I am appalled at the idea of ”Mothers For Nuclear”
As a mother myself, I am appalled that such a group as ”Mothers For Nuclear” even exists. Dont
they know about the effects of ionising radiation on women, especially pregnant women? Don’t they know about the breast cancers, the birth deformities in irradiated areas such as Pacific atomic bomb sites, and Belarus-Ukraine, near the Chernobyl site. No, they don’t seem to. (Perhaps that ‘s the beauty of a narrowly S.T.E.M. education?)
Both Heather Hoff and Kristin Zaitz work at the Diablo Nuclear Power Plant. Hoff worked as a plant operator, and now as a procedure writer. Zaitz works as a civil engineer.
Hoff was inspired by none other than that top nuclear schill Michael Shellenberger, and by the glossy nuclear advertising film ”Pandora’s Promise”.
They sound very sincere, but also very ignorant of the negative issues around the nuclear industry.
Why am I not surprised? The nuclear industry is busting its guts trying to get women onside. Their favourite thing is getting (preferably young and attractive) women into engineering, and at the top of nuclear companies. (This is good in two ways – good to promote the industry’s ‘gender equality’ image, and good if they muck up, as Leslie Dewan did, in her bogus claims for Transatomic’s molten salt reactor – let a woman take the flak!)
The thing is – lots of women have expertise in biology, genetics – and an understanding of the effects of ionising radiation. But the nuclear industry has got us all conned that these are ”soft”sciences. So – if you’ve got ”hard” scienvce knowledge – like engineering, then you can be an authority on nuclear issues.
These two women sound very sincere – alarmingly so.
The Activists Who Embrace Nuclear Power, New Yorker, By Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, February 19, 2021
To be fervently pro-nuclear, in the manner of Hoff and Zaitz, is to see in the peaceful splitting of the atom something almost miraculous. It is to see an energy source that has been steadily providing low-carbon electricity for decades—doing vastly more good than harm, saving vastly more lives than it has taken—but which has received little credit and instead been maligned. It is to believe that the most significant problem with nuclear power, by far, is public perception. ………..—the pro-nuclear world view can edge toward dogmatism. Hoff and Zaitz certainly seem readier to tout studies that confirm their views, and reluctant to acknowledge any flaws that nuclear energy may have. ……https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-activists-who-embrace-nuclear-power
Dr Helen Caldicott as mentor for anti-nuclear activists
My Six Mentors, “…….Helen Caldicott, MD, by Mary Olson, Gender and Radiation Impact Project, 1 January 20121
Helen Caldicott deserves a much greater place in our histories of the Cold War and ending the USA / USSR arms race than she generally gets. This is, perhaps, because she is powerful and a woman. A pediatrician, who in the 1970’s would not tolerate the radioactive fallout she and her patients were suffering from nuclear weapons tests in Australia, Helen and her family came to the USA. She and another physician named Ira Helfand revived what had been a local Boston organization of physicians and created a Nobel Prize winning organization called Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), which later participated in the creation of another Nobel Prize winning group, the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW). These two along with hundreds of other organizations committed to peace and nuclear disarmament formed the International Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) which has helped to create the new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (see http://icanw.org/the-treaty ) and also won the Nobel Prize (2017).
Helen herself is a powerful communicator and will move audiences at a level that can change the course of someone’s life and work. She followed her own destiny to winning meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev, President of the Soviet Union, where she educated him about Nuclear Winter and the fact that nuclear is not a war that anyone can win. She also met with President Reagan in the era and diagnosing early-stage dementia… Her ability to bring the reality of the world to these men, and reality of these men to the world set her aside, in a class by herself—and was an enormous contribution to us all.
I first met Helen in the body of her Cold War block-buster book “Nuclear Madness.” I was in the midst of an existential crisis that could have become an even bigger health crisis. After college I needed a job (not yet a career) because I was broke, broken up from my first “true” love, and far from home. I got a job as a research assistant in a lab at a prestigious medical school; it was 1984.
