Beyond Nuclear International
A passion for painting and planet Earth
An artist who once painted idyllic landscapes now worries about uranium power
By Mary Lou Dauray
The journey of an artist’s work involves a variety of pathways. Sometimes these lead to paintings inspired by serious events that involve the entirety of our planet. That was to be my destination as an artist, but my journey began with landscapes, on the top floor of my strict Catholic school, where, on Saturday mornings, we were allowed to paint scenes from photographs.
That sojourn in the tranquility and beauty of nature was abruptly turned upside down after the 2000 election of George W. Bush.
The election night itself, with its bizarre turn of events, set me painting furiously, an anger that exploded into a flame-filled oil painting in response to the 9/11 attacks almost a year later. Then came the war in Iraq and I found myself creating a series of watercolors of soldiers, bombings, the women of Iraq and of death. After all, the Iraq war was about oil. It had become increasingly obvious to me how burning oil and coal, non-renewable resources, contribute to greenhouse gases and the warming of our planet.
Leaping Flame. I use the circle to represent the beginning and the ending. Coal has been formed from vegetation that has been consolidated between other rock strata and changed by the huge amount of pressure and heat for millions of years. (Acrylic on gessoed paper). 2014
The real cost of uranium mining
The case of Tummalapalle
By Krishna Shree and Rajesh Serupally, First Post
Gangotri was 10 when the first boil appeared on her leg — an itchy pustule that soon led to others. Two years later today, both her legs are covered in scabby blisters that continue to spread. Doctors haven’t been able to diagnose her condition or cure it.
Gangotri is a chirpy, carefree child — she unselfconsciously showed us the skin disease (pictured above the headline) that has so changed her life. However, the mood in her village — Kottala in Kadapa district, Andhra Pradesh — is one of anger. Gangotri isn’t the only one to suffer from the mysterious ailment, other cases abound, as do other conditions: unheard-of diseases, death of livestock, loss of crops. Bad news is in plenty, and residents point to one culprit: the neighbouring Tummalapalle uranium mine.
Gangotri was 10 when the first boil appeared on her leg. Two years later today, both her legs are covered in scabby blisters that continue to spread.
The mine started its operation in 2012 after getting the requisite environmental clearance in 2006; the uranium ore in the Kadapa Basin is the largest reserve in the country. The neighbouring villages of Tummalapalle, Mabbuchintalapalle, Bumayigaripalle and Rachakuntapalle of Velpula and Medipentla Mandals and 60 hectares in Kottala village of Vemula Mandal were acquired by Uranium Corporation of India Limited (a government enterprise) for ‘tailing disposal’ — these are the areas where waterborne refuse material is pumped into a body known as a tailing pond. This is where the radioactive mining waste has been dumped for the past six years.
“The Last Victim”
Karipbek Kuyukov of Kazakhstan dedicates his life to ensuring that no one will ever again be afflicted by atomic bomb tests
By Linda Pentz Gunter
Karipbek Kuyukov, who will receive the 2018 Nuclear-Free Future Award for Education in October, likes to say: “I have no arms, but I join you in waving goodbye to nuclear weapons.”
Kuyukov was born in the small Kazakhstan village of Yegyndybulak, without arms, a result of his parents’ exposure to the Soviet atomic bomb tests. There were 456 of these in all, conducted between August 1949 and November 1989 at the Semipalatinsk test site — also known as The Polygon — just 60 miles (100 kilometers) from Kuyukov’s family home.
Today, Kuyukov is his country’s foremost campaigner against any resumption of nuclear testing and also for justice for those afflicted by atomic tests, not only in Kazakhstan, but around the world. And he is also one of his country’s most well known contemporary artists.
A painting by Kuyukov entitled, “Mother’s Mission.”
“I think my mission on earth is to fight to become one of the last victims in the history of nuclear testing,” Kuyukov says in Andre Singer’s compelling film — Where the Wind Blew — about the tests in Kazakhstan and also in Nevada in the US. (The film is due to be available in the US via iTunes in the fall. You can view the trailer below.)
Karipbek, now 50, wants “to ensure that this nuclear madness never happens again. So we can look with pride in the eyes of a new generation, the children who will live after us.” And he communicates that message through his painting.
