Part two of Testing the Waters – Our Radioactive Ocean
A program about the phenomenon of radiation and ways to monitor it. Opening with a clip from the song Radioactivity by Kraftwerk, leading into a sketch of the life and death of Madame Curie. She discovered radiation but was unable to understand its danger and died from radiation poisoning.
Next the comedian Dick Gregory who states that radiation is worse than hunger and war: “Because I can feel hunger. I can see war. .. I cannot see radiation. I cannot smell radiation. I cannot hear radiation. I look around one day and I am dead.”
On to the synopsis of 36 years in the life of a Geiger counter builder, Dan Sythe, whose main goal was to help people with their health issues. The huge scale of radiation contamination becomes clear when one follows him on his travels from Chernobyl to Fukushima with visits to the Marshall Islands, the Lakota, Navajo, and Cherokee Nations to Khazakstan, to people harmed by uranium mining, milling, processing, and nuclear weapons development, including the Hanford Reservation in Washington State, Rocky Flats in Colorado, Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California, Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee, Los Alamos National Lab, New Mexico. Then back to monitoring of nuclear power plants such as Pilgrim in Massachusetts, Seabrook in New Hampshire where Dan installed community monitoring systems to track the emissions – then Kerr McGee in Oklahoma, Sellafield, England, Cap de la Hague and Cherbourg, France, Muraroa Atoll, Tahiti, and Hawaiʻi Island.
Then on to the work Dan Sythe is doing now with the open source, “Make” community built site, Safecast.org, that is also supported by all major internet entities from Google to Twitter. They are undertaking what is often called the largest citizen science project to date. An attempt to deal with nuclear accidents and public health disasters and to get information directly from and to affected people.
Then ending with Steven Starr, Senior Scientist with Physicians for Social Responsibility, who eloquently explains the extreme danger that Cesium 137 poses that is present in all fuel-pools at nuclear power power plants.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 19.9MB)
