California Solartopia - Monday, June 15, 2026

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5. Was there an Adam? Was there an Eve?
6. Or did we evolve from what we conceived?
7. Either way, we got what was needed
8. When the sun shone down on the Garden of Eden
9. Don't you know we're gonna have a
10. Solotopia, Solotopia, Solotopia
11. Don't you know we're gonna have a
12. Hey everybody, this is Harvey Sunny Wasserman welcoming you to California Solartopia,
13. originating at the virtual studios of KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles. I'm with my co-host Kevin Camps
14. and we are welcoming Mary Olson, who is a truly great longtime activist and an expert
15. on radiation and health.
16. This show is being heard all over the world
17. on the Pacific Affiliate Network, WGRN,
18. 91.9 FM in Columbus, Ohio,
19. KCEI, 90.1 FM in Taos, New Mexico,
20. KPPQ, 104.1 FM in Ventura,
21. WOOL, 91.5, the Black Sheep Radio,
22. broadcasting from Belleau Falls, Vermont,
23. and many other places we are offered
24. on the Pacifica Affiliate Radio Network all over the world.
25. And the show is our frontline call to action in the fight for the planet's future.
26. Every week we break down some of our fiercest ecological battles,
27. many of them in the Los Angeles area and many as today all over the world.
28. We're primarily about nuclear power and also about data centers, plastics,
29. the dangers of nuclear power, nuclear weapons, fracking, fossil fuels,
30. you name it and we do advocate for a solartopian world a world powered entirely on renewable energy
31. which is more than possible and certainly cheaper than the fossil nuclear alternatives
32. mary olsen is with us today mary it's great to see you again we've known each other since before
33. the beginning of time you're a biologist and you are founder of the generational radiation impact
34. Project. You are in Western North Carolina. Well, tell us the mission of your group, if you would,
35. Mary. We are going to talk about radiation and health primarily today, but tell us, please,
36. straight from your golden mouth, what is the mission of your work and of your organization?
37. Well, radiation, as you and I know, can harm everyone. Younger people aren't so clear about
38. that. So our mission is to lower radiation exposure harm by preventing radiation exposure
39. and also working for better protection, better regulation. And our key piece of better regulation
40. is to move radiation standards off of what known as the reference man that we can get into and offer instead a reference girl because it turns out that after birth little girls are those most harmed and disproportionately most harmed by radiation
41. So our mission is to get better protection by having the standards center on those most harmed.
42. Well, as you know, as we know, as Kevin Camps with us knows,
43. there has been a 60-70 year battle over what the damage that radiation can and cannot do,
44. especially coming from nuclear power plants. In 1970 or thereabouts, John Goffman, who was the
45. safety guru of the Atomic Energy Commission, co-authored a book with Arthur Tamplin called
46. Poison Power, in which they showed, Tamplin was at the Rand Institute in Rand Corporation in Santa
47. Monica. John was at, lived in San Francisco and was the, based really out of Lawrence Livermore
48. in Berkeley. And they warned that nuclear power plants were killing 32,000 Americans every year
49. just from so-called low levels of atomic radiation
50. that were coming from daily operations
51. at very much, far fewer nuclear power plants
52. and far smaller in the United States in 1970.
53. And now we have 94.
54. And of course, the chief of safety regulation,
55. everybody sitting down, please,
56. the chief of safety regulation from atomic power plants
57. vis-a-vis radiation in the United States is none other than Donald Trump.
58. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which has been in charge of this for a long time,
59. and Kevin, you are very familiar with the NRC, which we have called No Real Chance,
60. or Nobody Really Cares, has set standards for atomic radiation that we believe are lethal.
61. and a great researcher, Joe Mangano, a friend of all of us, has shown in the wake of John Goffman
62. that radiation from nuclear power plants, like the Diablo Canyon reactor,
63. two of them in San Luis Obispo, California area, and many, many more, do kill people.
64. And Kevin, you're in Michigan talking about atomic radiation that would come from the Palisades reactor,
65. which they want to restart and which does come from Fermi and other reactors in Michigan.
