclear weapons with Jack Cohen-Joppa of The Nuclear Resister. This week, focus on the protest events surrounding 1985’s 40th anniversary of the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
• 750 - November 11, 2025 - This month’s contribution to our understanding the history of nuclear resistance: A big ELF that menaced the North Woods and threatened the world for thirty years was finally chased out by the teach-ins, petitions, lawsuits, and hand saws of popular resistance.  https://nuclearhotseat.com/podcast/savannah-river-site-nuclear-weapons/

And from the final thought:

• Ways of Knowing: A Navajo Nuclear History https://www.waysofknowing.us/ " class="text-nh underline hover:text-nh-dark"> https://www.waysofknowing.us/

This Week’s Peace Special Year-End Interviews:

Sister Megan Rice

• Sr. Megan Rice was a Roman Catholic nun who was arrested more than 40 times for protesting America’s military industrial complex and nuclear weapons -. She’s best known for breaking into Y-12, one of the world’s largest and most highly guarded uranium storage sites – the “Fort Knox” of the US uranium stockpile.
  
  But on July 28, 2012, this diminutive octogenarian nun and two other senior antinuclear activists used simple bolt cutters and their beliefs to walk into Y-12 – and not be noticed for more than 30 minutes! Our extremely embarrassed government threw the book at these three activists, charging them with “sabotage” – a felony with a penalty of up to 20 years in prison. She and the others served just over two years before being released.
  
  Sr. Megan passed away on Oct 17, 2021 at the age of 91, and there is no better commemoration of her life and work than her own words, recorded for Nuclear Hotseat on May 25, 2012, just after her release from prison (pictured above).

Susi Snyder: What You CAN Do to Help De-Fund Nuclear Weapons

ICAN's Susi Snyder, holding the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize

Susi Snyder is Director of Programmes at the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.  Her responsibilities include facilitating the development and execution of ICAN's key programmes, including the management of ICAN's divestment work and engagement with the financial sector. For more than a decade, Susi headed the Don’t Bank on the Bomb project, which was her position when we spoke for this interview on May 10, 2019.  Her information is as relevant now as it was then. The report on nuclear bomb producing companies that she references is updated every year. The 2025 report, "At Great Cost: The Companies Building Nuclear Weapons and their Financiers" is a joint publication of ICAN and PAX.

Susi has contributed to a number of recent books, including Forbidden (2023), A World Free from Nuclear Weapons (2020),  Sleepwalking to Armageddon: The Threat of Nuclear Annihilation

Zoomathon interview with Prof. Steven Starr

• Professor Steven Starr directed the Clinical Laboratory Science Program at the University of Missouri in Columbia for 11 years until his retirement in 2021. He is an Associate of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and has been a Board Member and Senior Scientist with Physicians for Social Responsibility. Starr also teaches a class for the MU Peace Studies Program entitled Nuclear Weapons: Environmental, Health, and Social Effects.
  
  Starr began making presentations at side panels at the United Nations in 2007, sometimes working as an expert witness for Switzerland, New Zealand, and Chile at the UN offices in NYC and Geneva. In 2010, Starr addressed the UN First Committee, discussing the environmental consequences of nuclear war, including nuclear winter and nuclear famine.
  
  I spoke with Steven Starr on June 19, 2023.

Steven Starr LINKS:

• BOOK - Nuclear High-Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse: A Mortal Threat to the U.S. Power Grid and U.S. Nuclear Power Plants
• Website – Nuclear Famine. Be sure to scroll down on home page to see all the articles available on a wide range of nuclear issues.
• Short version of talking points covered in today’s interview.
• Contact Steven Starr

This Week's Second Featured Interview:  Joseph Mangano

• Last week, we featured an interview with UK Radiation researcher Dr. Ian Fairlie about childhood leukemia rates for children living within 5 kilometers/3 miles of  a nuclear reactor. 
  
  Now, we take a look at U.S. cancer rates for infants, children, and adults living in the same county as a nuclear reactor and into adjacent counties, up to 50 miles away.  It's an excerpt from an interview we did in 2018 with Joseph Mangano, the epidemiologist who is head of Radiation and Public Health Project - RPHP.  His studies are based in the U.S. and he crunches the numbers based on publicly available data.  Here, he explains about how the work was done on Oyster Creek, a New Jersey nuclear power facility that was shut down shortly after we spoke.  (No causality implied.)

Joseph Mangano and RPHP LINKS: 

• Elevated Childhood Cancer Incidence Proximate to U.S. Nuclear Power Plants
• Counterpunch article: Closing Nuclear Reactors Means Big Improvements in Local Infant Health
• Direct link to RPHP Journal Articles and Studies

Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz Gunter:

Will a Supreme Court ruling mean the end of Democratic commissioners at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission?

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness):

Chernobyl's New Safe Containment building is no longer New or Safe - but that doesn't stop the sale of 22 tons of so-called "safe" "formerly" radioactive metal that's been reclaimed from the site.  Radioactive belt buckles, anyone...? 

Dr. Ian Fairlie speaking at Dr. Helen Caldicott's Symposium:
Fukushima Two Years Later: NYC - March 11-12, 2013

This Week's Featured Interview: 

Dr. Ian Fairlie, UK-based radiation expert, compiled statistics from 60 international studies done on leukemia rates for children living within 5 kilometers/3 miles of a nuclear reactor. His shocking results - all supported by the data - clearly demonstrate the lie of nuclear industry claims of nuclear reactor safety... especially when it comes to children.  He also exposes how the industry intentionally kept that information from the public until it was forced to reveal the data.

Dr. Fairlie is an independent consultant on radioactivity in the environment living in London UK and has studied radiation and radioactivity since the Chernobyl accident in 1986. He has a degree in radiation biology from Bart’s Hospital in London and his doctoral studies at Imperial College in London and (briefly) Princeton University in the US concerned the radiological hazards of nuclear fuel reprocessing. Fairlie formerly worked as a civil servant on the regulation of radiation risks from nuclear power stations. From 2000 to 2004, he was head of the Secretariat of the UK Government’s CERRIE Committee on internal radiation risks. Since retiring from Government service, he has been a consultant on radiation matters to the European Parliament, local and regional governments, environmental NGOs, and private individuals. His areas of interest are the radiation doses and risks arising from the radioactive releases at nuclear facilities.

• The Scientists Who Alerted Us To The Dangers of Radiation by Dr. Ian Fairlie and Cindy Folkers
• LINK to Dr. Fairlie’s article, “Childhood Leukemia Near Nuclear Power Stations”
• LINK to U.S. statistics on Thyroid Cancer Rates near NYC-area nuclear reactors from Joseph Mangano of Radiation and Public Health Project. Other articles available on that site as well.

Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz Gunter

What's throttling nuclear power development is actually, surprise, the nuclear industry itself!

Linda Pentz Gunter

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness)

• POETIC INJUSTICE?  Poems can trick AI into helping you make a nuclear weapon if the prompts are made in the form of poetry! Where is that iambic pentameter when you need it?

Links:

• The nuclear arms race is back, and it’s testing US power 
• Post-truth disasters: We’re not ready for nuclear war on social media
• How Holtec International became an expanding (and controversial) nuclear power
• Two nuclear engineers with nearly a century of combined relevant experience have warned U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) staff, and the agency’s Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards (ACRS), that one or more degraded steam generator tubes at the Palisades atomic reactor on southwest Michigan’s Lake Michigan shoreline are at high-risk of failure within a short period of time after the previously closed nuclear power plant undergoes an impending, unprecedented restart.

Filmmakers and life partners Mary Beth Brangan and Jim Heddle, who along with Morgan Peterson directed the award-winning film SOS: The San Onofre Syndrome

This Week’s Feature:

Some weeks, it’s personal.

It is with great sadness that this week's Nuclear Hotseat commemorates and memorializes a fierce, gentle anti-nuclear warrior who spent decades filming protests, meetings, interviewing, and documenting the work of activists - James Heddle. He and Mary Beth Brangan were life and work partners since 1983, and worked together as documentary video and radio producers, educators, community and international organizers. They co-directed EON, the Ecological Options Network,  producing video reports and blogs on activists and organizations working at local, national, and international levels for solutions to planetary challenges.

Jim died suddenly and unexpectedly two weeks ago, leaving so many of us behind mourning his loss.  To commemorate his life and activism, we present an interview from 2023 with Jim and Mary Beth, just prior to the premiere of their film SOS: The San Onofre Syndrome. 

We spoke on September 22, 2023

Links:

• TRAILER for SOS: The San Onofre Syndrome

Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story w/Linda Pentz Gunter:

It was a totally nutty week in DC, including -- and especially -- in the nuclear sector.
Linda Pentz Gunter explains it all in this week’s Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story.

ICAN Update w/Alistair Burnett

Alistair Burnett of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), provides the latest on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, or TPNW, direct from the headquarters of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons in Geneva, Switzerland

This Week's SPECIAL Episode on the International Uranium Film Festival in Navajo Nation

The International Uranium Film Festival (IUFF) came to Window Rock, the capital of Navajo Nation, for the fourth time to present films focusing on all dangers of the nuclear fuel chain, with a special emphasis on uranium mining.  Fourteen films over two days, plus live performances and Navajo drumming, singing, ceremonial dancing.  For the full program, CLICK HERE. 

Two Honorary Lifetime Achievement Awards 2025 Window Rock were given to:

Honorary Lifetime Achievement Awards 2025 Window Rock:

• At left, Jan Boudart, board member of Nuclear Education and Information Service (NEIS) in Chicago for her decades of tireless activism as she is about to turn 90 years old.
• Norman Patrick Brown or his lifetime of indigenous activism, with special focus on uranium issues and the impact on the Navajo people. 
• At right, Marcia Gomes de Olviera, co-Founder and co-Director of the International Uranium Film Festival.

Photo of the winners is the Keystone image for this episode.

Norman Patrick Brown (l) and Anna Rondon (r) - two powerful activists making an important difference for their people and the world. 

Toni Pinedo, who responded so powerfully and meaningfully to  the film The River that Harms.

Swiftbird Drum from Taos, NM, presented Native drumming, singing, and led us in a circle dance in the lobby of the Navajo Nation Museum

Damacio Lopez, a veteran of both the U.S. Air Force and decades of activism against depleted uranium, with his newly published book:  MY LAST BATTLE: BAN URANIUM WEAPONS.  We'll have a full interview with him near the book's official release date.

Outside the hogan preparing for the pre-Festival sacred ceremony.  (l-r) Front: Jan Boudart, Norbert Suchanek, Marcia Gomes de Oliviera, Nuclear Hotseat's Libbe HaLevy, CA activist Darryl.  Back:  Damacio Lopez, director Guy Morgan.  Note the clouds seeming to radiate from the sacred space. 

Libbe HaLevy with director Jeff Gipe (Half-Life of Memory: America's Forgotten Atomic Bomb Factory)

Libbe HaLevy and Haul No!'s Leona Morgan

Lynda Williams, "The Physics Chanteusse," straight from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, knocked our socks off performing excerpts from her show ATOMIC CABARET.  Then she rocked the house with the world premiere of her new song - finished just that afternoon! - HAUL NO!, in honor of Leona Morgan and Haul No's fight against uranium transport via truck through Navajo lands.

The Awards ceremony. (l-r) Norman Patrick Brown, Jan Boudart, IUFF co-Executive Directors Norbert /suchanek and Marcia Gomes de Oliviera

Mid-Zoom - Tom Clements of SRS Watch being interviewed by Libbe HaLevy

This Week's Featured Interview:

Tom Clements has been the director of Savannah River Site Watch, a public interest organization in Columbia, South Carolina, since 2014. SRS Watch monitors US Department of Energy management of weapon-usable materials, nuclear weapons production, and clean-up of high-level nuclear waste, with a focus on the Savannah River Site. While in senior positions at Greenpeace International, the Nuclear Control Institute, the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability, and Friends of the Earth, Clements concentrated on international nuclear nonproliferation issues. Now, he’s watching the planned production of plutonium pits - the explosive triggers for nuclear weapons - and ever-increasing amounts of radioactive waste, with no intervention by the DOE to make anything better.

I spoke with Tom Clements on November 7, 2025.

Links from the interview:

Savannah River Site Watch

LINK to Report:  Unleashing Plutonium Proliferation

For more on Nuclear Deterrence check out Nuclear Hotseat #737:  The Lie of Nuclear Deterrence, with ICAN's Melissa Parke:  https://nuclearhotseat.com/podcast/ican-hiroshima-atomic-bomb/

Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz Gunter:

US priorities:  Military spending  -- especially nuclear weapons and the Golden Dome -- versus SNAP benefits and other basic human needs.  Linda Pentz Gunter parses it out.

Milk and Cookies Story Time with the Nuclear Resister - Jack Cohen-Joppa

This month's contribution to our understanding the history of nuclear resistance:  A big ELF that menaced the North Woods and threatened the world for thirty years was finally chased out by the teach-ins, petitions, lawsuits, and hand saws of popular resistance. 

Nukewatch founder Bonnie Urfer and Mike Sprong, as part of the Silence Trident Plowshares action, cutting an ELF pole, June 24, 2000. Note the peace sign carved into the pole.

Links:

• Kat Kramer Films that Change the World - ON THE BEACH and Judgment at Nuremberg- Sunday, November 23, 1 pm, Fine Arts Theatre, Los Angeles.  TICKETS: https://fineartstheatrebh.com/

This Week's Special Featured Interview:

Nuclear Icon Dr. Helen Caldicott (r) interviewed by Nuclear Hotseat’s Libbe HaLevy next to the Bridgeton landfill in N. St. Louis. This was during a symposium she spoke at, “The Atoms Next Door.”  Back row: (l-r) unknown photographer, Mali Martha Lightfoot, Brian DeLear, Kay Dray, Dr. Caldicott, Karen Nickel

• Nuclear icon Dr. Helen Caldicott is an Australian physician, author, and for six decades has been one of the world’s most important anti-nuclear advocates. She revived or founded several associations that oppose nuclear, including Physicians for Social Responsibility and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. Caldicott is a dedicated opponent to the use of nuclear power, depleted uranium munitions, nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons proliferation, and military action in general. Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Nobel-winner Linus Pauling, she is at the root of much of the anti-nuclear work being done today.
  
  We spoke on Monday, April 25, 2022.
  
• LINK: Dr. Helen Caldicott Foundation
• Nuclear Hotseat episodes with the full interview, broken into two parts:  Nuclear Hotseat NH #568 and NH #569, May 11 and May 18, 2022. 
• Books by Dr. Caldicott:
  
  • Sleepwalking to Armageddon
    Edited by: Helen Caldicott A frightening but necessary assessment of the threat posed by nuclear weapons in the twenty-first century, edited by the world's leading antinuclear activist "Dr. Helen Caldicott has the rare ability to combine science with passion, logic with love, and urgency with humor." —Naomi Klein
  • Nuclear Madness
    In this completely revised, updated, and expanded edition of her classic book, Caldicott defines the dangers of nuclear power, discusses the insidious influence of the nuclear power industry and the American government's complicity in medical "experiments" using nuclear material, and calls on us to accept the moral challenge to fight against all things nuclear.
    Nuclear Power is Not The Answer
    Of all her books, this may be Caldicott's most powerful yet -- Publishers Weekly, 17 July 2006: Caldicott's latest antinuke book searingly debunks the claim that the impending "nuclear power renaissance", purported by some to be the only answer to global warming, is "clean and green."
  • Crisis Without End
    A project of the Helen Caldicott Foundation and co-sponsored by Physicians for Social Responsibility, this gathering was a response to widespread concerns that the media and policy makers had been far too eager to move past what are clearly deep and lasting impacts for the Japanese people and for the world.

Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz Gunter

Hurry hurry, step right up and claim your free plutonium! 

A House of Dynamite by Katherine Bigelow

This Week's Featured Interview:

Greg Mello, Executive Director and Co-Founder,
Los Alamos Study Group

A new film, A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE, by Oscar-winning director Katherine Bigelow, follows what would happen in the 18 minutes following discovery of a nuclear missile aimed at the United States.  It exposes vulnerabilities to our purportedly 100% protection from incoming nukes and creates nail-bting tension as the sequence plays out in three venues:  SAC headquarters, the Situation Room at the White House, and the President. 

This creates a unique moment of public awareness on nuclear that activist groups are already jumping on to take advantage of the media moment.  Greg Mello is Executive Director of the Los Alamos Study Group (LASG), an NGO located in Albuquerque, NM that focuses on Los Alamos - the birthplace of the atomic bomb.  Since 1989, LASG has worked on nuclear and energy policy research, environmental analysis, congressional education and lobbying, community organizing, litigation, advertising, and the nuts and bolts of running a small nonprofit.

Here, Greg explains actions LASG has already taken to take advantage of the film and its massive publicity campaign to put forth the activist position and raise consciousness about the weaknesses and vulnerabilities inherent in nukes.  He also reveals a not-generally-understood problem that underlies the entire nuclear enterprise in America, making us even more vulnerable on the ground than has been known.

I spoke with Greg Mello on Monday, October 27 2025.

LINKS from the interview:

• Santa Fe Reporter two-page ad by Los Alamos Study Group - 2-page ad written by LASG
• ‘Our world is combustible’: Kathryn Bigelow on AI, Andy Warhol and nuclear Armageddon

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Bonbheadedness):

Free Plutonium!  Huzzah! 

Links:

• Trucks with uranium cross Navajo Nation, reviving long-standing fears
• Sag Harbor Journalist Karl Grossman to Be Honored
• JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG And ON THE BEACH To Screen At KAT KRAMER’S FILMS THAT CHANGE THE WORLD - includes link to purchase tickets.

Epidemiologist Joseph Mangano, head of Radiation and Public Health Project (RPHP)

This Week's Featured Interview:

• Epidemiologist Joseph Mangano reveals how the nuclear industry has hidden the health impact of low level radiation emissions from the public and why there MUST be health studies on populations near reactors BEFORE any new ones get built. 


Such a national study of the health risks posed by existing reactors should:

• At a minimum, update the findings from the 1990 National Cancer Institute study;
• Estimate the time and resources needed to produce the first findings in less than two years.
• Maximize the use of existing publicly available datasets; for instance, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website includes county-specific mortality data from 1968 to 2024.
• Make results available to independent reviewers so they can reproduce the study;
• Be funded by the federal government, which regulates nuclear power reactors;
• Include only researchers who have no ties with the nuclear industry or the federal government, and are experts on the health effects of reactor emissions, having published in peer-reviewed journals already;
• Make the results public by publishing them in peer-reviewed scientific journals and present them in public events alongside proposed plans for the expansion of nuclear power in the United States.

LINK:  Why a national cancer study near US reactors must be conducted before any new expansion of nuclear power - original article by Joseph Mangano and the late Bob Alvarez

LINK:  Chernobyl's true death toll, World Health Organization manipulation of data and health studies:  Alison Katz of Independent WHO.  The WHO says 31 people died at Chernobyl; Russian researchers found studies indicating approximately ONE MILLION EXCESS CANCERS resulted from the explosion and meltdown. 

Libbe HaLevy: Her Play ATOMIC BILL AND THE PAYMENT DUE Subject of Enviro Close-Up with Karl Grossman

The Enviro Close-Up - a 35-year program on environmental issues - features Nuclear Hotseat's Libbe HaLevy talking about her podcast, her play ATOMIC BILL AND THE PAYMENT DUE, her book YES, I GLOW IN THE DARK! and media manipulation at the dawn of the atomic age.  Shot while on location at Wilmington College Peace Resource Center/Westheimer Peace Symposium, with clips from the PRC's World Premiere Staged Reading of the play. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAE9D_MkzyE

The episode airs Saturday October 25th at 4 PM on Free Speech TV, which is on Dish network and DIRECTV. It’s simulcast on their website you can watch live and that’s worldwide and then they’re also on additionally over 200 cable TV channels nationwide and on digital platforms as well such as Apple TV and Roku amongst others.  To watch Enviro Close-up  with Karl Grossman Episode on Libbe HaLevy and her play ATOMIC BILL AND THE PAYMENT DUE, play it here or CLICK to watch on Youtube.

Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story w/Linda Pentz Gunter:

We won one! Holtec has abandoned its New Mexico nuclear waste dump scheme!

The ICAN Update with Alistair Burnett

The latest on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) direct from the headquarters of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) in Geneva, Switzerland, ICAN 's Head of Media, Alistair Burnett, reporting.

Activist Shoutouts

• Dr. Gordon Edwards provides an introduction to Radioactivity, with a special emphasis on uranium:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJ5lScxQWd4

A-Bomb survivor Senji Yaaguchi , the first hibakusha to address the United Nations, holding up photo of him shaving.  Photo courtesy Wilmington College Peace Resource Center and Claude Baillargeon. Original photo posted at NH #743.

This Week's SPECIAL Feature:

This year’s 35th annual Westheimer Peace Symposium was based on the theme “Practicing Art, Practicing Nuclear Abolition” It was presented in conjunction with the Wilmington College Peace Resource Center Academic conference: Archives as Witness from Monday, September 29 through Wednesday, October 1, 2025 at Wilmington College in Wilmington, Ohio.

I attended for multiple purposes:

• to cover the event for Nuclear Hotseat,
• as an instructor for two classes on Activist Podcasting,
• on a panel examining media manipulation by journalists in the telling of the story of the atomic bombs at the dawn of the Atomic Age.

Academics, artists and activists from around the world - Japan, Korea, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, U.S. and more - to present work inspired by archival research related to nuclear histories as a reflection of the Peace Resource Center’s mission and vision over the past 50 years. 

Among the presenters:

Prof. Claude Baillargeon leading us through the art exhibit he curated,
"Memorializing the Hibakusha Experience."

An example of a 1950's Manga comic book - censored and probably burned -  dealing with the atomic bombings.  This is an example used in Prof. Yuki Miyamoto's presentation: Stewards of the Archives: Legal, Literary and Popular Culture Approaches to Nuclear Witnessing.

Hibakusha Mr Yukihiro Ishikawa, carrying the message of peace from Hiroshima to the Westheimer Peace Symposium.

Second generation Hibakusha, Masae Shoda, w/Nuclear Hotseat's Libbe HaLevy

"Witnessing and Photographing Atomic Bomb Sufferers" - a zoom Conversation with 92-year-old Murasato Sakae in Japan (lower right), interpreter and researcher Yoshiko Tanigawa (lower left) Peace Resource Center Director Tanya Maus handling the tech (upper right), and Prof. Claude Baillargeon, Curator of the exhibit providing a guided online tour (upper left.)

