Nuclear Hotseat Hosted By Libbe Halevy

The All-Numnutz Special: Nuclear 2015 in Review, seen through the lens of Numnutz of the Week. Laughs! Thrills! Radioactive spills! Leading to the first ever... Numnutz of the Year!

Fire! Rain! Floods! Nuclear Politics! In North St. Louis? Yes! West Lake Landfill Manhattan Project radioactive waste update w/Byron DeLear. http://ow.ly/WGEnk

Ambassador Murata's Honorable Retreat Olympics strategy; Twitter assault on West Lake Moms by paid Republic Services trolls. NY's aged, creaking Indian Point Reactor 3 now being driven without a license and not even a ticket and Peach Bottom in PA springs steam leak, but NRC sees no problem. Oy.

INTERVIEWS: Ed Smith, who is with the Missouri Coalition for the Environment, explains the proposed legislation to put Federal supervision of the West Lake Landfill under the Army Corps of Engineers and the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program, or FUSRAP. And Dawn Chapman, a Mom who lives two miles from West Lake and Admins the West Lake Landfill Facebook site, on latest developments in the PR “divide and conquer” pushback from Republic Services.

INTERVIEW: Kumar Sundaram is a true firebrand of an international activist in India's fight against nuclear technology. Kumar is a Research Consultant with the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP). Right now, he's in the middle of a two-week trip to Japan, where he has been speaking to groups and rallys as large as 10,000 as he gatherers support against the planned India/Japan Nuclear Agreement. He joined us via Skype from Hiroshima on Sunday, November 22, during a break from the World Nuclear Victims Forum. ENCORE INTERVIEW: Vicki Nelson lives in Hawaii and in 2012, after a trip to Fukushima, started the nonprofit Fukushima Friends, Inc. This program invites those living in the radiation to come to Hawaii to, as Vicki put it, "breathe fresh air, swim in the ocean and eat good food." Fukushima radiation refugees stay in people's homes for up to 3 months, or longer if the visas can be managed. She joined us via Skype from the Big Island of Hawaii, along with one of her homestay guests,

Appendix Cancer? St. Louis Nuclear Nightmare – Coldwater Creek, Cancer Clusters w/Karen Nickle. COVER-UP – LA kid’s camp contaminated w/strontium 90, tritium, 1997 report denied... by Judge Wapner? And a National Park f/the wild roentgen? The wooly rad? How about just WWII Manhattan Project propaganda? Now THAT'S wild! #Nuclear Hotseat 230: http://ow.ly/UMRbR

INTERVIEW: "Atomic Eggs" - Mary Olson of NIRS.org on gender differences in the impact of radiation on the human body and how women and girls are more vulnerable to its negative consequences. NUMNUTZ OF THE WEEK: Heeere, radioactive materials from Los Alamos National Laboratory... Heeeeeere, radioactive materials...! NRC DUCK AND COVER REPORT - Watts Bar, Davis-Besse, Millstone on hot standby, Sen Markey (D-Mass) wants to know how well reactors can stand up to extreme weather events. And all the news that fits.

FEATURED INTERVIEWS: Byron DeLear lives within seven miles of the West Lake Landfill. He has been involved in clean energy issues as chairman and CEO of Energy Equity Funding. He is a columnist with Examiner.com, was founder of Global Peace Solution, and is currently running for state representative. We talked about the legal situation that makes West Lake ineligible for the federal FUSRAP clean-up program of Superfund sites — and how that might be turned around. Mimi German is the founder of RadCast, (Radcast.org) which helps citizen activists learn how to take accurate radiation readings, then compiles their data to figure out what’s going on – radiologically speaking – wherever the EPA has fallen down on the job… which is just about everywhere. She can be contacted directly at: Info@Radcast.org. NUMNUTZ OF THE WEEK: Wanna know how to get around having verifiable radiation readings at a nuclear site? Don’t hire anyone to do the job when your current staff leaves! The workers aren’t in Kansas any mo

A full-length Nuclear Hotseat SPECIAL on the West Lake Landfill in North St. Louis - a Manhattan Project-era radioactive waste dump - and the encroaching underground fire less than a quarter mile away. INTERVIEWS: Dr. Helen Caldicott on medical implications of exposure to the improperly stored West Lake Manhattan Project-era radioactive waste; Bob Alvarez on the history of the site, where the waste came from, how it got there, the current risks; and Dawn Chapman, a Mom who lives within two miles of the West Lake Landfill and Admis the Facebook West Lake Landfill page.