Within 2 weeks, I was inadvertently contaminated with radioactivity (without my knowledge) by carelessness of a lab-mate. The radioactive material, Phosphorus-32 is used in research to trace biochemical activity in living organisms. This type of radioactivity is not deeply penetrating, so there was some reason not to panic, however the I was exposed continuously for over a week, and I also found radioactivity at home– my toothbrush was “hot”—so I had also had some level of internal exposure. I was terrified. The lab used concentrations of the tracer thousands of times higher than is typical.
The institution told me there was no danger, but because I was upset, they helped me transfer to a different job. No accident report was filed, and in the midst of transition, my radiation detection badge was never processed. It is not possible to know the dimensions of my exposure—I began having symptoms that were not normal for me. Many people, including some family members told me I was imagining things. No one in my circle understood how terrified I was.
I was fortunate that Helen had already written “Nuclear Madness”—the first edition came out in 1978, just before the March 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown in Harrisburg PA—an event that propelled the book into multiple printings including a Bantam Paperback edition that I found. It turned out that 7 years later I helped Helen to revise and update the same text for the 1994 WW Norton edition. It was Helen’s deep commitment to truth, to speaking and writing that truth, to empowering people to take action for good. Helen’s words accurately described radiation and its potential for harm, and in my panic about the unknown, this calmed me.
Every other authority I had encountered was trying to tell me there was no problem—when I knew they had no right to dismiss what had happened to me. I am quite certain that had I remained alone with my fear, despair, and confusion my panic would have resulted in behaviors that would have compounded any harm bodily from that radioactive contamination. Reading Helen’s work let me know there was at least one woman walking the Earth who did know what I was going through… it made it possible for me to choose recovery and walk away from a legal battle that would have forced me to maintain, hold and prove a myself a victim. Instead, following in Helen’s wake, I chose Peaceful Warrior. Thank you Helen! : ……….. https://www.genderandradiation.org/blog/2020/12/31/my-six-mentors
Small Nuclear Reactors (SMRs) if they work, will arrive too late to make a difference to global heating
Is nuclear power the answer?, DECEMBER 8, 2020 JOHN QUIGGIN
The last (I hope) extract from the climate change chapter of Economic Consequences of the Pandemic. I’m in two minds about whether this is really needed. The group of pro-nuclear environmentalists seems to be shrinking towards a hard core who can’t be convinced (and some of them, like Shellenberger turn out to have been concern trolls all along). But every now and then I run across people who seem open-minded enough, but haven’t caught up with the bad news on nuclear.
Debates about decarbonizing electricity generation inevitably raise the issue of nuclear power. Since nuclear power generates no carbon dioxide emissions (except in the construction phase) it is a potential solution to climate change, with a strong body of advocates.
Some of this advocacy may be dismissed as point-scoring. Rightwing pundits who oppose any action on climate change simultaneously promote nuclear power as carbon free, with the aim of embarrassing environmentalist. There is, however, a small but vocal group of nuclear power advocates who are convinced that a massive expansion of nuclear power is the only way to replace coal-fired power………
Today the choice is not between new nuclear and new or existing coal. It is whether to allocate investment to building nuclear plants or to accelerating the shift to solar and wind energy.
The key problem is not safety but economics. New plants are safer and more sophisticated than those that failed in the past, but they are also massively more expensive to build, and quite costly to operate. The capital costs of recent projects in the US, France and Finland (none yet complete) have been around $10/kw, compared to $1/kw or less for solar. And, whereas solar PV is essentially costless to operate, the operating costs of nuclear power plants are around 2c/kwH. Even when solar PV is backed up with battery storage, it is cheaper to build and to operate, than new nuclear.
The facts speak for themselves. Over the last decade, only two or three reactors have commenced construction each year, not even enough to replace plants being retired. This isn’t the result of pressure from environmentalists or alarm about the safety of nuclear plants. The slowdown is evident in countries like China, where public opinion has little influence on policy decisions, and in countries where public opinion is generally favorable to new nuclear power. China failed to reach its 2020 target of 58 GW of installed power, and currently has only about 15 GW of nuclear power under construction. That compares to 55 GW of new solar and wind capacity installed in 2019 alone.
It is clear by now that large-scale nuclear reactors have no future. The last hope for nuclear power rests on Small Modular Reactors. The idea is that, rather than building a single large reactor, typically with a capacity of 1 GW, smaller reactors will be produced in factories, then shipped to the site in the required number. The leading proponent of this idea is Nuscale Power, which currently has a contract with UAMPS to supply a pilot plant with a dozen 60MW modules.
