California Solartopia - Monday, June 8, 2026

Follows the audio · click any line to jump

1. Who follows the dream?
2. Remember, you can do anything you want to do.
3. Just make the intention.
4. Live your best life.
5. Peace and love, everyone.
6. Peace and love.
7. 90.7 FM, KPFK, Los Angeles.
8. Was there an Adam? Was there an Eve? Or did we evolve from what we conceived?
9. Either way, we got what was needed when the sun shone down on the Garden of Eden.
10. Don't you know we're gonna have a Solitopia? Solitopia? Solitopia?
11. Don't you know we're gonna have a Solartopia
12. All over the country
13. Hey everybody, this is Sonny Wasserman
14. talking to you from California Solartopia and the Solartopia Show
15. originating at KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles
16. and broadcast worldwide on the Pacifica Affiliate Network
17. We're heard among other places at WGRN 91.9 FM in Columbus, Ohio
18. LKCEI 90.1 FM, Taos, New Mexico, PPQ 104.1 in Ventura, California,
19. WOOL in Belize Falls, Vermont, and many, many other places throughout the Pacifica Network,
20. and also, of course, all over Southern California from the all-powerful signature at KPFK Los Angeles.
21. And we are archived, and you can be here and send it to us at kpfk.org.
22. We deal regularly with the environmental issues that affect California and the world.
23. And we've got a doozy for you today.
24. We're joined by Kevin Camps, our wonderful co-host.
25. Kevin is in the den of corruption in Washington, D.C., also known as Mar-a-Lago North.
26. And we're with Jenny Neck.
27. Jenny is in the Simi Valley north of Los Angeles, parents against Senator Susanna.
28. What does FL stand for, Jenny?
29. Santa Susanna Field Lab.
30. Well, the Santa Susanna Field Lab, for many of you who don't know, both in Los Angeles and worldwide, was the site of one of the worst of all time and certainly one of the worst early nuclear disasters.
31. It spread radioactivity all over the Simi Valley, all through the Los Angeles region, really.
32. and every time you read about a fire that's raging through Los Angeles County,
33. you got to literally hold your breath as we do.
34. I live in the valley, south of Simi Valley and downwind of Simi Valley,
35. as well as of Diablo Canyon.
36. I do have a personal interest in these nuclear issues.
37. They're not abstract to me.
38. My home is not insured against disasters at places like the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant
39. or the Simi Valley downwind, heavily radioactive region.
40. Jenny Knack, tell us why you care so much about these fires currently
41. or just recently raging through Simi Valley
42. and throwing up a radioactive cloud all over Los Angeles
43. and downwind all over the country,
44. for those of you listening elsewhere in the United States Our most recent fire was the Sandy Fire and it started in Simi Valley
45. The reason why we have such cause for concern is because it threatened to encroach upon the northwest border of the Santa Susana Field Lab.
46. And within this Santa Susana Field Lab, there are multiple areas.
47. Area 4 is the northwest land parcel, and that is where all the nuclear research, testing, and development was done when the site was still active.
48. So, as you mentioned, there were numerous accidents, spills, and the famous 1959 partial nuclear meltdown at the site.
49. The reason why this is important is because unlike nuclear facilities today that are covered by domes in an effort to control leakage, even though that is an imperfect solution, as we know, back then, they didn't have protective domes.
50. Instead, they had big garage doors. And when that nuclear, when the rods were malfunctioning and melting, instead of keeping it closed because they wanted to retain the energy contract, which was to provide energy for the city of Moorpark, they so desperately wanted to retain that contract.
51. So they, instead of shutting it down, they vented it.
52. They opened the garage door and wanted to keep it running.
53. And I believe, I hope that I'm correct, that it continued to run for 13 days.
54. I hope you're incorrect.
55. I mean, God forbid it ran for another 13 days.
56. Who was responsible for this fiasco back in 1959?
57. The responsible parties have changed.
58. currently the Department of Energy, NASA, and the Boeing Company are the responsible parties
59. for remediation of the site. The reason why this recent fire was such a concern to us
60. is because those parties and the state regulators, the Department of Toxic Substances Control,
61. all deny that contamination leaves the site. And therefore, according to them, it cannot have
62. impact to public health. But at the St. Suzanne's Field Lab, the contamination, chemical and
63. radioactive, is not contained in barrels. It is loose in the soil, and when fires encroach upon
64. the site and the surrounding areas, it is free to then come up into the air and ash and smoke and
65. be dispersed around the neighboring regions through the wind. The state often denies that,
66. But it has been proven with the last fire, the Woolsey fire in 2018, independent scientists, including Fairwinds Energy Education, which are nuclear watchdogs back east, they wanted to fact check DTSC's claims about the, you know, no radioactive particles, you know, dispersing from the lab.
