hello my name's alfred meyer going to i'm with physicians for social responsibility the new york chapter and today we're going to going to have a conversation with mr kevin camps the radioactive waste watchdog beyond nuclear dot org these are two organizations that have worked on nuclear issues for many years and we wanted today give you an overview of what the nuclear age is looking  how we're moving into the age of nuclear waste so welcome kevin thanks a lot for having me offer want to start out today with kind of an overview of the nuclear age it's just over seventy years since we've been starting to fusion uranium and there are so many different aspects to this quite complicated and pervasive activity i thought we should look at the overall story kind of the history of it but then also identify some of the issues that people are concerned about in today's life you'd have to go back to the hundreds and that was when kiri marie curie was experimenting with  nuclear materials specifically pitch blind which is uranium ore and she was the one who separated out elements like radio and polonium and identified them and added them to the periodic table and won the nobel prize for  and it was a process of the early nuclear scientists rutherford identifying the subcomponents of the atom the proton the neutron the electron but then before too long the came you know the the rise of the nazis and germany some of the best nuclear scientists in the world where in germany people like heisenberg and what had been a collaborative scientific effort for decades trying to you know fathom down into the mysteries of the atom and this international cooperation that was the norm in science up until that point all of a sudden ended and one of the first signs that there was trouble coming was when the scientific studies about uranium were suddenly silent in the scientific journals and different countries who were on the opposing sides of this coming war the british the germans stop talking to each other about eurabia matters and a really big moment was when lee's meitner who was a german jew discovered vision that you could split your rhenium and generate power and it was quickly realised how much power could be liberated by the splitting of uranium and the nuclear scientists realized that this could be a very powerful explosive and the nazis had driven many of the jewish scientists out of out of germany who fled for their lives essentially many of them came to the united states and formed an important part of the manhattan project in the united states so one date that really is fixed in my mind for the beginning of the atomic age would be when fermi rico fermi at the university of chicago created the first reactor as a part of the manhattan project as a as a part of this race for the bomb and the race was with nazi germany a lot of the scientists involved in the manhattan project believed so firmly created the first reactor  under the football stadium at the university of chicago at risk to the city of chicago and that was the first radioactive waste high level radioactive waste of the atomic age actually there's older waste and that would be the uranium that was processed in st louis missouri it came from belgian congo uranium or very rich and that waste ultimately by the one nine hundred seventy s had been dumped in the missouri river floodplain and we can talk more about how these you know first cup holes of nuclear waste of the atomic age are still haunting us we haven't dealt with them yet in any good way and they have leaked into the environment and they threaten human health so we lost the collegiality of science and scientists working together in open fashion suddenly we find ourselves in the thirty's fearful that germany may develop this super weapon it would allow them to dominate the world we started the project the manhattan project for us to develop that what happened with the german project and what happened with the american project at d day there was a special team of american soldiers who their job was to figure out where germany was at with the atom bomb project so they went deep behind enemy lines and they knew very quickly after d day june of one thousand nine hundred four that the german atom program was nowhere  it had ceased it had you know hit an impasse and so for some of the manhattan project scientists as soon as that news reached people like joseph rah platt he walked off the manhattan project his motivation was to stop the nazis from dominating the world with atomic weapons it wasn't the case and so there was a petition circulated among many of the manhattan project atomic scientists calling for an end or at least a warning to the enemy that there was this super weapon that they needed to know about but the powers that be the military leadership the manhattan project the political leadership decided not to warn the japanese and the first revelation of atomic nagasaki so hundreds of thousands of people were either instantly killed or badly injured in these two atomic blasts in japan there's plenty of evidence that japan was defeated the japanese people were starving and you've got quotes from people like eisenhower and leahy the head of the navy that japan was defeated we did not need to use those weapons against japan and there's a great scholarship showing that really the  the real message sent by the atomic bombs in japan was not to the japanese imperialists but rather to the soviet union that the united states had this powerful