Spirit in Action

Nukewatching from the Farm - John LaForge

Nukewatch staffer John LaForge has produced the Nukewatch Quarterly for more than 20 years, carefully documenting the dangers and disasters of nuclear power & weapons, mixed with reporting on Nonviolent Direct Action. Originating in Madison, WI, Nukewatch has long been based near Luck, WI, with the Anathoth Community Farm, living organically, nonviolently, and mostly off the grid.

Broadcast on:: 29 Dec 2013
Audio Format:: other

[music] ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world alone ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeat. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service. Hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world alone ♪ Over a year ago, I interviewed Karen Street in an episode of Spirit in Action that I called Nuclear Sanity, Investigating Nuclear Power, in which Karen shared the best evidence she's been able to assemble about the relative safety of nuclear power. Although Karen started out opposed to nuclear power production, the evidence she amassed convinced her that nuclear might well be the best and necessary power source for the U.S. Karen is very motivated by environmental concerns, including air and water pollution, and very importantly, global warming. She is also very motivated by the desire to make sound scientific judgments. Karen's conclusions are sometimes even violently contested, especially in the aftermath of the Fukushima reactor disaster in Japan, and I thought it was important to welcome to Spirit in Action a guest or guest who could speak knowledgeably about the reasons to question the desirability of nuclear plants. There is an excellent resource on the subject just north of me, and though it is in the backwoods of Wisconsin, they are very much on the front lines of anti-nuclear research and policy examination. We'll be speaking today to one of the staff members of Nukewatch, John LaFarge. Nukewatch has more than 30 years' experience confronting nuclear establishment with information and nonviolent direct action. Their Nukewatch quarterly, edited by John, and of which I'm a devoted reader, is chock full of a wide range of up-to-date info on all nuclear power, weapons, waste, and actions to address the related threats to all of us. John LaFarge of the Anathoth Community, outside of Luck, Wisconsin, joins us by phone. John, it's great to have you here today for Spirit in Action. Thank you, Mark. It's been a long time in coming. Actually, I'd intended to speak to you perhaps about a year ago right after I interviewed Karen Street about nuclear power. She has what is, on the left, a not so popular point of view. I mean, I think that people on the left seem to lean generally toward being anti-nuclear. How does that look from your point of view? I would say that's not necessarily a right wing and left wing sort of phenomenon. More to my light is a matter of your interest in environmental issues and science per se. It may be health and particularly human health issues. So it's a matter of personal interest. There are politically conservative scientists who are quite anti-nuclear or nuclear cautious in their approach to things. I understand that the stereotype does tend to consider anti-nuclear people left wingers. So there's some effect of news media coverage of the anti-nuclear events and whatnot that color those perceptions, I think. There's been a large shift in perception, I think, since the Fukushima near disaster. I spoke with Karen after that had happened, and she didn't seem to think that there was a great deal of damage to human life because of that event. What could have happened at the worst in that situation as far as you know? What do you perceive could have been a worst case scenario for Fukushima? Well, my understanding of what happened at Fukushima is that it was, in fact, the worst case scenario involving operating, and in the case of Fukushima, a couple of shutdown nuclear power reactors, large ones located on earthquake falls in particular. The world had never seen prior to Fukushima three reactors in meltdown simultaneously. And, in fact, the immediate haphazard response to those reactors catching fire and burning is to pour water onto them or into them or shoot water with jets into them that eventually all made its way back out into the Sea of Japan. And, in fact, is that the largest dispersal of radionuclides to the Sea in world history has happened as a result of Fukushima. And it's an ongoing phenomenon because those destroyed reactors are still being watered artificially by hoses and pumps. And that water is leaking, just recently it's been shown, to be leaking massively still directly into the Sea of Japan. The phenomenon has initially produced a massive release of iodine-131, which if inhaled as it was massively by evacuating populations around the area causes thyroid problems and thyroid cancer if it's untreated. Thyroid cancer can be treated and will be in the children who are going to come up with it in Japan, but it involves a lifelong problem of being treated for thyroid disease or thyroid cancer. It's not just a blithe little or done with that, and nobody died from thyroid cancer sort of event. And that's just one of the problems that associates now from Fukushima. In early on in the discussion you had with her, she made a comparison that pro-nuclear people do over and over again. It's quite confusing to people who aren't listening carefully. She said that the exposures people might get from a Fukushima disaster are comparable to taking a plane ride from DC to Denver. What's confusing and actually a fifth category about this comparison is that your exposure on an airplane is external. External radiation exposures are far different and far less hazardous than internally either ingesting or inhaling radioactive materials. And in Japan, as we know from news accounts that has been produced in volumes and about six books that I've picked up on the subject since the accident in 2011, the major source of radioactive exposures now in Japan is going to be from ingesting cesium and ingesting strontium 90, cesium 137 and 134 and strontium 90, both of which were dispersed in large volumes as a result of this accident and which have contaminated