Between The Lines - Flawed Nuclear Power Technology Presents a Dire Threat to Human Health in Japan, World (Week Ending March 25, 2011)

Award-winning Investigative Journalist Robert Parry (1949-2018)

Award-winning investigative journalist and founder/editor of ConsortiumNews.com, Robert Parry has passed away. His ground-breaking work uncovering Reagan-era dirty wars in Central America and many other illegal and immoral policies conducted by successive administrations and U.S. intelligence agencies, stands as an inspiration to all in journalists working in the public interest.

Robert had been a regular guest on our Between The Lines and Counterpoint radio shows -- and many other progressive outlets across the U.S. over four decades.

His penetrating analysis of U.S. foreign policy and international conflicts will be sorely missed, and not easily replaced. His son Nat Parry writes a tribute to his father: Robert Parry’s Legacy and the Future of Consortiumnews.

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The Resistance Starts Now!

Between The Lines' coverage and resource compilation of the Resistance Movement

"The man who predicted Trump presidential win now says Trump impeachment could happen," AM Joy with Joy Reid, MSNBC, Jan. 21, 2018
"Sketchy Kazakh money finds its way into Trump dealings," The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, Jan. 15, 2018
"Red flags seen in many Trump real estate deals," The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, Jan. 15, 2018
"Secret Money: How Trump Made Millions Selling Condos To Unknown Buyers," BuzzFeed, Jan. 12, 2018
"The Scandals of Donald Trump: Presidential Edition," The Atlantic, May 15, 2017
"Here's what we know so far about Team Trump's ties to Russian interests," Washington Post's ongoing compilation
"What Comey Was Investigating, Explained," The Moscow Project, Center for American Progress

"Donald Trump's Financial Ties to Russian Oligarchs and Mobsters Detailed In Explosive New Documentary from the Netherlands," Dutch TV documentary, Alternet.org, May 12, 2017
Ongoing compilation of Trump's creeping authoritarianism," MotherJones.com
Full resource list ...

SPECIAL REPORT: "The Resistance - Women's March 2018 - Hartford, Connecticut" Jan. 20, 2018

Selected speeches from the Women's March in Hartford, Connecticut 2018, recorded and produced by Scott Harris

SPECIAL REPORT: "No Fracking Waste in CT!" Jan. 14, 2018

Jen Siskind Jennifer Siskind, local coordinator for Food and Water Watch, describes the campaign to stop fracking waste in Connecticut, which so far has led to fracking waste bans in 34 towns around the state. Interviewed by Richard Hill on Mic Check, WPKN Radio, Bridgeport, CT

SPECIAL REPORT: "Resistance Round Table: The Unraveling Continues..." Jan. 13, 2018

Lindsay Kanaly The panel discusses Trump's long history of racism and the Republican voter suppression juggernaut confronting Democrats leading up to the 2018 elections. Special guest: Lindsay Kanaly, a lead organizer of the Women's Marches planned for Jan. 20, 2018. Panel: Scott Harris, Ruthanne Baumgartner and Richard Hill on Resistance Roundtable, WPKN Radio, Bridgeport, CT.

SPECIAL REPORT: "Capitalism to the ash heap?" Richard Wolff, Jan. 2, 2018

Richard Wolff, Economics professor Richard Wolff declares U.S. capitalism to be beyond repair and suggests the need for a radical alternative. Interviewed by Richard Hill

SPECIAL REPORT: Maryn McKenna, author of "Big Chicken", Dec. 7, 2017

Maryn McKenna, investigative journalist and author of Big Chicken, talks about the widespread use and dangers of antibiotics in commercial poultry, beef and fruit production. Interview by Bill Duesing, Richard Hill and Guy Beardsly on WPKN's Organic Farm Stand.

SPECIAL REPORT: Nina Turner's address, Working Families Party Awards Banquet, Dec. 14, 2017

Nina Turner, president of Our Revolution, talks about the fight ahead for progressives as she receives the Working Families Organization Award for Exceptional Leadership Towards Advancing Progress. The event was held in Meriden, CT. Produced by Richard Hill.

SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Dec. 12, 2017

Working Families Party of CT talks strategy and issues for 2018.
Lindsay Farrell, executive director of the Working Families Party of Connecticut, discusses the state's electoral landscape and lays out the issues and strategies that could lead to progressive victories in 2018. Interviewed by Richard Hill.

SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Dec. 9, 2017

Disturbing developments in the Trump/Republican Agenda
Focus on the tax bill, destruction of our public lands, North Korea and Trump's private CIA. Panel: Scott Harris, Ruthanne Baumgartner and Richard Hill. Special guest: Jo Macallero of Rise and Resist.

SPECIAL REPORT: On Tyranny - one year later, Nov. 28, 2017

Professor Timothy Snyder, author of the highly acclaimed resistance manual On Tyranny, discusses his book and offers a fresh assessment of the state of our beleaguered republic. Timothy Snyder, history professor at Yale, is introduced by Stanley Heller, administrator of Promoting Enduring Peace, a Connecticut-based organization that sponsored this event at the United Church Parish House in New Haven on Nov. 28. A brief interview with Snyder conducted by WPKN radio producer, Richard Hill, follows his talk.

SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Nov. 12, 2017

Lynne Ide, director of program and policy with the Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut, talks about the current state of health care coverage in Connecticut. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Nov. 11, 2017

Focus on the Republican tax plan, the just-released autopsy on the Democratic Party, and Internet censorship by Google, Facebook and Youtube. Including an interview with Hilary Grant, a lead organizer with Action Together Connecticut, who discusses the local results of the recent election, with hosts Richard Hill, Scott Harris and Ruth Baumgartner WPKN producers

SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017

Two leaders from Redneck Revolt, an anti-racist, anti-capitalist movement, talk about their work organizing with white working class people in Suffolk County, New York. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017

Bruce Gagnon, coordinator for the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, describes the extent of -- and motives underlying -- the vast US network of military bases around the globe. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Resisting U.S. JeJu Island military base in South Korea, Oct. 24, 2017

Joyakol, South Korean peace activist and singer, discusses the crisis on the Korean peninsula and focuses on the resistance to the U.S. huge military base being constructed on Jeju Island. The event was sponsored by the Greater New Haven Peace Council and this audio was recorded by Richard Hill, WPKN producer.
Joyakol discusses Americans' biggest misconceptions about the conflict between North and South Korea and the U.S., Interview by Richard Hill, WPKN producer.

SPECIAL REPORT: John Allen, Out in New Haven

John Allen, founding director of the New Haven Pride Center, Connecticut, talks about his new LGBTQ television show, Out in New Haven, which presents a range of political and cultural issues to the community. Interviewed by Richard Hill on WPKN's Rainy Day Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2018.

2017 Gandhi Peace Awards

Promoting Enduring Peace presented its Gandhi Peace Award jointly to renowned consumer advocate Ralph Nader and BDS founder Omar Barghouti on April 23, 2017.

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THANK YOU TO EVERYONE...

who helped make our 25th anniversary with Jeremy Scahill a success!

For those who missed the event, or were there and really wanted to fully absorb its import, here it is in video

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 1 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 2 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Between The Lines on Stitcher

Between The Lines Presentation at the Left Forum 2016

"How Do We Build A Mass Movement to Reverse Runaway Inequality?" with Les Leopold, author of "Runaway Inequality: An Activist's Guide to Economic Justice,"May 22, 2016, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, 860 11th Ave. (Between 58th and 59th), New York City. Between The Lines' Scott Harris and Richard Hill moderated this workshop. Listen to the audio/slideshows and more from this workshop.

Listen to audio of the plenary sessions from the weekend.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker "Dirty Wars"

Listen to the full interview (30:33) with Jeremy Scahill, an award-winning investigative journalist with the Nation Magazine, correspondent for Democracy Now! and author of the bestselling book, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army," about America's outsourcing of its military. In an exclusive interview with Counterpoint's Scott Harris on Sept. 16, 2013, Scahill talks about his latest book, "Dirty Wars, The World is a Battlefield," also made into a documentary film under the same title, and was nominated Dec. 5, 2013 for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary Feature category.

Listen to Scott Harris Live on WPKN Radio

Between The Lines' Executive Producer Scott Harris hosts a live, weekly talk show, Counterpoint, from which some of Between The Lines' interviews are excerpted. Listen every Monday evening from 8 to 10 p.m. EDT at www.WPKN.org (Follows the 5-7 minute White Rose Calendar.)

Counterpoint in its entirety is archived after midnight ET Monday nights, and is available for at least a year following broadcast in WPKN Radio's Archives.

You can also listen to full unedited interview segments from Counterpoint, which are generally available some time the day following broadcast.

Subscribe to Counterpoint bulletins via our subscriptions page.

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Flawed Nuclear Power Technology Presents a Dire Threat to Human Health in Japan, World

RealAudio MP3

March 16, 2011

Interview with Kevin Kamps, a nuclear waste specialist with Beyond Nuclear, conducted by Melinda Tuhus

The disasters that have befallen Japan continue to multiply. Thousands are already confirmed dead, with the toll expected to exceed 10,000 from both the 9.0 magnitude earthquake and the tsunami it triggered, which struck the island nation on March 11. Add to these already cataclysmic conditions the failures of the cooling systems, hydrogen explosions, fires and ultimately the possible breach of containment structures at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in the northern part of the country, where three reactors were operating at the time.

The failures at the nuclear plant may result in the worst scenario imaginable, a meltdown -- with a massive release of radiation. Hundreds of thousands of people have been evacuated from the area -- and another 140,000 living in proximity to the plants being ordered to stay inside their homes, sealing them up as best they can to prevent radiation exposure.