66. What is your take on the killing power of radiation?
67. And Mary Olson, we'll let you pick it up from Kevin.
68. Well, Mary knows a lot more than I do about the health impacts of radiation.
69. She and I have worked together for a very long time, since the early 1990s.
70. In fact, we overlapped at Nuclear Information and Resource Service for a number of years,
71. battling things like the Yucca Mountain dump, the Skull Valley dump. So we've shared a lot of
72. history in these battles. I would just say, like I've said before, that nuclear regulation is in
73. free fall without a parachute. That applies to safety. That applies to environment. That applies
74. to health. Compliments of Donald Trump since his executive orders of May 2025. But I would
75. turn it over to Mary to explain much better than I could the critical nature of this fight at this
76. time. Well, I just want to clarify, of course, you know, Donald Trump has made, and his family
77. have made very large financial investments in the nuclear power industry. Trump has also been the
78. first president in the history of the country to fire the chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission But Mary we would never ever think that Donald Trump would risk the health of the public
79. with radiation emissions from an industry in which he has personally invested. You're not
80. saying anything like that, are you? Actually, Harvey, let's take it home. It's been the
81. leadership of this country since the Manhattan Project that has put the atom and splitting it
82. and the power that that gives them over and above the health of everybody.
83. But when it harms women more and it harms children more,
84. that means that they're putting that power of,
85. whether it's nuclear power or whether it's nuclear weapons,
86. they're putting fission ahead of us.
87. And I want to emphasize that that Goffman-Tamplin number
88. that you quote from back in their day
89. has been doubled in a recent study by the Chan School of Public Health at Harvard.
90. A young researcher by the name of Al Wadi and a big team are showing 62,000 deaths that could
91. be prevented if the operating reactors were all shut down. 62,000 deaths a year in a paper
92. published in 2026 from Harvard Chan School of Public Health. So it isn't simply a view from
93. the early days. It's a view today that this technology is deadly. And I want to go back
94. to the fact now that it matters who you are when the radiation comes. It matters because
95. women are overall affected three times more than the reference man, which they use to set
96. the regulations, if that exposure occurs young in that woman's life, when she is between birth
97. and five years old, that exposure is going to cause seven times more cancer across that female's
98. life compared to the reference man who ends up being the most resistant part of the human life
99. cycle. So we're making the rules for what you can do to human beings, how many of us you can kill,
100. and how many of us you can harm based on the guy who is the least likely to be harmed. What kind
101. of sense does that make as a public policy when it comes to wanting healthy children and healthy
102. grandchildren? It makes no sense at all. And it goes back way before Trump. I'll get mad at Trump
103. with you, but this was the congresses of the 1950s and 1960s that mandated putting fission right next
104. to cities with no clue as to how to really contain the emissions, radioactive pollution,
105. and how to ultimately deal with the real product of fission, which is the irradiated fuel rods that
106. are going to be haunting this planet for longer than any of us are going to survive into the
107. future. The peak of that will be a million years into the future. We've had the incredible gall.
108. I mean, our current administration has gall. They're investing. They're deregulating. They're
109. placing us at greater danger. I totally agree with you about that. But the danger dates back,
110. and it dates into the hands of every single power broker in this country. And it's time
111. that those who are most impacted say no. No, that's not okay. Well, we're talking about 94
112. atomic reactors licensed in the United States right now about 400 worldwide I have heard Joe Mangano in a public meeting attended by the way by Alec Baldwin and Christie Brinkley among others I have heard him say that when a commercial nuclear power plant
113. opens, the infant death rate goes up. And when a nuclear power plant closes, the infant death rate
114. goes down. Is that an accurate statement, Mary Olson? Yes, it's an accurate statement. And it
115. also applies to fission that's been weaponized. We saw it after the very first fission event,
116. which was Trinity in New Mexico. There were babies that died in the weeks and months after for no
117. real explainable reason other than the radiation exposure to them or their mothers.
