If You Love This Planet, Dr. Helen Caldicott

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Prof. Alan Robock

This week, Dr. Caldicott interviews Dr. Alan Robock, Ph.D., a Distinguished Professor of Climatology in the Department of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers University. Dr. Robock has published more than 300 articles on his research in the area of climate change, including more than 170 peer-reviewed papers. His areas of expertise include geoengineering, climatic effects of nuclear war, effects of volcanic eruptions on climate, regional atmosphere-hydrology modeling, and soil moisture variations. This week’s conversation looks at the latest models of nuclear winter after a nuclear war between India and Read the rest of this entry »

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Prof. Alex Rogers

Dr. Caldicott talks with Alex David Rogers, a Professor in Conservation Biology at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford and scientific director of the International Program on the State of the Ocean (IPSO). Read the IPSO reports State of the Ocean and Implementing the Global State of the Oceans Report. Prof. Rogers’s research focuses on the diversity, ecology, conservation and evolution of marine species. He is internationally recognized for his expertise in deep-sea ecology and human Read the rest of this entry »

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Arnie Gundersen

This week, Dr. Caldicott gets an update on the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan from Arnold Gundersen, a consultant with Fairewinds Associates. Two recent items from the Fairewinds website: Too Close For Comfort - Floods, Earthquakes & Tsunamis and Newly Released TEPCO Data Proves Fairewinds Assertions of Significant Fuel Pool Failures at Fukushima Daiichi. Listen to our earlier programs featuring Gundersen here and here. As background for today’s program, read the recent news articles Read the rest of this entry »

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Bruce Gagnon

Dr. Caldicott interviews Bruce Gagnon, Coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, for the second time in a month. Gagnon’s recent interview was well received, and this time the conversation explores further issues surrounding the weaponization of space, military spending and nuclear ethics around the world. Topics discussed include the U.S. military goal of Full Spectrum Dominance under the document Vision 2020, how the U.S. Space Command protects corporate interests and threatens to Read the rest of this entry »

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Jim Shields

On the program this week, Dr. Caldicott talks with Dr. Jim Shields, a senior ecologist with more than 30 years experience in wildlife management. Dr. Shields has worked within agriculture, forestry, road construction and the hospitality industries in a variety of capacities. His common sense approach to wildlife management has been applied most recently in Australia, but his experience and ecological knowledge extend to North and South America, the United Kingdom and northern Europe, Southeast Asia, and Japan. For some background on Dr. Shields, read Following His Animal Instincts.

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Bruce Gagnon

Bruce Gagnon is Dr. Caldicott’s guest this week. Gagnon is the Coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, and has worked on space issues for nearly 30 years. He was the organizer of the Cancel Cassini Campaign (the Cassini Campaign was a project that launched 72 pounds of plutonium into space in 1997) which drew enormous support and media coverage around the world. In 2006 he was the recipient of the Dr. Benjamin Spock Peacemaker Award, and in 2010 Gagnon was extensively Read the rest of this entry »

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Bob Gilkeson

This week, Dr. Caldicott talks first with Robert Gilkeson, Registered Geologist, about the multiple hazards posed by the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The site in New Mexico is vulnerable to seismic activity, causing concerns about a new nuclear facility that is planned to be built which will make $80 billion of plutonium pits for atomic bombs in the 10 years.
Dr. Caldicott and Gilkeson, who won the Whistleblower Award from the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability in 2007, lay out the worst-case scenario in which an earthquake would disrupt the six metrin tons of radioactive material stored at the site. As background, Read the rest of this entry »

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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 Read the rest of this entry »

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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 Read the rest of this entry »

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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 Read the rest of this entry »

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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 Read the rest of this entry »

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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 Read the rest of this entry »

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Martin Sieff

This week on If You Love This Planet, Dr. Caldicott delves into conversation with Martin Sieff, Chief Global Analyst for the daily online magazine, The Globalist. For the past decade, Sieff has been chief news analyst for United Press International and is its former Managing Editor for International Affairs. He has received three Pulitzer Prize nominations for international reporting. From 1994 to 1999, Mr. Sieff was Chief Foreign Correspondent for The Washington Times. He was the paper’s Soviet and East European correspondent covering the collapse of communism for six years from 1986 to 1992 and for the next two years he was its State Read the rest of this entry »