INTERVIEWS: Diane Turco of Cape Downwinders in Massachusetts on Entergy's announcement that Pilgrim NPP was closing!... by 2019 - what could go wrong from now to then? Donna Gilmore of SanOnofreSafety.org on deadly problems with the thin "tin can" dry storage casks approved for radioactive nuclear "spent" fuel approved for San Onofre; and Gary Headrick of SanClementeGreen.org on the recent epic fail of the California Coastal Commission in granting SanO's opoerators, Southern California Edison, everything they want, hang the expense (to ratepayers) or long term danger. NUMNUTZ OF THE WEEK: Mobile Chernobyl in miniature as a drilling company searches over 18 counties in two states to find a missing radioactive piece of equipment -- you think we can trust them with high level nuclear waste on our highways? PLUS THE WEEK'S NEWS: St. Louis West Lake landfill fire draws mainstream media attention as residents struggle to cope with the implications for their lives; Japan recognizes its first case of cancer in

INTERVIEW: Tim Deere-Jones, an independent marine pollution consultant in the UK and a specialist in the behaviour and fate of marine pollutants in marine, coastal and estuarine environments. He explains how radiation from the UK's Sellafield ended up in the Arctic and Alaska, and applies sea-to-land dispersal patterns observed in England to Fukushima. NUMNUTZ OF THE WEEK: Japanese propaganda at Milan Food Expo touts Fukushima food as safe, even as one of its ministries finds cesium contamination in 46 of 50 dried persimmons grown in Fukushima prefecture. WEEK'S NEWS INCLUDES: Entergy announces Pilgrim nuke to close!... in 2019 (why can't they just put it out of its misery now?); thyroid cancer rates in Fukushima children and adolescents up to 50% higher than the rest of Japan, while international researchers pin down the risks of low level radiation; Nearly 2,000 people protest restart of Sendai nuclear reactor; and seaweed forces scram shutdown of Russia's Leningrad nuke.

INTERVIEWS: Mr. Masahiko Goto, representing the Yokusuka-based anti-nuclear group, Coalition Concerning Homeporting of the Nuclear Powered Carrier Vessel, on activist opposition to the return of the USS Reagan to Japan; and Carol Jahnkow., Director Emerita of Peace Resource Center of San Diego, on problems she learned about with the Reagan when it was homeported in San Diego after it returned from Fukushima. FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT: Marcus Schwenzel, director, writer and producer of "Seven Years of Winter," a short dramatic film shot in the exclusion zone at Chernobyl that has just won the Yellow Oscar for Best Film at the Int'l Uranium Film Festival. NUMNUTZ OF THE WEEK: Japan's PM Shinzo Abe claims "safety!" on Japan's second restart of a nuclear reactor, in Sendai, when there's an active volcano 31 miles away, the country's in the earthquake-prone Ring of Fire, it's a typhoon zone and a tsunami zone -- but hey, can't go all fascistic and militaristic w/o nukes, ya know? PLUS: Third Fukushima meltdown co

INTERVIEWS: Norbert Suchanek, Director of the International Uranium Film Festival, on current films showing at the Berlin festival and plans to bring the IUFF to Los Angeles. Christian Bruun, Executive Producer of "The Man Who Saved the World," how how this film about the Russian soldier who refused to launch nukes at the United States in 1983 in retaliation for what looked like an attack (it was a computer glitch) impacted his life even as it allowed all of us to have ours. NUMNUTZ OF THE WEEK: Japan's minister for the 2020 Tokyo (Radioactive) Olympics wants five sports to be located in Fukushima, including the surfing competition! PLUS: Japaneses researchers now believe that Fukushima Unit 2 may have melted down completely and Unit 5 had serious problems that the IAEA tried to bury in their recent report. Radioactive fallout still falling on Tokyo. Radioactive milk, mushrooms in Japan. US accidents at Hope Creek reactor in NJ and Honeywell uranium processing in Illinois. Oy!