It remains to be seen whether SMR’s will work at all. Even if they do, it is not clear that the reduced costs associated with off-site manufacturing will offset the loss of the scale economies associated with a large boiler, let alone yield power at a cost competitive with that of solar PV.
In any case, the issue is largely irrelevant as far as the climate emergency is concerned. NuScale’s pilot plant, with a total capacity of 720 MW, is currently scheduled to start operation in 2029. Large-scale deployment will take at least a decade more .
If we are to have any chance of stabilising the climate, coal-fired power must be eliminated by 2030, and electricity generation must be decarbonized more or less completely by 2035. SMRs, if they work, will arrive too late to make a difference. ….https://johnquiggin.com/2020/12/08/is-nuclear-power-the-answer/#more-17451
The world’s banks must start to value nature and stop paying for its destruction
The world’s banks must start to value nature and stop paying for its destruction, Guardian, Robert Watson 28 Oct 20, As a new report spells out how financial institutions contribute to biodiversity loss, the clamour is growing for a new approach.
- Banks lent $2.6tn linked to ecosystem and wildlife destruction in 2019 – report
- The scientific community has long been unequivocal about biodiversity destruction. Last month, the UN reported that the world had failed to meet fully any of the 2020 Aichi bioiversity targets that countries agreed with fanfare in 2010, even as it found that biodiversity is declining at an unprecedented rate, and the pressures driving this decline are intensifying.This week’s Bankrolling Extinction report finds that financial institutions provide the capital that is funding over-exploitation of our lands and seas, putting biodiversity in freefall. Last year, the world’s 50 biggest banks provided $2.6tn (£1.9tn) in loans and other credit to sectors with a high impact on biodiversity, such as forestry and agriculture. Bank by bank, the report authors found a cavalier ignorance of – or indifference to – the implications, with the vast majority unaware of their impact on biodiversity.
In short, this report is a frightening statement of the status quo.
- Fortunately, signs are emerging that some governments are – slowly – taking aim at financial backers of the destruction of the natural world. They must now push more forcefully. In the wake of Covid-19, treasury cupboards may be bare, but with new policies and limited recovery funds, they can steer trillions of dollars of private capital towards a nature-positive response to coronavirus, to spur growth, prosperity and resilience without returning to business as usual over-consumption and climate and biodiversity risk.
- Voices from economics and finance are starting to add impetus and rationale for such momentum. One of the world’s foremost business groups, the World Economic Forum (WEF), has recognised the economic importance of nature. In its annual Global Risks Report, published earlier this year, WEF found that for the first time environmental risks dominated perceived business threats. Biodiversity loss was considered among the five most impactful and most likely risks in the next decade, with concerns ranging from the potential collapse of food and health systems to the disruption of entire supply chains. ……………. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/commentisfree/2020/oct/28/the-worlds-banks-must-start-to-value-nature-and-stop-paying-for-its-destruction-aoe
Womankind arise! — Beyond Nuclear International

Still no equal protection under radiation law
Womankind arise! — Beyond Nuclear International
Nuclear exposure standards discriminate on the basis of sex
By Linda Pentz Gunter, 20 Sept 20,
As we mourn the passing of Supreme Court justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, we look back at her landmark victories against discrimination “on the basis of sex” and wonder how nuclear regulations might have stood up to her legal scrutiny. As things currently stand, the nuclear power industry gets away with “allowable” radiation exposure levels that discriminate against women……….
And despite RBG’s immense contribution to our greater wellbeing, as women, we still face discrimination in so many walks of life. That could be about to get worse.
That discrimination remains most infuriatingly true when it comes to the nuclear power industry which is not, it turns out, an equal opportunity poisoner, as we have shown in our earlier articles about Native American and African American communities.
Women and children, and especially pregnant women, are more vulnerable — meaning they suffer more harm from a given dose of radiation than the harm a man suffers from that same dose.
One should quickly add here that scientists still agree that there is no completely safe dose of radiation. In fact, when a dose is described as safe, it doesn’t mean harmless. It means something called “As low as reasonably achievable”, which means as safe as we are prepared to protect for — or, really, as safe as the nuclear industry is willing to pay for.