And the obligatory multi-selfie of three great anti-nuclear warrior/friends:
(l-r) Norma Field, Libbe HaLevy, Yuki Miyamoto. 

Tombstone for Protest "Funeral" for Santa Susana Field Lab clean-up.
(Photo Credit, Melissa Bumstead)

Keystone (cover) photo credit:  Sean Muniz via Snappr

This Week's Featured Interview:

The long-promised clean-up of radioactive Santa Susana Field Lab site near downtown Los Angeles is being killed by Boeing & CA's Department of Toxic Substances Control. Mothers from Parents Against Santa Susana Field Lab hold a funeral for their clean-up expectations, voice anger and disappointment.

We talked with Parents Against SSFL founder and co-Director Melissa Bumstead, and co-Director Jeni Knack on Friday, October 3, 2025. 

Funeral for soon-to-be-killed clean-uo agreement for the Santa Susana Field Lab.  Here, Parents Against SSFL gather to mourn outside the headquarters of the "killer," Boeing. 

NOTE:  Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) LIES when it says "there's no possibility for off-site migration of radioactive particles" when we already know, through the citizen science testing in the wake of the 2018 Wolsey fire, that there was verifiable migration of radioactive particles to as far as 9 miles away from the site, in Sherman Oaks. Check out this report from Nuclear Hotseat #541, November 3, 2021.

Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz Gunter:

High tensions continue at Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, still in long power outage.
NOTE:  As of this posting on October 8, 2025, Zaporizhzhia's six nuclear reactors are still without external power. One back-up generator is already out of operation.

LINK to Linda's story with more information on Beyond Nuclear International.

The Nuclear Resister - Jack Cohen-Joppa

Before the U.S. stopped underground nuclear testing in 1992, activists were hiking into ground zero at the Nevada Test Site, forcing expensive delays and arrests while magnifying public support for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. 

LINKS:

• Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) is launching a new training program for health professionals interested in learning about the health impacts of nuclear weapons and radiation. This eleven-week online course will bring together leading experts, frontline community voices, and health advocates to explore the medical, environmental, and social consequences of nuclear weapons production, testing, and military use, plus health risks related to nuclear energy. Participants will also develop advocacy and communications skills to bring the health perspective into policy debates, media conversations, and community action.
  LINK to register - fees on a sliding scale, some scholarships available. 
• Democrats alarmed as Trump eyes weapons material to fuel nuclear reactors. 
• From Zaporizhzhiato Natan,nuclear piracy is equally dangerous - and illegal
• The “Golden Age of Nuclear” is all a veneer
• U.S. to gift Pu-239 to private nuclear industry
• The dangerous new Washington consensus for more nuclear weapons
• It’s past time to start protecting US nuclear power reactors from drones

This Week's First Featured Interview:

Alfred Meyer of Physicians for Social Responsibility, mid-Zoom interview

• Alfred Meyer is a long-time member of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) and has served variously as Executive Director of the PSR Wisconsin chapter, Board Member of PSR National, and President of PSR New York.  He co-authored a PSR/IPPNW critique of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) report on the health effects of the radioactive releases from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors. He has also founded, co-founded and/or served as an executive for half a dozen other major organizations dedicated to nuclear issues relating to Fukushima, Chernobyl, Ukraine, and the connection between proposed fusion weapons w/nuclear reactor infrastructure.
  
  I spoke with Alfred Meyer on December 23, 2022.
• LINK to Alfred Meyer’s article in The Progressive: It’s All About the Bomb: Why civilian nuclear power is merely a cover for producing more nuclear weapons.

This Week’s Second Featured Interview:

Dr. Gordon Edwards, addressing the United Nations

• Dr. Gordon Edwards is a mathematician, physicist, nuclear consultant, as well as president and co-founder of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, a not-for-profit corporation established in 1975. He has served as a consultant on nuclear issues for governmental and non-governmental bodies for over 45 years, and been accepted as an expert witness by US and Canadian courts and tribunals. He is frequently invited to testify before provincial and federal bodies, and to give major addresses in various countries. He also explains complex nuclear matters in a way that is easy to understand, for which I am deeply grateful. I spoke with Dr. Edwards on February 12, 2024.

What Scares Me Most about Nuclear:

Excerpts from last year’s Halloween feature: “What Scares Me Most about Nuclear.” I spoke with more than 30 activists and concerned citizens about what they found most frightening about nuclear. Here are just a few, from:

• Jan Boudart – Nuclear Energy Information Service, Chicago (NEIS.org)
• Kevin Hester – Veteran activist, New Zealand
• Dr. Michael Ketterer – chemist, professor, researcher
• Leona Morgan – Haul No (HaulNo.com)
• Brian Morrison – space scientist

You can access the full Halloween special, with more than 30 different speakers on what scares people most about nuclear, by going to: Nuclear Hotseat #645

Ollie Basta, playing the lead role of podcaster/activist Jessie Keever, addresses a rally at the United Nations at the climax of ATOMIC BILL AND THE PAYMENT DUE 

This Week's Two-Part Very Special Feature - The Peace Resource Center at Wilmington College and the Play, ATOMIC BILL AND THE PAYMENT DUE:

• Nuclear Hotseat producer/host Libbe HaLevy's new play, ATOMIC BILL AND THE PAYMENT DUE, received its world premiere staged reading at the Wilmington College 400-seat Heiland Theatre on September 9, 2025.  Produced by the Peace Resource Center at Wilmington College, an internationally honored archive of materials on the human effect of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the staged reading played like a full production, even on a minimal-budget, book-in-hand staged reading.  Audiences cheered, yelled "BRAVO!" laughed, cried, and held the silence as the two-hour reading played out. 

Ollie Basta as podcaster/activist Jessie Keever in ATOMIC BILL AND THE PAYMENT DUE. 
Behind her, projection of the logo painted on the side of Bockscar,
the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki.
(Photo credit: Randall Sarvis, Wilmington College)

(r-l) Otto Cipollini as Gen. Leslie Groves, Kevin Wall as William L. Laurence ("Atomic Bill") and behind him, Gary Sheldon as NYTimes editor Edwin James - the moment when Groves co-opts Bill into the Manhattan Project. (Photo credit: Randall Sarvis, Wilmington College)

(below) Ecstatic author in the immediate aftermath of watching the successful staged reading of her play. (Sorry for the ginormous size, but I haven't figure out how to resize a video):

https://youtube.com/shorts/uW_sgNeCo1o?feature=share

Wilmington College Peace Resource Center: A Little-Known Treasure of an Archive on the Human Impact of the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and  Nagasaki

• The Wilmington College Peace Resource Center (PRC) celebrates the 50th anniversary of its founding this year with a series of events and exhibits, of which ATOMIC BILL AND THE PAYMENT DUE was one. 
  
  The PRC was founded in 1975 by the Quaker peace activist Barbara Reynolds (1915-1990) who worked ceaselessly toward creating a world free of nuclear weaponry and war and to helping atomic bombing survivors share their stories of the tragedy of military conflict.  Currently, the PRC develops events and programming that encourages dialogue on the Wilmington College campus about how to resolve conflict from the personal to the global level. The PRC assists faculty and students in creating student-led projects, internships, and local/global collaborations so that Wilmington College and its local region can become an even greater part of a global community of peace.
  
  The PRC and its director, Tanya Maus, have long held that art in all its many forms is an important way to communicate atomic and nuclear truths. 

ATOMIC BILL director Tara Lydy (l) and author Libbe HaLevy, seen at entry to the art exhibit "Memorializing the Hibakusha Experience."  (Photo Credit: Tanya Maus)

Photo wall installation of 108 close-ups of the eyes of Hibakusha and Downwinders who witnessed the atomic bombings of Trinity, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  (Photo Credit: Tanya Maus)

Display case showing 1947 New Yorker magazine that was completely given over to the original John Hersey report on Hiroshima, and Japanese magazine with similarly innocuous cover that contains the first published photos of Hiroshima survivors, 1952. (Photo credit: Libbe HaLevy)

Hibakusha Yamaguchi Senjihi shaving.  Original photo by Tomotsu Shohei

Author/Nuclear Hotseat host Libbe HaLevy (l) and Peace Resource Center Director Tanya Maus (r) in front of the PRC.

Articles on ATOMIC BILL AND THE PAYMENT DUE:

• Atomic Bill and the Payment Due by award-winning veteran environmental journalist Karl Grossman in Counterpunch.
• "Atomic Bill": The Bomb Publicist and the New Play by award-winning filmmaker, author, and nuclear gadfly Greg Mitchell
• A more personal take on the play by Karl Grossman:  I’m a character in Libbe HaLevy’s new play “Atomic Bill and the Payment Due” 

TO PRODUCE READING/STAGED READING/FULL PRODUCTION OF ATOMIC BILL AND THE PAYMENT DUE, CONTACT LIBBE HaLEVY:

• Email:  info@nuclearhotseat.com
• Or use the CONTACT link on this website:https://nuclearhotseat.com/contact/" class="text-nh underline hover:text-nh-dark"> https://nuclearhotseat.com/contact/

M. V. Ramana w/book, Libbe HaLevy w/Podcast.

• We discuss the acclaimed new book by reknowned physicist M. V. Ramana: Nuclear Is Not the Solution: The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change.  Ramana is professor and Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security at the University of British Columbia. He previously worked at the Nuclear Futures Laboratory and the Program on Science and Global Security, both at Princeton University. Ramana is a member of the International Panel on Fissile Materials, the Canadian Pugwash Group, the International Nuclear Risk Assessment Group, and the team that produces the annual World Nuclear Industry Status Report.

CLICK on book cover to purchase from Amazon.

Beyond Nuclear Article on M.V. Ramana's Book:

https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2025/09/14/read-this-book/

NUMNUTZ OF THE WEEK (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness)

• WESTINGHOUSE LIES.  The TOTALLY FICTITIOUS 2014 WESTINGHOUSE ANIMATION of a 116 WEEK BUILD SCHEDULE for the AP 1000 NUCLEAR REACTOR.
  Westinghouse has long since taken it down from their website, but Ramana downloaded and saved it. 
  NO WONDER they took it down! This is a LINK to that video, or CLICK BELOW.

THIS ANIMATION IS A TOTAL LIE.

Portrait of a playwright/podcaster in Peak Happiness with the stage of her new play,
ATOMIC BILL AND THE PAYMENT DUE.

Producer/Host Libbe HaLevy here.  I’m in Ohio at the Wilmington College Peace Resource Center (PRC) for the world premiere staged reading of my play, ATOMIC BILL AND THE PAYMENT DUE.  It's a featured presentation for the PRC's 50th Anniversary Celebration.  While here, my commitments are such that I’m unable to produce the Nuclear Hotseat that I planned to on the PRC and the play, as well as my experience seeing the airplane that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. All that will be on next week’s show. Here, an important full-length interview with Prof. Bo Jacobs on how we, all of us, are Global Hibakusha - atomic bomb radiation survivors.  Thanks for understanding. - Libbe.

This Week's Featured Interview:

This is a SPECIAL full-length interview with Prof. Robert “Bo” Jacobs on his book, NUCLEAR BODIES: The Global Hibakusha.

Professor Robert "Bo" Jacobs

• HIBAKUSHA is the term for those who survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But in recent years, it has come to be applied more widely to all who have been exposed to radiation from nuclear bomb testing and other sources of contamination from manufacturing, uranium mining, nuclear reactors, and radioactive waste. As today’s guest will explain, that means just about all of us.
  
  Prof. Robert “Bo” Jacobs is an American historian of nuclear technologies and radiation techno-politics. He moved to Japan in 2006 after being hired by the Hiroshima Peace Institute. and is currently a professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute and the Graduate School of Peace Studies of Hiroshima City University. He’s the author of the 2022 book, NUCLEAR BODIES: The Global Hibakusha.  Bo Jacobs retired from the Hiroshima Peace Institute and returned to the United States, where he continues to write, leacture, and teaxh on nuclear issues. 
  
  I spoke with Robert "Bo" Jacobs on Friday, July 21, 2023.

LINK:

To purchase the book, go to Amazon, Ebay, or order through your local independent bookstore. 

William L. Laurence - "Atomic Bill" (l) - and J. Robert Oppenheimer (r)  at the Trinity Site, one month after detonation of the first atomic bomb. 

Libbe's Play: ATOMIC BILL AND THE PAYMENT DUE
Premieres Sept. 9 at Wilmington Peace Resource Center

Next Tuesday, September 9, my play on media manipulation at the dawn of the Atomic Age receives its premiere staged reading presentation as a feature at the 50th Anniversary Celebration of the Wilmington College Peace Resource Center. If you can get to Wilmington, the performance starts at 7:30 pm and admission is free.  If you can't get to Ohio, you can still learn more about the show because media coverage has already been off the hook:

• Greg Mitchell:  "Atomic Bill": The Bomb Publicist and the New Play
• Karl Grossman:  Atomic Bill and the Payment Due. - Counterpunch
• Karl Grossman: Atomic Bill - shorter, more personal version of the article - Southampton Press
• Harvey Wasserman's KPFK show Solartopia

If you can get to south central Ohio next Tuesday, September 9, the performance starts at 7:30 pm and admission is free. 

This Week's Featured Interviews:

• Kimberly Roberson is Director of Fukushima Fallout Awareness Network (FFAN), a project of the National Institute for Science, Law, and Public Policy.  Formerly a campaigner with Greenpeace USA, Kimberly worked as a certified Diet Counselor and Nutrition Educator while serving on the board of the National Association of Nutrition Professionals. In March 2011 she petitioned for better food regulations due to Fukushima, which led to the formation of the Fukushima Fallout Awareness Network.
  
  I spoke with Kimberly Roberson on August 29, 2025.

LINKS from interview:

• The FDA has a list of states, brands and lot numbers for the shrimp recall HERE.  
• Please sign and share this Change.org petition
• Please sign and share this MoveOn petition, which is the signature companion petition to the FDA Citizen Petition on the radioactive food issue. 
• You can also leave a comment on the FDA petition.
• CONTACT: Kimberly Roberson, Executive Director, FFAN:  FFAN0311@gmail.com. 
• LINK to interview with Mary Olson of Generational Radiation Impact Project on disproportional health damage of radiation on women and children compared to the adult Reference Man used as the model to set food safety levels.

Steven Colbert Provides Humorous Look at Radioactive Shrimp:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gS2furzVWwg

San Onofre Radioactive Waste, Damaged Canisters, Recent Meetings w/Government Officials - Gary Headrick, San Clemente Green

• Gary Headrick is co-founder of San Clemente Green , a southern California grassroots organization working to address safety problems at the San Onofre nuclear reactors and other environmental issues in the area. Gary has been leading the charge for safe storage or removal of the high level nuclear waste currently sitting at the SanO site, 123 canisters each containing a Chernobyl’s-worth of radioactivity, sited only 100 feet from the Pacific Ocean. Now there are community meetings happening to try to handle that deadly waste in a more responsible, transparent, safe way - and the public is getting involved in ever-increasing ways.
  
  I talked with Gary Headrick about the latest developments on August 29, 2025.

LINKS from Interview :

• Archival of newsletters on the website under News tab, then click on BLOG.

Other Links:

• Guest columnists Robert Weiner and Jenny Zhao: The world needs another nuclear freeze movement
• BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO NUCLEAR WEAPONS - Beyond the Brink

Cindy Folkers

This Week's Featured Interview:

Cindy Folkers is Radiation and Health Hazard Specialist at Beyond Nuclear, with close to 20 years experience.  She co-authored with Dr. Ian Fairlie the book, THE SCIENTISTS WHO ALERTED US TO THE DANGERS OF RADIATION.  Here, she breaks down what's wrong with the recent nuclear Executive Orders, including the mandate to "enable" the building of new, untried Small Modular Nuclear Reactors, and why even the current Linear No Threshold model for setting nuclear "safety" standards is not perfect, but it's much better than where we seem to be heading. 

LINK:  Dr. Gordon Edwards on uranium enrichment levels required to make nuclear bombs, and how the 11-20% enrichment of HALEU fuel required for small modular nuclear reactors can be turned into a bomb.  - Nuclear Hotseat #731. 

Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz Gunter:

Trump will get his Russian yellowcake. If only he would eat it, too...

The Nuclear Resister with Jack Cohen-Joppa

Milk and cookies time!  Here's another story of heroism in the fight against nuclear weapons with Jack Cohen-Joppa of The Nuclear Resister.  This week, focus on the protest events surrounding 1985's 40th anniversary of the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  

In New Hampshire, the Pease Air Force Base Monument (described in the Nuclear Resister report)  that honors the Air Force unit that dropped the bombs on Japan.   it was dismantled and removed when the base was shut down in 1988. 

United Nations report on the generational impact of nuclear radiation on women and children, written by Mary Olson of Generational Radiation Impact Project and Dr. Amanda M. Nichols. 

This Week’s SPECIAL Featured Interview:

We all accept as proven scientific and medical fact that human exposure to ionizing radiation from nuclear weapons and their production is damaging to human health. But how do we know that? Who figures out how bad it can be? How much radiation we can be exposed to without risking our health? And how valid are those measurements?

We learn the alarming truth behind how those numbers were generated and what needs to be done instead from today’s guests, co-authors of the new report for the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, Gender and Ionizing Radiation: Towards a New Research Agenda Addressing Disproportionate Harm:

• Mary Olson holds a degree in Evolutionary Biology and has been an educator on radiation health impacts while serving nuclear-impacted communities… and so much more. Her website is RadiationProject.org
• Amanda M. Nichols, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Environmental Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Nichols research focuses on illuminating the role of women in the North American anti-nuclear movement.  Email contact: Dr.Amanda.M.Nichols@gmail.com

Gender and Ionizing Radiation: Towards a New Research Agenda Addressing Disproportionate Harm is cornerstone information in the movement to rid our planet of nukes. It is available for free downloa or pdf HERE.

Co-author Amanda Nichols holds up copy of the report

Further References mentioned in the interview and additional Resources:

• Nichols, Amanda M. Women on the Edge of Time: Grief and Power in the Nuclear Age. PhD Dissertation. University of Florida (2021). https://original-ufdc.uflib.ufl.edu/UFE0057378/00001.
• Nichols, Amanda M. “Nuclear Energy,” in Chad Seales (ed.) The Handbook of Religion and American Culture. 2025.
• Nichols, Amanda M. “Uranium and Religion: Toward a Decolonial Temporality of Extraction,” Religions, 16(1). 2025. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16010016.
• Olson, Mary. “Atomic Radiation Is More Harmful to Women,” Nuclear Information Resource Services, 2011. https://www.nirs.org/wp-content/uploads/radiation/radhealth/radiationwomen.pdf.
• Olson, Mary. “Disproportionate Impact of Radiation and Radiation Regulation,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 44, no. 2 (2019): 131–39.https://doi.org/10.1080/03080188.2019.1603864. 
• Gender and Radiation Impact Project Website: https://www.genderandradiation.org/.

For BEIR VII Reports

• NAS-NRC. “Health Risks from Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation: BEIR VII – Phase 2,” Committee to Assess Health Risks from Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation, Board on Radiation Effects Research, National Research Council of the National Academies. National Academies Press, 2006. http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=030909156X.
• NAS-NRC. “National Research Council – Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiations: Health Effects of Exposures to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation: BEIR V.” National Academy Press, 1990. http:// www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309039959.

On International Radiological Protections and Reference Man

• ICRP. International Commission on Radiological Protection. 2002. Basic Anatomical and Physiological Data for Use in Radiological Protection Reference Values (2002). http://www.icrp.org/publication.asp?id=icrp%20publication%2089.
• ICRP. International Commission on Radiological Protection. Publication 103: The 2007 Recommendations of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (2007). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/ANIB_37_2-4. 
• ICRP. International Commission on Radiological Protection. Publication 147: Use of Dose Quantities in Radiological Protection. 50, no. 1 (2021): 9–82. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146645320911864.
• ICRP. International Commission on Radiological Protection. “Official Definition of Reference Man.” Report of the Task Group on Reference Man. [ICRP Publication] No. 23. Oxford: Pergamon Press (1975). Adopted October 1974. Page 4. https://ieer.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/definition-of-reference-man.pdf.

Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz Gunter:

Nuclear is in hot water of its own making - and if spineless jellyfish can shut down a nuclear reactor, why can't we?

Ever notice now much jellyfish resemble the nuclear mushroom cloud...? 

ICAN Executive Director Melissa Parke in Hiroshima.  Photo: ICAN / Takeo Nakaoku

Melissa Parke, Executive Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, or ICAN, traveled to Japan for the 80th anniversary commemorations of the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  She is a former Australian Minister for International Development and former Member of Parliament for the Australian Labor Party. As an MP, she regularly voiced support for nuclear disarmament, including as a member of a cross-party parliamentary group dedicated to the cause. She has been the head of ICAN for almost two years. 


We caught up with Melissa while she was in Nagasaki the day after the Hiroshima 80th anniversary ceremony.  Her tour of the far east included the Nagasaki commemoration on August 9 and then travel to South Korea to talk with Korean hibakusha - Korean citizens who were in Japan as forced labor when the bombs were exploded.  We discussed the ceremonies, the dilemma of the Korean hibakusha, why "deterrence" is a false hope that leaves the door open for disaster, and why the only way to end the nuclear threat is to abolish nuclear weapons. 

I spoke with Melissa Parke on August 7, 2025. 

LINKS from the interview:

• Deterrence article cited during interview
• Children's Peace Memorial
• Cranes of Memory

Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz Gunter:

Linda Pentz Gunter returns following a sabbatical to complete her book, which will be published in March. For her first new Hot Story: The power of words and images serve as a lesson from Hiroshima.

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness):

Put a nuke on the moon or on the back of a trailer or in the middle of a busy airport - what could go wrong? (Steven Colbert has some ideas...)

https://youtu.be/kzFd_Vmgrws?si=0XjiJPlAjuntxl6f

And yes, Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry's - when it comes to nuclear it IS a Small World After All!

"Remember Hiroshima" doll added to "It's a Small World" ride at Disneyland.  See video below. 

https://youtube.com/shorts/WroPl1szjrY?si=toqEzk0Vv88F5avK

LINKS:

• A global call to action - Trades unions and peace groups demand democracy that delivers peace and prosperity for all
• These nuclear reactors fit on a flatbed truck. How safe are they?
• Nuclear winter would bring mass starvation and death for years post-war, startling new study reveals: ‘We must be prepared’
• August 8, 2025 - No Nukes for Power, Posturing or Destruction
 by Karl Grossman

Prof. Yuki Miyamoto on Narrative Manipulation of Hiroshima, Nagasaki

This Week's SPECIAL Featured Interview:

On the anniversary of the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a look at what this meant for further generations' health and psychology. Yuki Miyamoto is Nisei Hibakusha, second generation daughter of an atomic bomb survivor, and brings a personal perspective to her powerful work. She is a Professor in the department of Religious Studies and Director / Humanities Center at DePaul University in Chicago.

Since earning her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, she has been teaching nuclear ethics and environmental justice at DePaul. In addition to leading a biannual study abroad program bringing DePaul students to Hiroshima and Nagasaki for two weeks, her team project, TEAACH Nuclear History — is an initiative focused on teaching nuclear issues to inner-city middle school students.

We spoke on July 11, 2025.

LINKS from interview:

• Monograph by Yuki Miyamoto:  Unbearable light/ness of the bombing: normalizing violence and banalizing the horror of the atomic bomb experience
• The very "graphic" graphic novel, Barefoot Gen in English. A harrowing story of Hiroshima that was one of the original Japanese manga series. This all-new translation of the author's first-person experiences of Hiroshima and its aftermath is a reminder of the suffering war brings to innocent people. Its emotions and experiences speak to children and adults everywhere. Volume one of a ten-part series.
• TEAACH nuclear history project homepage with the curriculum Prof. Miramoto has developed to teach about atomic Here's a LINK to the NH #589 interview on the curriculum: “Cool” Nuclear History Education for Kids – Prof. Yuki Miyamoto, Aiko Kojima Hibino
• ATOMIC DOCTOR: Conscience and Complicity at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age by James L. Nolan Jr.  He cared for the scientists on the Manhattan Project, organized safety and evacuation plans for the Trinity test at Alamogordo, escorted the “Little Boy” bomb from Los Alamos to the Pacific Islands, and was one of the first Americans to enter the irradiated ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Most Grotesque Numnutz Ever:

As referenced in our interview, this is the episode of the live TV program THIS IS YOUR LIFE, which aired in 1955. In it, Hiroshima survivor (Hibakusha) Rev. Kiyoshi Tanimoto is surprised - some might say blindsided -- by a forced meeting with Capt. Robert Lewis, co-pilot of the Enola Gay, the plane which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. This segment begins at 14:45.

https://youtu.be/9cdzg01Gp9Y?si=Y42OHY7xbFrSzCM8

Rev. Kiyoshi Tanimoto on This Is Your Life.  Segment with Capt. Robert Lewis, co-pilot of the Enola Gay, which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, starts at 14:45.

• The artist who was commissioned by the city of Hiroshima in 2008 and by the University of Chicago in 2017 for his pyrotechnic is Cai Guo-Qiang.  But are fireworks the appropriate way to commemorate nuclear milestones and atrocities? 

https://youtu.be/Ss5ooEQL8Mo?si=ewozLsrZft_g6gGA

University of Chicago commemoration of the first sustained chain reaction - 2017

https://youtu.be/wBsa6YSUFU0?si=zMWsAppw5SscQITm

Not even close.  "Representation" of atomic bombing of Hiroshima - 2008. 

ICAN UPDATE from Hiroshima with Alistair Burnett

The ICAN UPDATE is a monthly feature from the International Campaign on the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons on progress being made on the passage of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, or TPNW. But this month is a little different, because ICAN is in Japan and participating in the commemoration ceremonies in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Here with his report from Japan is our regular correspondent, ICAN’s head of media, Alistair Burnett.

Activist Shoutout:

• The International Uranium Film Festival is hosting a free worldwide online screening of three films to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The screenings will be available through THIS LINK August 6-15, 2025.
  
  The Films are:
  
  • Atomic Cover-Up by Greg Mitchell
  • Nagasaki Journey by Chris Beaver and Judy Irving
  • Quote the Raven, Nevermore by Ari Besser and Regis Hirwa
    
• HIROSHIMA - Lino cut 18x24 by Sam Kerson from the artist's book, Hiroshima to Fukushima, produced by Dragon Dance Theatre

HIROSHIMA by Sam Kerson

A South Korean man holds a placard in front of a building housing the Japanese embassy in Seoul on August 24, 2023, as South Korean protesters gather to demonstrate against Japan's discharge of treated wastewater from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant.

This Week's Featured Interviews:

Japan's False Narrative of Fukushima Tritium-Contaminated Water Release:

• Tim Deere-Jones is marine biologist, marine radioactivity researcher and consultant, and a regular commentator on Nuclear Hotseat. Here, clarifies how a recent report out of Japan touting the so-called "safety" of tritium levels in radioactive water released from Fukushima into the Pacific Ocean is false, really just another example of nuclear propaganda.

Planned Restart of Palisades Zombie Reactor in Michigan:

Palisades Nuclear on Lake Michigan - only 74 miles from Chicago

• Arnie Gundersen is a nuclear engineer, whistleblower, and green energy advocate who has been a consulting expert on many nuclear reactor issues, including the shut down of the San Onofre nuclear facility in southern California.  Here, he explains the problems with the planned restart of the shuttered Palisades nuclear reactor in southern Michigan, on the shores of Lake Michigan. 

ACTIVIST SHOUT-OUT

• It is with deep sadness that we report on the passing of Daniel Hirsch.  He was founder and president of the Committee to Bridge the Gap, and a tireless opponent of the nuclear industry.  His lectures to students at UCLA led to them uncovering the 20-year cover-up of the nuclear accident at the Santa Susana Field Lab in Los Angeles.  He was a tireless, articulate, and accessible source of information on nuclear and we deeply mourn his loss. 
  
• Nuclear Hotseat #47 - 2012 interview with Dan Hirsch on Hidden LA Nuke Accident – Santa Susana Field Labs, 1959 - how the truth was uncovered after 20 years of cover-up.
  
• Tom Lehrer - https://youtu.be/rkbkXbtQrNs?si=oA-fOMmVlv7N65O

https://www.youtube.com/embed/yJDX-YD5dB4?si=PYdfhx6KOq5ebFoI

https://youtu.be/rkbkXbtQrNs?si=oA-fOMmVlv7N65O-

Posters for ATOMIC CABARET at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival

This Week's Featured Interview:

• 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: LyndaLovon@gmail.com

Remembering Church Rock:

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.

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness):

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! 

LINKS:

• 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

SPECIAL: Trinity Atomic Bomb at 80 - New Mexico Downwinder Radiation Victims Set the Record Straight

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. 

Featured Interviews:

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.

Links - Other Resources for Trinity:

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.

CHURCH ROCK Uranium Tailings Pond Breach Disaster in Navajo Nation – Elders, Activists Speak Out

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/

This Week's Featured Interview:

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

The ICAN UPDATE:  Alistair Burnett

• 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 Passing:

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.

LINKS:

• 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.   

This Week's Featured Interview:

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. 

The Nuclear Resister with Jack Cohen-Joppa

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! 

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness):

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..

Links:

• 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. 

This Week's Featured Interview:

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.

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness):

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... 

Don't Bank on the Bomb!

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?

This Week's Featured Interview:

• 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.

Links from Featured Interview:

• 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

Israel/Iran Bombings - Susi Snyder of ICAN

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.

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness:

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

Tulsi Gabbard

Links:

• 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

This Week's Featured Interview:

Jill Murphy Long

• Jill Murphy Long writes, directs and produces films based on the ethics of Justice, Mercy and Love - the initials of her company, JML Films. She is the force behind nine completed feature film screenplays and more than forty short films that spotlight current-day environmental and societal injustices.
  
  Jill’s anti-nuclear perspective originated with her personal experience living near the 1979 meltdown at Three Mile Island, and her resulting brain tumor in 2012 and thyroid cancer in 2023. Fortunately, her health is currently good. Now, she is creating a database of content creators who oppose nuclear - writers and filmmakers - for distribution to media, podcasts, broadcasts, and the entertainment industry to promote our stories and the perspective that nuclear is definitely not clean, green and renewable energy.
  
  I spoke with Jill Murphy Long on May 16, 2025.

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness):

Nuclear product rep claims to represents a process to "kill" radiation, tries to get Nuclear Hotseat host to endorse it. This does not end well for him...

THE ICAN UPDATE - The Latest on the Treaty to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons from the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear War with ICAN's Alistair Burnett

The latest on progress on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).

LINKS:

International Atomic Energy Agency's head Raphael Grossi

• Central Ohio:  "CALL FOR READERS: 80 Years After: Hibakusha Call us to Remember": The Hiroshima and Nagasaki Vigil

 on the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the 50th anniversary of the Peace Resource Center at Wilmington College in Wilmington, Ohio. The PRC’s quinquennial twelve-hour Hiroshima and Nagasaki vigil, on the 80th commemoration of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, consists of the communal reading of 80 hibakusha [atomic bombing sufferer] testimonials curated from the Peace Resource Center Barbara Reynolds Memorial Archives.
  
  Seeking 80 readers to read in person on August 6, 2025 between the hours of 8:15 a.m. and 8:15 p.m. for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Vigil. The typical time commitment for readers upon arrival to the Wilmington College campus is between 30-45 minutes. Readers are asked to rehearse their reading in advance of the vigil. (Please see detailed information by clicking this link.).
  
  For more information and to sign up, CLICK HERE.
  
• WEBINAR - June 23, 2025 10:00 AM - “Golden Dome”: A Costly, Destabilizing, and Ineffective Missile Defense System.  REGISTRATION REQUIRED. 
• Trump’s Nuclear Power Obsession by Karl Grossman and Harvey Wasserman

IAEA’s Grossi Warns of Severe Nuclear Safety Risks in Ukraine: Chernobyl Drone Attacks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jmh-bO1ny1k

Piles of bags containing radioactive topsoil scraped from all over Fukushima, still awaiting removal.

• Is it possible to live in a nuclear exclusion zone? Thomas Bass' just-published book Return to Fukushima captures the aftermath of the 2011 nuclear disaster, chronicling the resilience of people navigating life amid radioactivity. The book is based upon his visits to Fukushima in 2018 and again four and a half years later - and the difference was dramatic. 14 years after the triple nuclear meltdown began, Return to Fukushima chronicles the problems and deceptions by Japan, TEPCO, and the nuclear industry as they attempt to continue to cover up the true nature of this ongoing disaster.
  
  Thomas Bass is the author of eight books; a contributor to the New Yorker, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Smithsonian, Wired, and other publications; and Professor of English and journalism at the State University of New York in Albany.
  
  I spoke with Thomas Bass on Monday, June 2, 2025.

Links from Interview:

To purchase Return to Fukushima, go to:

• https://orbooks.com/catalog/return-to-fukushima/
• https://www.mcnallyjackson.com/book/9781682195109

Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz Gunter

Why the Golden Dome is another "insane" Trump obsession that won't work.

LINKS to Linda's other work this week:

• Donald Trump's Fool's Gold
• A Superhighway to Nuclear Hell

And There Is Hope - A Solar Benchmark:

LINKS:

• International Uranium Film Festival Winners - full list
• Veterans for Peace "Splashiversary" - June 14, 2-5 pm, Humbolt Bay, CA.
• The Terrible 13: The Worst Safety and Security Violators in the US Nuclear Power Fleet by Edwin S. Lyman, Director, Nuclear Power Safety, Union of Concerned Scientists
• The NRC’s new Mission Impossible: Making Atoms Great Again
• Nuclear weapons woes: Understaffed nuke agency hit by DOGE and safety worries

Greg Mitchell (l) and Libbe HaLevy (r)

This Week's Featured Interview:

• Director Greg Mitchell is an award-winning journalist and author of a dozen books on United States politics and history of the 20th and 21st centuries, including 2020’s “The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood–and America–Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” His previous books on the atomic bombings were “Hiroshima in America“ (with Robert Jay Lifton) and “Atomic Cover-up.” His film, ATOMIC COVER-UP, released in 2021, won multiple awards, including the Best Archival Documentary award from the International Uranium Film Festival. His latest film, THE ATOMIC BOWL: Football at Ground Zero — and Nuclear Peril Today, is about a football game played in Nagasaki in front of a bombed out middle school, where US military members tossed the pigskin only five months after the atomic bombing that killed more than 70,000 people. It’s currently being screened at the IUFF in Rio and will be released on PBS in July.
  
  I spoke with Greg Mitchell on April 18, 2025.

Links from Interview:

• Link to Greg Mitchell's award-winning film ATOMIC COVER-UP, free on PBS
• Greg Mitchell on Substack

The Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz Gunter

Trump "unleashes" five nuclear executive orders that while reckless and dangerous are also total fantasy.

The Nuclear Resister w/Jack Joppa-Cohen

There's something about a train… and in the early 1980s, anti-nuclear activists from coast-to-coast turned that truth into a successful campaign that literally drove the bombs off the rails.

Links:

• Tune in for the next Scholar Series webinar:
  Cute Drawings of Terrible Things: Nuclear History through Comics
  
When: Friday, June 6th at noon PT

  Who: B. Erin Cole, historian and artist

  Where: Zoom, register here
• New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s Major Nuclear Power Push by Karl Grossman
• Nuclear War Avoided, Again. But Next Time? - By W.J. Hennigan for the NYTimes
• Protest against Chalk River (Canada) nuclear waste disposal project from Dr. Gordon Edwards - (in French, with English translation available below:

NH #726 - Gordon Edwards - Chalk River - Translation fron French ArticleDownload

One of the many sessions held at the Outrider Nuclear Reporting Summit, December

This Week’s Featured Interview:

Gen. C. Robert Kehler, Ret.

Gen. C. Robert Kehler, Ret., former Commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, explains (he's retired so it's from his personal perspective) the issues of AI and nuclear weapons, and the nature of debate about it taking place inside the military.   This is Part 2 of an interview conducted at the 2024 Outrider Nuclear Reporting Summit.  Gen Kehler was interviewed in front of an audience of 130 reporters by W.J. (Bill) Hennigan, Correspondent, New York Times Opinion.  Part 1 of this interview appeared on NH #723. 

The interview took place on December 6, 2024, after Donald Trump was elected president but before he took office.

Our thanks to the Outrider Foundation for having held this event and for permission to use this recording on Nuclear Hotseat.

This Week's Second Featured Interview:

Mary Beth Gallagher

Want to know how to stop nukes? Follow the money – and then take it away from the nuclear industry. Mary Beth Gallagher is Director of Engagements for Domini Impact Investments, a mutual fund firm that’s women-led and, among other ethical choices, does not invest in any company that manufactures any part of nuclear weapons. After hearing her speak at the United Nations Second Meeting of States Parties on the Treaty to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons in December, 2023, I knew the conscientious listeners of Nuclear Hotseat deserved to hear what she had to say.

I spoke with Mary Beth Gallagher on January 26, 2024.

Links mentioned during the interview:

• Domini Impact Investments: https://domini.com/invest/
• Investors Open Statement to States Parties on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW):  https://divest.icanw.org/investors_open_statement_to_states_parties_on_the_treaty_on_the_prohibition_of_nuclear_weapons_tpnw, (signed by 111 investors representing at least $1,007 billion assets under management as of 1 December 2023)
• As You Sow Weapons Free Funds: https://weaponfreefunds.org/
• US Sustainable Investment Forum (USSIF) chart of Sustainable Investment Mutual funds and ETFs:  https://charts.ussif.org/mfpc/

One portion of the clean-up site at Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant

Investigative Journalist Jason Salley

This Week's Featured Interview: 

• Jason Salley is an investigative journalist known for his hard-hitting reporting on environmental contamination and government oversight. With a focus on uncovering the hidden truths of Appalachia, his work has exposed decades of radioactive pollution and corporate negligence at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Pike County, Ohio. Salley’s fearless storytelling and relentless pursuit of the facts have made him a powerful voice for the communities impacted by America’s nuclear legacy.
  I spoke with Jason Salley on May 9, 2025.
• Jason Salley LINKS:
  
  • https://linktr.ee/JasonSalley?utm_source=linktree_admin_share
  • Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/1EfEsDBGha/?mibextid=wwXIfr  

(l-r) Vina Colley, Gina Doyle, Jason Salley

A quote on the women in the photo, from Jason Salley: "There are two inspiring women pictured from left to right in the photo. The woman on the left is Vina Colley, who has been referred to as the Erin Brockovich of Appalachia. She was one of the original whistleblowers who brought attention to the contamination from the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant. The woman on the right is Gina Doyle, who is a lifelong resident of Piketon and the leader of the online advocacy group called “Don’t Dump On Us”. Both of these women are remarkable and have dedicated themselves to promoting justice for their community."

• Vina Colley and PRESS: https://www.facebook.com/vina.colley" class="text-nh underline hover:text-nh-dark" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> https://www.facebook.com/vina.colley
• Gina Doyle and Don't Dump on Us - https://www.facebook.com/groups/1687510908847082
• Ohio Nuclear Free Network

https://youtu.be/U21vki0arD8?si=wc4Hm1YJKUdwtWue

Youtube series on Piketon's Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, Episode 1 of 4
by The APPA Report - Appalachia's Environmental Watchdog . @TheAPPAReport

The Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz. Gunter

Reopen Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant? Ukraine should do renewables instead.

LINKS:

• CALL FOR PAPERS:  Archives as Witness: Preserving History, Memory, and Art at the Peace Resource Center at Wilmington College (September 30-October 1, 2025, Wilmington College, Wilmington, Ohio) - The Peace Resource Center at Wilmington College invites conference proposals from scholars, artists, and nuclear activists to present work inspired by archival research related to nuclear histories at their upcoming 50th Anniversary Conference.  For more information and to apply, CLICK HERE. 
• FUKUSHIMA FALLOUT AWARENESS NETWORK (FFAN)’s Mayday Campaign Needs Your Signature Now.
  The FDA continues to stonewall a 2013 Citizen Petition to lower the current allowable levels of cancer-causing cesium 134, and 137 in food. Fukushima Fallout Awareness Network, a project of the National Institute for Science, Law, and Public Policy, is asking for everyone to put HHS (which oversees FDA) on notice.
  Please sign the MoveOn petition now - CLICK HERE! The petition will be delivered along with others next week to HHS, FDA, and leaders of the Make America Healthy Again Caucus and Commission.

What you never want to see in your neighborhood... 

This Week's Featured Interview:

Gen. C. Robert Kehler, Ret.

Gen. C. Robert Kehler, Ret., former Commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, explains from inside the process how an order from the Commander in Chief to launch nuclear weapons would unfold down the chain of command. Excerpts from an interview conducted at the 2024 Outrider Nuclear Reporting Summit. He was interviewed on stage in front of an audience of 130 reporters by W.J. (Bill) Hennigan, Correspondent, New York Times Opinion. A nuanced military insider's take on what the nuclear launch process looks like once an Executive Order to launch takes place. The interview took place on December 6, 2024, after Donald Trump was elected president but before he took office.

NOTE:   This episode was ready to go with the full-length interview with Gen. Kehler, including a 20-minute section with his observations on nukes, deterrence, and AI.  With the news of India's attack on Pakistan and the downing of five Indian jets, the second half of the interview has been delayed to make room for this other story.  We hope to be able to have it for you in a few weeks.  

Our thanks to the Outrider Foundation for having held this event and for permission to use this recording on Nuclear Hotseat. 

W. L. Hennigan (l) and Gen. C. Robert Kehler, Ret r)

Ira Helfand of IPPNW at the United Nations for the NPT:

Dr. Ira Helfand at the United Nations, April 30, 2025

Dr. Ira Helfand, a board member of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), addressing the Third Preparatory Committee for the 2026 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City, on April 30, 2025.  Watch the speech by clicking on the image above or go to:  https://webtv.un.org/en/asset/k1h/k1hse9op1q?kalturaStartTime=3685.
To read a copy of the speech or download a pdf, go to:  https://peaceandhealthblog.com/2025/04/30/do-not-let-the-nuclear-armed-states-lead-us-down-the-path-to-death/

ICAN:  The Five Myths of Nuclear Deterrence:

A two-page brochure/fact sheet that spells out why "deterrence" is a flawed defense of nuclear weapons.  You can DOWNLOAD THE PDF HERE.

LINKS:

• 5 things to know as Trump rolls out Golden Dome missile defense shield
• Trump wants denuclearization and a ‘Golden Dome.’ He can’t have both
• International Responses to the Fukushima Water Release: Science and Politicss

This Week's Featured Interview:

• Since 1976, California law has banned the building of any new nuclear reactors until there is a solution to the problem of where to bury the deadly radioactive nuclear waste. But proposed new nuclear legislation, AB 305, has been called a “stealth attack” that subverts this 49-year old ban to allow for untold numbers of small modular nuclear reactors to be built around the state. As bad as the bill itself is the manipulation by highly paid lobbyists and political hacks to prevent the public from being able to comment on the nuclear legislation.Carefully following and challenging these machinations are the watchdogs at Public Watchdogs, Executive Director Charles Langley and Director of Development Nina Babiarz. Here they explain not ony whats wrong with HB 305, but the machinations and manipulations that have prevented the public from having input to the legislative process.

Public Watchdogs Petition on AB 305:

• PETITION: Demand a “No Vote” on AB 305 - STOP more New Nuclear plants in California!
• FILM SCREENING:  SOS: San Onofre Syndrome, the award-winning documentary on the activist battle to close the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station and have the radioactive waste responsibly handled, will receive a special showing on June 1, 5 pm, at the beautiful Lido theatre in Newport Beach. The screening is sponsored by Public Watchdogs, San Clemente Green, and the Samuel Lawrence Foundation. Discussion with the films directors and activist leaders will follow.

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness):

DANCES WITH OPPENHEIMER - A pro-nuclear rave with Oppenheimer's grandson to brainwash Gen- Z-ers into loving nuclear energy. They see absolutely no irony in dancing to the Britany Spears' song TOXIC.

The ICAN UPDATE with Alistair Burnett

ICAN's Head of Media Alistair Burnett interviews Ithe group's Advocacy Officer Florian Eblenkamp on the meetings on the NPT - Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Nuclear Rave to convince GenXers that nukes are WHEEEEEEE!!!!!!

The Nuclear Resister with Jack Cohen-Joppa

• Missouri is the "Show Me!" state, and the Missouri Peace Planters did just that when they repeatedly occupied multiple nuclear missile silos in the summer of 1988, causing a furor that helped raise awareness of this hidden danger at the height of the Cold War. Here’s Jack-Cohen-Joppa with this month’s Nuclear Resister.