beef in Japan. Beef exports were halted in Japan this past July for several months after the cattle were found to be contaminated, the flesh of the animals with cesium 137. Other highly contaminated foods in Japan include fish, rice, rice and the main staple of Japanese food culture for thousands of years now is going to undergo a major change because rice contamination has been found to be island-wide not just in the pre-fatures surrounding Fukushima accidents but nationwide in Japan on the large island. Other vegetables, of course, tea, even baby formula was found to be contaminated with cesium 137 and this again is another example of the treatment of radiation exposures by pro-nuclear people as if it's rather unimportant. We know from 50 years of studying radiation exposures that women, children and infants in particular are far more susceptible to any given dose of radiation than reference man, which is a term of rather some strange nuance used by most of the regulatory agencies now. Reference man is a white male of European descent between 150 and 200 pounds and between the ages of 18 and 30 who is exposed to a given amount of radiation and can expect to have such and such symptoms from it. Of course, we now know that reference man is an unscientific way to estimate effects of given doses with regard to children, infants, pregnant women and fetuses. It's being challenged by scientists around the world, in particular in this country, the Institute for Environmental and Energy Research in Maryland and its president, Dr. Arjun Makajani, have instituted a campaign called Safe from the Start, which would replace reference man as a standard for radiation risk analysis and replace it with one that takes into account the most vulnerable populations for radiation exposures. What you've been sharing, John, is detail I do want to go into, but I think I still need some more overview. At Newquatch, you are used to delving into the detail and documentation that a lot of people never even consider or encounter. People can follow these issues in much greater detail at your site, nukwatchinfo.org, but the question I started out with was about the worst case scenario. You said that Fukushima was the worst case scenario, what with three reactors in various stages of near meltdown. I still doubt that that was the worst case scenario because they were fighting like crazy and it was touching go to cool off the reactors because there was something worse that they were trying to prevent. Couldn't it have been much worse than that with thousands of people dying in just the first couple days? Oh, I see what you mean. One way to look at this would be to consider the last systematic analysis that was done by the U.S. government on this very question. The last time they did this was actually 25 years ago, and that study was called Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences for U.S. Nuclear Power Plants, or CRAC-2, was conducted by Sandia National Laboratories. And they said a worst case scenario accident at many power plants in the U.S. could cause tens of thousands of deaths from prompt radiation effects and long-term fatal cancers and cause hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. It's important to keep in mind here that, for example, at the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, the United Nations has said about four to nine thousand people have died as a result of reactor, explosion, and fire. And the New York Academy of Sciences, in a book published in 2009, the U.N. only looked at the Russian states of Belarus, Ukraine, and Georgia. And the U.N. study is quite limited because of it. A New York Academy of Sciences analysis looked at all of Europe and the Balkans increase. And the consequences for the radio and nuclei were dispersed all across Europe. They went all over the Northern Hemisphere, but most heavily fell in Europe. And that study said over 980,000 fatalities can be attributed to Chernobyl. So, Karen Street and other nuclear proponents like to ignore the most recent study, the New York Academy of Sciences report, and go with the U.N. So, to answer your question, a worst-case scenario would be a situation where radio activity released from the plant happened in such massive amounts and was spread directly to the surrounding populations so directly that people died of prompt radiation poisoning on the spot, or within days or weeks, kind of like what happened at Chernobyl. Because of the way the wind was blowing at Fukushima, much of the airborne iodine-137 and noble gases, which are radioactive, were initially dispersed out to the sea. But the wind did shift and moved inland and then ended up contaminating towns and up to a hundred evacuation sites where people were gathered specifically because they thought they were going to be safe. I think I read that with the right winds. It could have shut down Tokyo completely. What if that had happened? Well, that's a very interesting point you make, Mark. I mean, the wind did go towards Tokyo eventually, and the drinking water in Tokyo was contaminated with CZM, and people were told for days not to drink tap water in Tokyo. And the government of Japan considered, seriously, a very grim, expensive and chaotic prospect of evacuating all of Tokyo, the largest city in the world, 30 million people. It's a problem. That's Japan-wide, nationwide in Japan, spread of radioactive contamination. Let's talk about another point that Karen Street brought up. She said, I think, that it's important to compare the dangers and problems of nuclear to the harm caused by the fossil fuels like coal. She says that the scientific consensus is that the death and damage that happens from pollution and such from fossil fuels, the numbers are quite high. Whereas we have some not very high projections of deaths from radiation produced by nuclear power. And even then, that is offset somewhat by the deaths that are prevented because nuclear power doesn't add to global warming. She says, I think, that on the balance, it's clear that the number of deaths you get from nuclear is much smaller than the consequences of fossil fuels. What do you know about that? Is that accurate? Or are there holes in these estimates, too? Yeah, I believe there are holes in it, but