Raising Consciousness About Nuclear Technologies, War-Making and Climate Change
What’s the connection between militarism, nuclear weapons, nuclear power and climate change and how can people organize to effectively confront these existential challenges to our civilization, our species and the living planet? Those were the questions asked and answered in workshops held in New York as part of the Peoples Climate Convergence.

In this edition, we bring you our video coverage of some of those programs. Watch this space for future videos from the workshops. Our thanks to Western States Legal Foundation and to those of you who contributed the support that made our coverage of these important events possible.

Michael Klare – War & Climate Change
Author and peace scholar Michael Klare gave this talk as part of a workshop held ahead of the New York Climate Convergence on Saturday, September 20, 2014 at St. John’s University – New York City.
Sponsored by United For Peace and Justice, the workshop was titled “Uniting Our Strategies to Stop War and Save the Planet.”

Jackie Cabasso – Nukes & Climate Change Don’t Mix
Western States Legal Foundation’s Executive Director Jacqueline Cabasso gave this talk as part of a workshop series held ahead of the New York Climate Convergence on Saturday, September 20, 2014 at St. John’s University – New York City. The series was titled “Deadly Connections: Challenging Nuclear Weapons, Nuclear Power, and Climate Change.”
Cabasso’s talk opened the first segment of the workshop which focused on “Nuclear Weapons, Nuclear Power, and the Nuclear Disarmament Impasse.”

DEADLY CONNECTIONS: Challenging Nuclear Weapons, Power & Climate Change – Part 1

“Nuclear Weapons, Nuclear Power, and the Nuclear Disarmament Impasse”
This is Part 1 of workshop series held ahead of the New York Climate Convergence on Saturday, September 20, 2014 at St. John’s University – New York City. The 2 workshops were sponsored by Western States Legal Foundation, the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy and the American Friends Service Committee with support from the Jane Addams Peace Association.

Speakers included:
Jackie Cabasso, Executive Director, Western States Legal Foundation; National Co-Convener, United for Peace and Justice.
M.V. Ramana, Program on Science and Global Security, Princeton University.
Joseph Gerson, Disarmament Coordinator, American Friends Service Committee.
Andrew Lichterman, Senior Research Analyst, Western States Legal Foundation.
Moderator: Sophia Wolman, American Friends Service Committee
For more info: WSLFweb.org, AFSC.org.

DEADLY CONNECTIONS: Challenging Nuclear Weapons, Power & Climate Change – Part 2

“Acting Locally and Globally to Pressure the Capitals.”
This is Part 2 of a workshop series held ahead of the New York Climate Convergence on Saturday, September 20, 2014 at St. John’s University – New York City. The series was titled “Deadly Connections: Challenging Nuclear Weapons, Nuclear Power, and Climate Change.”

Speakers include:
Tony DeBrum, Foreign Minister, Republic of the Marshall Islands
John Burroughs, Executive Director, Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy, member of the international legal team representing the Marshall Islands in their historic World Court case holding the nuclear-armed states to account for non-compliance with their disarmament obligations.
Frank Cownie, Mayor of DesMoines, Iowa; member of Mayors for Peace; Board Member, ICLEI USA (Local Governments for Sustainability USA).
Judith LeBlanc, Field Director, Peace Action.

The workshops were sponsored by Western States Legal Foundation, the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy and the American Friends Service Committee with support from the Jane Addams Peace Association. For more info: WSLFweb.org, AFSC.org.

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Uniting Our Strategies to Stop War and Save the Planet
A panel of activists from a variety of issues areas talk about how they can join forces to end war-making and save the planet.
A workshop held ahead of the New York Climate Convergence on Saturday, September 20, 2014 at St. John’s University – New York City.
Sponsor: United for Peace & Justice
Moderator: Jackie Cabasso, Western States Legal Foundation, UFPJ National Co-convener.
Presenters:
Michael Klare, author of “Resource Wars,” “Blood and Oil,” and “The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources” (15 min.)
Lisa Fithian, Alliance of Community Trainers
Michael Eisenscher, US Labor Against the War
Michael McPhearson, Veterans for Peace
Mary Hladky, Military Families Speak Out
Matt Howard, Iraq Veterans Against the War
Saif Rahman, RESIST

For more info: UnitedForPeace.org

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On Sept. 21, 2014 hundreds of thousands of people from multiple issue areas took part in over 2640 Peoples’ Climate Convergence events in 156 countries. There are now more activists at work, on more issues, in more places, and on more levels – from the local to the planetary – than ever before in human history. The world-wide Peoples’ Climate Convergence events on Sept. 21, 2014 were a sign that single-issue activists are coming out of their issue ‘siloes’ and making common cause for the planet – truly a ‘Movement of Movements.’ The immune system of the global body politic is awakened. It is alive and well and responding to the challenge. We are deeply grateful for the contributions from our subscribers that allowed us to be there.

The experience of being on Wall Street at noon and Bolinas at midnight is both psychically intense and carbon intensive. We hope these reports of our intense NY experience, recollected in Bolinas tranquility, will inform, encourage and empower you and justify our carbon footprint. Here is the beginning of our report-backs. Please stay tuned…and please keep the support coming – it’s what makes our work possible.

[Visit our EON3 YouTube Channel for the first series of our video reports from this event.

Clips from the NIRS pre-climate march rally are here.

Clips from the Western State Legal Foundation pre-climate march rally are here. ]

Introducton by EON Co-Director Mary Beth Brangan

The joyful experience of joining with at least 400,000 others passionately
marching for the planet left me with hope.

Endless exuberance, amazing creativity and the huge diversity of race, class, gender and age all frolicking with humor and determination was a boost not only to me but to the planetary system for sure.

There were very young children, youth, teens, parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. There were representatives from every race and nationality and part of the US.

The whole city of NY seemed different, lighter to me while we were there with so many others of the same mind.

So many had made the trip and the march though it was expensive and arduous…. We gave each other hope and a sense of our cooperative power.

The atmosphere was brighter, more humane. More synchronicities were happening. People, even in the crush of the march were considerate and glowing with jaunty and poignant signs and music.

On Monday, truly an impressive flood of people flowed into Wall Street to protest in the streets – again with humor, determination, creativity and pizza.

And to top it off, the announcement was made Monday that the Rockefeller Bro. Fund was divesting from all fossil fuel investments. The Wallace Global Fund, who had divested already four years ago, emphasized on Democracy Now! that their portfolio value had actually increased more by the move out of fossils and into renewables.

So, despite the fact that our situation does look dire, my expectation of pleasant surprises is strengthened. You never know…Remember how quickly the Berlin Wall fell?

We were definitely blessed to be there with our diverse kindred spirits at such a historic moment!