118. And quite frankly, people are lining up for all kinds of fertility help, and yet nobody is
119. studying the impact of radioactive pollution on the ability to get pregnant, either male or female
120. fertility issues. And then, of course, the disruption of pregnancy is well known,
121. going back into the 1950s and Dr. Alice Stewart, who documented childhood leukemias.
122. And I want to just go back to what I said before, because the exposure of female children between
123. birth and five years old increases their cancer risk across their entire lifetime. It's not
124. childhood cancer we're talking about. It's an overall cancer rate seven times higher than the
125. current regulations account for. We are invisible in the current regulations. Well, are you saying
126. basically that without accidents, just in terms of normal daily emissions from commercial atomic
127. reactors, like in Diablo Canyon reactors, like Blay Indian Point, thank God, is shut now, but
128. other reactors, 94 in the U.S. Are you saying that without an accident, the radioactive emissions
129. from these reactors is deadly? Yes, absolutely. And my colleague, Dr. Ian Fairley, will go one
130. further, that no woman who plans on being reproductive, having babies, should live within
131. 10 miles, probably I'd say 20 miles of any nuclear power reactor. And that doesn't even do the job
132. because they dump radioactivity into rivers, into the ocean, into all kinds of places that get into
133. our food chain. There are emissions to the air that fall out in rain, just like the atomic tests
134. did. And so our entire northern hemisphere is being bathed in the radioactive pollution from
135. every single reactor that's operating today, not just in the United States. This stuff travels,
136. it goes around the world, it comes back. We've had measurable emissions from the Fukushima accident.
137. Yeah, it was a big deal, but daily emissions can also go around the world. We are bathing
138. ourselves and each other in radioactive pollution that is not healthy, can create illness,
139. and does create death. So the alternative, and we're going to bathe ourselves in a little
140. music. We're going to take a quick break.
141. Good, good, good.
142. And Mary Olson,
143. veterans of the movement for
144. a solartopian future.
145. Kevin, I want to ask you about a
146. fire that just happened at the Fermi
147. reactor in Michigan, but first
148. let's take a short musical
149. break.
150. What's that?
151. For their
152. mothers as they run
153. But no one stopped to think about the babies
154. Or how they would survive
155. And we
156. We've almost lost each other this time.
157. How would we ever get over?
158. Okay, everybody, we're back here at California Solotopia,
159. the Solotopia show on Pacifica Affiliate Network.
160. We're talking about the dangers of atomic radiation,
161. even from nuclear power plants that don't have accidents,
162. and there are 94 of them in the U.S.
163. and the Health and Safety Division,
164. Old Atomic Energy Commission,
165. the great John Goffman,
166. warned back then that 32,000 people a year were dying
167. just from normal so-called radiation
168. and nuclear power plants.
169. Mary Olson is with us.
170. She has said that the number has doubled since then
171. to at least 64,000.
172. That's without accidents.
173. With accidents, we now are facing,
174. in Southern California in the Simi Valley at the old Santa Susanna reactor that blew up in the 1950s.
175. There was tremendous residual radiation. It's now being spread with the Sandy Fire all over
176. Los Angeles, where me and my grandchildren live. We've got two reactor sites, a total of 10 reactors
177. in war zones in Ukraine, more in Russia. And we just had a fire where Kevin Camps is. Kevin is
178. in Michigan now. Kevin, can you tell us about the fire that just happened at the Fermi reactor just
179. south of Detroit in George Custer's hometown of Monroe? A recent incident at Fermi Unit 2
180. involved an industrial fire. I believe that emergency diesel generators were damaged.
181. This is just one of an ongoing, almost daily, incidence of events at nuclear reactors. So, yes, it's significant. In fact, I learned from David Lockbaum, who's the retired director of safety, nuclear safety at Union of Concerned Scientists, that a full 50% of all scenarios that could lead to meltdown at atomic reactors originate with fire.
182. And there have been some dramatic examples of that. Brown's Ferry Unit 1 in Alabama had a raging fire that was started in a most peculiar way back in 1975. A worker was testing for airflow in fire-resistant material, looking for holes that allowed the air to flow, with a candle, a lit candle, which then lit the supposedly inflammable material, but it was flammable, and they lost control of that reactor.