it depends on, of course, who you trust in terms of your study of the issue and what scientists you prefer to rely on when it comes to statistical analysis. For example, pro-nuclear activists will say no one died at Three Mile Island and Chairman of the Committee, at the time's name was Fitzgerald, said that Three Mile Island was an example of successful containment. These statements come from the Nuclear Energy Institute, which is the chief lobbying arm for the nuclear power industry. They completely disregard the incentives for disease control and prevention statistics on infant mortality. And if you ignore the CDC's statistics on infant mortality, then you might be able to claim that no one died at Three Mile Island. But if the Center for Disease Control and federally mandated statistics that anybody can gather from your county on infant mortality, if you trust in those numbers, then you can see that infant mortality skyrocketed in the county's surrounding Three Mile Island after the accident and after several years went back down to normal. Another thing about the death rate from operating nuclear power plants, you have to decide who you're going to believe. Now, child leukemia happens to spike at the incidence of it near operating nuclear power plants. A French study just completed in 2012 and published in the International Journal of Cancer concluded that there's a direct correlation between the frequency of acute childhood leukemia and the child's proximity to nuclear power stations. It's a rather devastating report, and it could do for France what a 2008 report did for Germany. In Germany, the year before, a similar study and that was the third one of a series of three in Germany and the largest one ever conducted in the world found that childhood cancer in the vicinity of nuclear power plants was increased dramatically. That was a 25-year-long study found incidents of cancers in the strong association with reactor installations across Germany. Now, both Germany and France heavily reliant on nuclear power at the moment and are currently taking drastically different approaches. Germany promising to phase out all 17 of the reactors replacing with renewable sources of electricity, primarily wind and solar power. The particular point here is that incidence of childhood leukemia is something that pro-nuclear activists regularly ignore. They say, "Well, that's just epidemiology. It's not the same as cause and effect." When you see in a study that the closer these children live to reactor, the higher their rate of leukemia, you see that and you look and you think, "Well, what else could have caused it then? How can the pro-nuclear lobby continue to say that these children less than one year of age must be smokers?" That's our favorite joke invented by Dr. Ernest Dernglass. Without some sort of alternative explanation for the increased leukemia, then the industry is stuck with this really rotten bag in their hand. They don't have any other explanation except maybe the kids are smoking. You have to take exception with Karen's use of the word "consensus" to scientific consensus that nuclear power is safe. It's a preposterous thing to say. There's certainly no consensus about the safety of nuclear power actors. There's, in this office, a stack of books by scientists who are anything but Chris Busby in England, Arjun Makajani, the physicist from IER that I mentioned earlier. Dr. Ernest Dernglass at Pittsburg University, Helen Caldeguide, Dr. J. Gould, John Goff, and Alice Stewart, Dr. Rosalie Bertel, the Russian Alexei Yabukov, who was the chief author of the New York Academy of Science and Book. In a former Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairman, Peter Bradford, they're all strenuously working to prevent any expansion of nuclear power in this country and to see the operating reactor shut down. It's hardly a consensus here. What we do know about this apparent support among state legislators, et cetera lawmakers, is that the lobby, I mentioned earlier, Nuclear Energy Institute and its associates, have spent $660 million in the last 10 years lobbying Congress and supporting particular congressional campaigns, 600 million in lobbying, 63 million in congressional campaign contributions, over 10 years. To convince these lawmakers that nuclear power is clean on one hand and some sort of a answer to problems and the threat and the real dangers we face from climate chaos. It's a public relations campaign that has been very successful in certain circles. It hasn't overcome what you and Karen talked about with regard to the fear of radiation or a public negative feeling about nuclear power reactors, especially if they happen to be in their own neighborhood and aging, as most of the reactors in this country are. Let me check something out with you, John. And again, you've been working with Nukewatch for a couple decades now, and it's your job to scrutinize the info that's out there about nuclear power and weapons and make clear the dangers of nuclear power. I think that everyone should check out the Nukewatch quarterly on your site, nukewatchinfo.org. When Karen talks about the scientific consensus, she's not talking about unanimity. As we're all aware, there are reputable scientists to be found on both sides of almost any issue, although there are some problems that just seem untenable with current knowledge, like the good scientists who nonetheless make impassioned arguments against evolution and natural selection. So, clear scientific consensus, but a lack of unanimity. Likewise, there's a consensus about human-caused global climate change, notwithstanding a number of prominent and reputable scientists who are deniers. What Karen said, and I trust her integrity on this, is that there is a consensus on the national and international level of peer-reviewed and validated research that organizations at that level have established consensus about the relative safety of nuclear to fossil fuels. That producing electricity in the USA using coal results in some 50,000 deaths from pollution, etc., and that the death toll would be smaller if we did equivalent production using nuclear power. So, it's a question of safer, not harmless, and of consensus, not unanimity. What do you know about the larger