Nuclear Hotseat

This Week’s Featured Interview: A jaw-dropping interview with UK Marine Biologist Tim Deere-Jones on the true impact of nuclear industry dredge-and-drop of nuclear 600,000 cubic metres (approx 780,000 tons) of radioactive waste into the Bristol Channel off the coast of Wales.  He works as an independent Marine Pollution Researcher and Consultant with a client list...

This Week’s Featured Interviews: Blast the money out of nuclear weapons!  Nuclear divestment means institutional nuke investments are going down — and Susi Snyder explains how any one of us can join that movement. She is project lead for the PAX No Nukes Project and coordinator for the Don’t Bank on the Bomb research and...

This Week’s SPECIAL Interviews: Following the devastation to New Orleans by Hurricane Ida, mainstream media has failed to cover the situation at the Waterford nuclear facility only 25 miles west of the city.  The facility is shut down, without grid power, and currently cooling the reactor with emergency back-up generators. But is this enough? Will...

This Week’s Featured Interview: Diane Turco is Director of the Cape Downwinders on Cape Cod, a group that’s been fighting against the Pilgrim nuclear power reactor for more than 40 years.  Here, two interviews: Post-shutdown problems at Pilgrim, including site security issues and her pending trial for trespassing to demonstrate to two NPR reporters how...

This Week’s Special Feature: New Mexico Nuclear Activists – On August 8, as part of the commemoration of the atomic bomb being dropped by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Taos Environmental Film Festival produced an important panel discussion.  Anti-nuclear and peace activists shared their views on the problems and possible solutions for...

This Week’s Featured Interview: Nuclear Contamination in Ohio is being tracked by Dr. Michael Ketterer, who has a PhD in Analytical Chemistry and has worked for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Enforcement, taught at John Carroll University, Northern Arizona University, Metropolitan State University of Denver, and at University of Denver. Since 2000, Michael...

This Week’s Featured Interview: Hiroshima Anniversary – 76 years after the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the effects of that bombing persist.  Survivors – who are known as Hibakusha – went on with their lives as best they could, but the legacy of the a-bomb persist into second and now...

This Week’s Featured Interviews: Trinity Downwinders advocating for justice: 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. ...

This Week’s SPECIAL Featured Interviews: Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) was enacted by Congress in 1990 to provide one-time benefits to persons who have likely developed cancer or other specified diseases after exposure to uranium mining, milling or transport, and from radioactive fallout from atomic weapons testing in certain areas of Utah, Nevada and Arizona. ...

This Week’s Featured Interview: Reference Man is the standard first developed in 1949 to establish maximum permissible amounts of radioactive materials in the human body.  BUT because humans are so diverse in age, gender, weight, height, lifestyles, geographic locations and other factors, no Reference Man definition can possibly reflect anything other than a scant few...

This Week’s Featured Interviews: Radiation/Radioactivity – it’s all nuclear madness, no matter what you call it.  But here, two experts give us background on each term, as well as some of how the nuclear industry does not want us to know or talk about any of it. Dr. Gordon Edwards, a Canadian scientist, mathematician, and...

This Week’s SPECIAL Feature: It’s not often that I prep a show’s interviews and then throw them out on Tuesday morning because something more important has happened — but that’s the case this week.  On Monday, June 28, a coalition of community and public interest groups filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Energy...

This Week’s Featured Interview: Nuclear Guinea Pigs:Desmond Narain Doulatram, a citizen of the Marshall Islands, is co-founder of the nonprofit organization REACH-MI (Radiation Exposure Awareness Crusaders for Humanity- Marshall Islands), where he serves as Research Director and Advisor. REACH-MI  provides information and explores ways to address unresolved nuclear issues to improve community conditions, people’s lives, and...

This Week’s Featured Interviews: San Onofre owners Southern California Edison plan to dismantle spent fuel pools – the last line of defense in a radiation accident on the California coast.  Now a lawsuit filed by Samuel Lawrence Foundation seeks to retain spent fuel pools and have a “hot cell” – repackaging unit – built on-site...

This Week’s Featured Interview: Exelon’s nuclear bailout in Illinois is yet another in a series of scams to trick the public out of billions of taxpayer dollars with no guarantee of increased nuclear safety.  We talk with Dave Kraft,  Director of the Nuclear Energy Information Service (NEIS), headquartered in Chicago  He is a veteran of...

This Week’s Featured Interview: 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 who are victims of radioactive contamination from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster...

This Week’s Featured Interview: The International Uranium Film Festival continues with 34 films on a wide range of nuclear issues around the world.  Of the Sense of the Whole: The Network of Physicist Hans-Peter Dürr (VOM SINN DES GANZEN) is a film by Claus Biegert.  As Biegert explains: Hans-Peter Dürr – as a physicist he...

This Week’s Featured Interviews: With the International Uranium Film Festival running online May 20-30 – and free – we bring you interviews with two of the filmmakers.  A third interview will run on next week’s show, #518. Register to watch at: www.UraniumFilmFestival.org.  Click on the Rio 2021 link. The two films and directors featured on...

