Author Archives: Maria

Bob Alvarez: Spent Fuel Pools and Radioactive Waste

Bob Alvarez, Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies became the focus of intense character assassination by the nuclear industry when he wrote in April 2012: Why Fukushima Is a Greater Disaster than Chernobyl and a Warning Sign for the U.S. He explained: “The radioactive inventory of all the irradiated nuclear fuel stored in spent fuel pools at Fukushima is far greater and even more problematic than the molten reactor cores.”
“Spent” fuel is a misnomer, far from being harmless, irradiated fuel remains too radioactive to handle for 5 years and thermally and radiologically dangerous way beyond that period. When the US government was looking for permanent storage for high level waste, which includes fuel rods, they were looking for [ . . . ]

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Arnie Gundersen: What did they know? When did they know it?

FUKUSHIMA SYMPOSIUM 2013: Gundersen argues that the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi accident in Japan began in 1965, inside the US, with General Electric and the engineers who designed the site plan and architecture for the Mark I reactor at Fukushima. He also points the finger at the US Atomic Energy Commission that permitted a flawed design to be licensed and built.
Gundersen holds an MA in nuclear engineering and once worked for the nuclear industry. He was an expert witness on the Three Mile Island partial melt-down, and more recently on the serious safety risks at the Vermont Yankee and California’s San Onofre reactors. He and his website at Fairewinds Energy Education <www.fairewinds.org/> became well known and respected after the Fukushima accident [ . . . ]

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 19.9MB)

Gary Nabhan: The Future of Orchards in Times of Climate Change

Farmers are not debating weather climate change is real or not, they are dealing with it already. At the 2012 Heirloom Seed Expo the co-founder of the local food movement, ethnobotanist and tender of a 6 acre orchard in Arizona, Gary Nabhan, made a wise and moving appeal to value the vast contribution orchards can make to mitigating climate change and resisting the impact of drought and heat.
Gary Nabhan, in 2011, made the Utne reader list of 30 people who made the world a better place to live. As teacher in academia and author of over 25 books, he inspired a new generation to understand the link between bio-diversity and cultural diversity. Many of them now dream of becoming farmers [ . . . ]

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Cathrine Sneed: The Garden Project in San Francisco

One program, self contained, 29min – Great special for Women’s Day
When prisoners in the San Francisco County Jail asked to remain in jail beyond their release date, prison authorities, Sheriff Hennessy, and Cathrine Sneed who started the gardening program that prisoners did not want to leave, – all realized that they had created a success, a model, or a mystery.
Cathrine Sneed credits John Steinbeck. In Grapes of Wrath he writes that there is hope, even in abject poverty, as long as the connection to the land can be restored.
The way in which she has connected land, the growing of organic food, and the resolution to hunger, addiction, unhealthy food, and crime, has become a model not just for prisons, but [ . . . ]

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Sandor Katz: Wild Fermentation TWO of TWO

Sandor Katz is a much loved fermented food maker, teacher and respected author of two books: Wild Fermentation and The Art of Fermentation. His mission is to rescue this ancient craft from oblivion and to inspire people to practice the arts of fermentation in their kitchens. This is the Question and Answer section after his talk at the second annual Heirloom Seed Expo in Santa Rosa, CA in September 2012. Katz responds to practical DIY questions about yoghurt, Kefir, and Kombucha. He ends with an inspiring linguistic flourish about political ferment and social change.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:02 — 19.9MB)

Sandor Katz: Wild Fermentation

When Sandor Katz escaped from NY City and joined a rural off the electric grid community in Tennessee a little over two decades ago he knew very little about growing vegetables and even less about fermenting them. His amazing development as teacher and author of two books: Wild Fermentation and The Art of Fermentation, was fueled by fond memories of pickles he relished as a kid in NYC, love for the nourishing power of good foods, and his deep interest in the culture, art and history of fermentation. His great appeal as a teacher and speaker also lies in his direct and honest approach to life. He is openly gay and living with AIDS and is convinced of the healing [ . . . ]

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:02 — 19.9MB)

Seniors for Peace – Happy Tenth Anniversary!

We remember the huge demonstrations against the war on Iraq in 2003. Of those hundreds of thousands who came out for peace across the world mostly films, photos and very fond memories survive. But one group, maybe the most unlikely of all, the Seniors for Peace in Mill Valley, CA, just kept going.  For ten years now this year, 2013, every Friday at 4 pm rain or shine, they spend an hour at the intersection of Miller and Camino Alto with hand drums, guitar, harmonica, fiddle and banners for peace. That in spite of the need of some to use a wheelchair or walker since their average age is now 86 and many are in their nineties.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 19.9MB)

From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima (Part TWO of TWO)