organizations, the level of national and international scientific consensus? For example, you mentioned the CDC, the Center for Disease Control, that and similar national organizations are what I'm talking about. What fully accredited scientific organizations do you know that line up either pro or anti-nuclear, and why should we or shouldn't we trust their judgment? Well, the National Academy of Sciences has published seven large book length reports called Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation BEIR. I think Karen mentioned the National Academy as reliable source of information in her interview. Their seventh report, Beer 7, concluded that there's no dose of radiation that's so small that it's safe or risk-free. No such thing as a risk-free dose of radiation. The US Department of Energy says the effects of low levels of radiation are more difficult to determine than high doses, but the US government assumes that the effects of all radiation exposures are cumulative and should be limited as much as reasonably possible. Another point well made here by the DOE that small doses, which were exposed over time, accumulate in the body. plutonium dispersed from the bomb tests in the 50s and the 60s, migrates to our reproductive organs, it accumulates there. CZM-137 migrates to muscle, that's why it's been found in bluefin, tuna in California, tuna that have swam the entire Pacific Ocean since the time of the disaster, and then caught off California are contaminated with CZM-137. So that has a serious long-term consequence for the fishery in the oceans, but the point here is these agencies all are unanimous in their conclusion that any exposure of any kind to radiation carries the risk of cancer. And how does that compare to the fact that there is naturally occurring radiation? I seem to recall somewhere reading that the increase in radiation around nuclear power plants is only some 150th of the normal background radiation levels. If that's true, and I don't know that it is for sure, then perhaps the effects of the use of nuclear power are small compared to our normal exposure. I would like to know exactly where this 150th number comes from. It's a new number to me, but just for the sake of arguments, if that were true. It does, as I pointed out earlier, mix up the difference between external exposure and internal exposure, and it also ignores the fact that women, infants, and children are far more susceptible to a given dose than reference man average standard of exposure risk that's used by the NRC and DOE and other groups in this country. So the analysis that Karen presented there is completely mistaken, and it's disinformative to the public. It's not just plain misinformation with deliberately dispersed. You know, the background radiation is all external exposure, whereas these reactors that operate 104 now in this country routinely have to release back into the environment into the lakes, rivers, or oceans that they get cooling water from. And water that was used to cool the reactor and the waste fuel is returned to the oceans and rivers and lakes at much higher temperatures than it was taken out of. And it's also slightly contaminated within legal limits, but it's contaminated with radioactive materials each and every day that they operate. These reactors, in fact, can operate at all without releasing radioactive gases out of their stacks. And radioactive contaminated water back to the cooling sink, as they're referred to by the industry, like we like to call them rivers and lakes. In any case, there's two things going on here. Some of that water is used for drinking water. Now, there is air that's used for breathing, and all of this contamination is allowed under the limits set by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, but it does add to the man-made radioactive pollution in the atmosphere. What we don't acknowledge very often in this country is that the cancer epidemic that this population and the world faces could be a direct result of all the radioactive materials that are being dispersed by nuclear power operations. Because women, infants, children, and men, and boys inhale and ingest small amounts of radioactive materials that are legally allowed to be dispersed every day of their lives. We started out with a question about which institutions have come down. I'm not sure if your question was on the side of being foreign nuclear power or against it. Another question that came to mind while you were talking is that Karen says the alternative to nuclear power is coal, and this is, again, just completely disingenuous. We have a new book called Carbon Free and Nuclear Free by Arjun Makajani from the Institute for Environmental and Energy Research. People could check that out. It's actually downloadable from IER.org online. And his analysis shows that the U.S. most highly industrialized countries in the world could go to an economy that was completely carbon free without nuclear power by 2050 if we decided to do so. And it sounds preposterous when you first hear it, I know. And the author, Arjun Makajani himself, when he was asked to do this report said, "Well, it can't be done, so why should I do that study?" And then he was convinced to do the study anyway, and in the course of conducting it realized it can be done. You can store electricity much better than we store it now. You can produce it without creating highly radioactive waste or gaseous and liquid radioactive emissions. And you can do it all without coal or even natural gas, which is great now. Price so low that it's putting it into nuclear power plant construction in this country. Karen did avoid completely the question of economics, which is probably the Achilles heel for nuclear power. The cost of citing and licensing nuclear reactors now, and the high cost of constructing nuclear reactors up to 10 or 12 billion dollars per unit is completely untenable in the face of the phenomenon of natural gas turbines that produce electricity. That produce electricity far cheaper. It's even been suggested in a recent study that wind power is now cheaper per kilowatt hour than nuclear power, which used to be considered an impossibility. The Oxford Research Group in the United Kingdom has published a study called Too Hot to Handle, so there's a group of scientists who say the future of nuclear power is too hot to handle. Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado has published a report called Forget Nuclear, which is mostly a look at the economics and how unfavorable they are for construction of reactors, at least as a foil to climate change. One thing I have to agree with Karen on is the urgent problem of addressing climate change, which itself weighs against any use of nuclear power to address it. In fact, it takes so long to build nuclear power plants, and so many would be needed in order to replace the coal system, coal now producing about half of our electricity, that it just doesn't have any chance nuclear power of addressing climate change soon enough. Whereas national and global efforts at energy conservation that really cut back on carbon emissions are the cheapest, easiest, and the fastest way to cut carbon emissions and spending money to develop, build new reactors, is actually a theft from workable solutions that are available to us now, and that are actually outpacing nuclear power by a launch site. Didn't I see that Germany's use of solar and wind energy is skyrocketing? I think it's phenomenal what they're doing, so when people talk about producing most of our electricity by an alternative energy in 10, 20, or maybe 30 years, I'm thinking, yeah, but isn't Germany going to do it in just five years? Yes, that's a good point. There's a lot of federal government incentives now to do individual household systems that people are taking advantage of, and on a larger scale, in this century, what I was referring to earlier about how wind is outpacing nuclear by leaps and bounds. I'm referring to American Wind Energy Association study, the 2010 annual report. I looked at installation of wind power in 2009, and it's just terribly encouraging. It's just shocking. Really, 9,900 megawatts of wind power was installed in just one year. In 2009, it broke all previous wind production records. One year increases equal to the building. That one year, 2009, was equal to the building of six large power reactors, three times the size of the giant 2,700 megawatts south Texas project. There's two reactors down there on the Gulf, the biggest power producer in the country. But point here, being is that it was all done in one-tenth of the time it takes to build just one new nuclear station, normally about 10 years. This really is the place to put all of our incentives in our federal support. The wind power is getting cheaper, better, more efficient every single day. As you point out, Germany has taken the lead on this. The most highly industrialized country in Europe, and it's making absolute plans to phase out all of its reactors. This country could do the same. It just needs to take both climate change itself and the dangers of nuclear power seriously enough. In case you just tuned in, you're listening to Spirit in Action. I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeet, for this Northern Spirit Radio production on the web at northernspiritradio.org, where you can listen to and download our seven and a half years of archives. Follow links to our guests and leave comments, and please, please, please do make our conversation two-way by posting a comment. We'd also appreciate a donation, and you can do that on our website. And while you're at it, I recommend donations to your local community radio stations who carry this program into the hard-working, dedicated folks like those at NukeWatch. We have John LaForge of NukeWatch with us here today for Spirit in Action, and he's been with NukeWatch for 21 years, providing in-depth information about nuclear power and weapons and their dangers, and using non-violent direct action to help protect the world from the dangers he and they research. A central objective of Spirit in Action is to help wind our way toward truth and to help care for the world. And we want to raise up those doing dedicated and inspirational work for our planet, like the folks of NukeWatch. I think we're all bit by bit working our way toward truth, which is why I wanted to have you on, John, to supplement the valuable information that we got from Karen Street with the carefully documented info that you've accumulated for NukeWatch. One of the factors that can, at least on occasion, keep us from moving toward truth is overblown fears, and our society is rife with fear from every corner, trying to get us to buy this product or that insurance or to vote for that person who will keep us safe. Sometimes the concerns are well-founded, and sometimes they are just manipulative, and the opposing forces are motivated to stir up or maybe suppress fears depending on their interests. For example, as the harmful effects of smoking were being documented, prominent scientists were also releasing information denying this harmful effect. There was a period where the issue was clouded by the scientists on both sides. Still, the scientific consensus emerged, and I don't think there are many scientists these days who will deny that smoking causes cancer, emphysema, and other illnesses. I think likewise that we've seen a massive growing scientific consensus around human-caused climate change, but I'm not sure 100% that we yet have that regarding nuclear power generation in the USA. Although there is generous documentation about the possible effects of radiation on our health, and obviously you provide great info about this in the NukeWatch quarterly. My question is, how can we get to the truth what with scientists adamantly testifying on both sides? It's very dangerous, or it's not very dangerous, etc. Fear, it seems, is the lever on both sides. Karen, in her interview, brought up the question of how we reconcile our perspectives on the truth, how we, from all sides, head toward the common truth, and she said she was part of a process that sought to do just that. And one of the things all the participants had to address was what evidence or information could get them to change their minds and position. With that, it can be possible, John, when you've been working for NukeWatch for so long. What could get you to say, "No, I was wrong. It does look like nuclear power would be the better option that we have." Of course, the