183. And by sheer luck or divine intervention, however you want to see it, the reactor did not melt down.
184. Here we are all these decades later, more than a half century later, and there are still reactors in this country, many of them, including Palisades in Michigan, dragging their feet, enabled by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
185. They've never made updates, required updates to their fire protections.
186. So they're playing with fire.
187. They're playing games.
188. I did want to mention about Fermi.
189. They had another really remarkable fire.
190. It was at Fermi Unit 1 in the year 2008, which is kind of curious because Fermi Unit 1 permanently closed in 1972, six years after it had a partial core meltdown and we almost lost Detroit.
191. So what was this 2008 fire?
192. It was sodium catching fire because sodium exposed to air, exposed to water, tends to catch fire or even explode.
193. So 36 years after permanent shutdown, Fermi Unit 1 had a fire.
194. Fires are all too common at atomic reactors and risk meltdowns in a worst case scenario Well we just had a similar situation at Chernobyl which blew up in 1986 has been all four reactors
195. are shut, allegedly, and Unit 4 has a $2 billion lid put on it, which Putin just hit with a drone,
196. for God's sakes. Kevin and then Mary, could Chernobyl explode again? Well, there's a book by
197. Aidy Roach of the Irish Chernobyl Children's Project, and one of the chapters was entitled
198. The Next Chernobyl Could Be Chernobyl. She wrote that in 1995 because the sarcophagus that was
199. thrown up so quickly at huge human cost was at the verge of collapse even by 1995. That's why
200. this multi-billion dollar new safe confinement was installed over the old sarcophagus because
201. the radioactivity, 90% of it or more, is still in there. And so, yes, Putin, the Russian military,
202. exploded drone on the surface of the new safe confinement, rendering it structurally ineffective.
203. And it burned the water-resistant layers inside. The firefighters, the Ukrainian firefighters,
204. had to punch holes in the new safe containment to put the fire out. And it's been admitted that
205. the new safe containment is structurally ineffective at doing its job at this point.
206. Mary Olsen, it's so great to have you with us. What do you have to say about the potential
207. health effects of what Kevin just ran through, much to our absolute terror?
208. So any nuclear power reactor that fissions any type of fuel, plus a conventional weapon that has the sufficient ability to spread that nuclear fuel, whether the thing has been turned off or not, as long as the nuclear fuel is in that core, like at Chernobyl, 95% of the radioactivity is still in there.
209. So if you use a conventional weapon and spread that fuel, that's the highest number of cancer fatalities you can have is any time you have particles from the fuel of a reactor.
210. and it's because it's highly highly concentrated cesium strontium and iodine that gases that come
211. off but the others are stable metals that can get in the body and irradiate the body from the inside
212. if you inhale it or eat it or otherwise ingest it but then you also have the situation where
213. these very small respirable particles can travel in the wind and cover a huge area.
214. So the largest population is where the largest damage and harm will occur. And so by vaporizing
215. fuel, that's going to result in the largest impacts. And this kind of thing has happened
216. and just goes unreported. And then we have lung cancers and everybody who's not smoking,
217. it's blamed on secondhand smoke. Well, it should, some of it be blamed on irradiated fuel
218. that is traveled around the world in these radioactive pollution clouds that I've been
219. talking about. Well, we have had a study from Chernobyl done by three Russian guys
220. published in New York that basically said that a million people died from Chernobyl. We know that
221. hundreds of times more radiation was released at Fukushima than came out at both Hiroshima
222. and Nagasaki combined I was in Ann Arbor in 1966 when Fermi 1 almost blew up I didn read about it until seven years later The good news on our California Solar Topia show is that in Los Angeles
223. the good news is that we do have the technology
224. to completely retire all the 400 reactors in the world
225. and never build another one
226. while producing electricity cheaper, safer, cleaner, faster,
227. and more reliable than comes from any nuclear power plant,
228. including the ones in California.
229. If we shut Diablo Canyon,
230. we would lower our electric rates immediately.
231. We just went through a governor's race election
232. where not one of the candidates may make that point.
