Beyond Nuclear International
The judge who assailed “worship of the Bomb”
An opinion worth noting as more peace activists face sentencing
By John LaForge
Federal District Judge Miles Lord, who died December 10, 2016 at age 97, could have given me 10 years once. Instead, the famously outspoken judge, who was well known for protecting ordinary people from corporate crime and pollution, used the anti-nuclear case a group of us argued before him to deliver a remarkably scornful condemnation of nuclear weapons and of the corruption that protects them.
On August 10, 1984, Barb Katt and I did more than $36,000 damage to launch-control computers being built for Trident missile-firing submarines by Sperry Univac (now Unysis) in Eagan, Minnesota. It was the 9th in a series of 100 so-called Plowshares actions, one we’d planned for two years.
After walking into the Sperry plant dressed in business suits, we used household hammers to smash two of the company’s missile-guidance computers then under construction.
We “named” the wreckage by pouring blood over it because, as the philosopher Simone Weil said, “Nuclear weapons kill without being used by forcing people to starve.”
We didn’t run away but waited for the authorities, explaining to workers in the room that we’d disarmed part of the government’s first-strike nuclear war machinery.
One worker said later as a trial witness, “I’ve heard the word ‘Trident’ but I don’t know what it means.”
A 1984 Star Tribune news clip about LaForge and Kate from the author’s archives.
Doctors’ prescription for the Tokyo Olympics
Breaking: IPPNW has launched a petition to “Keep the Olympic Games out of radioactive regions”. You can sign it here.
Statement of IPPNW Germany regarding participation in the Olympic Games in Japan
In July 2020, the Olympic Games will start in Japan. Young athletes from all over the world have been preparing for these games for years and millions of people are looking forward to this major event.
We at IPPNW Germany are often asked whether it is safe to travel to these Olympic Games in Japan either as a visitor or as an athlete or whether we would advise against such trips from a medical point of view. We would like to address these questions.
To begin with, there are many reasons to be critical of the Olympic Games in general: the increasing commercialization of sports, the lack of sustainability of sports venues, doping scandals, the waste of valuable resources for an event that only takes place for several weeks and corruption in the Olympic organizations to name just a few. However, every four years, the Olympic Games present a unique opportunity for many young people from all over the world to meet other athletes and to celebrate a fair sporting competition – which was the initial vision of the Olympic movement. Also, the idea of Olympic peace and mutual understanding between nations and people is an important aspect for us as a peace organization.
The Olympic stadium in Tokyo under construction. (Photo: Syced for Wikimedia Commons)
The radioactive Olympics?
Breaking: IPPNW has launched a petition to “Keep the Olympic Games out of radioactive regions”. You can sign it here.
Concern mounts over events to be held in Fukushima
IPPNW has launched a “Nuclear-Free Olympic Games 2020” campaign to call for a worldwide phase-out of nuclear power and to sound the alarm about the Japanese government’s efforts to use the 2020 Tokyo Olympics to “normalize” the aftermath of the still on-going Fukushima nuclear accident. Here, four members of IPPNW Europe outline the campaign and the reasoning behind it.
By Annette Bänsch-Richter-Hansen, Jörg Schmid, Henrik Paulitz and Alex Rosen
In 2020, Japan is inviting athletes from around the world to take part in the Tokyo Olympic Games. We are hoping for the games to be fair and peaceful. At the same time, we are worried about plans to host baseball and softball competitions in Fukushima City, just 50 km away from the ruins of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. It was here, in 2011, that multiple nuclear meltdowns took place, spreading radioactivity across Japan and the Pacific Ocean – a catastrophe comparable only to the nuclear meltdown of Chernobyl.
The ecological and social consequences of that catastrophe can be seen everywhere in the country: whole families uprooted from their ancestral homes, deserted evacuation zones, hundreds of thousands of bags of irradiated soil dumped all over the country, contaminated forests, rivers and lakes.