pro-nuclear folks would have to be willing to answer the question from their side as well, but what evidence could get you to leave what is probably a rather deeply ingrained point of view opposing nuclear power? I'd like to answer that question right after I want to add one more point to the statement I was making prior to that question, because I like to cite sources for what I'm saying. And just to come out and say that reactor construction can't really be expected to help us in the short run immediate crisis of climate change is easy to explain by considering a 2006 book by Dr. Bryce Smith. It's called Instrumentable Risks - The Dangers of Using Nuclear Power to Combat Global Climate Change. And he says in the book for nuclear power to play a role comparable to coal today, that is, you know, people do say that pro-nuclear because they're against coal, so they presumably are going to retire or shut down coal plants as they put nuclear reactors online. Something that the coal people never advocate themselves, but in any case, for a nuclear power to play a role comparable to coal today, which is about half of total electricity generation, 2,500 reactors would have to be built in the same time period between now and 2050. This is a rate one reactor every six days. This is the practical look at what people say about using reactors, bring them online, hurry it up, and we can get beyond coal. It's just a practical impossibility to build a new reactor every six days. The other requirement, if that sort of a scenario were actually to be embraced, would be to produce uranium fuel rods for these reactors at a highly accelerated pace. It's hardly ever discussed by pro-nuclear advocates, but hurried and massive reactor construction would result in a need for lots more fuel. New fuel fabrication fatalities would have to be brought online in the same sort of hurried, accident-prone rate that these new reactors would come online. There's only two major such systems in the world right now, one in France and one in the US. Another problem with producing radioactive earth and nuclear fuel rods for these reactors is that they'd get an exception to the CFC ban, which was imposed years ago. There were all four carbons being a ozone depleter, a massive way, production of which was banned way back in the '90s, although there was an exception to that ban given to the one place in the country that produces nuclear reactor fuel rods. They produce a lot of CFCs in the process, and that's another negative to nuclear power that's never acknowledged by the industry. All right, now we can move on to the other question about philosophically, what would it take for me to change my mind about nuclear power? That reminds me of a very similar to what my late father used to say, oh, philosophically, all the time you have to admit the possibility that you could be wrong, and we used to have late night arguments over the kitchen counter and discuss, you know, the eternal fairties and such things. Oftentimes, we'd end up arguing about the use of non-violence, radical, absolute, non-injurious, non-violence in terms of political action, as opposed to the taking up of arms, you know, to change your form of government. And me being an advocate of Gandhi and non-violent action, I would argue endlessly that there's something I won't change my mind about. You could talk till you're blue in the face and never convince me that organized warfare is going to be more predictable as with an outcome and more likely to result in success than mass non-violent action. I just, I know I'm not going to change my mind about that. I'm not saying I can't be proven wrong. It would just take so long to prove me wrong about that, having looked at enough history and analysis of the possibility. In regard to nuclear power and weapons, my gosh, let me say, I was first hired by Nukewatch in 1987 to do a one-time project that resulted in the nuclear heartland, the 1,000 ICBMs of the United States. In 1992, I was hired as an editor of the newsletter that you referred to a couple of times, so I've been working as the chief bottle washer for the newsletter for 21 years. Four newsletters a year, 80 newsletters later, all looking at the critical analysis of nuclear weapons and nuclear power operations, radioactive waste, disposal and transportation and the hazards of radiation exposure. There's a lot of water under the bridge and other things too, as the poet said. I guess one thing that would help me change my mind about it is if the scientific community all of a sudden realized, oh my gosh, look at this, radiation does not cause health effects, it doesn't cause cancer or immune deficiency. Well look, we were mistaken about that all this time. Kind of the way scientists once in a while will discover a new planet that wasn't there or they'll decide that known parts of the universe are expanding much faster than we thought yesterday, my gosh, look at that. Now there's huge changes in scientific perspectives do happen, sometimes just overnight like that. Some analysis could show that ionizing radiation when it's ingested doesn't smash apart your DNA and produce tumors. That's something else was actually going on there, some mechanism that they hadn't seen before, but what we know right now is that these isotopes do smash up DNA like little tiny explosions in the cells. That's what we know and spewing it into the atmosphere and into the waters and the soils, contaminating the food chain, contamination that actually increases as you move up the food chain. This is irresponsible behavior, something that doesn't happen with wind turbines or solar panels. So I'm not sure beyond that what will cause me to change my mind. Well, it sounds like you're open to what's important. If you have the evidence, then you'll go with the burden of the evidence. There are a couple other items that were discussed in my interviews with Karen Street that I'd like your input on. She said that there was no problem storing nuclear waste produced by nuclear plants because it's so small in volume. She said we have a political problem around it, but we don't have a technical problem, even though it evidently endures for some 300,000 years. She says that with such a small volume, it can be easily stored. What do