weapon and you need to stop your advance and eastern europe you need to stop your advance in asia so just to recap during the war years when this whole application of this new kind of scientific discovery of radiation when it was being put to use to make this super  weapon time was of the essence and or thoughts in terms of developing the manufacturing capacity were not at all about environmental concerns it wasn't about how to do something in the most efficient way it was really how to how to get the job done how to make this weapon and so i think now as time is going on we find ourselves moving into the age of nuclear waste but first let's talk a little bit about what happened after the dropping of the two bombs in world war two i think the world was aghast at the fact that two cities of considerable vaporized just gone and so this is a very fierce some weapon and i think the world was horrified at what they saw i think many americans  realized quickly that that could happen here and in fact stalin and the soviet union had deeply infiltrated the manhattan project where the pentagon the u s military thought that their secrecy the secret atomic cities like oak ridge and los alamos and hanford were keeping this secret from our cold war enemies the soviets actually it was deeply infiltrated and the soviet union had a lot of these atomic secrets very quickly so quickly in fact that they exploded their first atomic weapon in one thousand nine hundred eighty nine then the united states upped the ante with hydrogen bombs by the early one nine hundred fifty s on the soviets were just a couple years behind on the hydrogen bomb so we were in an all out arms race an atomic arms with the soviet union and an interesting development in the course of that was in november of one thousand nine hundred fifty three president eisenhower who had been critical of the atomic bombings in japan gave a speech at the united nations here in new york city that was entitled atoms for peace and effectively he communicated to the world that a phoenix must rise from the ashes on this horrible destructive power must be good put towards peaceful uses and that's where the idea of atomic electricity came from and atomic applications in agriculture and medicine and there's a great book by dr arjun makhijani at institute for energy and environmental research that came out in one thousand nine hundred nine entitled the nuclear power deception and he looks at primary documents that showed that really that atoms for peace propaganda pushed by the united states government the u s atomic energy commission was really just that it was a public relations facade for the u s arms buildup so all things here in him had to be expanded uranium mining melling processing enrichment and what was it for it was really for the weapons because if you look at the history there were is only a handful of reactors in this country sipping port pennsylvania in one thousand fifty seven built by admiral rickover in the nuclear navy but called civilian and then a handful of reactors around the country up until the  seventy s that's why nuclear power started to proliferate in the united states so from one nine hundred fifty three for twenty years where did all that uranium go from the mines in the mills and went into the arms buildup so it was a deceptive program and it was all about the weapons up to a certain point so if i can add just a little footnote to how this works that nuclear reactors fusion uranium and you i'm after is fish and produces plutonium so that you can then take this so called used fuel and chop it up and dissolve it and separate out the plutonium for the other kinds plutonium bombs this was the purpose of nuclear reactors it was an afterthought that somebody said we're dropping a lot of water up back we could run a steep durban and generate electricity and talk during which he said that this adams for peace this nuclear energy would give us energy too cheap to meter was going to be so incredibly almost free yet he had in his possession at the time of giving that talk a government study and you know what it down to five as the biggest problem with nuclear power at that time it was cost and that's why i was there to deception we've been misguided and i think that i hope from our discussion today people will understand that nuclear power is anything but clean and green that there's a nuclear fuel chain it starts with the mining of uranium it goes through many steps of milling and refinement enrichment and fuel fabrication and it each step of the way there's additional pollution being added there additional radioactive elements being created new wa streams of products that we don't know what to do with that are damaging to life forms so we're in you know really quite a pickle from this race to the bomb and then the cold war build up when we had both russia and the united states with missiles on hair trigger alert went at each other which we still have today there have been many near misses but we were living in a sense on borrowed time right we refer to nuclear power as dirty dangerous and expensive and you know getting back to that manhattan project history there were two pathways to the bottom one was iranian enrichment and one was like you said plutonium reprocessing and a thing about nuclear power and again the institute for energy and environmental research put out a book by dr barry smith in two thousand and six and titled insurmountable risks you clean power can't solve the climate