Dangerous radioactive hot particles span the globe
Citizen scientists are uncovering risks that governments would rather cover up
By Cindy Folkers
When reactors exploded and melted down at the Fukushima nuclear power complex in March 2011, they launched radioactivity from their ruined cores into the unprotected environment. Some of this toxic radioactivity was in the form of hot particles (radioactive microparticles) that congealed and became airborne by attaching to dusts and traveling great distances.
However, the Fukushima disaster is only the most recent example of atomic power and nuclear weapons sites creating and spreading these microparticles. Prior occurrences include various U.S. weapons sites and the ruined Chernobyl reactor. While government and industry cover up this hazard, community volunteer citizen science efforts – collaborations between scientists and community volunteers – are tracking the problem to raise awareness of its tremendous danger in Japan and across the globe.
After the Fukushima nuclear disaster began, one highly radioactive specimen, a particle small enough to inhale or ingest, was found in a private home where it should not have been, hundreds of miles from its source, in a vacuum cleaner bag containing simple house dust.
This “high activity radioactively-hot dust particle” came from a house in Nagoya, Japan – after it had traveled 270 miles from Fukushima. The only radioactive particle found in the home’s vacuum cleaner bag, it was an unimaginably minuscule part of the ruined radioactive core material from Fukushima – many times smaller than the width of a human hair. We know it came from Fukushima because it contained cesium-134, meaning that the particle came from a recent release, and we know it is a piece of core material specifically because it was so radioactive that it could not have come from any other material.
(Image courtesy of Arnie Gundersen/Fairewinds)
Still no country for old nuclear waste
Major challenges remain unaddressed says new report
By Dr. David Lowry
A very important, path-breaking report on radioactive waste was released in Berlin on November 11, 2019 at a press conference held at the headquarters of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, major sponsors of the research that informs the content of the study, titled World Nuclear Waste Report (WNWR).
It is the brain-child of former German Green Party/ Alliance 90 MEP, Rebecca Harms – a forty year campaigner against nuclear power – and independent Paris-based international energy consultant, Mycle Schneider, the team behind the now internationally respected and encyclopedically comprehensive annual World Nuclear Industry Status Report.
The WNWR concludes “The final disposal of high-level radioactive waste presents governments worldwide with major challenges that have not yet been addressed, and entails incalculable technical, logistical, and financial risks.”
Creative expression of protest in Germany against the annual “Castor” nuclear waste transports to an interim storage facility. (Photo: Christian Fischer/Wikimedia Commons)
It spells out in nearly 150 pages of detailed analysis that over 60,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel (one type of highly dangerous and long-lived) alone are stored in interim storage facilities across Europe (excluding Russia and Slovakia, as the data published by these two countries is inadequate, according to the authors). It adds that within the European Union, France accounts for 25% of the current spent nuclear fuel generated, followed by Germany (15%) and the United Kingdom (14%).
According to the WNWR press release, “In addition, more than 2.5 million m³ of low- and intermediate-level waste has been generated in Europe (excluding Slovakia and Russia). Over its lifetime, the European nuclear reactor fleet will produce an estimated 6.6 million m³ of nuclear waste. Four countries are responsible for most of this waste: France (30%), the UK (20%), the Ukraine (18%) and Germany (8%).”
Jane Fonda lights up Fire Drill Fridays
“We’re going to have to be very brave and very united and very determined”
By Linda Pentz Gunter
When at last she raised her fist in a trademark salute, then held out her hands to be zip-tied by police, it was the end of another long day for Jane Fonda, 81.
The two-time Academy Award and BAFTA winning actress has spent four of the last five Fridays getting herself arrested in Washington, DC, protesting for action — or against what she sees as inaction — on climate change.
It’s a script for which this long-time activist needs no rehearsal. For Fonda, this is now the most important role of her life.
Fonda is participating in a weekly protest she has dubbed Fire Drill Fridays — in a nod to teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg’s warning that our house is on fire. She has moved temporarily to Washington, DC and, sporting a fiery red coat, has vowed to demonstrate and face arrest every Friday until mid-January when she must resume filming her hit television show, Grace and Frankie. The first Fire Drill Friday was October 11.
Jane Fonda is arrested for the fourth straight week protesting climate inaction. (Photo courtesy Fire Drill Fridays.)
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