you think of that analysis? Well, she's mistaken about it. I mean, the case of Jekyll Mountain proves it. She mentioned Jekyll Mountain as if there weren't any problems with Jekyll Mountain. After spending 20 years and $9 billion, almost 30 years investigating the suitability of Jekyll Mountain, the scientists decided it's not suitable. It took that long and not much money, but they found in study after study that water moves far faster through that mountain than they ever expected. They found that water moves through the mountain in 40 years instead of hundreds of thousands, like they suspected. This was proven by the discovery of Chlorine 36, I think Chlorine 36, which is radionuclide that was dispersed by bomb tests in the Pacific. It was salted all over the top of Jekyll Mountain while it migrated down to the level of the repository in 40 or 50 years. So it turns out Jekyll Mountain was a water sieve compared to what they had hoped. It turns out that storing so much extremely thermally hot as well as radioactive hot material in close proximity would heat up the chambers dug into the mountain and draw water to it at a additional heat. So anticipating that, they decided, well, we need some zirconium lids or caps or little roofs to go over each of the casks inside these excavated caverns in the mountain. And that might have been the straw that broke the camel's back because the Obama administration finally canceled the Jekyll Mountain when the price tag came in for those little rain covers. But there are up to 12 scientific studies that I have listed in one of our fact sheets here, a Jekyll Mountain scientifically disqualified studies that have come out over the years since 1983, indicating scientific unsuitability of the mountain. And that was a long time coming. Karen dismissed the quantity of this. She said, well, it's about the same as a Coke can per person per lifetime. That doesn't sound very much when you translate it into that sort of an analogy. It's a rather comical way to look at it. It radiated or highly radioactive fuel from a current fleet of reactors amongst about 67,000 metric tons, a little bit more than a Coke can analogy. 67,000 metric tons. That's just the high-level fuel rods that have been pulled out of reactors and are currently mostly stored in cooling pools or in big dry casts outside the reactors. The problem of storing this long term, she referred to as only a political one when it's actually a scientific problem of great proportion. The court system, after scientists and environmental groups sued the energy department over its plans at Jekyll Mountain, disqualified the regulations that were being proposed. And Karen mentioned this 10,000-year storage requirement for Jekyll Mountain. Well, that's an archaic reference because the courts have decided that the National Academy of Science study on how long these materials need to be contained, require it to be containerized for 300,000 years, not 10,000. And that is a showstopper because of the scientific challenge in building a container that could possibly be expected to last that long, something that has not been demonstrated. It can only be demonstrated in a computer model in any case. The system that we have about 104 reactors right now produces 22 metric tons of high-level radioactive waste every year. Karen innocently said that even moving all these metric tons of high-level waste from where they are at reactors out to a central place, she mentioned Jekyll Mountain, wouldn't expose anybody along the way. But that's not true. The Department of Energy itself has estimated and has published these estimates in their draft analyses. The amount of radiation you might get sitting in your car at a stoplight if you happen to be stopped at the same light as one of these waste transport trucks. The amount of radiation, as we pointed out earlier, is it cumulative? You have to add it to the x-rays. You get it to the dentist and the hospital and the CAT scans you might have at the hospital. Being legally allowed to expose the public to even more radiation has come up with a death list of how many people could be expected to die over the course of shifting all this radioactive waste from these reactor sites to a dump site, which is the same as a license to kill. That's something that I think is unethical, that Nuke watches, and we look at this as I said for over 30 years, me personally 22 years. We propose with Arden Makajani and their scientists that this material be stored on site in dry casks indefinitely and taken out of these waste fuel pools, which are vulnerable right now to loss of off-site power. The cooling ponds where the waste is first taken hot out of the reactors and kept for six or seven years before it cools down enough to take elsewhere. The water has to be circulated to keep it cool, to move heat away from the hot fuel. Now, great at the moment, these pools have water circulated by pumps that are powered by the electricity from the reactor. If the reactor goes offline, then that water circulated by outside power. Fukushima, what happened, and what would happen at all of our reactors here, if off-site power is lost for some reason, the circulation in those cooling ponds comes to an end, the heat boils off that water promptly, and then the fuel will burn and disperse enormous quantities of cesium and other radioisotopes to the hair. This is a danger that's still present at Fukushima, where a 7.3 earthquake, another enormous earthquake, just shook all those plants again off northeast Japan just around Christmas time. But as I point out, these vulnerabilities are the same in this country until the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is moved by demands from the public to impose and enforce some backup emergency electrical generators to circulate water in the cooling ponds. That would be expensive and time-consuming to do, but it's something that I think is urgently necessary at our own nuclear power plants. That's another esoteric question about nuclear waste. I have to disagree with Karen about her claim that it's mostly politics that hold up our dealing with nuclear waste. These are scientific and practical dilemmas that we face and that haven't been resolved. Let's shift to a different subject right now, and