NH #481: Los Alamos Toxic Nuclear Tour of Legacy Radiation at NM LAB w/Joni Arends

Los Alamos Toxic Nuclear Tour – LANL is the Manhattan Project site where Little Boy,
the first atomic bomb, was designed and built.  Schematics of bomb above.

This Week’s Special Feature: 

• Los Alamos Toxic Tour Smug Stupid Los Alamos – its history and current problems – is the subject of this week’s show. Joni Arends is one of the founders of Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety and a 32 year veteran of that group. She provided the guided tour of public lands around the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), one of the original Manhattan Project sites. This is where, during World War II, the United States military kicked local farmers, ranchers and a children’s school off their ancestral land in order to build the first atomic bomb in isolation and secrecy. Joni’s Toxic Tour (as it has come to be known) took us to bluffs overlooking Manhattan Project-era laboratories, nuclear weapons facilities, radioactive waste dump sites, and the Rio Grande river, which has been and continues to be impacted by the migration of LANL radioactive, hazardous and toxic contaminants through surface and ground water pathways.Additional information on the tour was provided by Leona Morgan, Diné, who helped to found the Nuclear Issues Study Group of Albuquerque, and Ian Zabarte, Head Man of the Western Shoshone Nation.

Los Alamos Toxic Tour – Souvenir tee shirts, including an infant’s onesie! 

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness):

Nuclear industry players have NO incentive to act responsibly with nukes or radioactive waste when all they don when they’re caught is pay a pittance of a fine, with no ongoing responsability to clean up the waste.  Case in point:  Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. 

Activist Info Links:

• Back from the Brink ZoominaronOrganizing to Prevent Nuclear War in the Current Moment with Dr. Vincent Intondi, historian and author of African Americans Against the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism an the Black Freedom Movement.   Thursday, September 10, 2020 – 5 pm Pacific/8 pm Eastern.
• Article:  Russia’s “Slow-Motion Chernobyl”
• Article:  Forest Fires are Setting Chernobyl’s Radiation Free