Activist Shoutout, Links:

• Congratulations to Nora Schroeder, junior at Kirkwood High School in Kirkwood, Missouri, for her C-SPAN Classroom's StudentCam award-winning documentary about the radioactive contamination of North St. Louis and Coldwater Creek:

LINK TO VIDEO HERE: - COPY AND PASTE:
https://www.c-span.org/program/vignette/the-radioactive-waste-crisis-a-hidden-hazard/657522

• Lakenheath Alliance for Peace - Report on Peace Camp, April 14-26, 2025

The "Elephant's Foot" - corium (molten core) of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster 

The Chernobyl nuclear disaster began on April 26, 1986 – another of those dates that will live in infamy. Here is the second SPECIAL Nuclear Hotseat that paints the picture of what happened then, what it did to the people who lived through it, and what we still face. It includes an UPDATE on the damage caused by the February 16, 2025 Russian drone strike on the New Safe Containment Structure. Historic interviews originally produced for Nuclear Hotseat #357, April 20, 2018.

This Week's Featured Interviews:

• Bonnie Kouneva was a 15-year-old living in Communist Bulgaria when the Chernobyl disaster began, but no one knew about it because the Soviet Union said nothing to its people.  On May 1, May Day, only five days after it began, Bulgarian citizens were “encouraged” by the Soviet hierarchy to attend all-day celebrations of the communist state – outdoors, in the rain – at the exact time the worst of Chernobyl’s radiation was directly overhead. Here, she paints the picture of the impact of that radiation rainout and lets us know the result of this devastating experience.
• Dr. Timothy Mousseau is an evolutionary biologist and faculty member of the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of South Carolina. Since 1999, Professor Mousseau and his collaborators have explored the ecological, genetic and evolutionary consequences of low-dose radiation in populations of plants, animals and people inhabiting the Chernobyl region of Ukraine and Belarus.

Dr. Timothy Mousseau

• The late Dr. Janette Sherman edited the the English translation of the groundbreaking work, Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment by Alexei Yablokov, Vassily B. Nesterenko, and Alexey V. Nesterenko. Dr. Sherman was an early and enthusiastic supporter of Nuclear Hotseat, and we spoke about this book and how it came about for NH #97 on April 23, 2013.  She passed away on November 20, 2019.

The late Dr. Janette Sherman

• Dr. Alexei Yablokov was environmental advisor to Russian President Boris Yeltsin and the Gorbachev administration, as well as a co-founder of Greenpeace, Russia.  His book, Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, compiled and translated into English more than 5,000 separate scientific reports on Chernobyl that completely contradict the World Health Organization’s report, which undermined the seriousness of the accident.  Dr. Yablokov died in January, 2017.

The late Dr.  Alexei Yablokov

Link:

CLICK HERE for a free PDF of the classic book Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment by Alexei Yablokov, Vassily B. Nesterenko, and Alexey V. Nesterenko, edited by Janette D. Sherman.

Article:  How a Cheap Drone Punctured Chernobyl’s 40,000-Ton Shield by Kim Barker for the New York Times

(KEYSTONE COVER IMAGE). The wreckage of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station in Ukraine, shortly after the explosion and meltdown on April 26, 1986. 
(ABOVE)  Color shot of Chernobyl in the immediate aftermath of the explosion and meltdown.  The fuzziness of the picture is due to radiation hitting the film and creating spots. 

NOTE:  I have recently experienced a major computer setback that is requiring excessive time and mental capacity to recover from.  (I'll explain once it's in the past tense.)  As we are hard upon the 39th anniversary of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in Ukraine on April 26, 1986, I believe it's an appropriate time to revisit some hard truths about that nuclear reactor explosion and the long-denied, ongoing health impacts of that event. 

Here, in a truly classic episode of Nuclear Hotseat, we bring you a full-length interview with Alison Katz, head of Independent WHO.  Next week will feature a narrative recounting of the disaster, what it was like for people who experienced it, and a range of perspectives that continue to make Chernobyl an ongoing danger to people and the environment. 

Hopefully I'll have recovered from my computer meltdown by then. 

This Week’s Featured Interview:

Alison Katz, head of Independent WHO, outside World Health Organization headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland

Chernobyl Lies, Health Cover-Up by World Health Organization (WHO) Revealed
Interview with Alison Katz, a psychologist and sociologist who heads Independent WHO. This international watchdog group draws attention to the World Health Organization’s failure in its duty to protect those populations that are victims of radioactive contamination from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and, later, Fukushima.  The group held a vigil in front of WHO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, five days a week, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., beginning April 26, 2007 – the 21st anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster - and continuing until its 31st anniversary on April 26, 2017.  

Every working day, between 8am and 6pm, a relay of members of the IndependentWHO – Health and Nuclear collective demanded that WHO should assume its responsibilities, independent of the nuclear establishment.  These silent demonstrators were also demanding that the truth be told about the short-term and long-term health damage suffered by all the victims of radioactivity, including those resulting from atmospheric military nuclear

Scenes from Independent WHO’s Chernobyl vigil in front of 
the World Health Organization’s headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland

Given the visibility and popularity of the 2019 HBO series on Chernobyl – 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 the devastating impacts of the nuclear disaster refreshed. Originally recorded for Nuclear Hotseat #118, September 17, 2013, the material covered has in no way gone out of date.

Chernobyl Lies, Cover-Up by WHO – Other Excellent Information Sources:

Video produced by Independent WHO:

https://youtu.be/3XUFaIIVDPQ?si=TO-2SiGgfcFl3ZOH

• 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 this nuclear disaster, 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 put your tongue firmly in your cheek for 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 exceeds the power of the visuals provided in the HBO series.

Veteran UK peace activist Angie Zelter, zooming with Nuclear Hotseat's Libbe HaLevy

• Angie Zelter is a British peace activist and the founder of a number of international campaign groups, including Trident Ploughshares and the International Women's Peace Service. Zelter is known for non-violent direct action campaigns and has been arrested more than 100 times in Belgium, Canada, England, Malaysia, Norway, Poland and Scotland, serving 16 prison sentences for her beliefs.
  
  Angie is a member of the Lakenheath Alliance for Peace, a coalition of groups that is dedicated to preventing the return of US Nuclear weapons to Royal Air Force Lakenheath. She is also one of the organizers of the Lakenheath Peace Camp, which starts next Monday, April 14, 2025 and runs through the 26th, 2025. The 10-day event is cast in the image of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, which ran for 20 years to protest against nuclear weapons being placed at RAF Greenham Common in Berkshire, England, and was ultimately successful in having the nuclear weapons removed.

Photo from Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp, 1981 - 2000,
the model for the upcoming Lakenheath Peace Camp.

LINKS from Interview:

For people in the USA or other countries wanting to get involved or send a statement of support to the Lakenheath Peace Camp, you can write to: info@lakenheathallianceforpeace.org.uk or use this link:  https://lakenheathallianceforpeace.org.uk/front-page/about-us/contact-us/.

To help you get and stay motivated, here is a link to Angie Zelter’s book, Activism for Life: A whistle stop tour of the last 45 years of nonviolent direct action in the UK and abroad.

Second Featured Interview:  Mary Stamos-Osborn, Three Mile Island Mutated Plants

March 28 marked the 46th anniversary of the nuclear meltdown at the Unit 2 reactor Three Mile Island in Middletown near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I always like to include historical material from that time during the anniversary period. The timing didn’t work out for last week’s show. So I’m happy to this week be able to present my interview with Mary Stamos, also known as Mary Osborn, a long time Middletown resident, TMI survivor, and Three Mile Island Alert member.  Mary, who had no previous history as an activist, became involved in issues immediately after the accident when she noticed plant mutations - known as fasciation - that can be traced to radiation exposure.  Her collection of mutated plants and flowers was accepted by the Smithsonian Institution in 2019 to be preserved, digitized, and made available to the public. 

Mary Stamos-Osborn passed away on February 19, 2024.  This interview is from the 40th anniversary of the TMI accident as reported on Nuclear Hotseat #405, March 25, 2019.  

Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz Gunter

All these Holtec claims about small modular nuclear reactors - a Sputnik moment, or a sputtering senior moment?  Linda Pentz Gunter has the hot story. 

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness):

Why fool around with major corporations, government agencies, and billion dollar contracts?  A 12 year old boy from Tennessee built a fusion reactor in his bedroom with parts from ebay.  We are all doomed...  (ps - Elon Musk is rumored to have offered him an upper management post at DOGE.)

LINKS:

• Webinar based on materials presented at the United Nations 3rd Meeting of States Parties on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons - GENDER AND RADIATION: Towards a New Research Agenda Addressing Disproportionate Harm.  Presented by Mary Olson, founder, Gender and Radiation Impact Project; Dr. Amanda Nichols, University of California, Santa Barbara; and Cindy Folkers, Radiation and Health Hazard Specialist for Beyond Nuclear. 
  
  THE WEBINAR IS FREE BUT YOU MUST PRE-REGISTER TO ATTEND:  https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/K0lCXWlLRRCTYF0W3898fg#/registration
  
• Nuclear power is officially a clean energy source in Colorado. Not everyone is pleased.
• Should Canada explore developing a nuclear weapons program?

Dr. Gordon Edwards, speaking at the United Nations

This Week's Featured Interview:

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 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, in light of Trump’s tariff tantrum and threats to annex Canada as our 51st state, Edwards spells out the problems with Ontario’s planned importation of four US-made nuclear reactors, along with the safety issues created in these units by elimination of multiple safety systems in order to be able to label them “small.” I can honestly call this one of the most important interviews I’ve conducted in almost 14 years of producing Nuclear Hotseat every week.

I spoke with Gordon Edwards on Tuesday, April 1 - and I swear, this is not an April Fools joke.

Links from Interview:

• Video of Dr. Edwards' oral testimony on the BWRX-300 licence application.
• News story on the surcharge on electricity exports to the US.

The ICAN UPDATE with Lucero Oyarzun

Lucero Oyarzun, Digital Campaign Coordinator at the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, steps in for Alistair Burnett for this month's ICAN UPDATE.

LINKS:

• Three Mile Island - On anniversary of 1979 nuclear meltdown, Groups Protest Restart of Unit 1 at Pennsylvania State House

https://youtu.be/oiaYAUurSDw?si=Y7y6Am3842tU_BCc

• How a Cheap Drone Punctured Chernobyl’s 40,000-Ton Shield
• Nuclear Weapons Issues are Women’s Issues

At the 40th anniversary of the TMI accident in 2019.  Unit 1 in background was still in operation.

This Week's Featured Interview:

Eric Epstein is the Chairman of Three Mile Island Alert, Inc., a safe-energy organization based in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania that was founded in 1977.  TMIA monitors the Peach Bottom, Susquehanna, and Three Mile Island nuclear generating stations.

For more than 40 years, Mr. Epstein has specialized in research, litigation and providing expert testimony on the decommissioning, decontamination, environmental safety, rate recovery, and waste isolation at nuclear reactors. We spoke on Sunday, March 23, 2025.

Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz Gunter

During the United Nations Third Meeting of States Parties on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, one of the most significant events was the annual awarding of the Nuclear Free Future Award on Wednesday, March 5. There was a special magic in the air as the 2025 laureates were honored in the historic Great Hall at Cooper Union.

With the fabulous Linda Penta Gunter at the 2025 Nuclear Free Future Awards ceremony.

Me between the 2025 Nuclear Free Future Award winners in Education, Marcia Gomes de Olviera and Norbert Suchanek, founders of the International Uranium Film Festival.

The Nuclear Resister - Jack Cohen-Joppa

35 years ago, rural communities in Western New York took nonviolent direct action to Bump the Dump, stopping the state and the nuclear industry from trashing their countryside with 'low-level' nuclear waste.” Jack Cohen-Joppa of the Nuclear Resister Newsletter with the story the true tale of two counties that stood up and shut the door when the nuclear industry came knocking.

LINKS:

• Got anti-nuclear Catholic Bishops?  The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) wants to talk with them!   Contact Susi Snyder at susi@icanw.org. 

Great webinar!  CLICK ON IMAGE TO ACCESS RECORDING

• In a letter to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., watchdog group Fukushima Fallout Awareness Network calls on FDA and other Health and Human Services agencies to confront growing radioactive contamination of U.S. food.  Read the letter HERE.   

Libbe HaLevy's Three Mile Island Story:

Available on Amazon (sorry; I don't know any other way to make it available!).

ICAN Campaigner Forum at Riverside Church, March 2, 2025
(Libbe HaLevy front row, third from left behind red/blue banner)
Photo credit: ICAN | Darren Ornitz

This Week's SPECIAL on the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons - Third Meeting of States Parties March 2-7, 2025

Posing with the iconic gun sculpture in front of UN headquarteers in New York.

The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) held its Third Meeting of States Parties (3MSP) at the United Nations March 3-7, 2025, with a preparatory Campaigners Forum on March 2. Almost 1,000 representatives from 53 States Parties (countries that have signed and ratified), 31 Observer states, and 163 Civil Society organizations from around the world attended. 350 Campaigners (another term for "activists" but with less of a knee-jerk reaction to it) attended the Campaigner Forum on Sunday in advance of the official UN meetings. .

I attended on full press credentials (a rare accomplishment for a podcaster) and collected more than 60 interviews. No matter who I spoke with, each individual offered many insightful if not profound observations on the nature of nukes, why we need to rid ourselves of them, and what we’re all doing in our individual spheres to bring that about. The power and importance of this gathering cannot be over-stated.

This episode covers the Campaigners, who ranged in age from high schoolers in their teens to veterans in their 80's. It also shares information on programs that anyone can participate in that will help build the case against nuclear, including:

• From Dimity Hawkins, the Nuclear Truth Project, which created Protocols for working with affected communites, focusing on Rights, Respect and Reciprocity.  Essential guidance for those working with Hibakusha, First Nations and Indigenous people, and anyone working towards nuclear truth and remedy within, alongside, or in relation to victims/survivors and their communities. To learn the specifics and download a copy of these Protocols, visit their website: nucleartruthproject.org/protocols

UN breakout panel on the Nuclear Truth Panel.  Dimity Hawkins, second from left. 

• From Rachel Clark, we learn of Project 1030, a plan to test and map actual radiation contamination levels across the U.S. They are looking for people who use wood stoves or burn wood in fireplaces to share the ashes for testsing by radiation laboratories in Japan. The 2025 campaign deadline is May 31. Learn more by visiting Project 1030 on Facebook and if you decide to learn more and participate (there is a fee of $50 per sample tested to cover the lab expenses), go to: PROJECT 1030

Richard Miller map of areas crossed by two or more radioactive clouds from fallout during the era of nuclear testing in the American southwest. 

• ICAN has produced an excellent pamphlet that breaks down Five Myths of Nuclear Deterrence in easy-to-understand arguments.  Great for the next time you run into a relative or friend who claims that "we need nukes for deterrence!"  (HINT:  We don't.)  Access the information and download at the ICAN site: 5 MYTHS OF NUCLEAR DETERRENCE.  Essential reading for anyone who opposes nuclear weapons! (PDF link not working; use this url instead:  https://www.icanw.org/deterrence_myths )

A Look Back at 2MSP, November-December, 2023

I was privileged to cover the Second Meeting of States Parties at the UN, held November 27 to December 1, 2023 at UN Headquarters in New York City. Two Nuclear Hotseat episodes resulted, with several additional drop-ins of interview in various others. The main ones are:

• NH #648: TPNW SPECIAL: UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons: Nuclear Hotseat Looks Back
• NH #650: EXCLUSIVE REPORT: Int’l Activists Gather in NYC for UN 2nd Meeting of States Parties on Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty (TPNW)
• NH #651: TPNW SPECIAL, Pt. 2: US Congressman, Int’l Gov’t Reps Support Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty at UN

Fukushima disaster site, shortly after the earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011. 

This Week's Featured Interview:

We get all kinds of overly optimistic reports about the clean-up of radioactive water and debris from Fukushima, with Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the Japanese government, and their political enablers all claiming that things are going well!  Clean-up is not only possible, it's on schedule!  Everything is A-OK... but is it? 

There are so many inconsistencies and contradictions in the information from so-called "official" sources that it takes a report by a citizen's non-profit group, the Japanese Citizens' Nuclear Information Center, to provide us with a more accurate, less optimistic picture than the nuclear industry would rather we not know about.

This report was written by Mayu Takakuwa, editor of the CNIC newsletter Nuke Info Tokyo, and her team.  It is delivered on this program by veteran anti-nuclear activist Tsukuru Fors. 

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness):

So many choices, but whittled it down to two:  vacation options in Chernobyl-adjacent Pripyat, Ukraine would be the top numnutz in any other week, but here, it must take a back seat to Trump's ongoing assault on DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) extending to language in the most un-nuclear, counter-historical ways:

Politically "NO DEI WORDING!" correct, historically incorrect re-naming of the infamous plane that carried the men who dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima.  (They couldn't fit "heterosexual" on the nose...)

The ICAN UPDATE with Alistair Burnett

Alistair talks with Susi Snyder for background information on Don't Bank on the Bomb's new report, At Great Cost: The companies building nuclear weapons and their financiers, a joint publication of ICAN and PAX. NOTE that this report was recorded the week before the UN 3rd Meeting of States Parties on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. 

LINKS:

• Fukushima Pollution Solution: Spread Radioactivity Far and Wide by John LaForge
• “Difficult-to-Return” zones
• Life as a "Displaced" person
• Big Tech's big bet on nuclear power to fuel artificial intelligence
• Alice Slater:  New Report Warns of Increasing Nuclear Dangers
• Karl Grossman: The nuclear testing revival: Global fallout with deadly consequences

THANKS OR COMING HERE! 
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AND RESEARCH FROM OUR PREVIOUS 700+ EPISODES! 

AND SEND YOUR STORIES TO: INFO@NUCLEARHOTSEAT.COM

THIS WEEK'S SPECIAL FULL-LENGTH INTERVIEW:

Physicist M.V .Ramana being zoom interviewed by Libbe HaLevy

• A full-program interview with reknowned physicist M. V. Ramana on his new book, Nuclear Is Not the Solution: The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change,.
  
  Ramana is professor and Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security at the University of British Columbia. He previously worked at the Nuclear Futures Laboratory and the Program on Science and Global Security, both at Princeton University. Ramana is a member of the International Panel on Fissile Materials, the Canadian Pugwash Group, the International Nuclear Risk Assessment Group, and the team that produces the annual World Nuclear Industry Status Report.

Available on Amazon or better yet, order it from your favorite local bookstore.

Animation from Westinghouse - A Total Lie!

Referenced by Ramana in the interview is this TOTALLY FICTITIOUS WESTINGHOUSE ANIMATION OF A 116 WEEK BUILD SCHEDULE FOR THE AP 1000 NUCLEAR REACTOR.  Ain't no such thing possible!

This video was posted on the Westinghouse website in 2014.  The company has long since taken it down, but Ramana archived a copy. which he shares with us here.  This is a LINK to the video.

Westinghouse Propaganda video opening shot - LINK

ICAN Digital Campaign Coordinator Lucrero Oyarzun

THIS WEEK'S FEATURED INTERVIEW:

• Next week's UN meetings on the TPNW will be accessible online in large part through the work ICAN's of Digital Campaign Coordinator Lucero Oyarzun. She is in charge of coordinating that coverage, which includes livestreaming regular updates on the day's highlights, so you can stay in touch with all the developments no matter where you are. 

LINKS to Access TPNW Coverage:

• nuclearbanweek.org - This is where people can find the calendar, resources, easy posts to share on social media, and more.
• MSP-TV - the ICAN "channel" on the meetings with regular recaps for people at home - live at noon EST on Monday 3 March, Wednesday 5 March and Friday 7 March. You can watch episodes on your favourite ICAN social media, or catch them at https://www.icanw.org/msp_tv
• UN Web TV: https://webtv.un.org/en/schedule/2025-03-03 - for full length real time presentation of the meetings. 

Recap of 2023 interviews at 2MSP with International Politicians Against Nukes

• Massachusetts Rep. Jim McGovern. He has been a member of the United States House of Representatives since 1997. A Democrat, he is the ranking member of the House Rules Committee. Here’s our interview, done at the UN on December 2, 2023:
• Frank Cownie served as mayor of Des Moines, Iowa from 2004 to 2024. He was also the Mayors for Peace U.S. Vice President. He was still in office when we spoke at 2MSP in December, 2023.
• Kazumi Matsui, mayor of Hiroshima. We spoke through his interpreter:

• State Rep. Lindsay Sabadosa of Massachusetts
• Bill Kidd of Scottish Parliament.

JAPAN'S FUKUSHIMA STUPID DEBRIS TRICKS

Photo of the fabled Fukushima debris particle removed from Reactor 1.  Note the lack of comparison for scale - it's not a boulder; it's only 0.7 grams, or the equivalent in weight of 1/3 of a U.S. penny.  Still to be removed from the site: 880 tons of radioactive material. 

The Nuclear Resister with Jack Cohen-Joppa

In 1980, the Plowshares Eight hammered on nuclear warhead nosecones and sparked a global movement of direct action for nuclear disarmament.

The Plowshares 8

LINKS:

• In the King Of Prussia: The Trial of the Plowshares 8 - A Film by Emile de Antonio
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUph8GWFupE&t=671s
• A Plowshares Movement History and Chronology
  https://kingsbayplowshares7.org/plowshares-history/

Project 2025 fan and implementer Elon "Nuke Mars" Musk making his pro-nuclear bias - and ignorance - painfully obvious.

This Week's Featured Interview:

• Project 2025, Musk & DOGE, resumption of atmospheric bomb testing - nuclear dangers dominate our current bad news cycle. To help us understand what this means, we talk with veteran environmental journalist Karl Grossman.  He breaks down the threats this current moment holds, gives it an historic context, and walks us through thoughts on how to survive - both as people and a planet. 
  
• LINK:  Nuclear Hotseat #596 interview with Joseph Mangano of Radiation and Public Health Project on the baby tooth study that proved the impact of nuclear test fallout radiation on children's teeth and led to the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. 

Membership card which was sent, along with a lapel button with the gap-tooth child logo, to all children who donated their baby teeth to "Operation Baby Tooth."  Better than the tooth fairy!

Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz Gunter:

It's a mad, mad, mad, mad nuclear world!

Numnutz of the Week:

Oops! Maybe DOGE's Digital Muskrats should check employment files and job descriptions before firing NNSA's guardians of nuclear safety. And while they're at it, make certain they have home email addresses for everyone so they can be contacted to come back in to work ASAP when it's - HA HA! Just kidding! - shown that their work is essential to US nuclear safety. 

