Beyond Nuclear International
Another world is possible
Why Rick Wayman wages for peace
By Mitchell White
Rick Wayman is the new president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, taking over from the now retired David Krieger with whom he worked since 2007. As he wages peace each day, Wayman says, “I have to believe that another world is possible, otherwise, for me, there’s no point in being here.”
Each time Rick Wayman walks into his office, he is reminded about why he wages for peace.
Sitting on the mantle of his Anacapa Street office directly behind his desk are two plants. While at first glance these might just seem to be decorative pieces to create a healthy working environment, these two plants have a deeper meaning.
They are cuttings from a tree that survived “Little Boy,” the uranium gun-type bomb that destroyed nearly five square miles of the city of Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6, 1945, leaving some 80,000 people dead and injuring thousands of others.
“I walk into my office every morning and that’s the first thing I see,” Mr. Wayman told the News-Press. “It’s a really wonderful, tangible reminder. Not only that we’re doing this for the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and to ensure that there are no other cities that this happens to ever again, but it’s also a symbol of resilience. This tree survived and now it’s all over the world.”
Rick Wayman is the new President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. (Photo: Rafael Maldonado/New-Press)
Mr. Wayman and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation received the plants as part of a program called “Green Legacy Hiroshima.” Seeds or seedlings are disbursed to various places around the world where the message of a world without nuclear weapons would proliferate, serving as a welcome addition in the office of the local nonprofit.
Here’s who I’m cheering for
There’s no race for the cure for climate change
By Linda Pentz Gunter
We are saturated with information about Covid-19, which has killed an estimated 200,000 people worldwide. That’s less than the annual death toll due to climate change. Why doesn’t that get an equivalent emergency response? And shouldn’t we be applauding those like the Amazon guardians, also risking their lives to save us all?
It’s my congressman on the phone again. Or is it my county council rep? Either way, they are calling to invite me to yet another telephone town hall in which I will learn the latest details — updated from the call a few days ago — on how to protect myself from Covid-19, help the less fortunate in my community, respond to the possible reopening of businesses and services, hear about tests and vaccines in the works, and so on.
I am being educated to the hilt everywhere I turn. Almost every news article or broadcast segment is about Covid-19 or something closely related to it. Are we still in a presidential election cycle? I’m not sure. Are we worried about Russian interference in the next election? No, we are worried about whether there will even be a next election.
My elected officials are saturating their constituents with care, advice and resources. Which is all good. Because the novel coronavirus has already killed more than 200,000 of us around the world — an undoubted underestimate — and a number which will only keep climbing for the time being. But a number which, hopefully sometime soon, will also start to diminish.
That won’t be true with climate change which is already killing as many as 250,000 people a year says a 2014 World Health Organization report , but likely far more, according to more recent research.
Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, Andy Haines and Kristie Ebi said the WHO number represent, “a conservative estimate, because it does not include deaths from other climate-sensitive health outcomes and does not include morbidity or the effects associated with the disruption of health services from extreme weather and climate events.”
This means that climate change — or, more accurately, the climate pandemic — is already a bigger a threat to human mortality than Covid-19. But my congressmen are not calling me every other day about the climate crisis, with tips on how to live more sustainably and help others to do so as well.
Climate change-caused malnutrition will become an ever growing crisis and cause of deaths in the hundreds of thousands. (Photo: Russell Watkins/Department for International Development)
The nuclear pandemic
Billions would starve under nuclear war, and millions could be harmed by another nuclear meltdown
A statement from Abolition 2000
Earth Day should be every day, but this year’s marked a major milestone: 50 years! Abolition 2000 has set up a statement to be used in national and international campaigns, initiatives and platforms to advance nuclear disarmament and a sustainable world. Please sign it!
The year 2020 marks the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day and finds the planet facing existential threats like never before in human history.
The threat from climate change is manifesting itself more and more strongly as the years go by through extreme weather events, forest fires on a vast scale, the bleaching of coral reefs, and receding glaciers, among others. This year also sees the world facing a pandemic which, as we speak, is costing thousands of lives every day and seems likely to have an impact on our civilization for years, if not decades to come.
Tropical cyclones and other extreme weather patterns are on in the increase under climate change. (Photo: NASA/Nilfanion at Wikimedia Commons)
Alongside these threats to human existence, however, is the lesser-considered, but more dangerous threat from nuclear disaster, and in this context we recall that the year 2020 also marks the 75th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing an estimated 500,000 people either through immediate incineration by the blast or subsequent death over the following months and years from agonising radiation poisoning.