67. and they were wrong. The hottest particle dispersed that we collected was at the furthest
68. extent of the sampling boundary, which was nine miles away. So when fires start near the San
69. Susana Field Lab, we have to understand that the contamination has never been contained to the lab,
70. and it has been migrating off-site since 1959. Well, my understanding, according to the Nuclear
71. Regulatory Commission, which is now personally run by Donald Trump, and, you know, Elon Musk
72. cleared out all the riffraff with the Doge attack on the NRC, which we used to call no real chance,
73. and now we call it nobody really cares So the technical staff at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been completely gutted And Donald Trump is the first president in U history to fire the chair of a Nuclear Regulatory Commission
74. So now my understanding, of course, from the NRC is that when you have a fire and radioactive contamination goes into the air, it immediately falls to the ground at the legal boundaries of the property.
75. Are you saying that that's not the case? And the second assertion, of course, from the NRC, with which Kevin Camps has decades of experience, and we'll ask him about this, the other assertion is that radiation is actually good for you.
76. as we heard from Ann Coulter, the hormesis effect, that we really should all be running around
77. sniffing the offloading of these radioactive particles because they're good for our health.
78. Kevin Camps, you're in Michigan where we've just had a fire, another fire at a radioactive site.
79. This one at the Fermi 2 reactor in Monroe, Michigan, where Stephen Colbert has personally
80. paid a visit to the local community's TV station there. What's the parallel between the fire at
81. the Simi Valley and the fire that recently happened at the Fermi Nuclear Plant just south
82. of Detroit? Well, fires are all too common at U.S. nuclear power plants and also U.S. nuclear
83. weapons complex sites, also at places like Chernobyl. At Chernobyl, it's very amazing.
84. the microbes and insects that are supposed to decay the forests when trees and plants die
85. are no longer present in the ecosystem. So Timothy Mousseau, a biologist at the University
86. of South Carolina who's done many studies at Chernobyl and Fukushima, calls the Chernobyl
87. forests zombie forests. And they are tinderboxes ready to go up every summer, and they do.
88. At Fermi, they had another industrial fire. What's significant about fires at nuclear power plants is it represents 50% fully half of the scenarios that could lead to meltdown.
89. And another interesting factoid about Fermi is Fermi Unit 1 shut down permanently in 1972, six years after a partial core meltdown that almost led to the loss of Detroit.
90. But in the year 2008, many decades later, they had a sodium fire at Fermi Unit 1, many decades after closure.
91. So even closed nuclear power plants, where there's radioactive waste, radioactive contamination, are still at risk of fire.
92. And this is becoming worse with droughts and extreme weather and worsening wildfires.
93. Well, let's revisit this here.
94. At Chernobyl, that Unit 4 blew up in 1986, right?
95. And at Santa Susana, that reactor blew up in 1959, right?
96. And at Fermi, that one blew up in 1966.
97. now I have personal knowledge of that
98. because I was at the University of Michigan
99. I was an editorial director of the Michigan Daily
100. when that happened in October 1966
101. and I could have been blown away
102. I didn't find out about it until I read a book called
103. We Almost Lost Detroit seven years later
104. that was quite an interesting reading experience
105. around page 15 where the guy John G. Fuller
106. who was talking about how this nuclear plant
107. Monroe, Michigan almost blew up
108. and put a giant hole in Southeastern Michigan that would have sunk Ann Arbor and me with it I didn find out about this even though I was the campus correspondent for the United Press and you know in front of an AP machine every day in my senior year
109. I didn't find out until seven years later around page 15.
110. I'm going, oh, my God, I'm almost done.
111. So here we got nuclear plants at Chernobyl, nuclear plant at Santa Susanna, north of Los Angeles,
112. nuclear plant south of Detroit, and all three of them have shut decades ago,
113. and they're all incredibly dangerous.