International News:

Russian drone with a high-explosive warhead crashed into the Chernobyl containment vessel, blowing a hole in the roof and putting the safety of the entire complex at risk.

Bright yellow-white light coming from the curve of the Chernobyl "New Safe Containment" vessel was damage caused by a Russian drone. 

Activists from around the world gathering to demonstrate against U.S. nuclear weapons housed at the Buchel Air Force Base in Germany (Susan Crane far right, Nukewatch's John LaForge behind Nukewatch banner in red hat)

• Peace activist Susan Crane, 81, is a member of the California Catholic Worker movement and the Plowshares anti-nuclear-weapons and Christian pacifist movement. After decades of civil disobedience to bring attention to the need to rid our planet of nuclear weapons, she was arrested in Germany for protesting US nuclear weapons stored and maintained at Germany’s Buchel Air Force Base. She was sentenced to jail time in German prison in 2024. She was released last month, on January 17, 2025 and we spoke with Susan Crane just four weeks later, on Friday, February 7, 2025.

Libbe's Play ATOMIC BILL AND THE PAYMENT DUE Coming to Wilmington Peace Resource Center in Ohio!

• Regular listeners to Nuclear Hotseat will have heard me mention a play I've been working on, ATOMIC BILL AND THE PAYMENT DUE, centered around the Trinity test blast in New Mexico on July 15, 1945. Theatre being at best a slow motion endeavor, I didn't put much emphasis on it because you never know what will or will not happen in the arts, and I hate to feed false hopes - yours or mine. .
  
  That is why I am thrilled to tell you that ATOMIC BILL AND THE PAYMENT DUE has been selected by the internationally respected Wilmington College Peace Resource Center as one of the events of their 50th anniversary celebration. It will be presented as a staged reading on September 9, 2025, produced in cooperation with the Wilmington College Theatre Arts Department.
  
  
• ATOMIC BILL AND THE PAYMENT DUE is the 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.  It asks and answers the question: How do you hide an atomic bomb blast  in plain sight?
  
  For the record, I spent 35 years in theatre - 50 productions internationally, many awards, one show on incest survivors that ran 2-1/2 years in Santa Monica.   I co-founded a musical theatre development lab and interviewed dozens of musical theatre legends in front of live audiences. When my last musical production deal fell apart - after 12 years of writing and too many dashed hopes - I gave up on theatre.  Shortly thereafter, Fukushima happened, I started Nuclear Hotseat, and that's been the "theatre" with which I've been involved ever since.
  
  ATOMIC BILL tells a story I stumbled across while doing research for the show on the Trinity blast, the first nuclear bomb explosion on, July 16, 1945.  It took me more than eight years of digging to find the play hidden within the history, and another 4+ years to get it to the current draft.
  
  As this continues to move forward, I'll keep you informed.  Meanwhile, even in these desperately difficult times, in my little corner I am dancing the Happy Dance.  I hope you are, too.

Numnutz of the Week (For Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness):

Leave it to DOE to hand-hold nukesters and boost them up by providing grants to underwrite their applications for funding from... DOE! 

LINKS:

• John LaForge on his protest and imprisonment in Germany for protesting Buchel Air Base, from Nuclear Hotseat #602, January 4, 2023.
• Video promoting the Lakenheath Peace Camp in the UK, April 14 - 26, 2025) featuring the Nuclear Hotseat #709 audio of Jack Cohen-Joppa giving the history of the successful Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp -  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MK_JWT0aVM

https://www.youtube.com/embed/3MK_JWT0aVM?si=v_zG865kHo4NwsJN

Melissa Bumstead of
Parents Against Santa Susana Field Lab

This Week's Featured Interview: 

• Great news: A recent critical hearing was held before the Los Angeles Water Board regarding the clean-up of Boeing’s Santa Susana Field Lab site, which sits at the base of the hills only 30 miles from downtown Los Angeles.  And lo and behold - sanity prevailed and we won one!  Melissa Bumstead, Founder and Co-chair of Parents Against Santa Susana Field Lab fills us in. 
• Veteran Peace activist Alice Slater proposes that we replace the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Doomsday Clock with a Peace Clock.  Audio problems on our interview prevented the use of the recording, but we have Alice's thoughts and concepts from her recent article, Stop Imagining Doomsday and Start Imagining Peace, read by Libbe HaLevy.

Doomsday Clock reveal, 2025 - 89 seconds to midnight

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness)

A trifecta!  From the Onion... and then unfortunately, NOT the Onion:  New Orleans has a National Nucleaer Security Administration helicopter scanning the city for nuclear weapons (say what?  In Mardi Gras beads?); and NRC's updated mission statement turns the already captured regulator into a full-on pro-nuclear enabler.  Sheesh! 

Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz Gunter

Trump could launch a nuclear first strike all on his own. But there's a bill that could stop him.

The ICAN UPDATE with Alistair Burnett

Preparing for the United Nations Third Meeting of States Parties on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.  Includes interview with ICAN's Susi Snyder. 

LINKS:

• How Fukushima’s radioactive fallout in Tokyo was concealed from the public
• New U.S. Hydrogen Bombs May Have Arrived at NATO Bases - John LaForge
• Beyond the visitor entrance:  A newcomer’s guide to the TPNW 3MSP - A zoom call on Tuesday 11 February, 8:00 & 20:00 GMT  Registration required::
  
  • Call 1 → 08:00 GMT (convert your time zone here): Register
  • Call 2→ 20:00 GMT (convert your time zone here):  Register
• Mayors for Peace - an international "Peace Education Webinar" to promote youth-led peace activities - February 18 (Tue.), 2025, from 7:00am to 8:30 am (UTC) / 4:00 pm to 5:30 pm (JST) Register
• A New Generation of Nuclear Lies: Small Modular Reactors and Nuclear Plant Relicensing - Webinar with Paul Gunter of Beyond Nuclear; M.V. Ramama, Simmons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security, University of British Columbia; moderated by Linda Pentz Gunter of Beyond Nuclear and Nuclear Hotseat.  Mon March 24 @ 7:30 pm - 8:45 pm EDT REGISTER

Harvey Wasserman showing off his iconic Solartopia tee shirt

THIS WEEK'S FEATURED INTERVIEW:

Anti-nuke icon Harvey Wasserman is a veteran of five decades of activism against nuclear reactors. He has authored books, organized demonstrations that deeply impacted the movement, helped successive generations of activists to learn the issues, the talking points, and the actions they can take. In recent years, he has included a major outreach on alternative energy issues, especially solar, in the battle to eliminate nukes and reverse climate change.

Now, he has a new project - to create our own coordinated media platform - the Eco Broadcast Network, or EBN - an ingathering of existing nuclear and eco-podcasts, youtube channels, substacks, and the like - to make this information available to the public. so they can learn the truths we know to contradict the enormously subsidized nuclear industry media propaganda platform.

This network began organizing on January 27, 2025, and I spoke with Harvey Wasserman the next day, January 28, 2025.

NUMNUTZ OF THE WEEK (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness):

A right-wing "think tank" associate of Trump proposing open air nuclear bomb testing over Nevada, the Pacific, or (choking on this one!) "uninhabited atoll"?!?!???  WTF?!?!???

THE NUCLEAR RESISTER with Jack Cohen-Joppa

In a legendary anti-nuclear victory, British women came together at the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, and succeeded in kicking U.S. nuclear missiles out of England. Links: https://lakenheathallianceforpeace.org.uk/

This Week's Featured Interview: 

We all accept as proven scientific and medical fact that human exposure to ionizing radiation from nuclear weapons and their production is damaging to human health. But how do we know that? Who figures out how bad it can be? How much radiation we can be exposed to without risking our health? And how valid are those measurements? 

We learn the alarming truth behind how those numbers were generated and what needs to be done instead from today’s guests, co-authors of the new report for the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, Gender and Ionizing Radiation: Towards a New Research Agenda Addressing Disproportionate Harm:

• Mary Olson holds a degree in Evolutionary Biology and has been an educator on radiation health impacts while serving nuclear-impacted communities… and so much more. Her website is http://GenderandRadiation.org
• Amanda M. Nichols, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Environmental Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Nichols research focuses on illuminating the role of women in the North American anti-nuclear movement.

Gender and Ionizing Radiation: Towards a New Research Agenda Addressing Disproportionate Harm is cornerstone information in the movement to rid our planet of nukes.  It is available for free downloa or pdf HERE. 

Co-author Amanda Nichols holds up copy of the report

Further References mentioned in the interview and additional Resources:

• Nichols, Amanda M. Women on the Edge of Time: Grief and Power in the Nuclear Age. PhD Dissertation. University of Florida (2021). https://original-ufdc.uflib.ufl.edu/UFE0057378/00001.
• Nichols, Amanda M. “Nuclear Energy,” in Chad Seales (ed.) The Handbook of Religion and American Culture. 2025.
• Nichols, Amanda M. “Uranium and Religion: Toward a Decolonial Temporality of Extraction,” Religions, 16(1). 2025. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16010016.
• Olson, Mary. “Atomic Radiation Is More Harmful to Women,” Nuclear Information Resource Services, 2011. https://www.nirs.org/wp-content/uploads/radiation/radhealth/radiationwomen.pdf.
• Olson, Mary. “Disproportionate Impact of Radiation and Radiation Regulation,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 44, no. 2 (2019): 131–39.https://doi.org/10.1080/03080188.2019.1603864. 
• Gender and Radiation Impact Project Website: https://www.genderandradiation.org/.

For BEIR VII Reports

• NAS-NRC. “Health Risks from Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation: BEIR VII – Phase 2,” Committee to Assess Health Risks from Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation, Board on Radiation Effects Research, National Research Council of the National Academies. National Academies Press, 2006. http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=030909156X.
• NAS-NRC. “National Research Council - Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiations: Health Effects of Exposures to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation: BEIR V.” National Academy Press, 1990. http:// www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309039959.

On International Radiological Protections and Reference Man

• ICRP. International Commission on Radiological Protection. 2002. Basic Anatomical and Physiological Data for Use in Radiological Protection Reference Values (2002). http://www.icrp.org/publication.asp?id=icrp%20publication%2089.
• ICRP. International Commission on Radiological Protection. Publication 103: The 2007 Recommendations of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (2007). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/ANIB_37_2-4. 
• ICRP. International Commission on Radiological Protection. Publication 147: Use of Dose Quantities in Radiological Protection. 50, no. 1 (2021): 9–82. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146645320911864.
• ICRP. International Commission on Radiological Protection. “Official Definition of Reference Man.” Report of the Task Group on Reference Man. [ICRP Publication] No. 23. Oxford: Pergamon Press (1975). Adopted October 1974. Page 4. https://ieer.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/definition-of-reference-man.pdf.

Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz Gunter:

Announcing the 2025 laureates of the Nuclear-Free Future Awards!

TO ATTEND THE MARCH 4, 2025 AWARDS RECEPTION AND CEREMONY:

• The Nuclear-Free Future Awards will be held on Tuesday, March 4, 2025 at The Great Hall at Cooper Union in New York City (7 E 7th St. NY NY.)
• A reception at 6pm will be followed by the awards ceremony starting at 7pm.
• Both events are free admission and open to the public.
• Media are welcome.

The Laureates are:

• S.P. Udayakumar is the convenor of the People’s Movement Against Nuclear Energy in India and a committed advocate for environmental and social justice, with a focus on protecting vulnerable communities from the adverse impacts of nuclear energy. In particular, he helped galvanize and lead a grassroots movement in 2011 that involved thousands of local residents, fisherfolk and farmers, who challenged the construction of the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant in Tamil Nadu, India. Since then, he has worked tirelessly to raise awareness within communities all over southern India about the dangers of nuclear power, including radiation risks and ecological degradation.
  
• Márcia Gomes de Oliveira and Norbert Suchanek are the co-founders of the International Uranium Film Festival which began in Rio de Janeiro in 2010 and has to date presented more than 300 films in over 40 cities around the world covering a wide range of nuclear-related issues including uranium mining, nuclear waste, nuclear war and nuclear accidents. The festival offers prizes and serves to connect filmmakers with each other and to other activists. Norbert Suchanek is a German-born journalist on human rights and environmental issues, a writer and filmmaker. Márcia Gomes de Oliviera is a Brazilian-born social scientist, educator and filmmaker.
  
• Edwick Madzimure of Zimbabwe campaigns for the voices of women to be heard, especially in areas of militarism, nuclear weapons and climate change, given that women are disproportionately harmed by wars and colonialist practices. Emerging from poverty and a family of artisanal miners, she became in 2016 the founding director of the Zimbabwe chapter of Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, a feminist centered organization now more than 100 years old. She participated in the First Meeting of States Parties to the TPNW in Vienna in 2022 and has also spoken and led workshops at the COP conferences.
  
• Klee Benally was a Navajo activist and musician and member of the Navajo Tódich'ii'nii Clan and the Nakai Diné Clan. In addition to a musical career with his siblings in the band Blackfire, Klee was a passionate campaigner and filmmaker exposing the colonialist legacy of uranium mines and working for the cleanup of the more than 500 abandoned uranium mines that continue to contaminate the Navajo reservation. A month before his death on December 30, 2023,  Klee published his book, “No Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred.” Klee’s award will be accepted on his behalf by his mother, Berta Benally.
  
• Joanna Macy, a deep ecologist and Buddhist scholar, began her anti-nuclear activism in the 1960s, leading to her hopeful 1983 book, Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age — published at the height of the Cold War. More recently, she has written, “The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world—we’ve actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship with our world, with ourselves and each other.”

Image from Eaton Fire, Altadena/Pasadena, January 9, 2025

This Week's SPECIAL: NUKES AND FIRE - California Wildfires and Nuclear Dangers

Libbe's Story:

I live in Los Angeles in the foothills less than a mile away from what became the Eaton (Altadena/Pasadena) fire Evacuation Warning zone. 

There was no new Nuclear Hotseat last week because after the Eaton fire broke out on Tuesday, I lost power and internet for more than 32 hours - as well as being under the stress of possibly needing to evacuate at a moment's notice (and in the middle of the worst toothache of my life!). The winds were gusting up to 100 MPH, and only a few miles away from where I live, embers were being blown sideways, simultaneously setting whole neighborhoods afire. I packed my car, made arrangements with friends who had space for Munchkin and me to evacuate, and tried to stay in the moment instead of catastrophizing the worst.

Munchkin HaLevy

After a very intense several days, the danger receded, as did the border of the evacuation zone, and it seemed that I had escaped with my home and life intact. Only the shadows of PTSD - which everyone in Los Angeles is suffering from, whether they lost their homes or not - remained, motivating me to check disaster maps and evacuation updates multiple times every day and throughout the night, sleeping with my clothes on... and not unpacking the car.

Many of you reached out to me, and I'm deeply grateful for your concern and support. As you might imagine, during this time I received numerous email, texts, and Facebook questions on whether any nukes have been at risk. San Onofre is 70 miles from where I live and Diablo Canyon a good 160 miles away, so there didn't seem to be any immediate danger to them. But what are the dangers in general of fire and nukes?  What are we up against? 

To find out, I spoke with several experts to gain their insights. Our topics ranged more widely than I had anticipated, including:

• the difference between a line fire and a mass fire
• why reporters must NEVER evoke Hiroshima or Nagasaki as a comparison to the fire devastation here
• fire hazards posed by exposed spent fuel pools and fuel storage canisters
• how Southern California Edison retains a flawed power transmission tower system that may have contributed to the start of the Altadena/Pasadena Eaton fire
• radiation releases from fire in a radioactive materials dump zone such as the Santa Susana Field Lab (only 30 miles away)

...and other nuclear dangers created by wildfires at nuclear sites.

I learned more than I expected, information I'd not encountered before and that you probably haven't, either.  I will try to get this program into the hands and ears of reporters who can do a more thorough, focused job of following up.  There are important aspects to nuclear's vulnerability to fire, and given the nature of this current wildfire catastrophe - with maybe worse to come - we can't assume safety when it's clear that no one can.

In the meantime... I'm not unpacking the car. 

Featured Interviews:

Greg Mello of Los Alamos Study Group and Nuclear Hotseat Producer/Host Libbe HaLevy

• Greg Mello is Executive Director of the Los Alamos Study Group, which works for nuclear disarmament, environmental protection, social justice, and economic sustainability.  He gives a thorough overview of the difference between a line fire such as we see in the Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles, and a mass fire such as would result from a nuclear weapon.  A definite reproof to those reporters who, trying to donvey the devastation in Los Angeles, as looking like the aftermath of a nuclear bomb.  Not to in any way minimize how bad it is here in LA, but the analogy is not even close.  We spoke on Friday, January 11, 2025.
  
• To learn more about general nuclear reactor safety problems in the face of fire — and some specifics on how negligence by Southern California Edison may have possibly contributed if not caused the Eaton fire in Altadena/Pasadena - (DISCLAIMER: speculation only at this point, but it does involve some very new information that needs to be investigated thoroughly) - I spoke with Donna Gilmore. She is founder of San Onofre Safety, a public resource for factual information about the serious safety issues with the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station and the tons of stored nuclear waste just a few miles south of San Clemente, California. Most of the information on that site is from official government and scientific documents. I spoke with Donna Gilmore on Tuesday, January 14, 2025.

Nuclear Hotseat HOT!!!! Story with Linda Pentz Gunter

Linda asks: What if there'd be a nuclear power plant caught up in the LA fires?

This Week's SPECIAL Year-End Feature: Numnutz of the Year!

It's been a year, all right, with plenty of Numnutzery to go around. We look back on 2024 through the lens of Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness) - the nuclear stories that made no sense, defied logic, infuriated me, touched my "Despair" button, or just got me mad enough to go on a rant. 

Among the snippets from the past 52 weeks:

• Tucker Carlson blames "demons" for creating nuclear weapons.

• Scallops from Japan too radioactive to sell in that country?  Sell 'em to the U.S.A.!
• US Environmental Protection Agency promotes nuclear to school children with a comic book!
• Russian Prime Minister Putin consults with shamans about nuclear and builds plywood mock-ups of the White House and Big Ben in Siberia to use as nuclear targets.
• The many ways in which nuclear and its radioactive dangers hide in plain sight by getting its minions to simply "forget" to mention them!
• And of course, several instances of nuclear ignorance (aka "numnutzery") from members of the U.S. Congress. 

Dishonorable Mention for the Numnutz Story of the Year:

Not mentioned on the show, but definitely worth a visit:  NH #677:  OBSCENE Atomic Museum in Las Vegas Shows No Bomb Victims, No Downwinders, Just Nuclear “FUN”<!!!> - More numnutzery per square inch than even I anticipated.

Banner promising all kinds of "nuclear fun" displayed outside the Atomic Museum in Las Vegas.

Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz Gunter

Linda Pentz Gunter chooses her own numnutz, and it's Elon Musk!

The other Muskrat.

ICAN UPDATE with Alistair Burnett from Geneva, Switzerland

Nobel Peace Prize ceremony report and interview with ICAN's Digital Campaign Coordinator Lucero Oyarzun.  She was at the events in Oslo when the prize was awarded to Nihon Hindankyo, the Japanese Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations, and provides a deeply moving eyewitness report. 

Photo credit: ICAN | Darren Ornitz

The late, great, Sr. Megan Rice.

This Week’s Peace Special Year-End Interviews:

Sister Megan Rice

• Sr. Megan Rice was a Roman Catholic nun who was arrested more than 40 times for protesting America’s military industrial complex and nuclear weapons-. She’s best known for breaking into Y-12, one of the world’s largest and most highly guarded uranium storage sites – the “Fort Knox” of the US uranium stockpile.
  
  But on July 28, 2012, this diminutive octogenarian nun and two other senior antinuclear activists used simple bolt cutters and their beliefs to walk into Y-12 – and not be noticed for more than 30 minutes! Our extremely embarrassed government threw the book at these three activists, charging them with “sabotage” – a felony with a penalty of up to 20 years in prison. She and the others served just over two years before being released.
  
  Sr. Megan passed away on Oct 17, 2021 at the age of 91, and there is no better commemoration of her life and work than her own words, recorded for Nuclear Hotseat on May 25, 2012, just after her release from prison.

Susi Snyder: What You Can Do to Help De-Fund Nuclear Weapons

Susi Snyder, posing with the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) Nobel Peace Prize for 2017.

• Susi Snyder is Programme Coordinator at the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. For more than a decade, Susi headed the Don’t Bank on the Bomb project, which was her position when we spoke for this interview on May 10, 2019. Her information is as relevant now as it was then. The report on nuclear bomb producing companies that she references is updated every year. The 2025 report, "At Great Cost: The Companies Building Nuclear Weapons and their Financiers" is a joint publication of ICAN and PAX.

This Week's Featured Interview:

A new book, THE SCIENTISTS WHO ALERTED US TO THE DANGERS OF RADIATION, is a devastating look into the history of radiation harms and the scientists who attempted to reveal the truth by defying political and institutional pressures. It explains how those who tried to warn us were censored and discredited by nuclear interests, leading to our current institutionalized ignorance about radiation. Authors are:

• Ian Fairlie, PhD, a UK-based scientist who has served as chief scientific advisor to the British Governnment’s Committee on the Radiation Risks of Internal Emitters, and Cindy Folkers, Radiation and Health Hazard Specialist for Beyond Nuclear.  He has degrees in chemistryand radiation biology and his doctorate at Imperial College in London was on nuclear waste policies. He was chief scientific advisor to the British Government’s Committee on the Radiation Risks of Internal Emitters and continues as a consultant to many NGOs and nuclear activists both in Europe and North America.
  
• Cindy Folkers, MS, focuses on ionizing radiation and its impact on health and the environment, from a scientific as well as a historical perspective. Her work in this area advocates for fully protecting the health of females and early life stages in the face of uncertain health outcomes. She earned an MS in Environmental Science from The Johns Hopkins University and has been published in additional books as well as The BMJ and Journal of the History of Biology.

Technical difficulties prevented Ian Fairlie from joining us from his home in London.  I spoke with Cindy Folkers on December 13, 2024.

LINK to purchase THE SCIENTISTS WHO ALERTED US TO THE DANGERS OF RADIATION:

• Ethics Press - Hardback, paperback, or ebook

Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz Gunter

A Woods Hole report contradicts "A Woods Hole report contradicts decommissioning company Holtec's claim that radioactive wastewater dumped from the closed Pilgrim reactor into Cape Cod Bay would quickly disperse.” Here’s.

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness):

Andy Borowitz at BorowitzReport.com nails the utter numnutzery of possibly having Pete Hegseth, currently the nominee for Secretary of Defense, anywhere near the nuclear arsenal. 