233. It's ridiculous.
234. Mary, do you want to tell us about your website, please?
235. And as the father of five daughters
236. and nine granddaughters,
237. you're right up my alley here.
238. So tell us how to get to your organization
239. and what your main message might be.
240. Well, I just want to put your punchline, go solar, go solar, go solar. So our website is www.radiationproject.org.
241. We are a 501c3 nonprofit educational organization, and our mission is to reduce radiation exposure, radiation harm, and to have protection be centered on those who are most harmed, which post-birth is little girls.
242. Well, it's terrifying to me, and of course, it has a tremendous impact on the reproductive cycle.
243. and especially, you know, they come up, Donald Trump, who is now in charge of nuclear radiation
244. in the United States, if that doesn't terrorize you, I don't know what will. But, you know,
245. the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has previously set standards for so-called safe radiation doses,
246. but there can never be a safe radiation dose because an embryo in utero will be affected by
247. the least possible radiation. Kevin Camps, you are the executive director, you are a co-host
248. here at California Zootopia and the executive director of Don't Waste Michigan with primary
249. goal right now is to keep the Palisades nuclear reactor shut. Can you tell our listeners how
250. people can get a hold of you? Yeah, our website is just googleable at Don't Waste Michigan. And
251. the best way to contact me is just my email address, kevin.camps at proton.me.
252. Well, this is a terrifying topic. I co-wrote a book once called Killing Our Own, which put in
253. a basic, a huge investigation of the killing power of radiation, including at the Three Mile
254. Island accident in 1969. And I have to tell you that when I suggested on the Today Show in 1982
255. with co-host Brian Gumbel that people had died at Three Mile Island, the Nuclear Industry Senate
256. two-page telegram to the president of NBC News, you know, he said Brian Gumbel was anti-nuclear,
257. which is absolutely absurd. I am told that the, I said 1969 for the accident, it was 1979
258. on March 28th. And we now are facing basically the reality at the Avocado Canyon that 94
259. reactors in the United States have an ongoing radiation release that kills a lot of people.
260. Mary Olsen you said we can expect a 64 human death toll a year from ongoing atomic radiation in your organization Are you prepared to back that up
261. Yes, I am.
262. And I'm also prepared to tell you that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will, in July,
263. issue a draft proposal to gut the level of radiation protection we have today,
264. which is according to them if you expose someone over their entire life a single individual or a
265. group of individuals a better way to put it they live on the fence line of a reactor not very
266. likely but get this over 70 years with perfect operation the 100 millirems that are currently
267. allowed to the public would kill every one in 286 of a thousand such people. So every one in 286 is
268. what the current standard is, not one in 10,000 like Superfund, not one in 100,000 like toxic
269. regulation, not one in a million that most people assume that danger would be for a member of the
270. public's death. And this is fatal cancer from perfect operation of a reactor. And these are
271. the NRC's own published risk assessment for radiation. And they're about to double it.
272. So it's going to go down to more like one in 150 or more for girls and for women.
273. So the point is not to take the chance of being one of those 150 and not have your daughter or
274. your wife or your sister or yourself be killed by this.
275. We have been produced here at California Solar Topia by Milo Riesen,
276. engineered by Gary Scott.
277. We're at the virtual studios of KPFK Los Angeles,
278. and we've been co-hosted by Kevin Kantz.
279. I'm Sonny Wasserman,
280. and I'm reminding you that renewable energy is cheaper, safer, cleaner,
281. more reliable, faster to build,
282. and we can go 100% solar anytime we want by shutting these reactors.
283. Thank you, everybody, for listening in.
284. We'll be back again next week at California Solar-topia.
285. Thanks again, Marisa, for producing, Gary Scott for engineering,
286. the whole KPFK crew at 90.7 FM in LA.
287. Mary Olson, you've been a great, great guest,
288. even though your message is terrifying.
289. And just remember, folks, everybody,
290. that the person in charge of health regulation at 94 atomic reactors in the United States
291. is Donald Trump.
292. Sleep easy, everybody, and we will see you next week in a solartopian world.
293. No nukes.
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