This Week’s Featured Interviews: New Mexico Nuclear Nightmares – this one dealing with hearings that hide the planned expansion of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant to hold more than 50 TONS of “excess” plutonium – the most deadly radioactive substance on earth.  And all that plutonium will have to be trucked and trained across the...

This Week’s Featured Interviews: Indian Point Shutdown!  The closure of Indian Point’s last operating nuclear reactor – only 25 miles from Manhattan – is a cause for celebration… and a recalibration of the activist response to focus on decommissioning challenges.  Two genuine experts paint the decommissioning picture: Manna Jo Greene has been the Environmental Director...

This Week’s Featured Interviews: Chernobyl Anniversary 35 deserves more than a single program examining its consequences.  Check last week’s Nuclear Hotseat #513 for further interviews.  This week: 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...

This Week’s Featured Interviews: Kate Brown is the author of Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future. She is an historian of environmental and nuclear history at MIT and the author of Plutopia, which won seven major awards. Her research has been funded by the American Academy in Berlin and by Carnegie and Guggenheim...

This Week’s Featured Interview: LA’s Deadly Nuclear Nightmare – Simi Valley mother Melissa Bumstead only found out about the toxic, radioactively contaminated Santa Susan Field Lab – located less than three miles from her home – while her daughter was being treated for neuroblastoma – a rare cancer.  Her story, the history of the site,...

This Week’s Featured interview: Radiation Monitoring in USA based on Japan’s Citizen Activist model is the focus of our interview with this week’s guest.  Originally from Japan, Rachel Clark holds a degree in International Studies from Ramapo College of New Jersey.  As an independent interpreter/global coordinator, her language capacity has been utilized in various international...

This Week’s Featured Interview: Pınar Demircan is a Turkish antinuclear activist and a journalist who started writing about nuclear after the Fukushima nuclear disaster began. She speaks Japanese and English as well as Turkish, and has been involved to global forums and panels where she presented on nuclear projects and the antinuclear struggle in Turkey....

This week’s full-lengthThree Mile Island Anniversary SPECIALfeatures interviews with: Arnie Gundersen, Chief Engineer for Fairewinds Energy Education.Watch a video of Arnie Gundersen speaking about the accident at the 40th Anniversary of the founding of TMI Alert. Peter Bradford, who was a Commissioner at the Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner  during the TMI accident. Eric Epstein, Chair of...

This Week’s Featured Interview: Plutonium + Nazis + Crashes = U.S. Nukes in Space Dangers – As regular listeners to Nuclear Hotseat know, Karl Grossman is one of my favorite interviewees. He is an author and journalism professor at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury, host of the television program Enviro Close-Up...

  Fukushima 10: Voices from Japan – The 9th edition of Nuclear Hotseat’s Voices from Japan features on-the-ground interviews with people working in or involved with Fukushima.  For the first time, we are posting the original interviews in Japanese (scroll down). The interviews on this episode of Nuclear Hotseat: Voices from Japan were based on...

This Week’s Featured Interviews: Activists getting active on multple fronts! Linda Seeley is a veteran member of the group San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace.  Here, she fills us in on how the New York article, The Activists who Embrace Nuclear (GAK!) was not researched with anyone connected with the group – meaning due diligence...

This Week’s Featured Interviews: TEXAS NUCLEAR’S EPIC FAIL – Erica Gray, Nuclear Issues Chair of the Sierra Club, checks and posts the Nuclear Regulatory Commission status (power level) and event (accidents, problems) reports on social media the five days a week that they are supposed to be issued.  Last week, Nuclear Hotseat offered a rundown...

This Week’s Featured Interview: Nuclear Biden – a primer for the new president.  Alyn Ware is a New Zealand peace educator and campaigner in the areas of peace, non-violence, nuclear abolition, international law, women’s rights, children’s rights, indigenous rights, and the environment. He has served as the Global Coordinator for Parliamentarians for Nuclear Nonproliferation and...

This Week’s Featured Interview: Karl Grossman is an author and journalism professor at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury. He hosts the television program Enviro Close-Up with Karl Grossman, is the author of six books, and writer of numerous magazine, newspaper and Internet articles. That doesn’t even come close to describing his...

This Week’s Featured Interview: Oregon Nuclear Legislation is being proposed that will knock the knees out of 1980’s ballot initiative that banned nuclear reactors in Oregon until/unless they were approved by voters AND the federal government had a working long-term storage facility for the resulting high level nuclear waste.  Lonnie Clark – both a podcaster...

This Week’s Featured Interview: Hanford Downwinders stories preserved – The Hanford Plaintiffs: Voices from the Fight for Atomic Justice, written by Trisha Pritikin, was published in 2020. She is an attorney and a Hanford downwinder who felt compelled to preserve the stories of Hanford downwinders who tried to take part in the law suit. Joining...