LINKS:

• Radioactive Leaks, Fires, and Contamination: DOE Report Exposes Alarming Failures at Piketon

The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Nihon Hidankyo, the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations.  Three Hibakusha (A-bomb survivors) were in Oslo, Norway to accept the award.

Three members of Nihon Hidankyo, the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations, accept the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway on December 10, 2024.

Link:

Full broadcast, of 2024 ceremony (CLICK here or on screen shot above.)

This Week's SPECIAL Feature:

The first ever Outrider Nuclear Reporting Summit drew together more than 100 reporters, editors, nuclear experts, activists and NGOs from around the country to Washington, DC for two days of meetings, presentations, networking, and general schmoozing.  Outrider supports multimedia storytelling about nuclear threats and climate change and partners with creators, thought leaders, and news organizations to explain how smart policy can sustain a safe and livable planet.

Among the people interviewed who are on the show:

• Beatrice Fihn, former Executive Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) and currently Director, Lex International and Senior Fellow, United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research.

Former ICAN Executive Director Beatrice Fihn (r) being interviewed by philanthropy and peace expert Alex Toma (l), Executive Director at Peace and Security Funders Group.  Above them, a  slide showing some of Beatrice's latest work on the familiar images used to represent nuclear weapons in media stories.  

• Dawn Chapman, co-founder with Karen Nickle of Just Moms StL, the group fighting for clean-up of WWII Manhattan Project radioactive atomic weapons waste from their North St. Louis neighborhood and passage of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, or RECA. 

Map of radioactive fallout contamination from the US nuclear tests, created by Sébastien Philippe, Research Scholar, Program on Science and Global Security, Princeton University.  Used by Dawn Chapman and others in lobbying for passage of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA).

• Mary Dickson, Utah Downwinder, writer, playwright, and activist working for passage of RECA.

Mary Dickson and Libbe HaLevy at the Outrider Nuclear Reporting Summit

• ...and more than a dozen reporters, editors, and representatives of NGOs concerned with nuclear issues. 

Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with. Linda Pentz Gunter

Why are we protecting nukes from climate change rather than abolishing them?

Cover keystone photo credit:  Jeff Gipe.

This Week's Featured Interview:

Physicist and Activist Lynda Williams - a foe of nuclear greenwashing

Lynda Williams is a Hawaii-based physicist, activist, writer and performance artist - AKA The Physics Chanteuse.  She battles against nuclear greenwashing (aka lying) with public presentations, lectures, theatre, and a ferocious activist spirit.  Lynda is bringing her new one woman show, ATOMIC CABARET, to the 2025 Edinburgh International Festival this spring. Think of her as Bette Midler meets Carl Sagan, with a touch of Tom Lehrer and Mae West — but understand that underlying her musical theatre irreverence, her science background is rock solid and when she talks about nukes, she’s dead serious.

Here, she brings us new insights into a strategy for fighting against nuclear industry greenwashing disinformation (aka "propaganda") and how other countries, including Canada, are fighting back using readily available media tools. These techniques are not yet being implemented in the U.S., but can be - and soon!

I spoke with Lynda Williams on November 24, 2024.

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness):

A NUMNUTZ TWOFER!

• FEMA keeps trying to tell us that "shelter in place" will allow us all to survive a nuclear bomb attack <LOL!>.
• Writer and veteran activist Noel Wauchope points out the futility of staging 30" wide nuclear reactors under major cities.  I mean, what could go wrong? 
  
  Noel Wauchope's Substack LINK: "SMRs underground - long drop nuclear toilets? - a chance to use that beaut new word - enshittification"

Writer and activist Noel Wauchope

THE NUCLEAR RESISTER with Jack Cohen-Joppa

• Fifty years ago, in a classic case of civil disobedience, a young anti-nuclear activist toppled a tower and blazed a trail through the courtroom that nuclear resisters have followed ever since.

The ICAN UPDATE with Alistair Burnett, Direct from Geneva

The ICAN logo

The monthly ICAN UPDATE with Alistair Burnett, covering the past month's progress on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and some of what the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons has planned leading up to its meetings at the United Nations in March.

Don't Bank on the Bomb - Susi Snyder

Wanna help stop nuclear weapons?  It's as easy as a phone call to your bank - no minimum deposit required!  Susi Snyder once again fills us in on the highly successful Don't Bank on the Bomb program. 

Links:

• Holtec: Criminality, Corruption, Incompetence, and Inexperience - Compiled by Kevin Kamps,Nuclear Waste Watchdog, Beyond Nuclear.
• I wanted to run this Tom Lehrer song, SO LONG MOM, at the end of the show, but was unable to get a clean MP3 recording of this PUBLIC DOMAIN song. Digital gremlins spoiling all the fun. So here's a video of the song from Youtube. Enjoy! After 50 years, Lehrer is still the most spot-on voice to help us sing our way to Armageddon. (CLICK ON IMAGE)

Tom Lehrer, musically enlightening us about nukes

• What is "radiophobia?" It's a lie that says that fear of radiation is more dangerous to human health than radiation itself. 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 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. 
  
  I spoke with Majia Nadesan on June 6, 2019.

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/

Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz Gunter:

Like pie? You won't enjoy this one and it's nothing to be thankful for.

Links:

• Project 2025 calls for massive changes to Hanford nuclear cleanup
• Congress wants to turn the nuclear regulator into the US industry’s cheerleader—again
• NASA discovers secret US military base buried 100-foot deep in Greenland ice
• Revealed: how a San Francisco navy lab became a hub for human radiation experiments
• From NEWSWEEK: Map Shows Safest Countries if There Is Nuclear War and Famine

Those isolated green dots mark the areas on earth best suited to survival of a nuclear war. 

SPECIAL PROPOSAL!

#Nuclear80 
The 2025 Campaign to Reclaim the Nuclear Narrative

2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the start of the Atomic Age and all the ensuing nuclear madness covered by the show every week.  We already know that the media is going to make a “thing” out of this, because it’s an anniversary that ends in a “0.”  That’s why we need to be pro-active and take control of the nuclear narrative for 2025, starting now.

#Nuclear80 is a campaign focused on commemorating the start of all this nuclear madness: the first atomic bomb test at the Trinity site in New Mexico on July 16, 1945.  It is the moment the world changed forever, and can be the pivotal piece in .  it is a platform for international participation from local issues that will speak to our shared and varied nuclear experiences.  More is explained on the show under Activist Shout-Out, and more will be revealed as the platform grows.  What I envision is a day, perhaps spread to a week, where communities hold events on their local nuclear issues in alignment with their own culture, language, and traditions.  Mourning, Activism, Protests, Music, Art, Theatre, or whatever is appropriate - you decide. 

Just make certain all your posts, social media sites and articles contain the hashtag: #Nuclear80.

More Information will be provided on a weekly basis on Nuclear Hotseat.  And if you'd like to get our email with updates, make certain you sign up for our email list. 

Gen. Leslie Groves (r), J. Robert Oppenheimer (center) and reporters examine the first Ground Zero - the remains of the tower that held the bomb at the Trinity Site in New Mexico.  Picture taken two months after the detonation, September 7. 1945.. 

This Week's Featured Story:

• The country is gearing up to turn Pike County, Ohio, into what they’re calling a “nuclear hub,” starting with the first launch of a uranium enrichment plant in the United States in almost 70 years. The last one was the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, on the same site in Piketon. It’s being demolished, but is still a radioactive mess, part of a multi-decade clean-up (which will never be completed). Meanwhile, a new facility has been built there and just launched to make HALEU - High Assay Low Enriched Uranium, the fuel necessary for will be able to fuel the not-yet-existing Small Modular Nuclear Reactors and contaminate even more of the land.
  
  To find out how bad it is, I spoke with Joe Mangano.  He is a health researcher who has served Radiation and Public Health Project (RPHP, Radiation.org) since 1989. Mangano managed the study of Strontium-90 in baby teeth ,and is author or co-author of 33 medical journal articles on radiation health. Author of the books Low Level Radiation and Immune System Damage: An Atomic Era Legacy (1998) and Radioactive Baby Teeth: The Cancer Link (2008). He is featured in the documentary: "Silent Fallout: Baby Teeth Speak," which covers the Cold War era study of atomic bomb radiation in 320,000 baby teeth by St. Louis scientists.
  
  As you will hear, Joe has been crunching the health statistics on cancer in Pike and surrounding counties since 2021, and has now published his third report on cancer rates in the areas adjacent to the defunct-but-being-resurrected Portsmouth gaseous Diffusion Plant. I spoke with Joe Mangano on November 15, 2024

Links from Featured Story:

• RPHP Reports Finds Soaring Death Rate Near Ohio Uranium Plant - Piketon/Portsmouth Diffusion Plant reports by RPHP on cancer and other illnesses for 2021, 2022, 2023

Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz Gunter:

New moves attempt to further gut NRC safety oversight.

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness):

(NOTE that Numnutz was recorded but I ran out of time on the show!  Next week...? Meanwhile, here's something numnutz enough: the stained glass window at the Strategic Air Command Memorial Chapel at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, Nebraska, home to the United States Strategic Command.  Instead of saints or miracles, they feature bombers, a red telephone, and a mushroom cloud. Good to know what our military strategic command is praying to and for!

One panel of the stained glass windows at the Strategic Air Command Memorial Chapel
(U. S. Air Force photo)

Links:

• Nuclear Propaganda Exposed: The Dirty Truth Behind Government and Industry Claims by Linda Williams.  Clear, concise, brilliantly well done.
• Film - Britain's Nuclear Bomb Scandal: Our Story - New BBC documentary
• Dispatch from a nuclear petting zoo
• RPHP Reports Finds Soaring Death Rate Near Ohio Uranium Plant - Piketon/Portsmouth Diffusion Plant reports for 2021, 2022, 2023

This Week's Featured Interviews:

• Seth Shelden is General Counsel and United Nations Liaison for ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.  The United Nations First Committee just announced that they will be putting forward a resolution to create a 21-scientist committee to examine and determine the impact of nuclear war on people and the planet. A study of this sort has not been done since 1989 - 25 years ago - and the changes in the size of the bombs and the possible impact of nuclear war on the climate are top priories.
  
  To find out more, I spoke with Seth Shelden on November 7, 2024.

ICAN's Seth Shelden

• The International Uranium Film Festival (IUFF) has been invited by the G20 Summit in Rio de Janeiro to present films during the meetings, which start on Nov. 13 and run through Friday the 15th. Its involvement will also be part of a documentary covering the summit that is being shot by Academy Award-nominated David Lynch as executive director.
  
  I spoke with IUFF Founder and Director Norbert Suchanek on November 7, 2024.

IUFF Founders and Directors Norbert Suchanek and Marcia Gomes de Oliviera, via Zoom from Brazil

Films being shown at IUFF-G20 in Rio this week can be found at:
https://uraniumfilmfestival.org/en/uranium-film-festival-rio-g20-summit-2024-program

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness):

French household goods made from radioactive metal - what could go wron

Links:

• In a progressive US state (Maryland), more nukes?
• Opinion - When you combine AI and nuclear power, the results can be catastrophic
• What if the Nuclear Industry Really Isn’t Safe?
• How the War in Ukraine Could Go Nuclear—by Accident - Russian Atomic Weapons Are Dangerously Close to the Frontlines
• Britain’s Nuclear Bomb Scandal: Our Story - meet some of the contributors speaking out for the first time
• Can quake-prone Japan ever embrace nuclear energy again?

Part 2 of a talk with Doug Brugge and Aaron Datesman, authors of a brilliant new book, Nuclear Power in an Era of Climate Change.  Last week was Part 1.  This week, we focus on new information about the health dangers of so-called “permitted” radiation releases from operating nuclear reactors in easily understood science. 

• Dr. Doug Brugge is an endowed professor and chair of the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of Connecticut. He has published extensively about the social and health consequences of uranium mining.

Doug Brugge

• Aaron Datesman is a researcher, mathematician, and inventor who has held technical roles at the U.S. Department of Energy and as an engineer at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

Aaron Datesman

ICAN Update with Alistair Burnett of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons

• The importance of the United Nations call to form a 21-member science panel to report on the effects of nuclear war. 

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness):

Ex-Fox News host Tucker Carlson claims that demons are at fault for creating the nuclear bomb... and he's not talking metaphorically.  Trying out new White House talking points...? 

Favorite Story of the Week:

Mark Zuckerberg AI data center plans derailed by... THE KILLER BEES!   (No, really!)

The late John Belushi as a Killer Bee on Saturday Night Live.

Links:

• ICAN Australia new 20-page report on the intersections between climate change and nuclear weapons.
• AP report on Aging Nukes: A 4-Part Investigative Series by Jeff Donn:
  
  • Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV
• UK says it voted against UN nuclear war panel because consequences already known

This Week's Featured Interview:

• An important new book has just been published on the lies of the nuclear industry, put together by  Dirty Secrets of Nuclear Power in an Era of Climate Change is a meticulously researched and detailed book that exposes nuclear lies and provides detailed scientific information in easy-to-understand language.  It was written by two scientists with impeccable credentials and decades of experience calling nuclear out.  To back up its revelations - much of it new - the work is supported by charts, graphs, and clear writing that even the non-scientific among us can understand.
  
  The co-authors are Doug Brugge and Aaron Datesman:
  
  Dr. Brugge is an endowed professor and chair of the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of Connecticut. He has published extensively about the social and health consequences of uranium mining.
  
  Aaron Datesman is a researcher, mathematician, and inventor who has held technical roles at the US Department of Energy and as an engineer at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

FREE download of pdf of the book: Dirty Secrets of Nuclear Power in an Era of Climate Change.  

Numutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness:

The indoctrination of children towards nuclear starts early - but does the Environmental Protection Agency have to be this blatant about it by putting it in a comic book?  Apparently so:

Visual from nuclear propaganda kid recruiting comic book, Spark Squad.

Activist Shout-Out:

• The passing of activist, gifted artist, and loving friend Laura Lynch.  Here's a link to her brilliant article: THE ART OF PROTEST:  A NEW REINTEGRATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Just one of Laura Lynch's memes created for Fukushima Fallout Awareness Network (FFAN)

Links:

• 10 Nuclear War Movies That Are Downright Terrifying
• Karl Grossman in Counterpunch:  The New Nuclear Push: New Package, Same Lies
• ICAN Campaigners Group for the Cities Campaign to push for adoption of the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.  Join and get your local municipality to support the international ban on nukes! 
• We Need a U.N. Study of the Effects of Nuclear War

Cold War Horse, sculpture by Jeff Gipe - the only acknowledgement
of the radiological history of Rocky Flats nuclear factory present at the site. 

This Week's Featured Interview:

• The Half-Life of Memory: America’s Forgotten Atomic Bomb Factory by director/producer/videographer Jeff Gipe, is a gripping recounting of the history of Rocky Flats, which produced plutonium pits - triggers - for U.S. nuclear bombs from 1952 to 1989. public protests against it, and how its legacy has been disguised.  Jeff is an accomplished visual artist and filmmaker, known for works on the far-reaching implications of the US Nuclear legacy.  His deep connection to the subject matter stems from his upbringing near the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant, where his father was employed. zThe 55 minute film is about to have its world premiere on November 2 at the Denver Film Festival.
  
  I spoke with Jeff Gipe on October 18, 2024.

• Trailer for Half-Life of Memory
• Half-Life of Memory website
• Jeff Gipe website
• Jeff Gipe email
• Denver Film Festival

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness):

Nuclear Regulatory Commission "apologizes" for "misinformation" about - OOPS! - radioactive water from Monticello nuclear in the Mississippi river - but doesn't apologize for the radioactive tritium-contaminated water ACTUALLY BEING in the Mississippi River.  I don't think Emily Post would consider that as an appropriate apology.

Happy Halloween!

Piketon, Ohio anti-nuclear Halloween yard display.  You want a scary Halloween?  Nuclear is the scariest!  Vina Colley of PRESS on the left.

Links to Articles from News Segment:

• Back from the Brink - Talking points and suggestions to contact local newspapers in support of Nihon Hidankyo/s Nobel. Peace Prize and other nuclear issues. 
• Nuclear Weapons Have The Potential To Frighten My Nervous Dogs

• The Nuclear Waste Administration Act (H.R.9786): Don't be fooled by its apparent purpose! 
• Democrats Embrace Nuclear Power In Heated Senate Races
• Costly Replacement of ICBMs With Sentinel Missiles Increases Risk of Nuclear War - Many of our unmet needs as US citizens are due in part to the cost of the US nuclear arsenal.
• Nihon Hidankyo’s Bittersweet Receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize
• Indian nuclear weapons, 2024

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIFwk1VIsLQ&t=2s

Kenyans trying to block the building of its first nuclear reactor.

Lead Story:

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2024 to the Japanese organization Nihon Hidankyo. This grassroots movement of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, also known as Hibakusha, is receiving the Peace Prize for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again.  (Audio commentary on this award from the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) will be on next week's program.)

The rarely-seen carnage left behind in the wake of the atomic bomb drop by the United States on Hiroshima, August 6, 1945.  Because of actions taken by Gen. Douglas MacArthur to suppress information and images about how devastating the attack was on the people, most photos you see were taken after clean-up of the bodies.  This is from a Japanese newsreel company's footage the day after the bomb dropped.  The film was confiscated and suppressed as "Top Secret" until the 1980's.

This Week's Featured Interview:

Physicist and author M. V. Ramana

• The conclusion of our two-part interview with award-winning physicist M. V. Ramana (above), author of the book NUCLEAR IS NOT THE SOLUTION: The Folly of Atomic Power int he Age of Climate Change.  This week, he covers the myths about Small Modular Nuclear Reactors (SMNR or SMR) and reveals their direct connection to nuclear weapons.

THE NUCLEAR RESISTER:

A new monthly feature.  Jack Cohen-Joppa, who along with his wife, Felice Cohen-Joppa, publish The Nuclear Resister newsletter and have since 1980.  Here, Jack shares stories from their archive, bringing our shared activists history to life.  

NUMNUTZ OF THE WEEK for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness

Cameras meant to guide the removal of radioactive debris from Fukushima Daiichi have again failed. At least this time Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) admits that they fried from too much radioactivity. So what is TEPCO’s plan to “fix” these errant cameras? Can you say, “reboot?”

Links:

• For tech geeks, more information on the robot TEPCO is using to try to retrieve samples of radioactive rubble from the rubbled remains of the Fukushima nuclear reactors. 
• Nuclear Future: The Price  By W.J. Hennigan - NYT Op-Ed.
• Harvey Wasserman:  Nuke Power’s “Renaissance 4.0” Has Already Melted
• The radioactive legacy of the Hanford nuclear reservation will live on, even as plans for cleanup evolve
• Nuclear weapons and children

Mary Olson of Gender and Radiation Impact Project (genderandradiation.org) is alive and well!  She lives in Asheville, North Carolina, and we hadn't heard from her since before Hurricane Helene ripped through that town on September 27.  As of October 9, Cindy Folkers of Beyond Nuclear reports that Mary is FINE!  She has water, food, cell phone, but no internet c"onnection.  She has been hosting folks from the community at her house for showers and laundry services.  She is very lucky considering the circumstances of others - and we are VERY relieved for her safety.  Information was received just as Nuclear Hotseat #694 was posting.  


Mary Olson (l) and Nuclear Hotseat's Libbe HaLevy at the Nuclear Waste Summit in 2019.

This Week's Featured Interview:

• U.S. district court Judge Mary Geiger Lewis ruled last week that the US Department of Energy. - DOE - and its semi-autonomous nuclear weapons agency, the National Nuclear Security Administration - NNSA - violated the National Environmental Policy act by failing to properly consider alternatives before proceeding with their plans to produce plutonium pits - the core components of all nuclear weapons - at both Los Alamos National Lab in Santa Fe, NM, and Savannah River Site in South Carolina. This ruling comes as a result of a coalition of plaintiffs consisting of Savannah. River Site Watch, Nuclear Watch New Mexico, and Tri-Valley CARES near the Lawrence Livermore Labs in northern California.
  
  Jay Coughlin is Executive Director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, which has since 1999 successfully addressed nuclear weapons issues across the spectrum of disarmament, nonproliferation, open government, and environmental concerns. Here, explains what brought this lawsuit regarding plutonium pits about, what the ruling means, and what's next.
  
  I spoke with Jay Coughlin on October 7, 2024.

Jay Coughlin, Executive Director, Nuclear Watch New Mexico

Links from Featured Story:

• Court Rules U.S. Nuclear Weapons Production Plan Violates Federal Law
• PLUTONIUM PIT FACT SHEET

International Uranium Film Festival Named to 25 COOLEST FILM FESTIVALS, 2024 by MovieMaker Magazine!

The International Uranium Film Festival is honored to have been named as one of the 2024 COOLEST FILM FESTIVALS by MovieMaker Magazine.  They had this to say about it:

• You’ve never seen two people get more done than the life and project-partner duo Márcia Gomes de Oliveira and Norbert G. Suchanek, who run the International Uranium Film Festival in deep collaboration with activists around the world. The festival has its grand event in Rio, but also does an extensive U.S. tour in regions impacted by uranium-related industry. Inevitably, folks wonder whether there are enough films on the subject to warrant a festival. The answer is yes. This, of course, is because the issue is expansive, impacting all 50 U.S. states and many more corners of the world than most folks realize. From the Navajo Nation to Las Vegas to Chicago and many places between, this spirited DIY art, advocacy, and activism project brings folks together in a space of support, education, shared outrage, and a good time. The International Uranium Film Festival is a refreshing example of what activism and advocacy can be: inclusive, expansive, and celebratory.

To learn more about the award and the other festivals (it's an amazing group!), go to:https://www.moviemaker.com/coolest-film-festivals-2024/" class="text-nh underline hover:text-nh-dark"> https://www.moviemaker.com/coolest-film-festivals-2024/

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness):

Cameras meant to guide the removal of radioactive debris from Fukushima Daiichi have again failed. At least this time Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) admits that they fried from too much radioactivity.  So what is TEPCO's plan to "fix" these errant cameras?  Can you say, "reboot?"