A Planetarian Event – Success in the Streets, Failure in the Suites
Climate Change Consciousness Goes Viral

By James Heddle and Mary Beth Brangan

We must enlarge our approach to encompass the formation taking place before our eyes … of a particular biological entity such as has never existed on earth – the growth, outside and above the biosphere, of an added planetary layer, an envelope of thinking substance, to which, for the sake of convenience and symmetry, I have given the name of the Noosphere.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Birthing the Noosphere
The passing young woman’s glittering, handmade sign read, “Extinction Would Suck.”

In the creative chaos of last weekend’s Peoples’ Climate Convergence in New York, there was no chance to comment that extinction does suck – and, in fact, is sucking.

As Elizabeth Kolbert’s recent book The Sixth Extinction makes soberingly clear, the planetary fact hovering over all the various issues represented in the events comprising the worldwide Peoples’ Climate Convergences in 128 countries last weekend – social, environmental & economic justice, racism, sexism, the permanent war economy, the threats of nuclear energy, weapons and waste, corporate capitalism’s war on the planet – is that we are already in the midst of an escalating global mass extinction of species.

The good news is that the planet has suffered and recovered from five previous extinctions. In the most recent, the Pleistocene Extinction, – some 66 million years ago – earth lost 95% of its life-forms…and bounced back.

The bad news is that this current bout of planet-wide species loss is the first great extinction to be caused by human activity. Most tragically, DNA damage caused by human-made radiation is arguably more fundamentally damaging than prior extinctions and this time more planetary systems are deliberately being disrupted by human activities; the ionosphere, the troposphere, stratosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, magnetosphere, lithosphere and geosphere.

Consciousness of that planetary context gave a special sense of significance, poignancy and urgency to our experience of the Convergence as we worked to document the mini-conferences, workshops and rallies on nuclear issues organized by our friends at the Western States Legal Foundation and the Nuclear Resource and Information Service (NIRS).

Through our video reporting we want to amplify the voices of our friends and colleagues emphasizing that nuclear power is NOT the answer to climate change and that we must stop the push to make more nuclear weapons and radioactive waste.

The Best We Can Do is Avert the Worst and Build the Better
Inextricably connected, mass species extinction and climate change will now form the inescapable context of everything humans do from now on. As Naomi Klein – a strong presence at the Convergence – frankly states in her timely new book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate,

“…it’s too late to stop climate change from coming; it is already here, and increasingly brutal disasters are headed our way no matter what we do. But it’s not too late to avert the worst…”

And it’s not too late to co-create a planetarian alternative to deregulated corporate capitalism stuck on ‘self-destruct.’ Climate change will lead to system change, but whether it will be break-through or break-down will depend on whether the values and the vision represented by the Convergence can be implemented on a planetary scale in the next few years (we don’t have even a decade).

It’s the Stupid System, Stupid – We Have Solutions
The crazy-making insanity of the climate imbroglio is that we KNOW what kind of values need to be institutionalized and enforced; we KNOW what kind of institutions and regulatory regimes need to be created ( 10-point plan ) (by fiat, just like all existing ones currently imposed on us without our consent by global elites); we HAVE the technologies we need for a sustainable climate/energy transition; we KNOW that clean, renewable, decentralized, horizontally organized, small-scale, publicly-owned, locally governed ‘distributed’ energy generation and distribution systems must replace polluting, hierarchical investor-owned utilities (aptly termed ‘IOUs’).

Though perhaps the most eloquent, beloved Naomi Klein is not the first to point out that corporate capitalism is killing the planet. Fellow Canadian John McMurtry pointed that out in his powerfully argued 1999 book The Cancer Stage of Capitalism. John Michael Greer made the same point in his 2011 book The Wealth of Nature: Economics as if Survival Mattered. Anti-globalization advocate Jerry Mander explored the ideology’s inevitable failures in his 2012 The Capitalism Papers: Fatal Flaws of an Obsolete System

But, to our knowledge, Klein is the first to clearly detail one of the key fundamental stupidities of the system: trade and climate agreements are separate and contradictory. And trade rules always trump climate ‘agreements.’ Emission-reduction targets are ‘voluntary’ and unenforced. Trade rules set out by the World Trade Organization (WTO) are legally binding and ruthlessly enforced. Corporations can successfully sue countries or states for having environmental laws that reduce corporate profits. But suits against corporations for fouling the global environment are unlikely to succeed. Actions to heal the planet are WTO-illegal. Actions that damage the planet are legally enforceable under WTO rules.

The result, as McKenzie Funk documents in his new book Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming, is ‘melt, drought and deluge,’ from which the new and growing breed of climate change profiteers can make a lot of money.

It is the paradigmatic paralysis imposed by the reigning sociopathic ideology that guides all decision making to the Bottom Line – Greed is Good; short-term profit for the few at the expense of long-term well-being for the many; infinite, perpetual economic growth on a finite, polluted and depleted planet in the midst of a Great Extinction.

As Klein puts it, “…the three pillars of the neo-liberal age – privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and the lowering of income and corporate taxes, paid for with cuts to public spending – are each incompatible with many of the actions we must take to bring our emissions to safe levels. And together these pillars form an ideological wall that has blocked a serious response to climate change for decades.”

Separation of Street and Summit
Beyond a few token civil society groups, no representative of social movement NGO’s were invited to participate in Ban Ki-Moon’s UN Summit in which, as the New York Times itself pointed out, “companies are playing a larger role than at any such gathering in the past.”

The one-day green-washing event – which was not part of the official process of UN climate negotiations – seemed mainly to have the goal of promoting corporate-friendly ‘carbon market mechanisms’ rather than movement toward any clear and binding date-certain emission-control targets.

It was not without symbolic significance that the NY climate march followed a crooked path through the city dictated by the NYPD and ended up on the opposite side of the island from its putative target audience at the UN, the environs of which were a cordoned-off no-go zone for those without security passes.

The following day’s Flood Wall Street event again showed public passion effectively managed and contained by Mayor de Blazio’s Police Department. Mayor de Blasio actually joined the People’s Climate March the day before and under his administration, police were more measured in their interaction with protestors than in prior Occupy Wall Street actions before his tenure.

So, did the Convergence events have any impact on the so-called ‘world leaders’ meeting the following week at the UN? Not much, says Pablo Solon writing for Focus on the Global South.

After this week in New York, it is once again obvious that real solutions are not going to come from the UN, heads of state, corporations or the World Bank. Our main goal in strengthening marches like the one on September 21st is not to target the UN climate negotiations, but to build a movement that is strong enough to challenge and change the capitalist system. The main lesson from this week is that we need to make even stronger and more permanent mobilizations with much more clear messages targeting the main polluters, which are the big corporations. A march that calls for “climate action” without clearly saying what that action should be can be manipulated or used to promote wrong actions. In that sense, more than 370 organizations around the world have put forward a 10-point plan to really address the structural causes of climate change. At the next UN negotiations Lima, Peru, the challenge for social and grassroots movements is to come out with a plan of action to support clear demands to stop climate chaos.

[ For a comprehensive blow-by-blow of the day’s Summit events, including videos and tweets, see this Guardian timeline.