114. Jenny Neck, I mean, aren't you walking around with a gas mask to protect yourself, for God's sake?
115. I do have a nice mask, yes, for doing sample collection.
116. Yep.
117. Oh, my God.
118. And Kevin Camps, I'm going to come back to you in a couple minutes.
119. we're going to take a musical break here. This is the California Solar-topia, Solar-topia show
120. at KPFK in Los Angeles and nationwide, worldwide on the Pacifica affiliate network. We're going to
121. take a short break and come back to more of this really uplifting conversation about nuclear
122. to follow it in just a minute.
123. Everybody's wondering
124. if mankind is cursed.
125. He's ruining the sky
126. and the ocean even worse.
127. But I'll predict the cause
128. of his eradication from the earth.
129. Oh, plutonium is forever.
130. Now oil slicks someday will disappear
131. We'll stop dumping PCBs in a few years
132. But there is one pollutant that we should really fear
133. Oh, plutonium is forever
134. Hey, we are back here at the California Solar Topia Show,
135. Solar Topia Pacific affiliated,
136. and we are talking with Jenny Knack and Kevin Camps, two experts.
137. Kevin, of course, is from Michigan, lived, born and raised in Kalamazoo,
138. downwind from the Fermi nuclear plant.
139. Jenny Knack is too close to call here, too close for comfort in the Simi Valley,
140. north of Los Angeles, where I live a few miles in the heart there of the valley.
141. And we're talking about three major nuclear plants which have shut decades ago and which still pose mortal danger and tangible lethal contact right now.
142. Janney Neck in Simi Valley, California.
143. Aren't you terrified?
144. I mean, we just here we had the Santa Susana reactor there.
145. It blew up in 1959.
146. The worst nuclear disaster, one of the worst nuclear disasters to date.
147. now all these years later, we have a fire and you're still at risk? For God's sakes,
148. tell us about that. What terrifies me most is the federal deregulatory decisions.
149. And what we've seen from DOE, which you mentioned before the break, a public facing dialogue where
150. they're assuring the public that exposure to radioactivity is not harmful to public health.
151. And that partnered with, at least in California, and I'm assuming across the country, state bills that are trying to open up pathways to new reactors, new small modular reactors, you know, these micro reactors.
152. I think what I'm terrified most of is the rest of the United States becoming like the communities surrounding the S.
153. SysFL. DOE does not do health protective cleanups. They do not right now. I do not expect that they
154. will in the next 30 years. And if communities across the country have these reactors of any
155. size in their backyard, then we are all at risk. So it's a hyper-local problem, but I see us as
156. one of the canaries in the mine that is warning the rest of the country not to let these
157. bills move forward. Well, you mentioned prior to the break that, Jenny Neck,
158. that one of the problems at Santa Susana was that they didn't have a containment.
159. When it exploded in 1959, the radiation just went straight up in the atmosphere.
160. Chernobyl kind of had what you might call a garage door on top of it.
161. Monroe at Michigan, they did have a containment, but, you know, what the heck.
162. Now they're talking about building so-called small reactors,
163. which aren't all that small, basically.
164. They don't have containments.
165. Now, there are models that are allegedly going to be built underground, but not all of them by a long shot.
166. Kevin Camps, what was the danger and what is the danger now at Fermi, which almost blew up in 1966 and just had a fire now in 2026?
167. Are we at risk here?
168. Well, Fermi Unit 2 has been operating since 1988, and they have all kinds of problems all the time.
169. We just heard the rumor we're fighting a zombie reactor restart at Palisades upwind of Kalamazoo in Michigan.
170. We just heard a rumor that the powers that be in the nuclear industry are thinking about zombifying, get this, Fermi Unit 1.
171. That's been shut down permanently since 1972 that had a partial core meltdown in 1966.
172. So it is nuclear madness that's going on.
173. As Jenny said, Nuclear Regulatory Commission safety, environmental and health regulations are in free fall without a parachute under Trump.
174. And get this. July 4th is coming up. 250th birthday party for America.
175. Trump's idea of celebrating it is to fire up two different designs of micro reactor under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy.
176. And because it's DOE, that means NRC has nothing to say about safety over there.
177. And just last week, the New York Times ran an article about Trump wanting to give away for free weapons-grade plutonium to nuclear power startups.
178. So the proliferation risks of weaponry spreading, the safety risks are hard to overstate at this point.
179. Well, let me just put in my three cents worth here that this is all designed as a desperate move by the billionaire Epstein class to stop the spread of solar energy.
180. Batteries are the big breakthrough here, have made it imminent that the world can be powered 100 percent or at least 90 percent with renewable energy.