Links:

• Silkwood film streaming on Hulu
• United Nations Principles for Responsible Investing (UN PRI)
• Jane Fonda: Nuclear power at Three Mile Island is no climate solution
• Hurricane Helene sends a warning
• New NRC Report Highlights Dangerous Components at Palisades Nuclear Plant

Stop Japan Working Group 2023 - JNC-TV - LINKS to videos:

• October 5th Los Angeles Rally and March to stop the discharge of Fukushima wastewater
• October 7th Washington DC Rally and March to stop the discharge of Fukushima wastewater
  

M. V. Ramana w/book, Libbe HaLevy w/Podcast.

• A new book by reknowned physicist M. V. Ramana: Nuclear Is Not the Solution: The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change,. Ramana is professor and Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security at the University of British Columbia. He previously worked at the Nuclear Futures Laboratory and the Program on Science and Global Security, both at Princeton University. Ramana is a member of the International Panel on Fissile Materials, the Canadian Pugwash Group, the International Nuclear Risk Assessment Group, and the team that produces the annual World Nuclear Industry Status Report. The first of a two-part interview base upon his recently published book.

TOTALLY FICTITIOUS WESTINGHOUSE ANIMATION
OF A 116 WEEK BUILD SCHEDULE
FOR THE AP 1000 NUCLEAR REACTOR. 
Taken from the Westinghouse website in 2014. Westinghouse has long since taken it down.
NO WONDER!  IThis is a LINK to the video.)

THIS ANIMATION IS A TOTAL LIE.

Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz Gunter:

Let's applaud climate activists willing to risk their freedom to save us all.

The ICAN Update with Alistair Burnett

The latest news direct from the Geneva, Switzerland headquarters of the Nobel Peace Prize winning Intrnational Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). 

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness):

Foooood, glorious Fukushima fooooood!  (NOT!)

Links:

• Karen Silkwood and Kerr-McGee: A Reinvestigation By Steven H. Wodka
• CNIC Statement: Concerns over Revival of the Nuclear Power Myth and Unrealistic Nuclear Policy

Three Mile Island

This Week's Featured Interviews:

• Eric Epstein of Three Mile Island Alert explains what's wrong with the Bill Gates/Microsoft plan to restart TMI unit 1 (not the one that melted down), which has been shuttered for five years, to power the MIcrosoft AI data center. 

Eric Epstein of Three Mile Island Alert with Nuclear Hotseat's Libbe HaLevy
at the 40th anniversary of the nuclear meltdown - March 28, 2019

• Arnie Gundersen, Chief Engineer at Fairewinds Energy Education speaking at the Three Mile Island accident's 40th anniversary on how much radiation was released. 
• Aaron Datesman, co-author with Doug Brugge of the newly published book, Dirty Secrets of Nuclear Power in an Era of Climate Change, with new information about the radiation release at Three Mile Island.  Datesman is a researcher and inventor living in Washington, DC who has held technical roles at the US Department of Energy and at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.  This is an excerpt from a full-length interview with Datesman and Doug Brugge which will be coming in the next few weeks. 

Scene of the Crime:  Nuclear Hotseat's Libbe HaLevy
in front of the cooling towers at Three Mile Island

The Nukewatch Report with John LaForge

Lockheed Martin jets, nukes, and NATO.

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness)

It's the first ever Numnutz Twofer, courtesy Russia!  Putin talks with shamans!  And plans are floated to build a plywood White House and Big Ben in Siberia... and then nuke 'em! 

Links:

• Petition:  No deportation of anti-nuclear activist Dennis DuVall! The 82-year-old U.S. citizen and long-term resident of Germany is facing deportation following his two arrests for nonviolent nuclear protests at the Buchel air base. Sign Here.

Dennis DuVall, in red, enters Büchel air base July 2018.
Photo from Community for Human Rights in the Free State of Saxony

• The radioactive issue: Meet the 2 Native American women fighting to save nuclear exposure benefits (RECA)
• Excavation near radioactive creek in Pike County triggers calls for investigation
• An EMP Attack on the U.S. Power Grids and Critical National Infrastructure - Extensive, w/maps by Steven Starr
• World now has five times more PV than nuclear power-  World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2024
• World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2024
• More Nuclear Reactors?  The Nuclear Schizophrenia of IAEA's Director General Rafael Grossi
• Nuclear power: future energy solution or potential war target?

Massive icebergs from Jakobshavn Glacier melting in Disko Bay on sunny summer evening, Ilulissat, Greenland.

This Week’s Featured Interview:

The next United Nations Climate Change conference, COP 29, is scheduled to be held in Baku, Azerbaijan from 11 to 22 November, 2024 - an annual bone tossed to those who are striving to reverse the climate catastrophe despite not having any power to do so. Incessant pro-nuclear doubletalk has infested what is supposed to be a rallying event for genuine renewables and conservation, drowning out the voices of informed activists.

To prepare our minds for what's coming in November (besides that other thing in the U.S. on November 5), we’re revisiting an interview from 2022, after COP 27, on the consequences of nuclear radiation on the Arctic ice. Our interviewee is a regular resource for Nuclear Hotseat who always comes up with clear explanations of complex issues.

• Tim Deere-Jones is a marine biologist – a radiation researcher and consultant – who specializes in analysis of the radiation threats to our planet’s waters from a wide range of nuclear sources. Here he provides a SPECIAL report produced exclusively for Nuclear Hotseat on the Nuclear Arctic radiation dangers. 
  
  We spoke on Monday, January 24, 2022.
  
• PDF DOWNLOAD of the text of this presentation – CLICK HERE
• CONTACT for Tim Deere-Jones:  timdeerejones@outlook.com

Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz Gunter

Starving kids is fine as long as we keep overfeeding the nuclear hogs.

Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Reactor Cooling Tower Fire

Ukranian president Vladomir Zelinsky posted this photo of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear facility's cooling tower fire.  The resulting damage is so bad, the tower will need to be torn down. 

LINKS:

• file:///Users/libbehalevy/Downloads/978-3-031-59595-0.pdf    Dirty Secrets of Nuclear Power in an Era of Climate Change by Doug Brugge • Aaron Datesman

Prof. Robert "Bo" Jacobs and his brilliant book NUCLEAR BODIES: The Global Hibakusha

This Week’s Featured Interview:

This is a. SPECIAL full-length interview with Prof. Robert "Bo" Jacobs on his book, NUCLEAR BODIES: The Global Hibakusha.

• HIBAKUSHA is the term for those who survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But in recent years, it has come to be applied more widely to all who have been exposed to radiation from nuclear bomb testing and other sources of contamination from manufacturing, uranium mining, nuclear reactors, and radioactive waste. As today’s guest will explain, that means just about all of us.
  
  Prof. Robert “Bo” Jacobs is an American historian of nuclear technologies and radiation techno-politics. He moved to Japan in 2006 after being hired by the Hiroshima Peace Institute. and is currently a professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute and the Graduate School of Peace Studies of Hiroshima City University. He’s the author of the 2022 book, NUCLEAR BODIES: The Global Hibakusha, and that’s what we’ll be talking about.
  
  I spoke with Bo Jacobs on Friday, July 21, 2023.

Jack Cohen-Joppa of The Nuclear Resister (l) on Zoom with Nuclear Hotseat's Libbe HaLevy. Note his tee shirt in light of the demonstrations he talks about at Rocky Flats.

This Week's Featured Interview:

• Depleted Uranium weapons - nuclear radiation weapons without the blast.  Who's got them and are they being used by Ukraine?  Russia?  Israel?  Jack Cohen-Joppa parses the known and verifiable information.  Since 1980, Jack Cohen-Joppa and Felice Cohen-Joppa have been co-coordinators of the Nuclear Resister and co-editors of the newsletter. The Nuclear Resister networks the anti-nuclear and anti-war resistance movements while acting as a clearinghouse for information about contemporary nonviolent resistance to war and the nuclear threat. Their emphasis is on support for the women and men jailed for these actions.  For 44 years, they have covered reports on nuclear and anti-war arrests while encouraging support for more than 1,000 imprisoned activists.
  
  Their stated belief is that in any significant movement for social change, many committed individuals are imprisoned. Behind bars, they are physically isolated from their supporters and their own resistance activity is limited. Broader awareness of their actions and support for the imprisoned activist are essential to the movement for a peaceful, nuclear-free future. We’ll have more on that and how you can help. after the interview. 
  I spoke with Jack Cohen-Joppa on August 30, 2024.

Links from the Interview:

• Prison Addresses for the Two Susans, convicted for their nonviolent protest actions at Büchel air base in Germany, where U.S. nuclear weapons are stored.  Susan Crane and Susan van der Hijden are now serving their time at an open (lower security) prison in Koblenz. You can write to them individually at the followin addresses:
  
  • Susan Crane, JVA Koblenz – Offener Vollzug, Simmerner Str. 14a, 56075 Koblenz, Germany.  Sentenced to 229 days in June 4, 2024)
  • Susan van der Hijden, JVA Koblenz – Offener Vollzug, Simmerner Str. 14a, 56075 Koblenz, Germany.  Sentenced to 115 days in June 4, 2024)
  • You can read their prison reflections here and here, from Nukewatch
• This is the Ukraine update on the International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons (ICBUW) website: https://www.icbuw.eu/icbuw-update-on-du-in-ukraine/
• This is the ICBUW weapons and platforms list:
• The Israel and Gaza update as regards DU Weapons.

Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz Gunter:

Russia's war in Ukraine has put another nuclear power plant in danger: their own.

The ICAN Update with Alistair Burnett

Monthly update on issues and actions regarding the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear War from ICAN - the Nobel Peace-Prize winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. Here, we learn the latest on the actions taken to pass the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) with ICAN's Head of Media, Alistair Burnett, reporting from ICAN headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.

Poster for film FIRST WE BOMBED NEW MEXICO

THIS WEEK'S FEATURED INTERVIEW:

• Award-winning filmmaker Lois Lipman talks about how she first learned about the plight of Downwinders, those who lived downwind of the Trinity test of the first atomic bomb.  Her resulting film, FIRST WE BOMBED NEW MEXICO, tracks not just Trinity's history of radiation impact, but the timelines of Downwinder illness through five generations.  She also covers recent efforts to pass the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) in Congress, to provide some financial compensation to those harmed by America's nuclear weapons program.  FIRST WE BOMBED NEW MEXICO website

Downwinder Tina Cordova demonstrating outside entrance to Trinity site.
From the film FIRST WE BOMBED NEW MEXICO.

Links from Featured Interview:

• Article: Documentary about Trinity Test victims fights for wider audience
• Article: A Nuclear Legacy in Los Alamos?  About recently found plutonium contamination in Acid Canyon, a popular hiking trail adjacent to Los Alamos. 
• Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness):

The Democrats went wild for Harris and Walz... but nobody was talking about nukes!  Note the use ot screws to denote how we're all being screwed by nuclear.

The only reference to nuclear weapons found during. the entire Democratic National Convention - an art piece entitled “Elections matter.”  The mushroom cloud artwork produced by TaskForce uses thousands of screws to represent the world’s nuclear arsenals, and flagging tape used on construction sites. Photo by Thomas Gaulkin

Save the Date!  Dec. 7-8 - Atomic Age Cinema Fest in LA!

The second Atomic Age Cinema Fest - a co-presentation of Kat Kramer Films that Change the World and the International Uranium Film Festival, will take over the Crescent Theatre in Los Angeles for two days of films, plus a panel discussion jam packed with Hollywood celebrities.  More info on further episodes

To get a glimpse of what an experience that will be, LISTEN to Nuclear Hotseat #223, which provides an audio mosaic of the first Atomic Age Film Festival, held in Hollywood in 2016.

Links:

https://youtu.be/sNlwV5ybL_c?si=F28ysVE0lDsZS6XG

Webinar on Japan's release of radioactive tritium-contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean.

• Nuclear Free Team of the Sierra Club offers a free screening of ATOMIC BAMBOOZLE during the entire month of September.  https://watch.eventive.org/scnuclearfree/play/65df9b811095cc004ea923de" class="text-nh underline hover:text-nh-dark" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">REGISTER HERE - : https://watch.eventive.org/scnuclearfree/play/65df9b811095cc004ea923de
  Supporting informational webinar on September 30, 5-7 pm Pacific Time.  Panelists will be filmmaker Jan Haaken, Associate Producer Cathy Sampson-Kruse, M.V. Ramana, Mark Z. Jacobson, and David Schlissel. The panel will be moderated by Nuclear Free Team Co-Chair Mike Carberry.  REGISTER HERE  https://sierraclub.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_2CNxDUwVSGWZvzFEpIpwEw.
• PIKETON/PORTSMOUTH INTERVIEWS - Saturday September 14th at the Career Technology Center in Piketon Ohio 1:00-4:00 PM.  These interviews will be for a documentary with Duane Pohlman Local 12. This is for the people who have or had Cancer or other related illnesses living or working at Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion plant.  To join the private Facebook group DON'T DUMP ON US, contact Gina Doyle on Facebook and ask to join the group.  She'll give you the link to send a Friend request.  It's for the protection of the private information shared on the FB site.
• Digital Activism: Do’s and Don’ts to Keep Yourself Safe Online

Canada Pushing for Nuclear Waste Repository on Indigenous Lands:

Tons of radioactive waste from nuclear reactor operation keeps piling up, with no resolution in sight.  What to do with the waste? Canada has been making plans… but they’re bad ones. Here to explain how we got ourselves into this problem, what’s wrong with Canada’s current plans, and suggest some temporary steps that can be taken are two experts:

• Dr. Gordon Edwards is head of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility,
• Elysia Petrone, who is of mixed descent (Italian, German and Anishinaabe), is a board member for Mining Watch Canada and a member of Niniibawtamin Anishinaabe Aki (We stand for our land), an indigenous-led group dedicated to stopping the disposal of nuclear waste in Anishinaabe territory.
• Niniibawtamin Anishinaabe Aki - our concerns with nuclear waste.pdf

Radioactive Ohio School Auctioned Off to Christian Group

Zahn's Corner Middle School, shuttered in 2019 as too contaminated with radioactive material from the demolition of the nearby Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, sold to a Christian school and rehab center.  Note the sign on the fence warning of radioactive contamination.

Radioactive particles from the Portsmouth 
Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon, Ohio, migrated into the nearby Zahn’s Corner Middle School and  contaminated it with radioactive materials including plutonium and americium.  The problem forced the school to be shut down in 2019.  But after five years, the local school board decided to unload this liability and offer it up for auction. The one known potential buyer - a Christian school - was contacted by activists, attorney Terry Lodge and Prof. Michael Ketterer, who had discovered the contamination. They explained all the biological and legal reasons why the school should not be used. Within 24 hours, this group decided against bidding.

However, there was another Christian group in play, with what promises to be a very dirty backstory.  I spoke with Vina Colley of Portsmouth/Piketon Residents for Environmental Safety and Security (PRESS) on August 17, 2024, the day of the auction, about what had just taken place.

Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz Gunter:

No matter what happens in Chicago, Democrats will continue supporting nuclear power.

Democratic National Convention - an explosion of confetti, non-nuclear.

Dawn Chapman of Just Moms StL (l) and Nuclear Hotseat host Libbe HaLevy at
symposium on West Lake Landfill issues in North St. Louis, February 19, 2016.

Keystone Photo - activists Dawn Chapman and Kay Drey on-site at radioactively contaminated Coldwater Creek in N. St. Louis, MO.  February 19, 2016.

This Week's Featured Interview:

• Reuters news agency published a scathing report on August 8 blasting companies and government agencies responsible for some of America's most toxic waste sites -- and how they are using a federal health agency’s faulty reports to save money on cleanups, defend against lawsuits and deny victims compensation.  Focus was on the West Lake Landfill in North St. Louis and ongoing contamination from the WWII legacy radioactive waste that has caused rates of cancer, MS and auto-immune disease to skyrocket in the adjacent neighborhood. 
  
  Specifically, it honed in on how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) presented reports riddled with distorted, obsolete data to “prove” - put that word in quotes - that there was nothing to worry about from the smouldering, radioactive Bridgeton waste dump in North St. Louis, Missouri.
  
  We talk with Dawn Chapman, co-founder of Just Moms StL, who has been fighting this landfill and pushing for clean-up and restitution for more than a decade.  We spoke on Sunday, August 11, 2024. 

Nuclear Hotseat's Libbe HaLevy interviewing Dr. Helen Caldicott on-site at the West Lake Landfill in North St. Louis.  February 19, 2016. 

Links:

• Just Moms StL on Facebook
• Just Moms StL website
• Reuters story:  How a US health agency became a shield for polluters

Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz Gunter:

It's hard to compete with childless cat ladies and Olympic gold but there's still plenty of race to run to stop nuclear folly.

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness):

Seafood too contaminated with radionuclides from Fukushima to sell in Japan?  Easy!  Ship it to the U.S. for beaucoup bucks!  Scallops with a side of cesium - mmmmmm!

The remains of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb destroyed the city, 1945

ATOMIC COVER-UP – Director Greg Mitchell is the award-winning author of a dozen books including 2020’s “The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood–and America–Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” His previous books on the atomic bombings were “Hiroshima in America“ (with Robert Jay Lifton) and “Atomic Cover-up.” His film, ATOMIC COVER-UP, was released in April, 2021 and won the Best Archival Documentary award from the International Uranium Film Festival.  I spoke with filmmaker Greg Mitchell on how this remarkable film came to be on Saturday, May 15, 2021.

• You can view the documentary ATOMIC COVERUP here.
• Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists video, How many people were killed by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
• What happened to the bodies at Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Hiroshima bomb survivor Setsuko Thurlow, accepting the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize
on behalf of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.

Setsuko Thurlow is a dedicated campaigner against nuclear weapons for ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear War.  She was a 13-year-old child in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, in school when the United States dropped the atom bomb on that city. 

As a hibakusha – atomic bomb survivor – Setsuko has worked tirelessly with ICAN.  When the group received the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for its work in realizing the successful UN negotiations for a Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, Setsuko – along with ICAN Executive Director Beatrice Fihn – accepted the award on behalf of the group.  Here is the deeply moving speech Setsuko Thurlow gave on behalf of ICAN at the Nobel Peace Prize Awards Ceremony in Oslo, Norway, on December 10, 2017.

• Full Nobel peace prize ceremony link
• International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons – ICAN – www.ICANw.org

ACTION LINKS TO WORK AGAINST NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND WAR

• World Beyond War – www.WorldBeyondWar.org
• Don’t Bank on the Bomb – www.DontBankOnTheBomb.com
• Nuclear Age Peace Foundation – www.WagingPeace.org
• VIDEO:  Obstacles to Nuclear Abolition — a discussion with David Swanson, Alice Slater, and Bruce Gagnon

Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz Gunter

As we remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki we must also look to the present as the dehumanization of people "not like us" continues.

Links:

• Flooding at Uranium Mine Near Grand Canyon Tops 66 Million Gallons - great charts from Grand Canyon Trust

The shuttered Zahn's Corner Middle School, shuttered for contamination with nuclear materials from the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, only 3 miles away.  And now the school district is trying to auction it off "AS-IS" without explaining what the "AS-IS" is?!?!???  

This Week's Featured Interview:

• Latest radiation findings near the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in southern Ohio show increased radiation levels in Little Beaver Creek water, sediment, plants.  Interview with Dr. Michael Ketterer, who has a PhD in Analytical Chemistry and has worked for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Enforcement, and at University of Denver. Since 2000, Michael has been conducting studies of plutonium in the environment, publishing and lecturing extensively, and has analyzed samples from locations worldwide. He is currently studying plutonium dioxide particles in soils near the former Rocky Flats facility in Colorado, and fingerprinting off-site contaminants near the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in southern Ohio. Michael is Professor Emeritus of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Northern Arizona University. We spoke on July 22, 2024.

To contact Dr. Michael Ketterer and Others Re: PORTS:

• Michael E. Ketterer, PhD; Professor Emeritus, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Northern Arizona University.Phone: +1 928 853 7188; Michael.e.Ketterer@gmail.com
• LINK to Duane Poulman WKRC Report on Dr. Michael Ketterer and recent radiation findings in water, soil, plants near the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Ohio
• Ohio Nuclear Free Network
• PRESS and Vina Colley -
• CONTACT for Portsmouth/Piketon Residents for Environmental Safety and Security (PRESS), National Nuclear Workers for Justice (NNWJ) and Vina Colley: vcolley@earthlink.net ; Vina Colley on Facebook

Links:

Fukushima Fallout Awareness Network Congressional Briefing:  RADIOACTIVE CONTAMINATION OF US FOOD AND WATER and what Congress Can Do About It:

https://youtu.be/Cbk-gYgVI9s?si=DwbM4XcKWM8dCZLV

Fukushima Fallout Awareness Network Petition link  https://sign.moveon.org/petitions/keep-harmful-radioactive-1.

Current U.S. Nuclear Warhead Inventory Numbers:

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneneadedness):

You want to know where all the money went that should have gone to support RECA (Radiation Exposure Compensation Act), national health care, infrastructure, education - you know, the things that make our world and our lives better?  Even at a "mere" 3,748 nukes, the money to build, design, deploy, maintain, and ultimately mothball these devilish weapons - to say nothing of the new ones that are in the pipeline, being built even not - could be put to better use.  Here's a chart of our nukes, 1945 - 2023. 

Annual walk to commemorate Church Rock uranium tailings pond disaster on Navajo Nation land - from 2019.  Site of the mine and tailings pond in the background. 

This Week's Featured Interviews:
Trinity Downwinders Advocating for Justice - Tina Cordova:

Trinity Downwinder Tina Cordova grew up in her family home in the Tularosa Basin, 40 miles from the explosion of the first atomic bomb on July 16, 1945. A cancer survivor like so many in her community, in 2005, she co-founded the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium.  She and her community have been working for compensation for New Mexico atomic downwinders for the past 15 years.

Links:

• Video created by Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium in 2020. 

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

Video creted by the Tularosa Basin Downwind Consortium on the Trinity test
and the need for the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA)

• Trinity: “The most significant hazard of the entire Manhattan Project” - Kitty Tucker/Robert Alvarez research and article on infant mortality rates around the Trinity test site caused by radiation exposure.  From the articler:  “New Mexico residents were neither warned before the 1945 Trinity blast, informed of health hazards afterward, nor evacuated before, during, or after the test. Exposure rates in public areas from the world’s first nuclear explosion were measured at levels 10,000- times higher than currently allowed.” - U.S. Centers for Disease Control

Church Rock Uranium Tailings Pond Spill Disaster

It’s been 42 years since the July 16, 1979 uranium tailings pond spill/disaster that contaminated Navajo Nation land, adding to the radiation burden already there from abandoned uranium mines.  Two brief interviews from Nuclear Hotseat #423 from July 23, 2019, where Nuclear Hotseat producer/host Libbe HaLevy covered the 40th anniversary events.