that is what Nukewatch is and the community, the Anathoth Intentional Community that you're part of. Could you say how and why Nukewatch was founded and the part that plays in the Anathoth community? Yeah, way back in 1979, our founder Samuel H. Day Jr., known to everybody as Sam Day, who was working as the editor of the Progressive magazine in Madison. And the magazine was going to publish an article by Howard Morland, the secret of the H-bomb, how we got it and why we're telling it. And the point of this article was to show the world, or the readers of the Progressive, that building in H-bomb is open to anybody these days. That was a long time ago, who has access to open records. That scientific expertise needed to build H-bombs, wasn't that sophisticated, and that the means to do so was accessible to all sorts of nefarious elements around the world. What happened with this article was that the government tried to censor it. They issued a joiner, justice department, halting the Progressive from publishing this article. Sam was the editor there. He took this pretty seriously. They started the Progressive Foundation at that moment to raise money to hire attorneys to help fight this attempt at prior restraint to open violation of the First Amendment. That's where the Progressive Foundation got it started, in the fight against censorship about nuclear weapons. What happened in that particular case was that two newspapers in Madison published the article on their own, and that sort of left the cat out of the bag, and the federal government then dropped its attempted censoring in the Progressive magazine, which went ahead and published. But there you are. Then what the Progressive Foundation having been established, and Sam Day was excited and energized by the struggle that it created that he decided to leave the Progressive magazine and start out with this project called Nukewax, that he and a group of others, including Bill Christ's Office in Madison and Cassandra Dixon. Others founded Nukewax as a project of the Foundation to draw attention to the problems of nuclear weapons in particular, and nuclear power actors eventually. That's how we got started. It was in Madison for many years then. The office and the organization moved up to rural Wisconsin here, 10 miles east of Luck, Wisconsin in 1996. The group here, the farm, we built a new office for the Nukewax and Progressive Foundation here at the farm, and we started here in the late '80s with a commitment to radical non-violence on one hand, and safe food production, and safe forestry practices. On the other, those two legs being the principal pillars of our foundation here were a really great fit for Nukewax to come here, because Nukewax as a group has practiced an advocated non-violent action for all those years since 1980, particularly with regard to the abolition of nuclear weapons and our struggle against the war system. We advocate not just non-violent direct action against weapons makers and nuclear reactor operations, but non-payment of federal war taxes as well. In order to do that, the community members here all agree to live at a level of income that's below the taxable level for an individual right now. That's about $9,500 a year. That way we're not paying taxes to the Pentagon at the same time that we're protesting with the Pentagon's doing. The community has gone through big changes over the years. Up to 10 people have lived here at one point, and now down to about six. And it fluctuates year to year, being rather isolated in the countryside. It's not for everybody, but it is a great place to test your analysis and test your theories against practice and whatnot in terms of living a simpler lifestyle with a smaller carbon footprint, you could say, and trying to produce food that's not industrial and full of chemicals. Two of the houses here that we've built ourselves are off the grid and good examples of solar powered houses, you know, with the utilities inside being run with batteries powered by panels, photovoltaic panels. So we've got a good mix of the old and the new and try to practice what we preach as much as we can. Since you've had as many as 10 members and you're only at six now, does that mean that if people were interested in contacting you, that they might become part of the Anathoth community? Oh sure, yes. That's clearly a possibility. People normally just write us a letter and ask about how things work here and indicate some interest in organic agriculture and peace activism, environmental justice, and suggest what their strengths are and how they might contribute to the effort here. And then we usually decide as a group whether we want to meet with these folks and oftentimes come out and visit for a weekend or a few weeks and see how they like it. Sometimes people stay six months, sometimes they stay six years. So who would they write the letter to and what's the best way to contact Anathoth? To whom they may concern is this sign in the address of 740 Round Lake Road from the luck of Wisconsin 54853. We can take on interns who are interested in a particular aspect of these issues. We have often had interns stay here and conduct projects or research or study on their own along with our supervision in exchange for a room and board here and a stipend. So internships are quite common here and welcome for people who like to consider spending just a summertime or a couple of months in time of the year. So listeners, if you want to get a hold of Nukewatch or Anathoth, you'll find links at northernspiritradio.org. Directly, go to nukewatchinfo.org and anathothcommunityfarm.org. We've been speaking with John Leforge, who along with Bonnie Erffer, Paul Voss, Benkowski and Troy Jones are the staff of Nukewatch doing meticulous and vital research about nuclear issues, sharing that info and living off the grid in nonviolent direct action in harmony with the earth. John, it's been an honor to have you here today. Clearly, you've done your homework with high grades. Thanks for joining me for Spirit in Action. Well, my pleasure, Mark. Thanks for having me with you. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website. northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along and our lives will feel the echo of our healing.