Between the Lines' Melinda Tuhus spoke with Kevin Kamps, a nuclear waste specialist with the group Beyond Nuclear, whose mission is to educate and activate the public on the connections between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. The group advocates for the abandonment of both to safeguard the planet's future. Kamps talks about the effects of exposure to radiation on human health -- and why building more nuclear plants in the U.S. is not the solution to our energy needs or to address the dangers of global warming. The information in this interview reflects facts known about Japan's nuclear plant accident on March 15.

KEVIN KAMPS: Well, it's fair to say this is an unprecedented nuclear emergency in history. There were news reports even 24 hours ago that radioactive cesium had been detected outside of the facilities in the outdoors. So radioactive cesium is escaping at Fukushima, as is radioactive iodine. Radioactive iodine 131 attacks the thyroid gland, and that's why there's already been widespread distribution of potassium iodide tablets to evacuees, who -- the latest figure I saw -- now number about 350,000 people, which means this is an evacuation as big as the evacuation that took place around Chernobyl 25 years ago.

It's a good thing they're distributing potassium iodide. They did not do that at Chernobyl -- there's been a thyroid pathology epidemic at Ukraine, Russia and Belarus ever since Chernobyl happened, because they didn't distribute these protective tablets. But one problem in Japan is that they, again, were downplaying the situation in the early hours. They only evacuated people two miles out from the Fukushima nuclear power plant, and they were telling everyone else just to stay indoors. Well, they should have evacuated those people in the beginning. Everybody should have been given potassium iodide tablets immediately. They were not, so there were many hours when people were in their homes, as little as three kilometers away from this reactor in distress, without potassium iodide tablets, breathing radioactivity in the air -- radioactive gases, radioactive particles in fine dust form. If radioactive cesium and radioactive iodine are loose in the environment, that means there has at least been fuel damage; we knew that 24 hours ago. But now we know that there is a partial meltdown, because the authorities have admitted it.

There are over 200 different radioactive isotopes in nuclear fuel, in high-level radioactive waste, and many of them are biologically hazardous, so any talk of benign radioactivity or less harmful radioactivity is very misleading, is very downplaying. You name the radioactive isotope; it's going to have its own particular impact on the human body. Radioactive cesium seeks muscle tissue; radioactive strontium seeks bone; radioactive iodine seeks the thyroid. Plutonium -- a microscopic speck in your lung, if inhaled, will initiate lung cancer. It may take a decade or two, but you will have lung cancer someday if you inhale plutonium. That, too, may be being released right now in Japan, because the fuel has melted down. Everything in it is now airborne; it's being driven out of the reactor into the environment by steam and pressure and falling out downwind over vast territories at this point.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Kevin Kamps, someone I respect a lot -- James Hansen -- says we need more nuclear power to offset fossil fuels to reduce the threat of climate change. These existing plants are mostly, like, 40 years old. What about a new generation of nukes with a different design?

KEVIN KAMPS: Well, I'm sorry to have to say that James Hansen really needs to do his research on the subject. I know that he is a brilliant climatologist and very courageous in that regard. But his advocacy for generation 4 atomic energy as some kind of solution to the climate crisis is very misplaced. The reason I say that is that generation 4 atomic reactors are decades off, most optimistically, because they are not, as you said, in existence yet; they are merely on paper. To give you an idea of even the flaws of generation 4 proposals, about a decade ago, the top leading candidate generation 4 atomic reactor -- again, this is all theory, it's not reality yet -- it was called a pebble bed modular reactor. And the best selling point for the industry on this reactor was that we're going to save a whole lot of money in the construction of these reactors because we're not going to build containment buildings because they are so inherently safe you couldn't possibly melt one down and you don't need containment if you're not going to have a meltdown. Well, September 11 happened, and the major U.S. partner in the deal walked away; a South African firm was leading this effort, and Excelon Nuclear of Chicago walked away from the project because without a containment building, this reactor -- even if it were true, which it's not, that it was inherently safe -- would be wide open to terrorist attack. And just like with the Chernobyl reactor, the pebble bed modular reactor used a lot of graphite in its design; graphite is flammable. So from a security perspective, it was wide open to an attack and catastrophic radioactivity release.

But even the safety issues with that reactor were very real. In Germany a pebble bed modular reactor that was research in scale suffered a radiation release about the same time as Chernobyl disaster. So we've had accidents; we've had the risk of attack; that was the lead candidate generation 4 design. The thing is, something that's that far off in the future anyway -- not even perfected, far from perfected, actually risky -- it can't help us with the climate crisis. As Hansen himself has said, we have a decade or two to turn this thing around in a very big way. We can't wait a generation for these new reactors to show up. And besides waiting that long, these new reactors are going to cost hundreds of billions of dollars in research and development, and then finally construction. So we could waste a whole lot of time and money and breath arguing about more atomic energy of a better form. But we could solve the problem in the meantime, if we chose to, with renewables, with efficiency, that do not have radiological risks whatsoever.

Contact Beyond Nuclear at (301) 270-2209 or visit their website at BeyondNuclear.org