NH #734: Atomic Cabaret with Physics Chanteuse Lynda Williams at Edinburgh Fringe + Remembering Church Rock

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:

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: