If You Love This Planet, Dr. Helen Caldicott

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Martin Sheen

This week, Dr. Caldicott has a lively discussion with film and television actor and anti-war activist, Martin Sheen. Sheen has been a long-time supporter of efforts to stop nuclear testing and eliminate nuclear weapons. Read a 2003 interview with Sheen in The Progressive in which he discusses his views on the role of civil disobedience. About Dr. Caldicott’s 2007 book Nuclear Power is Not the Answer, Sheen wrote that the book “reveals truths … that confirm we must take positive action now if we are to make a difference.”

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Helen Caldicott, M.D. (nuclear-free.com)

Three weeks after the Japan earthquake and tsunami that devastated the Fukushima nuclear power plant, Dr. Caldicott gave a lecture to residents of Hanover, New Hampshire about the dangers of radioactive elements and the future of the planet. At the start of her lecture, Dr. Caldicott refers to the book Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout. She also mentions her appearance on Democracy Now, debating George Monbiot, after Fukushima. Later in the talk, she refers to her still-relevant book about the present nuclear danger, The New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bush’s Military-Industrial Complex and her latest book, If You Love This Planet: A Plan to Save the Earth. For background on this episode, read Dr. Caldicott’s recent articles on Fukushima, Unsafe at Any Dose and How nuclear apologists mislead the world over radiation. Watch her April 9 presentation at the recent Chernobyl conference in Berlin [note: about three minutes of the beginning of the speech are missing, and there is some occasional cross-talk from translaters at the beginning]. See her press conference in Montreal about how Fukushima will dwarf the Chernobyl catastrophe. Listen to her debate about the ramifications of Fukushima with George Monbiot and Laurence Williams. Read her interview with CNN: Nuclear radiation ‘the greatest health hazard’. For the very latest on Fukushima, read (more…)

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Thomas Cochran

Dr Caldicott talks with Thomas Cochran, the Wade Greene Chair for Nuclear Policy and a nuclear physicist and senior scientist in the Natural Resources Defense Council’s nuclear program. He is the author or co-author of several books and numerous articles on nuclear weapons, proliferation and nuclear energy. Cochran is currently a member of the Department of Energy’s nuclear energy research advisory committee and has served on a number of government and non-government advisory committees. Among other topics discussed are the present status of the reactors at Fukushima, radiation releases from the reactor and how they may increase over time, and the tremendous health hazards of nuclear power and nuclear weapons. After this interview was recorded May 2, the Japanese government has confirmed that a meltdown occurred at Fukushima. Read the May 12 article Nuclear Meltdown at Fukushima Plant: One of the reactors at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi power plant did suffer a nuclear meltdown, Japanese officials admitted for the first time today, describing a pool of molten fuel at the bottom of the reactor’s containment vessel. Also relevant to this week’s interview is the May 13 article Problems Cited With Nuclear Backup Power: Tests Show 32 U.S. Nuclear Reactors Pose Threat.

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Robert Moore

This week on If You Love This Planet, Dr Helen Caldicott talks with Dr. Robert Moore, a microbiologist trained at The Australian National University and The University of Sydney. Dr. Moore now works as a freelance biotechnology consultant specialising in algae as biofuel. His unofficial discovery of a whole new phylum of algae in 2001, and his formal publication of this finding in 2008, allowed him to leverage new horizons in the emerging field of environmental microbiology. Industry is now using Dr. Moore’s research and the utility of algae is taking off as a going concern. Dr. Moore refers to a program on Australian television, Crude: The Incredible Journey of Oil. For background on algae, read the report Cultivating Clean Energy: The Promise of Algae Biofuels, watch the four-minute video A Shipload of Algae and read the articles Algae Blooms for Planes and Cars and Boeing planes successfully fly with biofuels.