So not really safe then, and when they say “safe”, the question women must ask is: safe for whom?
In the US, that means safe for someone called Standard Man or sometimes Reference Man. That is on whom the “allowable” radiation exposure standards are based.
Who is Standard Man? ….
Discrimination strikes again here, on the basis of race and age, because the amount of radiation exposure that is considered “safe” for an individual in the US is based on what would be safe for a healthy, robust, 20-30-something white male…….. more https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/72759838/posts/2922365220
Nuclear bomb testing – the cruellest legacy of environmental injustice and racism
Nuclear testing legacy is ‘cruellest’ environmental injustice, warns rights expert,
https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/07/1068481 16 July 2020
Human RightsThe dangerous legacy of nuclear weapons testing continues to affect many communities, a leading rights expert said on Thursday, on the 75th anniversary of testing in the United States, that heralded the nuclear age.
In an appeal to governments worldwide to get rid of weapons of mass destruction, UN Special Rapporteur on toxics, Baskut Tuncak, said that the Trinity tests in New Mexico on 16 July 1945, were the prelude to “two horrific explosions suffered by (the) innocent people of Japan”, during the Second World War.
They were also followed by the detonation of hundreds of nuclear bombs over vulnerable communities in the Pacific, and the disposal of radioactive waste on lands and territories of indigenous peoples. Paradise lostThis had created a legacy of nuclear testing that “is one of the cruellest examples of environmental injustice witnessed” in “what should be a peaceful island paradise”, said Mr Tuncak, who reports to the Human Rights Council in Geneva. From 1946-58, 67 nuclear bombs were detonated on the Marshall Islands, he said, the equivalent of more than 1.5 “Hiroshima-sized explosions every day for 12 years”. Communities “have suffered unimaginably” from radioactive contamination and this continues today “with a legacy of contamination, illness and anguish”, the expert insisted.
Twin environmental disasters made matters worse, he added, referring to climate change-induced sea level rise and nuclear waste concentrated in a radioactive “tomb”. 200 tests in 30 yearsSimilarly, in French Polynesia, over 200 nuclear tests were conducted over a 30-year period from 1966 to 1996, subjecting inhabitants to associated health and environmental damage, the Special Rapporteur said. From Greenland to the indigenous territories of the United States, he warned that people continued to suffer from the nuclear testing era. Waste not“In recent decades, numerous Native American tribes received funding to store unwanted nuclear waste on their lands,” he said. “Those of Point Hope, Alaska, became recipients of radioactive soil and higher cancer rates that are believed to have been the foreseeable result. And the people of Greenland discovered radioactive waste left by the US military, unbeknownst to them as the ice continues to melt in the Arctic.” This discriminatory approach should be addressed by all States as part of the discussion on “systemic racism” and nuclear disarmament, Mr. Tuncak insisted. “Unaddressed, the dangers of radioactive contamination will persist for centuries, and so too will the harmful legacy of racism that surrounds this tragic chapter of humanity,” he added. |
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Climate change is seriously hitting women, right now
Extreme weather and rising seas are increasing the burden of work, ill-health and violence faced by women who are forced to leave home or left behind as menfolk seek jobs elsewhere
BARCELONA, – From sexual violence in displacement camps to extra farm work and greater risk of illness, women shoulder a bigger burden from worsening extreme weather and other climate pressures pushing people to move for survival, a global aid group said on Tuesday.
Scientists expect forced displacement to be one of the most common and damaging effects on vulnerable people if global warming is not limited to an internationally agreed aim of 1.5 degrees Celsius, CARE International noted in a new report.
“This report shows us that climate change exacerbates existing gender inequalities, with women displaced on the frontlines of its impacts bearing the heaviest consequences,” said CARE Secretary General Sofia Sprechmann Sineiro.
For example, women and girls uprooted by Cyclone Idai, which hit Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi in 2019, are still facing serious health threats due to poor access to basic services and sanitary products, the report said.
And in Ethiopia, where about 200,000 people were forced from their homes last year by drought and floods, women living in overcrowded shelters face higher levels of sexual violence there and on longer, more frequent trips to fetch water and firewood.