Fire licks the Chernobyl perimeter
Questions about raised radiation levels linger along with the smoke
By Cindy Folkers
How close to the Chernobyl nuclear plant did the recent forest fires come? Did the smoke that enveloped Kyiv contain dangerous levels of radioactivity? We look at these and other questions about the deadly legacy of the 1986 nuclear disaster.
The recent wildfires in Ukraine and Belarus came dangerously close to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant site. Some burn still; others are smoldering. So, too, are the lingering doubts about denials from the Ukraine government that the fires, which tore through areas of the already radioactive Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, posed no radiological risks to those breathing in their fumes.
These latest fires, in a region where brush and forest fires are a frequent occurrence at this time of year, began on April 4, 2020. At least two were allegedly deliberately set. The fires have burned around 40,000 hectares across Ukraine and Belarus.
The April 26, 1986 explosion and meltdown of Chernobyl nuclear reactor unit 4, showered long-lived man-made radionuclides across large swaths of the Former Soviet States and Europe. A 30-km area around the Chernobyl nuclear site, dubbed the Exclusion Zone, has since been off-limits to human habitation because of the high contamination levels within it.
Firefighters confront the latest blazes in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and beyond. (Photo: State agency of Ukraine on Exclusion Zone management/Wikimedia Commons)
Consequently, forest fires that occur in radiologically-contaminated areas such as the Exclusion Zone pose a particular danger, remobilizing and redistributing radionuclides by burning the vegetation and soils that had sequestered them.
Indian Point should be “autopsied”
Analysis of closed reactors would reveal dangers of those still operating
By Linda Pentz Gunter
The Indian Point reactors have had numerous problems and near-misses. A close look at Unit 2 would inform the safety status of reactors still running — and ought to prompt their shutdown as well, rather than extending operating licenses to 80 years.
The Indian Point Unit 2 nuclear reactor in New York closes down permanently on April 30. It is a moment replete with good news and golden opportunities that should not be wasted.
As Richard Webster, Legal Director for Riverkeeper, wrote recently in Gotham Gazette, “there will be no problem keeping the lights on when Indian Point closes.” But the question is, with what? Riverkeeper and others have launched a Beyond Indian Point campaign (a good choice of name!) which says that the electricity delivered by Indian Point will be replaced by renewables.
But will, or could be? Despite a ban on fracking in the state, New York still imports fracked gas from Pennsylvania. It is processed at a recently opened giant fracked gas power plant at Wawayanda, just 53 miles from New York City. The plant faced strong local opposition and acts of non-violent civil disobedience, including by actor and Beyond Nuclear supporter, James Cromwell.
There has also been opposition to “A massive, 42-inch, high-pressure gas pipeline [that] was built under the property of Indian Point to carry fracked gas to Canada for export,” posing risks even after Indian Point closes, since its inventory of high-level radioactive waste will remain on site.
So while, even before closing the plant, New York had already made “considerable progress toward replacing Indian Point with demand reduction, additional transmission, and new renewables,” as Webster wrote, Beyond Indian Point has set out to ensure that the Indian Point electricity is indeed replaced by a mix of renewables, energy efficiency and conservation.
Indian Point has been dubbed “Chernobyl-on-the-Hudson.” (Photo: Tony Fischer/Wikimedia Commons)
The women who told Chernobyl’s story
And the charity that sees those consequences first hand
By Linda Walker
Three great women writers have done so much to tell the story of Chernobyl. Their focus was not on the accident itself, but its impact on the people of Belarus and Ukraine.
Alla Yaroshinskaya
When reactor No 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant blew up in the early hours of 26th April 1986, it threw millions of curies of radioactive materials into the air, forming a 2km high plume.
Amongst the most dangerous isotopes it released were iodine 131, caesium 137 and strontium 90.
But according to Alla Yaroshinskaya, a journalist whose tenacity was responsible for revealing much of the subsequent cover-up, the most dangerous substance to escape from the mouth of the reactor did not appear on the periodic table. It was Lie-86, a lie as global as the disaster itself.
She visited towns and villages in northern Ukraine 18 months after the accident. The head of the local department of child health told her that they had not found any problems linked to radiation, or any thyroid problems. She had just visited doctors who told her that 80% of the children in their district had thyroid problems.
On land contaminated to less than 15 curies sq/km, agriculture continued as normal. The land in the UK from which farmers could not sell their lambs was contaminated to less than 1 hundredth of this level.
People who continued to live on contaminated land were given extra money for food and free medical care and better pensions, sometimes called the ‘coffin allowance’. Villagers in Ukraine signed an undertaking not to drink milk from their cows, but they were not provided with any clean milk or meat.
(You can watch a three-part interview with 1992 Right Livelihood award winner, Alla Yaroshinskaya below)
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