• Edith Hood grew up in the Red Water Pond Road Community, on land which had her living between two uranium mines and just down the road from the 1979 tailings pond spill. Edith worked at a different mine than the UNC facility that had the accident, but faced all of the same dangers.
• Terracita Keyanna has lived her entire life in the Red Water Pond Road Community on Navajo Nation. She was not even born when the Church Rock uranium spill happened… but that did not stop her being exposed to uranium mining waste from what was released and deposited by the spill.

Edith Hood of the Red Water Pond Community on Navajo Nation land just across from where she lives –
between two uranium mines and just down the road from the
site of the Church Rock uranium tailings spill

Terracita Keyanna next to sign warning “no uranium mining” in Navajo

Links Referenced in This Week’s Show:

• Nuclear Hotseat #423: Church Rock Uranium Tailings Pond Disaster – full show.
• Piketon, Ohio Radiation Spikes from Demolition of Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant

This Week's Features:

• How do we get a younger demographic into the movement against nuclear?  What do Youth Want to Know (to use an olde phrase)?  Nuclear Hotseat producer/host Libbe HaLevy met via zoom with students at Wilmington College in Ohio, who are studying nuclear issues with Tanya Maus, head of the Peace Resource Center.  A wide-ranging Q&A followed with some very astute, perceptive students.  They give us all hope for the future.  An excerpt from what turned out to be a 90 minute session held on July 8, 2024. 

LINKS from this feature:

• Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War by Susan Southard

Radioactive Contamination of U.S. Food and Water and What Congress Can Do About It - Upcoming Webinar

An interview with Kimberly Roberson, founder/director of Fukushima Fallout Awareness Network (FFAN) and lead organizer for this Congressional briefing. 

WHERE & WHEN? The briefing will be held via Zoom on Monday, July 15 at 2pm Eastern time. 

Registration is required. For further information and to register, go to https://nislappdc.org/ffan-congressional-briefing/.

Speakers will include:

• US Congresswoman Cori Bush – Representing Missouri’s 1st Congressional District (invited)
• Arjun Makhijani -- Nuclear engineer, President of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, author of Exploring Tritium's Dangers, member of an independent scientists’ panel commissioned by the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat to review radioactive dumping from Fukushima into the Pacific
• Prof. Bob Richmond -- University of Hawaii Marine Biologist, expert in biological uptake of radiation in the oceans, member of the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat panel on Fukushima
• Kimberly Roberson -- Project Director, Fukushima Fallout Awareness Network (FFAN). She served on the board of National Association of Nutrition Professionals and helped organize the FFAN Coalition which petitioned FDA for better food regulations​ following the Fukushima disaster.
• James Gormley -- President and Senior Policy Advisor of Citizens for Health and a leading consumer health advocate
• Cindy Folkers -- Radiation and Health Hazard Specialist with Beyond Nuclear (moderating)

NUKEWATCH REPORT with John LaForge

The Two. Susans (Susan Crane, 80, from Redwood City, California, along with Dutch citizen Susan van der Hijden from Amsterdam) enter German prison for having peacefully protested U.S. nuclear bombs being held at Buchel Air Base in Germany. 

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness)

Looking for a fun Nuclear vacation activity?  How about a tour of the Hanford Site? <!>

Anti-nuclear activists are often isolated from each other because we focus on what’s most important to us – a local issue with radioactive waste dump, or uranium mining, or weapons, or a spike in health crises, or any one of dozens of other nuclear issues. Or we’re working on the same issues as other groups, but not necessarily in communication with each other to coordinate what we’re doing and saying to make a bigger media splash with our limited resources.

Today’s guests are among those making a difference in terms of all of us working together and strategizing so we’re all on the same page and creating our own echo chamber.

• Bonnie Fisk is Director of Development for the Ploughshares Fund, a public grant-making foundation that supports initiatives to prevent the spread and use of nuclear weapons, and to prevent conflicts that could lead to their use.
• Mac Hamilton is Program Director, Peace and Security, for ReThink Media, which builds capacity across movements, works to minimize competition, maximizes resources, and raises the voices of underrepresented spokespeople.

Together, they produced the six sold-out previews of the Oppenheimer film around the country which featured panel discussions on the issues raised – and huge leg up that led to news stories and features on what the movie did not cover. Now is a great time to review their strategies and talking points and apply them to the latest batch of issues.

I spoke with Bonnie Fisk and Mac Hamilton on Friday, August 18, 2023 for Nuclear Hotseat #635.

Links from Interview:

• Sign up for ReThink Media’s AM Nukes Roundup, sent weekdays at 8:15 AM ET.
• Other organizations to receive action alerts from:
  
  • Take action with the Union of Concerned Scientists
  • Take action with Global Zero
  • Sign up for action alerts with Physicians for Social Responsibility
  • Join Win Without War and take action for nuclear frontline communities
  • Follow the work of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium
• Ploughshares.org – where you will find more information about what they fund)
• Ploughshares.org/pressthebutton  – the Ploughshares Fund’s podcast)
• The ballet that includes nuclear storytelling: Yvonne Montoya’s production, “Stories from Home”

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness):

Japan on 7th release of tritium-contaminated radioactive waste water from Fukushima into the Pacific. 

ICAN UPDATE with Alistair Burnett

The latest on work to implement the work of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, direct from ICAN headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. 

LINKS:

• Why cost should not be an obstacle to compensating nuclear survivors
• From sheep camp to the city to study uranium’s damage to Navajo people
• Nuclear danger is growing. Physicists of the world, unite!

Diane D'Arrigo, Radioactive Waste Project Director for Nuclear Information Resource SErvice (NIRS.org)

This Week's Featured Interview:

• Diane D’Arrigo is Radioactive Waste Project Director for Nuclear Energy Information Resource Service, or NIRS, where she has worked since 1986.  Her main area of expertise is radioactive waste and radiation issues. She has closely followed so-called “low-level” nuclear waste issues for decades, the national and international moves to deregulate nuclear waste that would allow it to be made into everyday household items and be dumped as regular trash. Diane has been deeply involved with tracking and fighting the backwards ADVANCE Act, and was eager to share her insights with the Nuclear Hotseat audience.
  
  I spoke with. Diane D'Arrigo on Monday, June 24, 2024.

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness):

Fukushima saki?  That's right - get drunk to ignore the radionuclides that might be in your alcohol!

Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz Gunter:

The ADVANCE Act will gut nuclear safety and keep the Nuclear Navy happy.  Hardly anyone on Capitol Hill opposed it.

Activist Shoutout:

Thomas the Stank Engine illustrates the dangers of nuclear waste hauling in the UK and is the cartoon creation of Cumbrian campaigner Marianne Birkby of Radiation Free Lakeland.  Thomas got his name because he hauls train wagons which contain very stinky, very dirty, and very nasty nukiller waste (unshielded nuclear waste can kill a human in a minute). This deadly stuff is traipsed around the country to Sellafield.”  Perhaps an image for Haul No? 

Veterans for Peace Webinar:

https://youtu.be/oedv9hlsNIk?si=DLY0oITd_ndSoMS0

Veterans For Peace No Nukes webinar on Nuclear Power and Weapons in a Time of Rising Tensions
with presenters William Hartung, Linda Pentz Gunter and Greg Mello.

PRESENTER CONTACT INFORMATION:

• William Hartung, Quincy Institute https://quincyinst.org/author/william…
• Linda Pentz Gunter, Beyond Nuclear email: linda@beyondnuclear.org https://beyondnuclear.org/ https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/
• Greg Mello, Los Alamos Study Group email: gmello@lasg.org https://lasg.org/

Links:

• Congress’s Nuclear Addiction by Karl Grossman

Welcome to the start of the 14th year of Nuclear Hotseat!

This Week's Featured Interview:

Hinamoeura Cross, 2023 winner, Nuclear Free Future Award, at ceremony in NYC, December 2023

• Hinamoeura Morgant-Cross is from French Polynesia. In her mid-thirties, she became an activist when she realized that her leukemia was a legacy of the 193 French nuclear tests in the South Pacific. She conquered her blood cancer and became a collector of unheard stories of suffering and ignored medical records from the Polynesian people. In doing so, she put pressure on the French government, which to this day lacks accountability for its actions. Hinamoera fights for recognition, medical care and financial compensation for victims, and in 2023 was awarded the Nuclear Free Future Award. In May 2023, seeking a wider base of authority for her actions, she moved into politics and was elected to the Polynesian Assembly of Representatives.

Hinamoeura Cross of Polynesia and Tina Cordova of New Mexico, both winners of the 2023 Nuclear Free Future Award, embrace in congratulations and commiseration, as both are Downwinders from different parts of the world.

Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz Gunter:

The likely next UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, says Britain will be “fit to fight” with nuclear weapons within a year. So what happened to deterrence?

What Would a Nuclear Blast in Downtown Los Angeles Look Like? 

https://youtu.be/DBodrWwJb5M?si=Uz1f_ESwyvgtHBII

Compare and Contrast:  Picture of what the bombing of Hiroshima looked like to this one infant vs. logo outside the Atomic Museum in Las Vegas, promising all kinds of radioactive, life-destroying fun!

This Week's Featured Interview:

• Sometimes one has to go into the belly of the beast.  While in Las Vegas for the closing two days of the International Uranium Film Festival, I visited the Atomic Museum, which is dedicated to preserving the history of the Nevada Test Site (now known as the Nevada Nevada National Security Site).  I interviewed the museum's Deputy Director and Curator Joseph Kent, an historian who has risen through the ranks of the museum since joining it full time in 2019.  Here is our interview, recorded on May 1, 2024.
• Linda Lovon - An activist attending the International Uranium Film Festival from Hawaii, with her brief thoughts on the museum. 

Atomic Museum's Deputy Director Joseph Kent with his PR handler and Robbie the Robot.

The Miller Map

The Miller Map, by Richard L. Miller, author of Under the Cloud: The Decades of Nuclear Testing.  The true impact of the above ground atomic tests at the Nevada Test Site.  This map and its information is not presented in any way at the Atomic Museum. 

Links to Fill In the Atomic Museum's Blanks:

I urge everyone - especially those who work with the Atomic Museum - to view the following films to fill in the blanks in the "story" told by the Atomic Museum:

• DOWNWIND - Award-winning documentary on every aspect of the Downwinder situation.  Available on Amazon Prime.  Filmmakers:  Douglas Brian Miller, Mark Shapiro
• ATOMIC COVER-UP - The earliest on-the-ground footage of the atomic aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with audio from the cameramen who shot the film.  This material was classified TOP SECRET for decades.  Filmmaker: Greg Mitchell.  Available on PBS. 
• TIME BOMBS - The story of 40 young Canadian soldiers sent to Nevada to be used as guinea pigs  when the American military wanted to know how the average soldier would hold up on a nuclear battlefield.  Filmmakers:  Guylaine Maroist, Eric Ruel

And if you prefer your information in book - which deserves to be stocked in the gift shop - check out American Ground Zero by Carole Gallagher. 

The Nukewatch Report with John LaForge

NRC "apologizes" for lying about Minnesota's Monticello nuclear reactor leaking radioactive tritium contaminated water into Mississippi River.

Links:

• Veterans for Peace webinar — Nuclear Power and Weapons in a Time of Rising Tensions —Thursday, June 20, 2024, 7pm Eastern time. Featured speakers are William Hartung, an expert on US military spending; Beyond Nuclear international specialist, Linda Pentz Gunter; and Greg Mello, director of the Los Alamos Study Group.
• There will be a rally in New York in front of the Japan Consulate at 2 PM on July 6, followed by a gathering at Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza at 3:30 PM, to demand a halt to the dumping of nuclear wastewater from Fukushima.

Alfred Meyer of Physicians for Social Responsibility, mid-Zoom interview

• Alfred Meyer is a long-time member of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) and has served variously as Executive Director of the PSR Wisconsin chapter, Board Member of PSR National, and President of PSR New York.  He co-authored a PSR/IPPNW critique of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) report on the health effects of the radioactive releases from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors. He has also founded, co-founded and/or served as an executive for half a dozen other major organizations dedicated to nuclear issues relating to Fukushima, Chernobyl, Ukraine, and the connection between proposed fusion weapons w/nuclear reactor infrastructure.
  
  I spoke with Alfred Meyer on December 23, 2022.
  
• LINK to Alfred Meyer's article in The Progressive: It's All About the Bomb: Why civilian nuclear power is merely a cover for producing more nuclear weapons.

This Week's Second Featured Interview:

Dr. Gordon Edwards, addressing the United Nations

• Dr. Gordon Edwards is a mathematician, physicist, nuclear consultant, as well as president and co-founder of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, a not-for-profit corporation established in 1975. He has served as a consultant on nuclear issues for governmental and non-governmental bodies for over 45 years, and been accepted as an expert witness by US and Canadian courts and tribunals. He is frequently invited to testify before provincial and federal bodies, and to give major addresses in various countries. He also explains complex nuclear matters in a way that is easy to understand, for which I am deeply grateful.  I spoke with Dr. Edwards on February 12, 2024.

What Scares Me Most about Nuclear:

Excerpts from last year's Halloween feature: "What Scares Me Most about Nuclear."  I spoke with more than 30 activists and concerned citizens about what they found most frightening about nuclear.  Here are just a few, from:

• Jan Boudart - Nuclear Energy Information Service, Chicago (NEIS.org)
• Kevin Hester - Veteran activist, New Zealand
• Dr. Michael Ketterer - chemist, professor, researcher
• Leona Morgan - Haul No (HaulNo.com)
• Brian Morrison - space scientist

You can access the full Halloween special, with more than 30 different speakers on what scares people most about nuclear, by going to:  Nuclear Hotseat #645

The Miller Map.  The path radioactive fallout took from the 100 above-ground nuclear tests in Nevada.  Actually, it took three or more nuclear fallout clouds overhead to make it onto this map.  Compiled by Richard Miller, author of Under the Cloud: The Decades of Nuclear Testing.

This Week's Featured Interview:

Mary Dickson at DC Press Conference for passage of RECA. 
To the right, Dawn Chapman (in green) and Karen Nichol (in blue) of Just Moms StL.

• Mary Dickson is a Salt Lake City journalist and writer whose award-winning play, Exposed, puts a human face on the cost of nuclear testing. She has been recognized by the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility for her lifetime work on behalf of downwinders and regularly speaks out against the resumption of nuclear testing as well as her downwinder information talks.  We talk about the horrific price paid by those who were downwind of the atmospheric atomic bomb tests of the 1950’s and 60’s… and the ongoing legacy of those blasts.
• Contact Mary Dickson:  Exposed.Downwinders@gmail.com

PHONE NUMBERS TO CONTACT CONGRESS FOR RECA:

• Speaker of the House Mike Johnson: 202-225-2777
• House Majority Leader Stephen Joseph Scalise - (202) 225-3015

https://twitter.com/senatorlujan/status/1791154873003569498?s=46

Press Conference on RECA held last week in Washington, DC.

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness):

A public "conference" on nuclear that's supported and promoted by nukesters, yet passes it off as a "public meeting" - how much honest discourse can you possibly expect?  (That was a rhetorical question...)

Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz Gunter

The Lyndon Larouche crowd cravenly promoted building a nuclear power plant in Gaza at a Free Palestine rally. No one bought it.

ICAN UPDATE - Int'l Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons

Latest on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons - with Alistair Burnett reporting from Nobel Peace Prize-winning ICAN headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.

LINKS:

• The Vow from Hiroshima - Now on PBS! A bio-pic of human rights campaigner, Nobel Peace Laureate and Hiroshima A-bomb survivor Setsuko Thurlow's life.  It is also the story of the Treaty to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) which she worked so hard to bring to the world.  Check your local PBS station for listings and a link to streaming.
• Sites with radioactive material more vulnerable as climate change increases wildfire, flood risks
• It’s not just toxic chemicals. Radioactive waste was also dumped off Los Angeles coast

The late, Great, Patti Ameno

Patti Ameno (also Patty, Patricia) grew up in Apollo, Pennsylvania, 35 miles NE of Pittsburgh, not realizing that her childhood home was directly across the street from the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation.  NUMEC manufactured fuel for commercial nuclear power plants and the Navy’s nuclear submarines, leaving behind a legacy of uranium and plutonium waste that impacted the health of everyone in the area — including Patti. 

A trained investigator with Naval Investigative Service (NIS) and former U.S. Federal Criminal Investigator, Patty took on NUMEC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Babcock & Wilcox and Atlantic Richfield… and won.  But the battle she was ultimately unable to win was her fight against illnesses and cancers that wracked her body as a result of that early exposure to radioactive materials. Patti Ameno passed away on Friday, May 10, 2024. She was 72 years old.

This interview was recorded for Nuclear Hotseat #239 for January 20, 2016. 

Patti Ameno Obituary

https://youtu.be/pvY7NAm0QV4?si=UZgQOU_pfez-YqB3

Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz Gunter:

Instead of getting us off nuclear power dependence, a new Russian uranium import ban will further condemn Native American communities to new uranium mines. Here’s Linda Pentz Gunter, back from her sabbatical, with this week’s Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story.

Links:

• Speaker of the House MIKE JOHNSON'S office:  202-225-2777. CALL AND TELL HIM TO BRING RECA TO THE FLOOR FOR A VOTE! 
• NuScale Has Deceived Investors about the Certification of its Reactor


• UN watchdog warns on nuclear trafficking
• As war in the Middle East threatens to spread, nuclear disarmament is imperative

https://nuclearhotseat.com/podcast/1-nuclear-explosion-in-space-emp-fries-grid

Enviro Close-Up with Karl Grossman - The New Nuclear Push featuring Kevin Kamps

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psPv71EODOE

This Week's Featured Interviews:

Some weeks, it's time to catch up with a number of stories.  So here we present a series of short interviews covering a range of issues that are up for us right now.

• Informational meetings between representatives of nuclear radiation-impacted communities around the country with members of the House of Representatives about expanding and extending the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, or RECA. This program, which provides nominal payments for health care help to those whose lives and health have been negatively impacted by government-created radiation exposure, is set to expire on June 7, just only three weeks from now. The meetings with Congress were going on right as I was recording this episode.
  
  I spoke with Dawn Chapman, co-founder of Just Moms StL, the group raising awareness of WWII Manhattan Project radioactive atomic weapons waste which was dumped into Coldwater Creek and which has contaminated water, land, homes, and children.
  
  We spoke on Tuesday, May 14, 2024.
  
  
• Ian Zabarte is Principal Man of the Western Bands of the Shoshone Nation, and organizer of the Las Vegas presentation of the International Uranium Film Festival
  
  
• Shelley Berkeley has served seven terms in Congress and is now running for Mayor of Las Vegas. She was the only Nevada-based politician who chose to attend the festival and who has closely aligned herself with issues regarding the proposed nuclear waste dump site at Yucca Mountain.
  
  
• The International Uranium Film Festival spent two months touring North America, going from Window Rock in Navajo Nation down into Texas, then up the east coast, over to Chicago, the west coast, even Vancouver, British Columbia, before ending its marathon 13-venue, 10,000 mile journey in Las Vegas. IUFF co-Founder and Director, Norbert Suchanek, gives us perspective not only on what this grueling trip was like, but the next set of plans for the IUFF... including Hollywood in November...? 

International Uranium Film Festival co-Founder and Director Norbert Suchanek,
seen here hard at work from his North American Tour office. 

Patricia (Patti) Ameno

It is with great sadness that we let you know that Patti Ameno, long-time activist and a supporter of Nuclear Hotseat since our earliest days, has passed away.  Patti grew up in Apollo, Pennsylvania, 35 miles NE of Pittsburgh, not realizing that her childhood home was directly across the street from the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation.  NUMEC manufactured fuel for commercial nuclear power plants and the Navy’s nuclear submarines, leaving behind a legacy of uranium and plutonium waste that impacted the health of everyone in the area — including Patti.  A trained investigator with Naval Investigative Service (NIS) and former U.S. Federal Criminal Investigator, Patty took on NUMEC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Babcock & Wilcox and Atlantic Richfield… and won. 

Patti Ameno passed on Friday, May 10, 2024. She was 71 years old and died of one of the cancers that plagued her health for so many years.  The full interview with Patti Ameno from Nuclear Hotseat #239 will be aired in the coming weeks. 

Activist Shoutouts:

• Godzilla vs. Music Box Film Series in Chicago, June 7-13, 2024 - co-production of the Music Box Theatre and Japanese Arts Foundation. Depaul University professor Dr. Yuki Miyamoto will be one of the speakers. Tickets available at: MusicBoxTheatre.com.
  
  Meanwhile, enjoy their unique, brief video - the BEST PROMO VIDEO EVER!

https://youtu.be/yk_NCGMC43c?si=dtLgjMQXxizxAjnx

• The original 1954 Japanese film, GODZILLA ("Gojira"), was a metaphor for the nuclear bomb. It was made at a time when direct mention of the impact of the atomic bombs on the people of Japan was still illegal. LINK to full original movie, with Japanese subtitles.   (NOTE:  If you see a version of the "original" GODZILLA film that has Raymond Burr in it, that's a doctored/edited/censored version of the film.  See the full original in Japanese (with subtitles) to understand the atomic bomb parallels.)

Links:

Oppenheimer Opens in Japan: Prof. Robert "Bo" Jacobs of Hiroshima Peace Institute

After a delay of more than one year, the Oppenheimer film has opened in Japan. To learn what the response has been, we spoke with Prof. Robert "Bo" Jacobs of the Hiroshima Peace Institute and the Graduate School of Peace Studies of Hiroshima City University. He is author of the book NUCLEAR BODIES: The Global Hibakusha. Bo gives us an insightful examination of the many issues at play in Japan's muted response to the film, as well as what has kept the country from developing a more robust opposition to nuclear weapons.

Prof. Robert "Bo" Jacobs, Hiroshima Peace Institute and
the Graduate School of Peace Studies of Hiroshima City University

Interview Links:

• NUCLEAR BODIES: The Global Hibakusha
• Robert "Bo" Jacobs website
• Nuclear Hotseat #632 - Hiroshima/Nagasaki Radiation Aftermath – We Are All Hibakusha (A-Bomb Survivors)

The ICAN Update with Alistair Burnett:

Our monthly exclusive report on international activism and progress to enact and enforce the United Nations Treaty to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons.  ICAN head of media Alistair Burnett reports from ICAN headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, with Susi Snyder, ICAN programme coordinator, joining from the Netherlands. 

• The ICAN map of nuclear testing

This Week's Nuclear Hotseat CLASSIC: Independent W.H.O.’s Alison Katz on World Health Organization’s Chernobyl Cover-up