Sven Harmeling, CARE’s global policy lead on climate change and resilience, said displacement linked to climate stresses was already “a harsh reality for millions of people today”.
If global warming continues at its current pace towards 3C or more above pre-industrial times, “the situation may irrevocably escalate and evict hundreds of millions more from their homes”, he added.
Climate change impacts are likely to strengthen and “unfold over the next couple of years, and not only in the distant future”, he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Failure to prepare for them will lead to more suffering and people having to abandon their land, he said. Many places already are affected by multiple climate shocks and rising seas, making it harder for those displaced to return, he added.
“(Climate extremes) may mean more men are leaving to try to find income elsewhere, and that puts additional burden on the women who stay back and have to try to earn (money) while taking care of the family,” he said. ……….
In most countries, climate measures supported by public finance do not adequately prioritise women, CARE noted, calling for at least 85% of funding for adaptation projects to target gender equality as an explicit objective by 2023 at the latest.
But some projects are making women a priority, it said……… https://news.trust.org/item/20200707051425-a5d5v/
University boffins discuss the eternal problem of nuclear wastes
The problem of nuclear waste, The Naked Scientists, 07 April 2020 Interview with Claire Corkhill, University of Sheffield
Part of the show The Rise of Radioactivity
Chris – So what you’re saying is, if we’ve got say something that looks like glass, because it’s spitting out all these energetic particles of radiation all the time, it’s slowly going to shatter the glass. It’s almost like shaking the glass very, very hard for hundreds of thousands of years; it’s eventually going to fall to pieces and it will no longer be any good at retaining and constraining the radioactive products inside.
Adam – How do we design something in the future so that this stuff stays where it is, and isn’t archeologist bait, and they suddenly dig up a radioactive cube of glass?
Male dominated climate talks falter, while women’s perspective is excluded
The first step to achieving this aim would be gender parity at international climate conferences such as the Madrid COP. While we don’t yet know how many of the 13,000 registered governmental delegates were women, based on past numbers they are unlikely to make up more than a quarter. This is not the only forum where the experiences of women are ignored. Our research, spanning Kenya, Cambodia and Vanuatu, has found women are working collectively to strengthen their communities in the face of climate change. But their knowledge about climate risk is dismissed by scientists and political leaders. Bridging climate awareness When women are excluded from local and national-level governance, the absence of their voices at regional and global levels, such as COP meetings, is virtually assured. Our work across Africa, Asia and the Pacific found scientists – generally male – lack awareness of the knowledge women hold about the local consequences of climate change. At the same time, those women had little access to scientific research. In places where the labour is divided by gender, women and men learn different things about the environment. Though the women in our research generally did not know about government policies or programs on climate change and disaster risk reduction, they were very aware of environmental change. In Kenya, the pastoralist women we spoke to are acutely aware of the link between their physical insecurity and extreme drought. Continue reading |
The toxic gender norms in the nuclear weapons establishment
discussion of nuclear weapons is informed by and perpetuates toxic gender norms. In this world, strength, force, rationality, and destruction are masculine. Things like weapon design, targeting, and nuclear strategy fall into this category. Weakness, emotion, the very concept of peace, and the human costs of nuclear weapons are feminine.