crisis and like you said the real nonstarter with nuclear power when it comes to the climate crisis is the astronomical cost and also the long time period it takes even to build atomic reactors but in addition to that there's a long list of insurmountable risks that nuclear power has on its own and the very first one they write about in this book is nuclear weapons proliferation the atomic age began with you know mushroom clouds over japanese cities and tens and hundreds of thousands of deaths and terrible injuries and so that is a real risk with nuclear power itself with the so called peaceful atom any country that has uranium enrichment technology or plutonium reprocessing technology if it chooses to do so can use these nuclear power so called atoms for peace technologies to build nuclear weapons programs with what i think iran would be an example of s iran now under the control of the ayatollah and the moon was still has this research reactor it's a part of their nuclear infrastructure and so that can happen to you and an example with the soviets now russia would be north korea a longtime ally of the soviet union soviet union gave north korea research reactor and that was the source of the plutonium and in two thousand and three and thereafter that north korea used to build its nuclear weapons with speaking of explosions terrible pollution of the environment of the ongoing pollution in the pacific ocean this is a nuclear power plant in crisis and it's still is in crisis as we speak and one of our concerns that physicians for social responsibility is we really don't know what the health impacts are of irradiating the pacific ocean but this is a new territory this is  unplanned nonconsensual human experiment is being done to us on a worldwide basis the timing is interesting at the time that fukushima began march eleventh of two thousand and eleven the twenty fifth anniversary of the chair noble nuclear catastrophe was about to happen so april twenty sixth of one thousand nine hundred six is one chair noble exploded and burned for ten days and so now turned all the still regarded as the worst nuclear power catastrophe in human history but followed by fukushima and so here we are in the year two thousand and sixteen and it's now the fifth anniversary of the beginning of the fukushima nuclear catastrophe it's now the thirtieth anniversary of the chair noble nuclear catastrophe and the thing about nuclear power catastrophes is they have a beginning date what would you call their end date because the poisons that are on least are very long lasting so you've got radioactive cesium one thirty seven that escapes in large quantities it's  chernobyl is where children are born with congenital heart defects and this is very likely radioactive cesium attacking their heart tissue even in the fetal stage so these catastrophes are ongoing and of the future so you have to take a half life of cesium one thirty seven of thirty years and multiply it by at least ten to get the hazardous persistence that's three hundred years of hazard over a broad region of china mobile and there are a list of radioactive poisons that attack different human organs that we could talk more about the extensive we also are living with the impacts of the atmospheric nuclear testing nuclear weapons done in the late forty's one nine hundred fifty s and early one nine hundred sixty s a little over a thousand tests were done in the atmosphere the radiation from the south pacific was found in young kids teeth in boston in the early sixty's which led to great concern about what the health impacts are of the radiation of our biosphere incredibly enough the national security archives that george washington university just a few years  ago revealed that the underground testing because after a certain point on the atmospheric tests were banned by the united states in the soviet union they started doing them underground supposedly to contain the radioactivity under the earth's surface and it turns out that a third of the tasks and the united states a third of the tests in the soviet union even though they were conducted underground they still leaked into the atmosphere so they were still radioactive releases into the biosphere from these underground tests and how can we protect the biosphere from these materials we are faced with such an overwhelming amount there is the high level nuclear fuel which are the actual fuel rods that fusion now an unused fuel rod with the enrich uranium the radiation it puts off is appreciable but it's not lethal we could be near one one of those fuel rods and be more or less ok a so called spent fuel rod though is ferociously hot in temperature and in radiation after it's used up so to speak and these fuel rods if we were close to one for just a few seconds it would be lethal to us and these are building up at every nuclear reactor site and yet we don't know what to do with it well you're really hitting on the insurmountable risks we've talked about nuclear weapons proliferation we've talked about reactor accidents these are chapters in dr smith's book insurmountable risks and another chapter is about the unsolved radioactive waste problem so in the united states we have well over at this point well over seventy thousand metric tons of high level radioactive waste just in our commercial nuclear power industry it is piled up the reactor sites it's in deep pools of water right here at indian point new york the pools are full just up the hudson river and now with