Algerians still suffering from French atomic legacy decades later
Compensation scheme has aided very few people, as Saharan residents experience cancers, blindness and birth defects
By Johnny Magdaleno
Ahmed el-Hadj Hamadi was huddled into a building with the rest of his community by French soldiers early in the morning. They were instructed to lie down, close their eyes and cover their ears. He then remembers a sound like “the world coming to an end” and the windows turning white. A cord above their prone bodies swung erratically until the light bulb it held shattered.
“I thought it was the apocalypse. We all did,” he said. “We all thought we might die.” Later, the French military began tasking out labor to residents in the isolated desert region of Algeria. “They had built a kind of village at the explosion area, and even put animals in it,” Hamadi added. “After the blast we were sent out to gather all the rubbish. The ground was all burned, white, liquid.”
To nomadic communities around the town of Reggane, they’re known more than half a century later as “leopard skins” — stretches of sand across Algeria’s southern Sahara that are peppered with small black clumps. People used to collect scrap metal from the charred warplanes and trucks that emerge, fossil-like, and then smelt them into jewelry and kitchen utensils.
Tourists have been told it is safe to visit the Hoggar Mountains, site of underground French atomic tests. (Photo: Guillaume Lecoquierre, Creative Commons/Flickr)
The not-so-glorious mud in #GeigerBay
Welsh Labour sells out its citizens to let radioactive mud dumping continue
By Linda Pentz Gunter
On October 10, the Welsh Assembly had the opportunity to cast a vote that would have protected the health, wellbeing and livelihoods of the people of Wales. But instead, on that day, the Welsh Assembly members of the UK Labour Party marched into the Senedd with blinkers around their eyes and plugs in their ears.
They could have halted the colonialist and medically dangerous dumping of 320,000 tonnes of radioactive mud dredged from the English Hinkley C nuclear construction site that has been delivered daily (and sometimes by night; see headline photo) to the “Cardiff Grounds” disposal site less than two miles from the Welsh coast. (The first round of dumping has now ended but it is due to resume in January 2019.)
There have been several protests outside the Welsh Assembly against the dumping of radioactive mud into Cardiff Bay.
That mud has been inadequately tested for radioactive isotopes. Fishermen work those waters. The seas move mud back to land and into rivers and streams. The winds blow spray onto shore. It is beyond essential to have 100% certainty about what is in that mud. Everything is at stake here: health, jobs, wildlife, the marine environment.
With an alphabet soup of treaties, why haven’t we achieved disarmament?
We need a cooperative movement of movements for peace
By David Krieger
Nuclear weapons, unique in their power and capacity for destruction, pose an existential threat to humanity. Their inability to discriminate between soldiers and civilians, diversion of resources from social necessities, and concentration of power within a small number of leaders in a small number of countries make them incompatible with a just and sustainable world.
Fortunately, the number of nuclear weapons that exist today (nearly 15,000 across nine nuclear-armed countries) is far fewer than the Cold War peak of 70,000. But it is still enough to destroy civilization several times over. The vast majority of these weapons are in the arsenals of the US and Russia, the two countries that have always led the nuclear arms race.
It is clear that the status quo is not working. The paradigms of arms control and non-proliferation that dominate international diplomacy assume the continued existence of nuclear weapons. However, the dangers inherent in nuclear weapons will remain whether there are tens of thousands or only a few. As long as they exist, they can be used, whether by malicious intent, miscalculation or careless accident.
A Brief History of the Nuclear Age
In 1945, the US shocked the world by becoming the first country to use the atomic bomb in war, killing tens of thousands of people in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The immense power of this most deadly of weapons set off an arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, the emergent superpowers of the postwar era. The threat of mutually assured destruction kept the use of these weapons in check. But in 1962, restraint was nearly abandoned. In a thirteen-day confrontation between the US and the Soviet Union after the Soviet placement of nuclear missiles in Cuba—known as the Cuban Missile Crisis—the outbreak of a World War III, now with nuclear weapons, became a very real possibility.
The dangers inherent in nuclear weapons will remain whether there are tens of thousands or only a few
Beyond Nuclear International 