The human cost of nuclear weapons is not only a “feminine”
![]() It would be easy to dwell in frustration on experiences like these, or similar ones I have seen my colleagues face. Instead, I’m inspired by the women who excel in this field despite these challenges. What’s more, I’m glad that these experiences led me to start poking holes in the received nuclear weapons wisdom and to seek new approaches. One such approach, which is often overlooked but increasingly gaining prominence, is to examine nuclear issues through a social justice lens. As with many social justice issues, women, indigenous communities, communities of color, and low-income and rural communities have often been those hit hardest by nuclear weapons production and testing. The scope of suffering among these frontline communities—those directly impacted by US nuclear weapons production and testing—is shocking. A recent study very roughly estimates that atmospheric nuclear testing led to 340,000 to 460,000 premature deaths between 1951 and 1973. The US government has estimated that roughly 200,000 armed service personnel were involved in nuclear weapons tests, though others put that number as high as 400,000. The 67 nuclear tests conducted in the Marshall Islands, in total, had the equivalent power of 1.6 Hiroshima bombs exploded every single day for 12 years. Through all of this, women have been and are still being harmed in unique ways. Women exposed to radioactive fallout have much higher risks of miscarriage, stillbirth, and birth defects in their children. In the most exposed areas of the Marshall Islands, it became common for women to give birth to “jellyfish babies”—babies born without bones and with transparent skin. Breast cancer rates in the Marshall Islands are also shockingly high, yet there is a severe lack of cancer care available to the Marshallese. In the United States, breast-feeding mothers exposed to atmospheric nuclear testing passed Iodine-131 to their children through their breast milk. A recent study from the University of New Mexico showed that in the Navajo Nation, 26 percent of women have “concentrations of uranium exceeding levels found in the highest 5 percent of the US population.” In Japan, women who survived the nuclear bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in addition to bearing the burden of physical health effects, were stigmatized and shunned, unable to marry because of the fear of radiation-caused illnesses and defects passing down to future generations. And overall, though the reasons are not fully understood, women at all ages are more vulnerable to ionizing radiation and seem more likely to get cancer from radiation exposure, and die, than men. Gender matters when it comes to the physical effects of nuclear weapons, but also the way we do and don’t talk about them. In a recent study on women in national security, I was stunned to read that “the consideration of differential group effects is often dismissed by policymakers who do not consider civilian impacts to be important or useful.” Reading that I had to ask: not “important or useful” for whom? Perhaps they’re not important to policymakers, though I find that incredibly cynical. But surely they’re important to the people suffering and dying from these effects. In her classic “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals,” Carol Cohn describes the ways that discussion of nuclear weapons is informed by and perpetuates toxic gender norms. In this world, strength, force, rationality, and destruction are masculine. Things like weapon design, targeting, and nuclear strategy fall into this category. Weakness, emotion, the very concept of peace, and the human costs of nuclear weapons are feminine. She found that the reality of human death was not even a part of the language that policymakers use when discussing nuclear weapons—it’s been scrubbed out. If you feel conflicted discussing war plans involving nuclear weapons that could kill tens of millions, you’re a “wimp.” Maybe you don’t have the “stones” for war. The arms control community has largely bought into this mindset. At a recent meeting about how we might reach new audiences, a woman suggested using more emotion and storytelling in our work. Someone else quickly responded that this was not what our work was about, that we didn’t have time to dwell on emotions. I think sticking to strategy, budgets, and warhead and missile design feels safer and more acceptable to this male-dominated field. Because of this, I often feel as if I must work twice as hard to prove my credibility and make my voice heard. Not only am I a woman—already a strike against me—I also want to talk about the human impacts of nuclear weapons, apparently an emotional and irrelevant topic. At a recent nine-day conference for aspiring nuclear professionals, I attended 33 lectures on everything from stockpile stewardship to Russia’s nuclear doctrine to ballistic missile defense. There were no lectures on the human costs of nuclear weapons; it was barely mentioned. It is long past time for the nuclear nonproliferation and arms control community to work with these affected communities and center them in our advocacy. The arms control community is small, but it has resources, access, and in many cases the labels of “expertise” and “credibility.” The communities affected by nuclear weapons creation and testing have in many cases been denied all of these things as part of a larger history of marginalization. When the traditional arms control community also denies them credibility and access, sidelines their stories, and does not support their goals, we are perpetuating the systems of oppression that caused them to be harmed in the first place. People in these communities are dying today, and we are ignoring it. This is the motivation behind my new project, “Sharing the Stage with Nuclear Frontline Communities,” funded by the Ploughshares Fund Women’s Initiative. My project works to put the voices of these communities front and center, share the work of local leaders and experts, and help find opportunities for collaboration with those in the more traditional arms control and nonproliferation sphere. As a first step, I will create a database of leaders and experts that are interested in partnering with those in the arms control and nonproliferation world. Ultimately, I hope to find opportunities for genuine, mutually supportive collaboration. Could those with contacts in congressional offices help atomic veterans organize a lobby day to call for expanding compensation from the government? Could a community watchdog group share their expertise on the ins-and-outs of a nuclear lab and help inform the work of nuclear policy groups? Can the grassroots advocacy and storytelling happening in frontline communities be coordinated with policy work happening on the Hill in Washington, D.C.? The database will also include entries for organizations in the nuclear policy and arms control world. Those interested can support the project by including an entry of their own. An even better way to get involved is to get in touch with frontline community members themselves for suggestions—as the ones directly impacted, they know best what kind of collaboration is most effective and helpful. Over the years, nuclear weapons policy has been made largely without input from the people who actually have a first-hand understanding of the effects of these weapons: the communities harmed by nuclear weapons production and testing. Though there is much work to be done to right the wrongs these communities have endured, a good first step for those in the nuclear policy community is to embrace their perspectives and knowledge: listen to their stories, build relationships, and find ways to meaningfully work together. Lilly Adams Lilly Adams is an independent consultant specializing in nuclear weapons outreach and policy issues. She works with the Union of Concerned Scientists in their Global Security Program and was… |
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The woman who was first to scientifically show, in 1856, how atmospheric C02 caused global warming

One of my favourite obscure journals, The Public Domain Review, in touch with our climate-debating times, has just dusted off Eunice Foote’s paper Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays. It was published in the November 1856 American Journal of Art and Science.
