If You Love This Planet, Dr. Helen Caldicott

Archive for July, 2011

Best of 2010: Diane Curran on the legal aspects of nuclear safety and regulation

Friday, July 29th, 2011

 

Diane Curran (Julie Wiatt, Takoma Voice)

Diane Curran (Julie Wiatt, Takoma Voice)

This week, we hear a repeat of Dr. Caldicott’s January 2010 interview with Diane Curran, an environmental laywer based in Washington, D.C. Since 1981, Curran has represented citizen groups, state and local governments, and individuals in a wide range of licensing and enforcement cases relating to nuclear power plants, factories, and waste storage and disposal sites. A nationally recognized expert in the field of nuclear safety and security regulation, Curran has litigated the requirements of the Atomic Energy Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, and other public safety and environmental (more…)

David Bradbury on the power of film to reveal the truth about nuclear weapons, uranium mining and other unpleasant realities

Friday, July 22nd, 2011

 

David Bradbury

David Bradbury

This week, Dr. Caldicott talks about the power of film with David Bradbury, described as “one of Australia’s best known and most successful documentary filmmakers” on his website. Bradbury’s 2007 film Hard Rain addresses the horrifying realities of nuclear power, and gets beneath the hype propounded by the nuclear industry. Watch a 25-minute clip here. Bradbury’s films have been shown widely in Australia and overseas, and he has won numerous prizes including five AFI awards and two Academy Award nominations (for Frontline, which profiled war cameraman Neil Davis, and for Chile: Hasta Cuando?, on the brutal military dictatorship of General (more…)

Michael Madsen on the staggering problem of storing the world’s nuclear waste

Friday, July 15th, 2011

 

Michael Madsen

Michael Madsen

Michael Madsen, the Danish director of the new documentary film “Into Eternity”, joins Dr. Caldicott for a riveting conversation with worldwide implications. “Into Eternity” focuses on the vast amounts of radioactive waste created every day by nuclear power plants the world over, and the constant challenge to find an adequate way to store it, with a special emphasis on the Onkalo nuclear waste repository being built in Finland (to be completed in 120 years). Read two 2011 articles about the film: ‘Into Eternity’: Effort to store nuclear waste and Nukes are forever which includes the trailer for the (more…)

Dr. Arjun Makhijani on the stunning potential for solar, wind and other green energy to replace fossil fuels and nuclear power right now

Friday, July 8th, 2011

 

Dr. Arjun Makhijani

Dr. Arjun Makhijani

Dr. Caldicott once again welcomes engineer Arjun Makhijani, Ph.D. to the program to further update listeners on how solar, wind, geothermal and other green power sources can fully replace nuclear power and fossil fuel-based energy right now, not in the future. The need for such a transition is abundantly clear in the wake of the unprecedented Fukushima disaster and new reports that global warming is accelerating much faster than most climate scientists predicted. Dr. Makhijani is President and Senior Engineer of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research and the author of the seminal report, Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free, A Roadmap for U.S. Energy Policy (2007), which demonstrates that the U.S. and the rest of the world could successfully meet all of its energy needs with (more…)

Dale Bridenbaugh on the numerous safety flaws in Fukushima-style reactors and the ongoing disaster in Japan

Friday, July 1st, 2011

 

Dale Bridenbaugh

Bridenbaugh

In this episode, Dr. Caldicott talks to Dale Bridenbaugh, a former nuclear engineer and retired energy consultant to governmental and other groups interested in evaluation of nuclear plant safety and licensing. In his role as a consultant within his own company and others, Bridenbaugh worked with many organizations in the U.S. and overseas, including the Swedish Energy Commission, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. According to a Wikipedia entry on nuclear whistleblowers, “On February 2, 1976, Gregory C. Minor, Richard B. Hubbard, and Dale G. Bridenbaugh (more…)