For a summary of who made what(non-binding, voluntary) pledges to do which, see this.

For what more than 370 NGO’s agree should and shouldn’t be done, see this.]

UN climate chief Christiana Figueres termed the Summit ‘clearly not enough’and, according to BusinessGreen.com, backed a scathing critique by Nelson Mandela’s widow Graça Machel who told the UN general Assembly at the end of the summit. “I acknowledge that there is the beginning of understanding of the gravity of the challenge we face, but at the same time, I have the impression that there is a huge mismatch between the magnitude of the challenge and the response which we heard here today.”

Peter Rugh of Waging Nonviolence had a more sanguine assessment, pointing out that:

The day following the march, the heirs to John D. Rockefeller, the famed 20th century oil baron, announced they were divesting their $860 million charitable fund from fossil fuels. Addressing the United Nations last Tuesday, President Obama referenced the demonstration, stating, “Our citizens keep marching. We cannot pretend we do not hear them.”

While it might seem like another toothless remark from the president, it at the very least shows that the commotion two days earlier penetrated the inner sanctums of power.

For us the most upbeat, yet realistic commentary is How We Win on Climate Change by author and activist Harvey Wasserman. He points to five:

…inter-related issues we can’t avoid:

NET NEUTRALITY defines the core nervous system of what’s left of global democracy. The corporations want it killed. This demands everyone’s immediate attention.

CORPORATE PERSONHOOD must die by Constitutional Amendment.

ELECTION PROTECTION demands universal hand-counted paper ballots, an end to Jim Crow vote theft and a ban on the corporate billions that poison what’s left of our democracy.

SOCIAL JUSTICE, including workplace democracy and a universal living wage, means we can all live and work with integrity, no matter our diverse religions, race, gender, sexual preference, etc. Poverty is an unsustainable form of planet-killing pollution.

PEACE means ending the suicidal idiocy of permanent imperial war.

All these difficult issues are essential to the health of our species. We don’t get to a green-powered Earth without bringing them with us.

Much Ado About Something – Let the ‘Little People’ Vent – On With the Show
But the NY Times front page on the following Monday seemed to graphically show a permanent war system stuck on ‘self-destruct’ and how nonchalantly the ruling establishment takes the survival challenges facing our civilization as well as its attempts to minimize the powerful public will for change.

Four small, not-very-informative pictures of the Convergence were flanked above the fold by the headline “U.S. Ramping Up Major Renewal in Nuclear Arms.”

While noting the participation of Al Gore, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and NY Mayor Bill de Blasio (Where’s the parade? We’ll get in front and lead it.) , the brief Times story on the march called it “…mostly an event for concerned ordinary people, many of them veterans of climate change efforts, others relative newcomers.” Translation: No real Power Holders were involved. Most of the space in the article was taken up by a large aerial picture of a few straggling marchers that had nothing to do with the closely packed, miles long sea of marchers we experienced and documented.

The Times nuclear ramp-up piece used the recent dedication of the National Security Campus in Kansas City to launch a largely uncritical report on

‘…a nationwide wave of atomic revitalization that includes plans for a new generation of weapon carriers. A recent federal study put the collective price tag, over the next three decades, at up to a trillion dollars.’

But even the story’s two authors did not fail to notice the irony that ‘this expansion comes under a president who campaigned for “a nuclear-free world” and made disarmament a main goal of American defense policy. ‘

Nuclear Winter is Not an Antidote to Climate Change
That irony was precisely the concern being raised in the well-attended mini-conference focusing on the nuclear energy-weapons-waste component of the overall climate change challenge.

Years ago, the late science luminary Carl Sagan was famously the spokesperson for a report (TTAPS) demonstrating that the result of even a limited a war using atomic weapons would produce massive global atmospheric clouding and cause a ‘nuclear winter’ by obscuring solar input.

Now, as nuclear weapons upgrading and saber-rattling kicks in, and as expansion of nuclear power generation is being falsely touted as a ‘clean energy solution’ even in the wake of the on-going Fukushima disaster, the dangers of nuclear technologies and their deadly waste are re-emerging from decades of public inattention into increasingly wide-spread public consciousness and concern, particularly in the thousands of communities most directly affected.

Whatever effect the Convergence had on ‘world leaders’ at the UN, the events demonstrated a growing global solidarity across previously siloed issue areas as well as across class, gender and racial lines. The workshops and events we documented explored the many connections between nuclear technologies and democratic choice; social, economic and environmental justice; racism; sexism and gender bias; energy policy; war, peace and climate change. They help set the context for what looks like a growing multi-issue ‘movement of movements.’

Visit our EON3 YouTube Channel for the first series of our video reports from this event.

Clips from the NIRS pre-climate march rally are here.

Clips from the Western State Legal Foundation pre-climate march rally are here.

Here’s an outline of workshops we covered. Workshop excerpts will follow in up-coming posts:

Deadly Connections: Challenging Nuclear Weapons, Nuclear Power and Climate Change Pt. 1
Jacqueline Cabasso, Sofia Wolman, M.V. Ramana, Joseph Gerson, Andrew Lichterman Co-Sponsored by Jane Addams Peace Association

Nuclear Power Makes Climate Change Worse and is Stealing our Energy Future
Diane D’Arrigo, Jessica Azulay,
Sponsored by Nuclear Information and Resource Service

Deadly Connections: Challenging Nuclear Weapons, Nuclear Power and Climate Change Pt. 2
Jacqueline Cabasso, Tony DeBrum, John Burroughs, Franklin Cownie, Judith LeBlanc Co-Sponsored by Jane Addams Peace Association

Uniting Our Strategies to Stop War and Save the Planet
Jackie Cabasso, Lisa Fithian, Michael Klare, Michael Eisenscher, Michael McPhearson Co-Sponsored by United For Peace and Justice

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Raising Nuclear Awareness, Envisioning a Clean Energy Future

On August 12, 2014 Cultural Potholes Institute and the EON – the Ecological Options Network teamed up to present an upbeat program on challenges and opportunities to a standing-room-only audience in Pt. Reyes, California.

In the video segment below – MC-ed by Jim Heddle – author Cecile Pineda introduces main speaker Harvey Wasserman, who lays out his assessment of nuclear dangers and his vision of solar possibilities.

In up-coming segments John Bertucci and Dan Sythe talk about citizen-based strategies for monitoring on-going Fukushima fallout and Mary Beth Brangan surveys health protection measures people can take to help themselves and their families resist the impact of radiological polution in food, water and air.

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“Failure to Disarm: Holding Our Government Accountable”

Hiroshima Commemoration, Protest & Nonviolent Direct Action at Livermore Lab Highlights Courageous “Nuclear Zero” Lawsuits Brought by the Marshall Islands.