“Foote’s seminal experiment was ingeniously homemade. Using four thermometers, two glass cylinders, and an air pump, she isolated the component gases that make up the atmosphere and exposed them to the sun’s rays … Measuring the change in their temperatures, she discovered that carbon dioxide and water vapour absorbed enough heat that this absorption could affect climate.”
“Entirely because she was a woman, Foote was barred from reading the paper describing her findings at the 1856 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science held in Albany, New York. Instead, Professor Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian had the honour of introducing her, announcing that science was ‘of no country and of no sex. The sphere of woman embraces not only the beautiful and the useful, but the true.’ Perhaps this was Henry’s attempt to shield Foote and her findings from sexist criticism .”
It would not surprise if, just as Greta Thunberg is so often accused of only reading speeches written for her by some grown-up Green Svengali (for she is surely too much of a girly flibbertigibbet to really be as knowledgeable and articulate as she pretends) Eunice Foote was suspected of having lots of (unacknowledged by her) cerebral male help with her paper.
Likell thinking Australian atheists/agnostics I am both appalled and fascinated by our prime minister’s extreme religiosity……https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6430152/climate-science-sexism-reheated/?cs=14246
Another expensive nuclear weapons race about to take off
Are We Headed for Another Expensive Nuclear Arms Race? Could Be. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/08/world/europe/arms-race-russia-china.html, By Steven Erlanger,Aug. 8, 2019 BRUSSELS — After the recent death of the treaty covering intermediate-range missiles, a new arms race appears to be taking shape, drawing in more players, more money and more weapons at a time of increased global instability and anxiety about nuclear proliferation.
The arms control architecture of the Cold War, involving tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, was laboriously designed over years of hard-fought negotiations between two superpowers — the United States and the Soviet Union. The elaborate treaties helped keep the world from nuclear annihilation.
Today, those treaties are being abandoned by the United States and Russia just as new strategic competitors not covered by the Cold War accords — like China, North Korea and Iran — are asserting themselves as regional powers and challenging American hegemony.
The dismantling of “arms control,” a Cold War mantra, is now heightening the risks of a new era when nuclear powers like India and Pakistan are clashing over Kashmir, and when nuclear Israel feels threatened by Iran, North Korea is testing new missiles, and other countries like Saudi Arabia are thought to have access to nuclear weapons or to be capable of building them.
The consequence, experts say, is likely to be a more dangerous and unstable environment, even in the near term, that could precipitate unwanted conflicts and demand vast new military spending among the world’s biggest powers, including the United States.
“If there’s not nuclear disarmament, there will be proliferation,” said Joseph Cirincione, a nuclear analyst and president of the Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation. “If big powers race to build up their arsenals, smaller powers will follow.”
“As long as the big boys cling to their toys, others will want them,” he added, quoting the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei.
Not only are the big boys clinging to them, there are more big boys now, and they want more toys. Continue reading
The IEA supports nuclear power, BUT realises that its future prospects are poor
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