Moving Energy Education Forward
The Woolsey Fire started near the site of a 1959 reactor meltdown that released more radiation than the three mile island incident. Now Malibu residents worry their homes were tainted by radioactive fallout from the blaze.
Read MoreAttached are non-illustrated versions of Jim Morris’ series for the Houston Chronicle entitled “Clamp Down: The Silencing of Nuclear Industry Workers" from 1993. Fairewinds hopes these PDFs will assist viewers that seek to better understand how the nuclear industry silences whistleblowers.
Read MoreThe Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) staff and management don’t like whistleblowers, and somebody who probably ranks as their least favorite one is this week’s Nuclear Hotseat guest: Arnie Gundersen, chief engineer with Fairewinds Energy Education.
Read MoreArnie spent one week at the end of March in the Harrisburg Pennsylvania area for a series of events remembering the 40-years since the meltdown at TMI. Arnie was invited to present the keynote at Penn State’s 40th commemoration of the TMI disaster that was filmed by C-Span on March 27, 2019.
Read MoreSoviet doctors treating Chernobyl-exposed suddenly had an unwelcome crash course in this medical problem. They found that radioactive contaminants, even at relatively low levels, infiltrated the bodies of their patients, who grew sicker each year. Gradually, health officials understood they had a public health disaster on their hands. Thousands of archival records document the catastrophe. Ukrainian doctors registered in the most contaminated regions of Kiev province an increase between 1985 and 1988 in thyroid and heart disease, endocrine and GI tract disorders, anaemia and other maladies of the blood-forming system.
Read MoreImagine a stun gun powerful enough to immobilize the US. Listen to Nuclear Hotseat host, Libbe HaLevy, and Arnie Gundersen discuss the effects of an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) from a nuclear weapon in space. EMPs are becoming the new face of global war. It can happen here. Also hear Fairewinds Board Chair, Robert Manning, talk about the importance of detente for world peace.
Read MoreNearly everyone who’s seen it and lived to tell the tale describes it the same way: a horrifying, otherworldly thing of ghastly beauty that has haunted their life ever since.
“The colors were beautiful,” remembers a man in Morgan Knibbe’s short documentary The Atomic Soldiers. “I hate to say that.”
“It was completely daylight at midnight—brighter than the brightest day you ever saw,” says another.
Read MoreMuch of what’s known about the health impacts of radiation comes from studies of acute exposure — for example, the atomic blasts that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan or the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in Ukraine. Studies of those events provided grim lessons on the effects of high-level exposure, as well as the lingering impacts on the environment and people who were exposed. Such work, however, has found little evidence that the health effects are passed on across generations.
Read MoreFairewinds Energy Education is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to furthering public understanding of nuclear power and nuclear safety related issues.