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Arnie Gundersen

This week, Dr. Caldicott has an in-depth conversation with Arnold Gundersen, energy advisor with Fairewinds Associates Inc. and a former nuclear engineer. They discuss the present situation in Fukushima, where three nuclear power plants have melted down, and the continuing effects of the disaster on Japan and the rest of the world. For background, read the June 16 article, Fukushima: It’s Much Worse Than You Think: Scientific experts believe Japan’s nuclear disaster to be far worse than governments are revealing to the public, in which Gundersen states that Read the rest of this entry »

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Chris Hedges

This week, we play for the third time Dr. Caldicott’s
August 9, 2010 interview with American journalist, author, and war correspondent Chris Hedges about military culture and the consequences of combat. Hedges, a Senior Fellow at the Nation Institute, specializes in American and Middle Eastern politics and societies, and his most recent book is The World As It Is (2011). He is also the author of War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. In 2002, Hedges was part of the team of reporters at The New York Times awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism. He currently writes a weekly column for Truthdig.com. Read his latest columns and his earlier work here. Read his May 30, 2011 article The Sky Really is Falling about global warming. Particularly relevant to this program is Hedges’s January 4, 2010 piece The Pictures of War You are Not Supposed to See. At the close of the interview, Dr. Caldicott says that in the future, she will interview Hedges in depth about Empire of Illusion.

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Dr. Vini Khurana

This week, we hear for the third time Dr. Caldicott’s October 2008 interview with Dr. Vini Khurana about the dangers of cell phones and electromagnetic radiation. In May, a new report was released indicating a connection between cell phone use and cancer. Read the May 31, 2011 article Cell Phones May Cause Brain Cancer, WHO Experts Say. Dr. Khurana is a senior staff specialist neurosurgeon at the Canberra Hospital in Australia, and Associate Professor of Neurosurgery at the Australian National University Medical School. He has exhaustively studied the medical research on electromagnetic radiation from cell phones. See his webpage about cell phone dangers which includes his report Mobile Phones and Brain Tumors – A Public Health Concern. A joint U.S.-Korean team reviewed 13 past studies on cell phone radiation Read the rest of this entry »

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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 Read the rest of this entry »

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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.

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Miriam Pemberton

Before hearing from this week’s guest, Dr. Caldicott gives a short Fukushima update recorded mid-week, laying out the “terribly serious” facts that seven nuclear reactors at Fukushima have melted down. Next, she brings on this week’s guest, Miriam Pemberton, a Research Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, writing and speaking on demilitarization issues for its Foreign Policy In Focus project. She has recently published a report, Military vs. Climate Security: Mapping the Shift from the Bush Years to the Obama Era. Some of the topics they discuss include runaway U.S. military spending in the face of massive unemployment and economic collapse, U.S. wars in the Middle East, global warming, and the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

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Susan Greenfield (Guardian/UK)

Dr. Caldicott provides a new eight-minute Fukushima update recorded April 20, describing how the multiple meltdowns in this unprecedented nuclear disaster are starting to sicken people in Tokyo. She then conducts an interview with Baroness Susan Greenfield, the former Director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain. She is a writer, broadcaster and Professor of Pharmacology at Lincoln College at Oxford University. Greenfield argues that we should be increasingly wary of how the changing technological environment is affecting the minds of the young. For background, read Social websites harm children’s brains: Chilling warning to parents from top neuroscientist and Computers could be fuelling obesity crisis, says Baroness Susan Greenfield: Computer games, the internet and social networking sites may be promoting obesity by changing the way the brain works.