INTERVIEW: Author Kristen Iversen on the history of the Manhattan Project and plutonium trigger manufacturing waste at Rocky Flats, which is about to open as a Colorado Wildlife Refuge . NUMNUTZ OF THE WEEK: The New York Times goes in for hard core hormesis (no - Whore-YOU-sis) propaganda that completely undercuts its reputation as the "Great Gray Lady" of U.S. journalism and turns it into a shill for radiation deniers everywhere. PLUS: San Onofre secret meetings over waste and failed clean-up at the Los Angeles area Santa Susana Field Lab both subjects of major investigative reports by southern California mainstream media; five US nuclear reactors have NRC-level "unusual" events - isn't that the definition of "usual?" US Senator petitions Secretary of State John Kerry to intervene with our deadly international neighbor to the north - Canada - to prevent to construction of the nuclear waste storage facility within one mile of the shores of Lake Huron; and no, the enormous wolf fish caught in Japan is no

INTERVIEW: Mary Beth Brangan of EON3 on the recent event she helped to product, FUKUSHIMA CONTAMINATION In the Ocean and in the Biosphere with Timothy Mousseau and Ken Buessler. NUMNUTZ OF THE WEEK: What to do with former plutonium contaminated nuke sites? Why, if you're Rocky Flats in Colorado, just turn it into a nature preserve! And don't be ironic about it! PLUS: Typhoon Etau floods Fukushima and sends radioactive water into the Pacific as it washes away 395 bags of decontaminated dirt and plant material; NRC drops study of cancer rates near nuclear reactors as "too expensive" at a mere $8 million; and a South Korean town wants a referendum to stop construction of new nukes because the government had shut them out of the decision-making process. Sounds like us.

INTERVIEWS: Celine-Marie Pascale of American University in Washington, DC about distortions in news coverage of Fukushima for the first two years after the disaster began (from Nuclear Hotseat #203, May 2, 2015); award-winning investigative journalist Susannah Frame of KING 5 in Seattle on how she came to cover the Hanford site for the NBC affiliate (From Nuclear Hotseat #109, July 16, 2013). SOCIAL MEDIA SUPERTRICKS #8 - Dave Parrish completes our summer social media series w/a vision of how to pull all the pieces together to create a unified social media platform.

INTERVIEW: Investigative journalist Paul DeRienzo reveals the political manipulations, intimidation tactics and loose-and-fast burying of nuclear waste at WCS in West Texas, along with personal recollections of growing up the son of the man who designed both Hanford in Washington state and Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. Dave Parrish offers SOCIAL MEDIA SUPERTIPS #7 on Google Plus. NUMNUTZ OF THE WEEK: The NRC rejected its own task force's recommendations and has decided to allow the nuclear industry to privately self-police its voluntary plans for coping with a cor-melt accident. Fox in charge of the Nuclear Henhouse yet again! PLUS: Fukushima waste detected along the Southern California coast...again; baby seals in Pacific Ocean dying of leukemia-linked disorder; and a nuke-powered airplane - what could go wrong?

INTERVIEWS: With the revelation of high levels of uranium in the drinking water of six million Americans, Nuclear Hotseat digs into the story w/Karen Hadden of SEED Coalition in Texas, who points to a number of nuclear sites that may be implicated in the aquifer contamination. Then Mimi German of No Nukes NW and Radcast reveals problems at the Columbia Generating Station, a Fukushima-style nuclear reactor on the Columbia River in Washington State. NUMNUTZ OF THE WEEK: A vaccine for radiation?!? Do you think you're Edward Jenner's cow? PLUS: Restarted Sendai nuke in Japan found to be leaking in five pipes as a major typhoon barrels down on it a mere 31 miles from a volcano threatening major eruption. Ya'd think they'd get the message…

INTERVIEW: More on the NRC petition to allow radiation-denying hormesis theory set the standards for radiation exposure with Dr. Ian Fairlie, a British scientist and independent consultant on radioactivity in the environment. SOCIAL MEDIA SUPERTRICKS #5: Pretty Pictures, w/Dave Parrish of Operation Save the Earth. NUMNUTZ OF THE WEEK: Beer is no way to commemorate the violent death of almost a quarter of a million people. PLUS: Japan restarts nuke in Sendai just in time for nearby volcano to threaten to blow its top; update on species mutations in Fukushima; billions of dead fish washing up on shore in Alaska "because of warm water" and no one says a word about Fukushima's leaks into the ocean and how radiation creates heat; Feds must build new storage for Hanford's radwaste in Washington State; and Sen. Bernie Sanders becomes the only candidate for the presidential nomination to make his nuclear policy known.

FACEBOOK: Nuclear "Organizational Psychosis" w/Dr. Lloyd C. Williams - and what to do about it. Social Media Supertricks: Twitter! NUMNUTZ OF THE WEEK: The White House approves the EPA's "new, improved radiation limits in water!" Way to go, EPA's Gina "never met a nuke I didn't love enough to cover for" McCarthy! PLUS: Chernobyl forest fires release more radiation; Japan restarts Sendai nuclear reactor despite protests and a nearby active volcano; and Pacific Ocean in even worse condition than we feared - w/a Nuclear Hotseat Special Correspondent Report.