181. because this idea that the sun don't shine at night, which is true, and the wind don't blow in the daytime, which is often true, has been obviated.
182. It's been transcended by the massive breakthroughs in battery technology.
183. In California, we have 14 times as much battery backup capacity as is produced by the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant.
184. between 7 and 14 times. California will never have another electric blackout because between
185. the utilities being dragged kicking and screaming and the local homeowners we have more than enough battery backup to prevent there ever being another blackout in California And this has terrified the Epstein billionaire
186. class. And so they are dragging, kicking and screaming us into the nuclear abyss because,
187. you know, they just don't want us to go solar because we can control that and we can lower
188. our electric bills. I will say one encouraging thing has happened. We have found a suitable site
189. for a national repository for atomic waste. It's at Mar-a-Lago in Florida. It's perfectly designed.
190. It will not be, however, known as a repository. It will be called a suppository, but it's right
191. there in the heart of Florida. Kevin Camps, you mentioned now this insanity at Palisades.
192. One of the things you never hear discussed by proponents of atomic power is the cost.
193. It's amazing.
194. They claim it's carbon free, which is a lie.
195. They never talk about, because all nuclear plants do emit carbon-14.
196. They talk about cooling the planet when, in fact, these reactors operate at 350 or so degrees Fahrenheit or centigrade, whichever.
197. take your pick. But the bottom line here is that all nuclear reactors heat the earth
198. and produce carbon. Kevin Camps, what is the cost? And they all cost phenomenally more.
199. What is the cost argument going on at Palisades in Michigan, where they now want to stuff the
200. place with small reactors in addition to refiring this dead one?
201. Holtec International has already gotten $3.52 billion from the state of Michigan and also from the federal government for the restart and for the small modular reactor new builds.
202. But they would like another $12 billion, thank you very much, if possible, towards that one site.
203. And I'm speaking to you from the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability's 38th annual DC Days.
204. and shout out to Jenny at Parents Against Santa Susanna Field Lab. They are a member group,
205. as is Don't Waste Michigan, and about 40 groups all together across the country, many of them in
206. the shadows of the Department of Energy weapons complex, but a growing number of groups working
207. on nuclear power issues. One of the things that Senate and House offices here are more open to
208. talking about than the health or the environment or the safety are the costs. And just one example,
209. the most recent reactors built in the United States, Vogel's Unit 3 and 4 in Georgia,
210. originally estimated in 2001 to cost $2.5 billion each by the Nuclear Energy Institute,
211. as quoted by Dick Cheney in his Energy Task Force report. Fast forward to 2012, the price had
212. tripled to $7.5 billion each. At another decade, the actual cost once they fired up was $18.4
213. billion each. And since there's so much federal subsidy tied up in that and ratepayer subsidy,
214. there's some interest, at least on the Democratic side of things.
215. Sometimes the fiscal hawks in the Republican Party, where are they at these days?
216. I don't know.
217. But that's one battleground that we also have to engage in.
218. We're having about 100 Hill meetings and Trump administration meetings this week,
219. trying to get these messages across.
220. And we're doing our best.
221. Well, Jenny Nack is a fellow Californian.
222. You are in the wasteland of Santa Susanna.
223. and you also downwind from the Diablo Canyon I have seen a lot of paper from hardcore economists who say that the only way to really lower electric rates in California which are the highest in the continental United States the only way to lower those rates is to shut the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant
224. And, you know, we heard from all these governor candidates,
225. and not one of them, they're always telling him,
226. well, I'm going to lower electric rates and blah, blah, blah.
227. Now, one of them talks about shutting Diablo Canyon,
228. which is the only way we're going to lower our electric rates.
229. I think that Newsom said he supported the shutdown. He also said he supported the SSFL remediation, but he has both of those pledges back. So I think that the governor, whoever it is that takes office, needs to have some real integrity and stand up for not only the health of the planet, but also the health of the people.
230. because I think the claim of nuclear energy being cheap, we all know that that's not true.
231. But the cost is borne by the public. The cost both in enormous pay rates, but also
232. the releases from a nuclear power plant, those are dismissed. People say, oh, there's no greenhouse
233. gases. This is clean green, right? It's clean green energy. It is not. There are no reactors
234. that do not release radioactive emissions.
235. So we minimize the potential for those to affect public health.
236. And it is data.
237. It is searchable data that people who live closer to nuclear power plants
238. have higher rates of cancer.