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Subhankar Banerjee

Once again, before interviewing this week’s guest,
Dr. Caldicott provides another update on the perilous situation at Fukushima, Japan, where four reactors are compromised in an accident that will likely surpass the effects of Chernobyl. Next, Dr. Caldicott welcomes Subhankar Banerjee, an Indian-born American photographer, writer and activist. He is the founder of ClimateStoryTellers.org. Over the past decade he has been a leading international voice on issues of arctic conservation, indigenous human rights and global warming, and over the past five years he has also been focusing on forest deaths from global warming. His photographs and writing have reached tens of millions of people around the world through exhibitions, publications and public lectures. See his photographs and learn more about his activism at subhankarbanerjee.org. In this interview with Dr. Caldicott, Banerjee discusses the effects of global warming on the Arctic region, his efforts to protect wildlife in the region, his photography, the corporate greed for oil, gas and coal that threatens the largest wildlife habitat in the world, and how to fight the economic and political forces ravaging the planet. In his writing, among many other topics, Banerjee has discussed the Arctic permafrost and the potential displacement of Alaskan communities due to the effects of global warming. Read four 2011 articles by Banerjee, Extreme Weather Report From Home: The Thong Will Drop, Earth Activism: What We Don’t Want, From Toilet to Planet: A Brief Journey of Survival and Tim DeChristopher Is Convicted: We’re Blowing This Moment, Too.

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Lexi Shultz (LCVoter)

Before interviewing this week’s guest, Dr. Caldicott provides a short update on the situation at the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant, explaining how the accident is far more dangerous than news media are reporting. She elucidates what will happen if there is an explosion at the facility. Read Dr. Caldicott’s April 11 article in The Guardian, How nuclear apologists mislead the world over radiation - George Monbiot and others at best misinform and at worst distort evidence of the dangers of atomic energy. Also see the April 11 news article Japan Raises Severity of Nuclear Crisis to Chernobyl Level. After the update, today’s program features a discussion with Lexi Shultz, the Union of Concerned Scientists’ (UCS) director of advocacy for the Climate and Energy Program. Shultz provides direction for US federal climate and energy policy work. Her efforts are focused on advocating for practical, science-based solutions to climate change, while helping translate climate science information to coalition partners, decision makers and the general public. For background, read the January 24 Union of Concerned Scientists’ press release, GOP Efforts to Defund Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change Is Foolhardy, the February 21 article House Republicans Cut Funding to Nobel Prize-Winning UN Climate Science Body, and the March 4 article Republicans Attack Obama’s Environmental Protection From All Sides. Also see the January 9 article Canadian Study Sees Global Warming for Centuries.

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Arnie Gundersen

In this special program about the meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant, we present two interviews recorded last week followed by a speech about nuclear radiation given by Dr. Caldicott in 2009. In the first 20-minute segment, If You Love This Planet’s Australian producer Jasmin Williams chats with Arnold Gundersen, energy advisor with Fairewinds Associates Inc., and former nuclear engineer. Gundersen explains the events that have crippled the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan following the March 11th, 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

Helen Caldicott, M.D. (William Lauer, AP)

In the next 20-minute segment, Williams interviews our host, Dr. Helen Caldicott, about the alarming increase in radiation from the Fukushima reactor. Dr. Caldicott lays out the health consequences now facing the people of Japan and the rest of the northern hemisphere. Read Dr. Caldicott’s April 11 article in The Guardian, How nuclear apologists mislead the world over radiation - George Monbiot and others at best misinform and at worst distort evidence of the dangers of atomic energy. In the last 20 minutes, we hear part of a presentation Dr. Caldicott gave in Berkeley in June 2009 about the dangers of nuclear power and the nuclear fuel cycle, including but not limited to radioactive isotopes. This segment is courtesy of TUC Radio, which recorded the lecture (the complete speech can be ordered on their Web site). As Ms. Williams says in her introduction, the major media in their coverage of the Japanese nuclear accident are not offering much information about the health effects of nuclear energy. For more information, read Dr. Caldicott’s books Nuclear Power is Not the Answer and Nuclear Madness: What You Can Do. And view the material on the Web site of The Helen Caldicott Foundation for a Nuclear-Free Planet.