California peace advocates marked the 69th Anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the Livermore Lab, where the U.S. is spending billions of dollars to create new and modified nuclear weapons. The aptly titled event, “Failure to Disarm,” highlighted the landmark litigation filed recently by the tiny Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), used as a U.S. nuclear test site for 12 years, against the nine nuclear weapons states for their failure to disarm under the Nuclear Non-­‐Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and customary international law. The RMI also filed a separate case against the U.S. in Federal Court in San Francisco. The complaint specifically cites Livermore Lab’s activities to modernize the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile as a breach of the NPT and flagrant violation of international law.

Excerpts – Protest & Nonviolent Direct Action at Livermore Lab

Rick Wayman – Keynote
Rick Wayman delivered the keynote. Wayman is Director of Programs for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. He worked on nuclear policy with the UK Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament before moving to Santa Barbara in 2007 to join NAPF. Wayman works closely with the government of the Republic of the Marshall Islands to coordinate the educational, policy and legal components of the litigation.

Jackie Cabasso – Nuclear Militarism
Jackie Cabasso addresses resurgent U.S. militarism in Asia-­‐Pacific and the growing dangers of great power wars among nuclear armed nations. Cabasso, Executive Director of the Oakland-­‐based Western States Legal Foundation since 1984, is an internationally recognized leading voice for nuclear weapons abolition. She was the recipient of the 2008 Sean McBride Peace Prize.

Chizu Hamada – Hiroshima & Fukushima
Chizu Hamada speaks on the links between nuclear weapons, nuclear power and the ongoing dangers at Fukushima Daiichi. Hamada is a San Francisco business owner and spokesperson for the No Nukes Action Committee, a group of Japanese citizens, Japanese-­‐Americans and others who came together after the 3/11/2011 earthquake, tsunami and meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Scott Yundt – New Nuclear Weapons
Scott Yundt details weapons activities currently underway at Livermore Lab. Yundt is Staff Attorney at the Livermore-­‐based Tri-­‐Valley CAREs. He manages the group’s environmental and “right to know” litigation, and is preparing an amicus brief in support of the Marshall Islands’ Federal case. Yundt facilitates a support group for Livermore Lab and other workers made ill by on the job exposures.

On the 69th Anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, activists gathered at the location where scientists are developing new and modified nuclear weapons. The Livermore Lab budget request reveals that 89% of the money will go to nuclear weapons activities in the coming fiscal year.

Overall, the U.S. government spends nearly $2 million each hour on the nuclear weapons stockpile. U.S. spending will reach nearly $4 million each hour by 2030. This reality stands in stark contrast to the President’s rhetoric of seeking a “world without nuclear weapons” and the U.S. legal commitment to disarm under the NPT.

The tiny Pacific Island Nation of the Republic of the Marshall Islands has filed valiant “Nuclear Zero” lawsuits against the U.S. and eight other nuclear weapons states in the International Court of Justice in The Hague. The nuclear nine are: the U.S., Russia, UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. The Marshallese have also filed separately against the United States in the U.S. Federal District Court in San Francisco. The Marshall Islanders know all too well the devastating effects of living in the nuclear age.

From 1946 to 1958, the U.S conducted 67 nuclear weapons tests in the Marshall Islands. Their explosive power was estimated to be 1,000 times greater than the atomic bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet, the Marshallese are not seeking damages in their historic litigation. Instead they seek to compel compliance with the nuclear disarmament obligation enshrined in the NPT and in customary international law binding on all states.

The Japanese Hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) also speak for global nuclear disarmament. Each August 6 and 9th, their voices are raised to cry “never again,” so that no others shall ever feel the horrific blast, heat, thirst, radiation sickness and either bloody death or [often] lingering illness that follows. On this August 6th, participants remembered with sadness our government’s use of nuclear weapons on the Japanese people and recommit with joy to our ongoing our efforts to abolish nuclear weapons – an urgent necessity for our collective survival. They stood, also, in solidarity with the people of the Marshall Islands as their historic litigation for nuclear zero wends its way through the international and domestic court systems.

For more info:
WagingPeace.org
TriValleyCares.org
WSLFweb.org
PSR.org
NoNukesAction.wordpress.com
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Too Hot to Handle. Too Hot to Move.
Over 1,600 tons mostly ‘high burn-up’ highly radioactive waste is stored in overlapping earthquake, tsunami, and wildfire zones at the shutdown San Onofre reactor site.

Donna Gilmore, founder of SanOnofreSafety.org, explains in seven minutes why what’s happening with San Onofre’s high level nuclear fuel waste is incredibly dangerous and vitally important for the public to know about.

San Onofre, owned by Southern California Edison, may be considered by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) as a prototype for dealing with the deadly intensely radioactive reactor waste in shut down reactors across the U.S., according to Citizen’s Engagement Chair, David Victor.

Residents must pressure the NRC and utility owners not to make storage decisions for highly corrosive, hot radioactive waste hazardous for 250,000 years based on cost rather than safety.

Cutting corners on design, materials and personnel puts all of southern California, major seaports and the nation’s food supply at risk.

See SanOnofreSafety.org
For a 2-page PDF summarizing Gilmore’s research and recommendations to the CPUC, DENY FUNDING FOR NUHOMS 32PHT2-DSC DRY STORAGE CANISTERS – INDEPENDENT STUDY NEEDED REGARDING SAN ONOFRE NUCLEAR WASTE STORAGE click here.

Scroll down or Click here for
What You Can Do

Lowering the Bar for “Waste Confidence” Policy
Policy for short, mid- and long-term storage for tons of extremely radioactive ‘high burn-up’ nuclear fuel at nuclear reactor sites around the country may be set at the recently shutdown San Onofre nuclear plant on the southern California coast between San Diego and L.A..

Its shutdown on June 7, 2013 was an important milestone in the accelerating demise of nuclear power. Fairewinds.org Chief Nuclear Engineer, Arnie Gundersen called it, “A seismic event for the nuclear industry.”

Now the controversial conundrum of what to do with its over 1,600 tons of highly radioactive waste in an earthquake/tsunami/wildfire zone in the middle of Camp Pendelton, a major strategic US military base, in a major urban, industrial, shipping and agricultural region is becoming a major point in the nuclear policy debate.

That’s why a recent “Community Engagement Meeting” hosted June 22 by Southern California Edison [Video here.] drew the attendance of high level transnational nuclear industry executives with an eye for the tremendous profits to be made from the decommissioning process.

However, the hasty rush by the NRC to approve a controversial cask for storage without considering the additional problems of ‘high burn up’ fuel was partially blocked by joint action of environmental groups who signed onto a letter by Diane Curran to the NRC.