Treaty to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons passes into international law as of Friday, January 22, 2021! SPECIAL FEATURE: Nuclear Hotseat at 500!  A look back featuring excerpts from: NOTE:  This is not an all-inclusive rundown of episodes, just a saunter through some moments that have stuck with me from the first 9-1/2 years of Nuclear Hotseat...

This Week’s Featured Interview: Radioactive Olympics Torch Relay – Again! – Beverly Findlay-Kaneko is Nuclear Hotseat’s Voices from Japan producing partner.  She evacuated Japan with her son following the 2011 nuclear disaster.  Here, she provides details from on-the-ground reports out of Fukushima Prefecture, along with direct statements by former residents of Futaba translated from Japanese blog posts exclusively...

This Week’s Featured Interview:  Radioactive Olympics – Dr. Alex Rosen is one of two co-chairs of the German affiliate of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), where he is responsible for the topic of nuclear energy.  Dr. Rosen is a pediatric specialist and head of the pediatric emergency department of the...

This Week’s Feature SPECIAL: NUCLEAR NUMNUTZ 2020 – Numnutz of the Week is Nuclear Hotseat’s most popular feature – always good for a laugh, a head-shake, or a deep sigh at some freshly revealed nuclear absurdity, or to provoke a sense of outrage at how a single industry has been allowed to play so loose...

A SPECIAL Nuclear Hotseat interview that considers what Peace is, what Peace Culture is, and how we might work on a planetary basis to institute new ways of being and building for a sustainable future.  A Holiday gift from me and the crew at Nuclear Hotseat for those who are working in what this interview...

Nuclear Racism: Navajo Nation’s Radioactive Legacy –Uranium mining disaster site: SRIC’s Chris Shuey on site at Church Rock, explaining the devastation of the 1979 uranium tailings pond spill of 94-million gallons of highly acidic radioactive waste into Puerco River on Navajo Nation land. This Week’s Featured Interview:

Social Media for Activists:  Beyond the Bomb and Global Zero’s Colleen Moore (above)explains powerful social media techniques for anti-nuclear activists. This Week’s Featured Interviews: Social Media for Activists:  Colleen Moore is Digital Engagement Manager for Beyond the Bomb and Global Zero.  She creates content to promote the message of eliminating nuclear weapons. Colleen has experience...

Children of Atomic Veterans – DNA damage, penile cancer,and the message: Don’t have kids! The American devastation of military personnel from the atomic bomb test radiationthat devastated the Marshall Islands and its people. This Week’s Featured Interview: Children of Atomic Veterans focuses on medical and genetic issues in those whose parents – primarily fathers –...

UN Nuclear Weapons Ban – The inside scoop from Ray Acheson,Director of Reaching Critical Will, Women’s International League for Peace and FreedomShe was in ALL the rooms where it happened! This Week’s Featured Interview: UN Nuclear Weapons Ban:  Ray Acheson is Director of the Disarmament Programme of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom...

This Week’s Featured Interview – A Nuclear Hotseat CLASSIC: Chernoby Truth, World Health Org. Lies Revealed – Alison Katz is a psychologist and sociologist who heads Independent WHO. The international watchdog group draws attention to the World Health Organization’s failure in its duty to protect those populations who are victims of radioactive contamination from Chernobyl and, later, Fukushima.  The...

Seabrook Nuclear Concrete Containment Degradation – 40 miles from Bostonand licensed until 2050! This Week’s Featured Interviews: Seabrook Nuclear Station watchdog Natalie Hildt Treat is Executive Director of the C-10 Foundation, which operates the only real time radiation monitoring system open to the public.  This allows it to keep a sharp and critical eye on...

Exelon Nuclear Hostage Crisis called out by Dave Kraft of NEIS, seen here at hiscommand control console for slaying nuclear dragons. NOTE:  Letters are still needed to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission opposing plans for Holtec to build a so-called “Interim” high level radioactive waste storage site in New Mexico.  Deadline is September 22, 2020.  PLEASE: ...

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...

Saskatchewan First Nations activists Candyce Paul (r) and a lurking Marius Paul (lower l)Interview by Libbe HaLevy This Week’s Featured Interview: Saskatchewan First Nations activist Candyce Paul has lived in northern Saskatchewan for more than three decades with her husband, Marius Paul. She spent many years living and learning the traditional northern culture which she...

Nuclear Hell:  Hibakusha Setsuko Thurlow at the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize Awards Ceremony, giving her acceptance speech on behalf of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons This Week’s Special Commemorative Features: Nuclear Hell began 75 years ago with the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  It continues to this day, with...

Nukegate in Ohio:  Activists against Ohio’s bailout of failing nuclear reactors were gamed out of their referendum to block it in 2019.  Now, there’s a scandal with criminal indictments against the Ohio House of Representatives Speaker Larry Householder for taking First Energy money (aka “bribes”).  This may show the way to bailout reversal.  Attorney Terry...