the pools being full they've had to turn to this outdoor storage called dry cask storage these are silos of concrete and steel so this high level radioactive waste which as you said without radiation shielding at close distance is instantly lethal effectively a matter of minutes you can get a lethal dose of gamma radiation like x rays so it has to be isolated from the environment and has to be shielded from people and other living things and that's going to remain the case for a very long time the gamma x ray like radiation coming off that's going to be around for centuries if not a thousand years into the future but then even after that dissipates you've still got a long lasting radioactive poisons like plutonium two thirty nine for example which was the key ingredient in the nagasaki bomb it has a half life of twenty four thousand years and again you have to multiply by at least ten to get the hazardous persistence that's two hundred  forty thousand years about as long as homo sapiens has been a species so that's a long way into the future to try to keep this stuff out of the biosphere and that's going to be a real challenge so it's a curse on all future generations we really need to stop making this stuff we need to abolish nuclear power we can make electricity and much better ways that are protective of the climate renewable sources like wind and solar energy efficiency stop wasting so much we don't have to turn to fossil fuels as an alternative to nuclear we have clean safe technologies we can turn to and in terms of weapons we really need to abolish nuclear weapons before they abolish us  this is an ominous cycle technology if all out nuclear war happens and it really and p s ares done great work on this as well if it would only take a relatively small exchange of nuclear weapons between adversaries such as india and pakistan world would be plunged into instead of global warming plunged into nuclear winter and the famine resulting from crop failures would result in billions of deaths so we really have to get real these weapons so we see the kind of the catastrophic threats the use of nuclear weapons yes our research does show that two billion billion b as in boy billion people would be endangered for from a small conflagration we've talked about the problems of long term waste storage what do we do with this because it's as if we've created a bit of the sun here on earth and yet we don't know what to do with  it but aside from these catastrophic events i mean is nuclear power ok i mean who what if the plant's running just fine if there are no problems there are no leaks there are no spills no accidents no attacks is nuclear power can i feel confident that is safe we have a pamphlet that is about the so called routine radiation releases from not only atomic reactors but also from every stage of the uranium fuel chain from mining all the way through waste management but let's just focus on the reactors so the u s nuclear regulatory commission which is supposed to protect the public health and safety and the environment from the hazards of nuclear power the radioactivity allow those grants permits to nuclear power plants to release radioactivity on a regular basis on a good day nothing's going wrong they release radioactivity to the air and to the water and so here it indian point for example you're going to have atmospheric releases of radioactivity you're going to have releases that go into the hudson river one radionuclide of great concern to us is tritium which is a radioactive form of hydrogen and it can go anywhere in the ecosystem or the human body that hydrogen goes which is everywhere hydrogen is the smallest of the elements on the periodic table it's very mobile only in the case of tritium it is a radioactive  so if you have a tritium atom in a water molecule it is radioactive water it is not contaminated with radioactivity it is radioactive and again damage the human anatomy down to the most intimate levels including the d n a molecule where it can cause cancer it can cause birth defects it can cause genetic damage well that's certainly a sobering thought that even under a normal operating circumstances that we have be endangered through nuclear power and we've talked during the show about how nuclear power really came from the pursuit of nuclear weapons  haven't really touched upon the fact that currently the united states is planning on refurbishing the nuclear weapons complex although president obama has called for getting rid of nuclear weapons at the same time is planning to spend one trillion dollars over the next thirty years to completely rebuild the manufacturing capacity for nuclear weapons so it certainly seems like this is a place where people need to educate  themselves beyond nuclear has a lot of materials physicians for social responsibility does as well there are many other groups working on these issues people should learn about this they should speak up let their elected representatives know what their pauling who said that every activity and nuclear has been a wrong turn for humankind and so we really need to abolish nuclear power we need to abolish nuclear weapons we need to learn the lessons of the last seventy five or so years  from this failed experiment that as you said has really put our planet in peril thank you very much thanks for having me while we look forward to solving the problems and getting lots of people  million people or more in some trip are calling for a freeze on the nuclear arms race