NRC Breaks Own Rules
In a recent letter to the NRC on behalf of over 20 environmental groups, D.C. attorney Diane Curran urged the agency to ‘withdraw and reconsider’ a hasty rule change issued April 15, 2014 approving ““new transportable dry shielded canister (DSC)” for shipment of high burn-up fuel on the nation’s highways and railways. According to Curran,

The Direct Rule flagrantly violates the requirements of the Atomic Energy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act for prior notice and opportunity for public participation in NRC decisions affecting public safety and the environment. Citizens Awareness Network v. NRC, 59 F.3d 284 (1st Cir. 1995). Equally troubling, the notice is grossly misleading, and appears designed to lull the public into a false sense of confidence. [ Full PDF of letter here. ]

In response, on Wednesday, June 25, 2014, the NRC made this announcement in the Federal Register:

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is withdrawing a direct final rule that would have revised its spent fuel storage regulations to include Amendment No. 3 to Certificate of Compliance (CoC) No. 1029, Transnuclear, Inc. Standardized Advanced NUHOMS[supreg] Horizontal Modular Storage System listing within the “List of approved spent fuel storage casks.” The NRC is taking this action because it has received at least one significant adverse comment in response to a companion proposed rule that was concurrently published with the direct final rule.

This can be seen as a partial success for safety advocates, but the Commission went on to say, “the NRC will address the comments in a subsequent final rule. The NRC will not
initiate a second comment period on this action.” As Donna Gilmore says, “We’re not out of the woods yet.”

Cutting Corners on Safety
The French company Areva’s U.S. subsidiary TransNuclear is hoping to sell the NUHOMS cask to San Onofre (and then to other utilities bulging with nowhere-to-put-it high level nuclear waste spent fuel assemblies). Critics of the pending deal point out that the outer wall of the NUHOMS cask is only five-eights of an inch thick. This is in stark contrast to cask designs in other countries, where cask constructions range from 15 to 20 inches thick. [For example, see this description of the widely-used (outside the U.S.) Castor cask.]

Meanwhile intense discussions are going on at local, regional and national levels about how to best manage the accumulated nuclear waste at San Onofre in overlapping wildfire, tsunami and earthquake zones. Some say store it as securely as possible where it is. Some say ‘Get it into dry casks ASAP.’ Some say move it further inland on the vast Camp Pendelton complex. Others say “get it out of here!” to somewhere else in California that’s in a drier location or even out of state.

The objections to all of these proposals revolve around several conundrums. The San Onofre waste is being held currently only 13 feet above high tide in a highly corrosive ocean environment in the midst of a huge population spanning from Los Angeles to San Diego.

(1) Spent fuel pools are much more densely packed than designed for originally, reducing cooling water circulation and making them more precarious and less safe. (2) Spent fuel pools are dependent on off-site supplies of power to be kept cool otherwise they can boil dry and potentially combust on exposure to oxygen, releasing huge amounts of radiation in a fire. (3) Power disruptions are more likely now than ever before due to extreme weather events caused by climate change. (4) Spent fuel pools are not protected by reinforced containments like reactor vessels are, though they contain many years worth of reactor cores and therefore, much more radioactivity than a single reactor core. (5) Spent fuel pools are vulnerable to terrorist attacks or accidents, wildfires or tsunamis like Fukushima experienced. (6) Newly released information from NRC studies show the ‘high burn-up’ fuel assemblies, used for the last 17 years, must be held in spent fuels for 15 to 20 years before they cool sufficiently to be transferred to dry casks – contrasted with 5-7 years for non-high burn-up assemblies. But current NRC and utility thinking is to ignore the studies and move them into dry cask storage after a shorter cooling time. Many concerned citizens are advocating moving the ‘spent’ fuel as soon as possible into dry cask storage. (7) Many are unaware of the unique challenges presented by ‘high burn up’ fuel. Cladding on ‘high burn up’ fuel is more prone to cracking, thinning and sloughing off, exposing the uranium fuel pellets. (8) The cladding of high burn-up fuel rods continue to degrade after being removed from cooling pools and placed in dry casks, causing potential hydrogen explosions. (9) No dry cask design under consideration has yet been shown to be adequate for both long-term storage (more than 20 years) and for transportation of high burn-up fuel assemblies, nor adequate in consideration of the increased fragility of the ‘high burn up’ fuel cladding.

The San Onofre waste perplex is a microcosm of the serious questions facing all nuclear plants…and there are no quick and easy answers.

According to San Onofre Site Vice President Tom Palmisano, “San Onofre has 2,776 fuel assemblies in spent fuel pools in Units 2 and 3 and about 800 Unit 2 and 3 assemblies in dry storage. In addition, there are about 400 Unit 1 used fuel assemblies in dry storage.” An estimated 1,602 of the fuel assemblies are high burn-up.

A National Model?
To help understand why San Onofre is becoming one of the epicenters of the growing nuclear waste storage controversy, its helpful to summarize the main points in the current state of play:

With 5 reactors slated for decommissioning since San Onofre’s shutdown and more on the way, ‘decommissioning’ is being promoted as a growth industry.

Affected utilities will want to cut costs and maximize profits – as is their chartered fiduciary corporate mandate.

That means each plant is run by a limited liability company, which can go bankrupt or sell out and walk away without danger to the parent corporation.

It also means that they want continued insurance coverage under the Price-Anderson Act, which means the taxpayers pick up most of the tab for any future disaster that may happen.

At the same time, they want the NRC to assume that, now that the plants are shut down, the risks to public health and safety (which they also deny exist) will be reduced, thus eliminating the need for evacuation plans, trained and equipped emergency responders, and radiation monitoring technicians.

They’re saying, “There is no risk. But we don’t want to be liable if anything does happen.” Let’s let the taxpayers and the ratepayers foot the bill.

Ratepayers pay for Southern California Edison’s mistakes
Nothing drives that point home like the ongoing controversy over the California Public Utilities Commission’s (CPUC) proposed ‘settlement’ of the allocation of costs for the massive mistakes Southern California Edison executives made with the faulty steam generators that caused San Onofre’s shutdown. In what outraged citizen groups are calling a backroom secret deal between SCE, CPUC and the insider utility watchdog group TURN, ratepayers will be saddled with over $3.3 billion in charges for the utility’s screw-ups.

The California Public Utility Commission (CPUC) announced a public meeting regarding the San Onofre proposed settlement, Monday, June 16, 2014, at the Costa Mesa Neighborhood Community Center, 1845 Park Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92627, 4pm to 7pm. The public was invited to present their views and ask questions.

The press release explained that the proposed settlement,

…provides that SCE receive $3.3 billion for the crippled San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS). Proponents have sold this as a $1.4 billion “refund” but in reality, that figure is simply the difference from the original absurd utility request of $4.7 billion and the proposed settlement figure.

Opponents believe ratepayers should receive refund checks of about $250 million.

“The difference in the two sides is stark. The utilities and their followers want ratepayers to provide the net asset value of the base plant PLUS a return of 2.65%, a situation unheard of, even in the distorted world of public utilities,” said Ray Lutz, National Coordinator of Citizens Oversight, representing the Coalition to Decommission San Onofre (CDSO) a leading opponent to the bailout settlement. “It is clear that the Commission had this rigged from the beginning, as the meat of the investigation was delayed so long while they fiddled with inconsequential issues.”