In common history Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima represent the beginning and the end events of World War II suggesting that the attack on Pearl Harbor forced the US into war and the bombing of Hiroshima saved the lives of up to one million US soldiers who might have been killed in an invasion of Japan. With help from long ignored or classified information Arjun Makhijani re-analyzes both events. This talk, given to Nuke Free Now in August 2012 near the Los Alamos Weapons Lab, presents thought provoking information about why and how nuclear weapons were developed and who really was in control of their use.
Arjun Makhijani asks how it had been possible to exclude almost all military and civilian leaders [ . . . ]

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 19.9MB)

From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima by Arjun Makhijani (ONE of TWO)

Disarmament is more urgently needed now that nuclear weapons have spread far beyond the original weapons states. Makhijani shows that we can only find the path back from the abyss if we are clear and honest about how nuclear weapons were invented and first used. And there is much information in this talk that has been shunned or kept secret: Why was the US fleet moved from San Diego to Pearl Harbor? Does the Japanese attack have anything to do with the US oil embargo? What were the original goals of the Manhattan Project and why and when were they changed? And who was in charge of this secret program when even the US Vice President or the generals responsible [ . . . ]

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Happy Birthday Bertolt Brecht – 115 years since February 10, 1898

Even though the German playwright, poet, director and theoretician of the stage was persecuted by the Nazi’s, and then forced to leave his exile home in the US when he was accused of being a communist, he did become a major influence on visual and performance artists such as Jean Luc Godard, Robert Wilson, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Augusto Boal, Pina Bausch, Dario Fo and many others.
His most famous plays, the Threepenny Opera and the Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny were just two of over sixty plays. During the war years, Brecht became a prominent writer of the “Literature in Exile”. He expressed his opposition to the National Socialist and Fascist movements in his most often performed plays: [ . . . ]

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 19.9MB)

A Quarter Century of Unheeded Warnings: Stephen Schneider Tribute (TWO of TWO)

Schneider gave the opening address at the “Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change” conference at the Hadley Centre in England on February 1, 2005. At the request of the British government 200 scientists convened to counter the refusal of the US administration to acknowledge the urgency of the problems related to climate change.
Data on the accelerated melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and the possible collapse of the Gulf Stream that brings warm waters from the tropic across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe caused the greatest concern – but were not covered in the commercial US media.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 19.9MB)

A Quarter Century of Unheeded Warnings: Stephen Schneider Tribute (ONE of TWO)

When the Stanford Professor Stephen Schneider died on a return flight from a climate conference in Sweden in 2010 the world lost one the great and courageous climate scientists. He and Prof. James Hansen risked their careers by researching and publishing on climate change since the 1980s and the world would be a very different place today had their warnings been heeded instead of denied and disparaged.
This conversation was recorded in March 2001 in the garden of Schneider’s home near the Stanford Campus. He had just returned from his work with the IPCC. Thousands of scientists are making contributions that are reviewed by the IPCC and then must be approved line by line by all 120 plus member nations. [ . . . ]

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 19.9MB)

Global Warming – A Quarter Century of Unheeded Warnings

Remembrance of the late Dr. Stephen Schneider
Topics: CO2 now 20% higher than in last half million years; rate of CO2 increase higher than in geologic time; extreme weather; solutions: carbon pricing and equity.
In TUC radio’s last program you heard Hansen’s acceptance speech. This – by extension is my credit to Schneider whose name on the press coverage of the award came up only as a quote: “a Stanford professor who died”. Nothing about his very unique and holistic view based on his expertise in biology and atmospheric science, his ability to describe how climate and life evolved together – and how that process is falling apart as humans are disturbing the earth. And nothing about his work with the Intergovernmental [ . . . ]

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 19.9MB)

Dr. James Hansen: CALL TO ACTION – LEAVE COAL IN THE GROUND AND PUT A PRICE ON CARBON

Topics: Superstorm Sandy, carbon pricing VS cap and trade.
Dr. James Hansen heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and is Adjunct Professor at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. He is one the first climate scientists to issue an urgent warning on climate change and has been embattled ever since – and stood his ground. Now, a quarter century later he speaks, campaigns, and issues scientific papers with an ever growing group of concerned scientists from across the world. He works with Bill McKibben on the campaign against the Keystone XL Pipeline, joined in civil disobedience and was arrested. Hansen has very clear ideas as to what needs to be done politically to face the immediate danger of climate change.
On December [ . . . ]

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:01 — 19.9MB)

Michael Parenti: The 1% Pathology and the Myth of Capitalism (TWO of TWO)

Parenti explores how the post World War II prosperity emerged in the US and how at the same time the organized destruction of the human and environmental support systems accelerated.
This is the conclusion of a one-hour speech by Dr. Michael Parenti, given in October 2012 at Evergreen College in Olympia, Washington. Parenti, with a Ph.D. from Yale, is an independent scholar, lecturer and author of over 20 books.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:59 — 19.9MB)