239. That is a fact.
240. And what we pay for is with our lives.
241. We pay, you know, these cancer families have astronomical bills.
242. It bankrupts families.
243. So, you know, the human cost is not something that is weighed into these decisions, and it should be because we're paying for it with our pocketbooks, with our health, with our lives.
244. Well, the insurance policy on my house in the Valley in California says explicitly,
245. I have no place to go if a radioactive cloud comes down.
246. And from Diablo, Kenya or Santa Susana, take your pick.
247. And what we're talking about here is atomic reactors that have been dead for decades.
248. 1959 for Santa
249. Susanna, 1966
250. for Fermi
251. 1986 for Chernobyl
252. they're all still
253. putting radioactivity
254. into our planet. I will mention
255. by the way that the very first
256. denial of the
257. death impacts of
258. atomic radiation in the atmosphere
259. there was a radium dial factory
260. in the US in the 20s
261. where the women licked their
262. brushes and got jaw cancer, and that was, you know, denied. But the biggest denial came in Hiroshima.
263. When people started dying from radiation in Hiroshima, the military, the American military,
264. denied that it was possible. They knew full well that people could die from radiation, as at least
265. one guy did in the Manhattan Project that made the atomic bomb, but they started in Hiroshima in 45,
266. and they're still going with all these so-called dead reactors. Kevin Camps, how's your health,
267. man? You're in Michigan. I dodged a bullet I didn't know was shot at me in 1966 in Ann Arbor.
268. How are you doing from Kalamazoo? The health studies often do not happen. There seems to be
269. no money for health studies but I point out that there have been some insights gained at Big Rock Point which is Palisades sibling reactor upstate A family practitioner Dr Gerald Drake in the 1970s saw so many cases of spina
270. bifida coming through his rural clinic that he asked his statistician, PhD wife, University of
271. Michigan trained, Martha Drake, to look at it, and they found statistically significant spina bifida
272. incidents near the Big Rock Point atomic reactor, just 67 megawatts electric. These new SMRs are
273. five times bigger than that. And I'd just like to point out that parents against Santa Susanna
274. Field Lab, Cumbrians opposed to a radioactive environment in the Scottish Lake District,
275. many anti-nuclear groups first start as childhood cancer support groups. I think there's some truth
276. to be gleaned from that fact.
277. Yes, and we have the work of the great Joe Mangano,
278. who has looked at cancer rates around nuclear plants around the country.
279. Boy, this has been devastating stuff.
280. So, Jenny, you're with one of the great groups
281. that has proliferated nationwide to fight nuclear power.
282. How do people get a hold of you?
283. We are Parents Against the Santa Susana Field Lab, or PASSFL,
284. And you can find us at parentsagainstssfl.com.
285. We also have Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok groups to follow us, parentsagainstssfl.
286. Thanks so much for having us.
287. Jenny Knack, thank you so much for joining us here at California's Sorotopia and the Pacific Network Sorotopia Show.
288. Kevin Camps, you're the greatest, our co-host here.
289. And I will say that Joe Mangano has found that when nuclear power plants open, cancer rates go up.
290. And when they shut, cancer rates go down.
291. But here we have three places, Chernobyl, Fermi, and Santa Susana, where we have reactors shut for decades that are still killing us, for God's sakes, and raising our electric rates through the roof.
292. Thankfully, here at Solar Topia, we know we have the ability to generate renewable energy worldwide and to back it up with batteries.
293. And that has the billionaire boys totally terrified.
294. Let's get them even more scared.
295. Listen, everybody, this Solar Topia show has been produced by Maya Rison, engineered by Gary Scott at the virtual studios of KPFK Los Angeles 90.7 FM and at kpfk.org.
296. we will join you next week
297. at California Solartopia and in the world
298. of Solartopia
299. thank you again Jenny and Ak, thank you Kevin Camps
300. and no nukes
301. everybody and now we say not only do we
302. need to shut them down but
303. we need to clean them up
304. but let's go solar, see you next week everybody
305. no nukes
306. don't you know we're gonna have a
307. Solartopia
308. Solartopia
309. Solartopia
310. don't you know we're gonna have a
311. What's going on, everybody?
312. This is Chris Small, the founder of the Amazon Labor Union.
313. And you're tuned in right now with KPFK, the people's station, power to all people.
314. Thank you.
315. .