Parties to the Proceeding are of differing opinions as to how to respond to the ruling. Some, like Friends of the Earth (FoE) and the Santa Barbara-based World Business Council want to move on and devote their energies and resources to closing the PG&E plant near San Luis Obispo, just north of Santa Barbara. Others, like former San Diego City Attorney Mike Aguirre and Ray Lutz of CitizensOversight.org, are calling the deal a ratepayer rip-off.

This video by Ace Hoffman shows what Attorney Mike Aguirre had to say about the ruling.

This is Ray Lutz’s powerpoint presentation, which he was not permitted to present to the Commissioners.

For more on this issue, see VIDEO: CPUC president curses out San Diego attorney Mike Aguirre

Cutting Safety Corners
Southern California Edison’s recent request to the NRC to dispense with emergency response, evacuation and safety measures at the shutdown plant has evoked Sen. Barbara Boxer’s outrage. She’s currently in a showdown with the NRC over its refusal to hand over requested documents. And has filed criminal charges. [ see: Nuclear regulators to Sen. Boxer: ‘None of your business’ in the not exactly radical Orange County Register.
and this video clip Sen. Boxer Reads SCE’s Request for EXEMPTION from ALL Offsite Evacuation Plans at SONGS! ]

No Place for Waste
Meanwhile, despite calls for resuming construction of a waste repository at Nevada’s Yucca mountain, it remains closed. A recent fire, explosion and radiation release at the Waste Isolation Pilot Project near Carlsbad, New Mexico has caused its indefinite closure. And the temporary diversion to above ground nuclear waste sites in Texas of shipments of nuclear waste from around the country slated for WIPP have been stopped.

For an excellent recent WIPP update, see: Breaking Bad: A Nuclear Waste Disaster by Joseph Trento

In this video, Insight New Mexico host V.B. Price gets an update on the WIPP leak from Don Hancock, Director of the Nuclear Waste Safety Program for the SW Research and Information Center.

So, whether they know it or not nuclear waste is about to become a big issue for the 113 million people living within 10 miles of the nation’s nukes – a third of the U.S. population.

The situation at San Onofre throws the decommissioning conundrum into stark relief with implications for all reactor communities here and around the world:

High Burn-Up ‘spent’ nuclear fuel is: Too hot to handle. Too hot to ship. And there’s no place to put it safely.

Meanwhile, a shadowy agency within the Department of Energy (DoE) called the National Nuclear Safety Administration (NNSA) is overseeing the shipping of decommissioned nuclear weapons materials from other countries to the U.S., allegedly for reprocessing into nuclear reactor fuel – a process which produces even more radioactive waste. For more on this, see Breaking Bad: A Nuclear Waste Disaster

Its high time for an informed and outraged public to get involved in the nuclear waste policy debate.

What You Can Do
Become Informed and share information and links with your networks
Check out the SanOnofreSafety.org Nuclear Waste Page

Read: Core Message to the NRC
From the Coalition to Decommission San Onofre
and Sierra Club Angeles Chapter ‐ San Onofre Task Force

Read: San Onofre Nuclear Waste Recommendations

E-mail Senator Boxer:
Tell her you support her efforts with the NRC regarding San Onofre

Make a tax-deductible contribution to the SOS Waste Project
A joint project of SanOnofreSafety.org and EON, a 501 c 3, tax-exempt organization

Send check to: EON, PO Box 1047, Bolinas, CA 94924 (Memo – SOS Waste Project )
Through PayPal: ℅ orders@eon3.net
Or via the EON Donate page

The Battle of Bodega Head

According to some historians, the nuclear free movement was born in the successful 1960s grassroots campaign that prevented Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) from building a nuclear power plant directly over the infamous San Andreas earthquake fault at Bodega Head California. A massive excavation was started, which today has become a pond for migrating birds known as the ‘Hole in the Head.’ A reminder of the power of determined, non-violent citizen action. Fukushima Response Campaign’s co-founder John Bertucci tells the inspiring story.

Ocean Sampling Fukushima Radiation
Dr. Ken Buesseler of the Wood Hole Oceanographic Institution and founder of the website OurRadioactiveOcean.org, demonstrates how citizen groups can join his effort to monitor levels of radioactive contamination from the on-going Fukushima nuclear disaster up and down the North American west coast.

The sampling demonstration at Bodega Head, north of San Francisco, was organized by John Bertucci, co-founder of Fukushima Response Campaign, in cooperation with Dan Sythe, CEO of IMI – International Medcom, Inc..

In the absence of monitoring efforts by the pro-nuclear U.S. Government, this citizen-funded grassroots project aims at establishing a base-line of current radiation levels so as to track expected increases in the coming months and years, as Fukushima continues to pour radioactive pollution into the Pacific, and ocean currents continue to transport it westward.
For more info:

Homepage – One-Page Scroller

https://www.facebook.com/FukushimaRes…

Home

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If you like EON’s work, you can support it, whatever your budget level, here.

by James Heddle – EON – May 6, 2014

“So I think if I wanted to pass on my DNA I would probably choose to be a cockroach ….”
Elizabeth Kolbert author of ‘The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History’

Ukraine: Energy War Ground Zero
As Extinction Number Six proceeds apace – the first of the Great Extinctions to be caused by planet-scale human activity – with hundreds of species disappearing into oblivion at an accelerating rate, the dominant nations of the world are in a ‘race for what’s left‘ of the earth’s resources, especially energy sources.

A major epicenter of that moronic, ecocidal competition is Ukraine. As Canadian commentator Prof. John McMurtry shows in his recent analysis, “Global Society Destruction” and The Ukraine Crisis: Decoding its Deep Structural Meaning, “…Ukraine – the biggest country and bread basket of Europe – has now been pried wide open for transnational Western banks, agribusiness, Big Oil and NATO to feed on.”

The maps below tell the story.

NATO
NATO is pushing forward in its strategy to encircle Russia & China. [For background on this issue, see: Mearshimer & Cohen on Crosstalk

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Motherfrackers
Mother-earth-fracking transnational energy corporations are circling, licking their their chops over the third largest shale gas deposits in Europe.

Pipelining Geostratigests
US and European strategists are moving to control the flow of gas through the many pipelines that crisscross the Ukrainian landscape, bringing supplies from Russia and the Middle East to Europe.

Vampire Bankers
The IMF and the EU banking elite are pushing for control of the Ukrainian economy with the help of the country’s recently coup-installed banker president, Arseniy Yatseniuk. [ Asst. Sec. of State Victoria (F**k the EU) Nuland’s pet name for him is ‘Yats.’)

Solar Offensive from an Oil-Rich (and Silicon-Rich) State
A Qatari-controlled & supplied German solar company is hoping to replace Russian gas with its solar panels.

Nuclear Fuel Salesmen
Oh, and Westinghouse is competing with Russia to supply nuclear fuel to Ukraine’s fleet of operating nuclear reactors.

