This year, the government of Japan announced plans to dump contaminated water from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant into the ocean. Till this day, cleanup of the 2011 Fukushima disaster continues and it is estimated that by 2022 the Fukushima site will be at capacity for storing contaminated water. As outrageous as this news is, even more so is how little coverage it received, or outcry it warranted. It exemplifies the absurdity of nuclear energy, the inability of nuclear power reactors to deal with their waste, the pervasiveness of nuclear contamination and its paradoxical invisibility. Nuclear contamination is everywhere, yet we rarely talk about it. The threat of nuclear annihilation is always looming, yet we rarely talk about it. This week’s episode is dedicated to changing that. We talk to Dr. Helen Caldicott, who draws our attention to the realities of nuclear power reactors, proliferation and weapons, as well as the ways in which nuclearism has already wrought an unimaginable amount of havoc and trauma on our environment, culture and bodies. 

Helen Caldicott, a graduate of the University of Adelaide School of Medicine, was a faculty member of Harvard Medical School and in 1974 founded the Cystic Fibrosis Clinic at Adelaide Children’s hospital. In 1971 she played a major role in Australia’s opposition to French atmospheric nuclear testing in the Pacific.

While at Harvard in the early 1980s, she helped to reinvigorate, as its president, Physicians for Social Responsibility, an organization of 23,000 doctors committed to educating their colleagues about the dangers of nuclear power, nuclear weapons and nuclear war. On trips abroad she helped start similar medical organizations in many other countries; their umbrella group, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. She also founded the Women’s Action for Nuclear Disarmament (WAND) in the US in 1980.

The author or editor of eight books including Nuclear Madness, Missile Envy, and, most recently, Sleepwalking to Armageddon, she has been the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees, the subject of three award-winning documentary films, and was named one of the 20th Century’s most influential women by the Smithsonian Institution.

In our conversation with Dr. Caldicott, we begin by discussing the environmental and health impacts of the nuclear fuel cycle in terms of uranium mining, plutonium contamination. What has transpired in sacrifice zones across the Southwestern United States and the Pacific Ocean? Can abandoned uranium mines ever be properly remediated?  In the next step of the nuclear fuel cycle, we explore the health ramifications of nuclear power reactors and the “industrial vandalism” that occurs at these sites and through the transportation and storage of their waste. We also explore how nuclear contamination spreads through the more-than-human world, how radioactive boar are a reality, thus changing our very understanding of “nature.” And lastly, we learn about nuclear proliferation and global politics. 

♫ Music by Rupa and the April Fishes and Cat Clyde

Episode References

Chernobyl | The New York Academy of Science

Crisis Without End by Helen Caldicott

Evolutionary Biologist Timothy Mousseau 

'An Appalling Act of Industrial Vandalism': Japanese Officials Do PR for Plan to Dump Fukushima Water Into Ocean

Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant

Pueblo Leaders Voice Opposition To Massive Nuclear Waste Transport Project 

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