What Ukrainian Nuclear Reactors?
Hadn’t heard about those? Yup. Conflict-racked Ukraine is home to 15 aging Russian nuclear reactors of the famous Chernobyl design – six of them at the Zaporizhia Nuclear Power Station – the largest nuclear power plant in Europe and the fifth largest in the world – in the eastern part of the country that is the focus of the recent neo-Nazi-led violence.

What if those rickety Russian-built reactors become the targets of sabotage, or are abandoned by operators because of surrounding warfighting? What if they become the targets of NATO or Russian ‘tactical’ nuclear weapon strikes?

Unthinkable? Think again.

Hiroshima Peace Institute’s Dr. Yuki Tanaka points out. “…the Obama administration has not simply continued the aggressive Bush-era stance on America’s nuclear arsenal, but actually extended it.”

Meanwhile, Russia, for its part, is also ramping up the nuclear posturing. According to a new study by the Federation of American Scientists, Moscow deployed 25 new strategic nuclear launchers in the past six months, bringing its total of deployed launchers to 498 with 1512 associated nuclear warheads. And just last Thursday, the Russian military held a massive three-day nuclear exercise involving 10,000 soldiers in its Strategic Missile Forces. Global Research

The Stalled Chernobyl Sarcophagus
Not to mention the still-dangerous Chernobyl site itself, where construction of a ‘sarcophagus’ to cover the continuously-emitting radioactive ruble of its 4 reactors just north of Kiev has been halted. The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear explosion showered Europe, Scandinavia and North America with radioactive fallout, and the construction of a new ‘cap’ for the site is considered an ecological urgency for the entire surrounding region. Nevertheless, the political and economic crisis in Ukraine has brought construction on the $2.1 billion New Safe Confinement (NSC) cap, scheduled for 2015 completion ‘to a screeching halt.’

Marking the 28th anniversary of the April 26th. nuclear reactor explosion and fire at Chernobyl, Ukraine, Beyond Nuclear.org radioactive waste specialist Kevin Kamps pointed out, “The current tension between Ukraine and Russia serves as a stark reminder that armed conflict and nuclear power don’t mix.” Kamps further warned:

Decades of warnings that nuclear power plants are potential weapons for an enemy in wartime have gone unheeded. Whether intentionally targeted or accidentally hit during military conflict, atomic reactors and radioactive waste storage facilities could unleash catastrophic amounts of hazardous radioactivity over a broad region.

ProF. Floyd Rudmin, of the University of Tromsø in Norway writes in a recent CounterPunch article,

A rational world cannot tolerate chaos, or a collapsed economy, or a civil war, or any kind of war, in a region with nuclear reactors. If the power grid fails, if workers are unable or unwilling to show up for their shifts, if there is an act of sabotage, an act of war, if something happens to a nuclear reactor, then the Ukraine, Europe, Russia, and the rest of the world will receive heavy doses of radioactive fallout. There is now no government in Ukraine with the resources to manage a nuclear catastrophe.

Ukraine theoretically renounced possession of nuclear weapons at the end of the ‘Cold War,’ but heated rhetoric at the start of the current conflict suggested the country could develop nuclear weaponry quickly…and, as Kamps says, in conflict zones, reactors themselves become potential weapons.

Pointing out that “The ability to start a war has now been distributed across hundreds of relatively low-ranked individuals, on both sides,” Prof. Rudmin suggests a number of steps he says the ‘international community’ should take to prevent nuclear catastrophe in Ukraine, including: deploying non-aligned peace keeping troops; settling the Crimean secession with a second referendum; pressing for formation of an interim government of national unity including all factions; granting immediate economic aid, without condition; investigating all oligarchs for financial crimes; and auditing the $5 billion Victoria Nuland, the US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, has gone on record saying has been spent by the US in Ukraine. See: What Can be Done? The Crisis in Ukraine

But Ukraine is not alone in embodying the threat of a nuclear time bomb. All 400 of the world’s operating nuclear reactors pose a ‘clear and present danger’ to the planet – and will continue to do so even after they are decommissioned, because of the unsolved and apparently unsolvable problem of isolating millions of tons of nuclear waste from the environment for longer into the future than human civilizations has yet existed.

Cases in point are the recent fire and radiation-releasing explosion at the 15-year-old,’state-of-the-art’ model Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) near Carlsbad, New Mexico (supposedly designed to last 10,000 years before something like this happened); and moves by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to reduce safety standards at decommissioned reactors, where thousands of tons of highly irradiated waste remains onsite.[See: Senators fight to keep nuclear protection zones in place For decomissioning power plants. ]

The case for the abolition of nuclear energy and weapons (all reactors are ‘weapons-in-waiting’) has never been so clear, nor so urgent to pursue. Nuclear Ukraine is yet another wake-up call.

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For backgrounders that go beyond the misleading ‘pro-Ukrainian/pro-Russian’ narrative being put forward by US media, see these:

Western Media Blackout on the Reality in Ukraine

Ukraine Crisis Goes Nuclear. The Storming of Zaporizhia Nuclear Power Plant by Neo-Nazis

Neo-Nazi “Right Sector” attempts to seize largest Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine

After Chaotic Autonomy Votes, Negotiations Could Be Sole Path to Prevent Ukraine’s Disintegration

Ukraine’s Dueling Elections

Who’s the Propagandist: US or RT?

Our People Massacre Civilians in Odessa, and Politico Blames Putin

Is the U.S. Backing Neo-Nazis in Ukraine?

America Has Switched Sides: Now Backs Al Qaeda and Nazis

Civil War Has Begun in Ukraine; U.S. Backs Neo-Nazis against the Democrats; U.S. Media Suppress that News

California’s Shutdown Imperative
In the following preview clip from the forthcoming EON documentary SHUTDOWN – The California-Fukushima Connection (ShutdownDoc.tv), Linda Seeley, Spokesperson for Mothers for Peace, and David Lochbaum, Director of the Nuclear Safety Project at the Union of Concerned Scientists, and Co-Author of FUKUSHIMA – The Story of a Nuclear Disaster, explain why the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant near San Luis Obispo – run by indicted safety regulations violator Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) – is California’s Fukushima-waiting-to-happen.

Located at the intersection of no less than 13 earthquake faults, in a tsunami zone, storing over 6 million pounds of highly radioactive waste, and run by Pacific Gas & Electric (the utility recently indicted for criminal negligence in the San Bruno gas explosion), Diablo Canyon is now California’s ‘last nuke standing.’

After its success last year in shutting down Southern California Edison’s flawed San Onofre nuclear generating station (SONGS) between San Diego and Los Angeles, the Nuclear Free California movement is focusing its attention on Diablo Canyon, just north of Santa Barbara.

One down. One to go in California.

The Spring fundraising campaign for the SHUTDOWN documentary-in-progress on Indiegogo ends midnight, May 5.

Even after the Indiegogo fundraiser ends, you can still support the project with direct contributions to EON, a tax-exempt, non-profit organization.

For more info on shutting down Diablo:
Mothers For Peace https://www.mothersforpeace.org/
Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility https://a4nr.org/
Union of Concerned Scientists https://ucsusa.org/

Please download and pass along this poster

Seeing the Connections

[Editors’ note: The Indiegogo fundraising campaign for the new EON documentary SHUTDOWN: The California-Fukushima Connection will close on May 05, 2014 (11:59pm PT) Please contribute what you can and pass word on to your friends and networks! Diablo Canyon, in San Luis Obispo is California’s last nuke standing and we must shut it down before a Fukushima-like disaster happens. In California, One Down…One to Go! Download PDF flyer here.]

Fukushima Forever
As the 3rd anniversary of the still-ongoing and probably perpetual, world-impacting Fukushima nuclear disaster rolled around, aware people across the planet gathered in events aimed at bringing the implications to wider social consciousness, and to help build the renewed international campaign to abolish nuclear power and weapons and to responsibly deal with its deadly waste.

One of those events was held in Laguna Beach, CA at the BC Space Gallery. Mark Chamberlain, owner of BC Space, has consistently sponsored social and political art for decades. This show was part of an on-going exhibit of the work of celebrated documentary photographer and policy analyst James Lerager. James generously organized the evening to lead off with a screening of a preview of EON’s new documentary-in-progress SHUTDOWN: The California-Fukushima Connection, followed by a preview of the Samuel Lawrence Foundation’s up-coming production Fukushima: Ongoing Lessons (scroll down to view videos). The main events were the premier screening of Jun Hori’s METAMORPHOSIS, an award-winning new documentary on Fukushima & beyond, and presentations by Donna Gilmore, SanOnofreSafety.org; Gary Headrick, SanClementeGreen.org (both played major roles in the shutdown of San Onofre) and Harvey Wasserman, co-author of ‘Killing our Own” and editor of the excellent news site NukeFree.org (who also worked to shut down San Onofre.)

Donna Gilmore presented extremely significant information she discovered after the San Onofre shut down about what’s called ‘high burn up’ fuel rods. This NRC-based data about the fuel rods used for the last decade or more at San Onofre and most other nuclear reactors in the US, being twice as hot radioactively and thermally as the formerly used fuel rods, changes everything about how to deal with a reactor’s thousands of tons of intensely deadly waste stored onsite. As yet, the NRC doesn’t have the technology to deal with the problems the greater radioactivity is causing. Donna’s vitally important research is news to many even in the NRC, so she’s teaching other experts and reactor communities around the country about this unexpected new issue that makes the already terrible nuclear waste problem even more hazardous. Of particular concern are the cracks which are developing in the cladding (which surrounds the nuclear fuel pellets), because the pellets can escape and clog the water flow to cool reactors, thus leading to a Fukushima type accident. See https://sanonofresafety.org/2014/01/08/high-burnup-fuel-fact-sheet-2/ by Marvin Resnikoff and Donna Gilmore She encourages local citizens to demand responsible action by the NRC and Southern California Edison to protect public health.

Harvey Wasserman’s talk was a brilliant historical overview of nuclear industry-caused global disasters culminating in an update on the little known ongoing disaster at Fukushima. Harvey illustrates the patterns of the industry’s denial of harm, though according to independent scientists there is no safe dose of radiation. Harvey concludes by saying what’s needed to save the planet from total annihilation has been shown by the men and women present who proved that no matter how well-funded and large a nuclear reactor site is, it can be shut down, as happened at San Onofre.

Gary Headrick acknowledged the brave whistleblowers who initiated his focus and community organizing on the extreme hazards at San Onofre. He also expressed gratitude for the fine work of many other people, both residents and elected officials in the closure of San Onofre. Now our community extends across the Pacific to our allies in Japan. In California, one down and one to go!

James Lerager has been photographing and documenting nuclear sites since the 1980s. His work has been widely exhibited and published. He is the photographer / author of the book “In the Shadow of the Cloud: Photographs & Histories of America’s Atomic Veterans” and several monographs. James Lerager’s forthcoming book – a global perspective on the human and environmental consequences of the nuclear age – is currently in preparation.

The exhibit also featured work by three other celebrated photographers:

Kei Kobayashi has undertaken an extensive photographic series of de-populated landscapes of the Fukushima region since the tsunami and nuclear meltdowns. His titles provide the location where the photographs were taken and include the ambient radiation reading at the time of exposure. Kei’s work has been exhibited widely in Japan.

Ron Azevedo toured the Chernobyl region in 2012. His “Shadow of Chernobyl” series of photographs present a ghostly portrayal of abandoned areas that are slowly rotting away without human presence. For him, the trip was like walking through the set of a horror movie, exposing evidence of how “the actions of a few have the potential to create widespread ruin for so many.”

Photographer and poet, Ed Heckerman’s series “Glocal: A prayer for Japan” reveals layered complexities through silver gelatin photograms created with different kinds of rice from Japan. The rice was gifted to the artist from numerous sources and is accompanied with text by Iwauko Murakami who originally asked Ed to make the “prayer” from this staple of the Japanese diet.

Silent But Deadly was assembled with the help of many people. Notably, the assistance of Mihoko Yamagata and Mrs. Mayumi Oda in establishing the connection with the Japanese artists was crucial.

The standing room only crowd in the evening was preceded by a gathering on the local beach of citizen-activists who had participated in the successful campaign to shutdown the flawed San Onofre nuclear plant operated by Southern California Edison near San Clemente, CA. As they looked across the Pacific in solidarity with their Japanese counterparts who are fighting to prevent the restarting of Japan’s 50 nuclear reactors – which were shutdown after Fukushima, but which the current Abe administration is pushing to restart (with US support) – they affirmed their commitment to the current campaign to shut down California’s last remaining nuclear plant at Diablo Canyon, operated by Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), which is facing indictments for its catastrophic handling of the recent San Bruno, CA gasline explosion. [ Download PDf info here. ]

[Editors’ note: The Indiegogo fundraising campaign for the new EON documentary SHUTDOWN: The California-Fukushima Connection is in its final week. Please contribute what you can! ]

One down and one to go in California – support the campaign!

Download pdf: PG&E Diablo flyer 3.9.9

Clips from an Activist Life
WomensEnergyMatters.org Founder/Director,the late Barbara George, reinvented herself many times in the course of an engaged & active life.

The video below was shown at her recent memorial. It covers some high points. [ Video of the memorial is forthcoming. ]

Fashion model, comedienne, performance artist, nuclear free campaigner and fierce advocate of clean, renewable, energy sources, and community choice aggregation (CCAs), she concluded her full career as a skilled and effective Intervener at California’s Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) working on behalf of energy efficiency, conservation and renewables.

Her presence will be sorely missed, but the work for a carbon free, nuclear free, democratic future to which she dedicated her life will continue….

Filmmakers
Mary Beth Brangan James Heddle
An EON Production for Women’s Energy Matters

On Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/91388143

BARBARA GEORGE – A Woman Whose Energy Mattered from EON-Ecological Options Network on Vimeo.