Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Karl Grossman, Robert Hunziker March 11, 2021

Welcome back to Gorilla Radio’s Home Edition, recorded March 2nd, 2021 Sept. 17, 2016

This March 11th marks the tenth anniversary of the Fukushima tsunami-engendered nuclear disaster. And, what have we learned? Ten years after, even as Japan continues cleaning up the mess, there is no solution to the question of just what to do with irradiated debris already collected, or how to deal with the contaminated cooling water still being generated every day, and now amounting to millions of litres.

In fact, far from getting a handle on the problem, things are only getting worse; as JapanToday reports, “The decades-long challenge to scrap the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant… is becoming more complex as recent remote-controlled probes have highlighted just how damaged the reactors are.

And yet, the nuclear industry is enjoying a renaissance, buoyed by concerns for climate change, and an unlikely partner in NASA and its collaborators who recently landed nukes on Mars.

Karl Grossman is professor of journalism at State University of New York/College at Old Westbury, and author of, ‘The Wrong Stuff: The Space’s Program’s Nuclear Threat to Our Planet’, and ‘Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power’. He’s also the host of the nationally syndicated television program, Enviro Close-UP with Karl Grossman, and is an associate with the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). Karl’s articles too appear at CounterPunch.org, and Nation of Change, among other places, where I found his latest, ‘Plutonium—the most lethal of all radioactive substances—in space’.

Karl Grossman in the first half.

And; what about the Olympic Games? In 2016, the IOC announced not only would Japan host the 2020 Games, it would do so in the nuclear shadow of Fukushima Prefecture. But, Fate intervened in the form of the Covid-19 pandemic. But, but, the IOC and Japan determined to carry on come pandemic Hell, or atomic high waters, rescheduling Japan 2020, to July 2021. And, despite 80% of Japanese polled saying the games should be postponed again, new Tokyo Olympic organizing committee president, Seiko Hashimoto is reassuring the public it will be safe to for the Games to go on saying, “The situation around coronavirus doesn’t go easy on us.

About Fukushima’s lingering nuclear radiation and the threat it posed, Hashimoto had this to say, [crickets].

Robert Hunziker is an environmental journalist whose climate clarion calls appear in numerous journals and multiple languages around the World and across the internet. He’s also appeared in a variety of media to talk about global climate change and has written extensively about the ongoing aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. I spoke to Robert waaaaaay back in 2016 about the then newly announced winning Tokyo Olympics bid, and Japan’s “progress” cleaning up the World’s worst civilian nuclear disaster.

Robert Humziker revisiting Fukushima in the second half.

But first, Karl Grossman and Earth’s nuclear envoy to Mars.

 

Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Thursday between 11-Noon Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, and on the internet at: https://cfuv.ca. He also serves as a contributing editor to the web news site, http://www.pacificfreepress.com. Check out the GR blog at: http://gorillaradioblog.blogspot.com

Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Pablo Ouziel May 14, 2020

Welcome to GR. We are as yet NOT broadcasting live from the basement of the Student Union Building at the University of Victoria, but instead recording live-to-Skype this day, May 13th, 2020.

Fitting it’s been a late Spring here. Winter’s intransigence keeping us indoors longer than we’d like, confined to leaving the greeting rituals of the new season overlong under wraps. But nature won’t be denied, and sure as God made green apples and bright flowers, our deliverance from the power of the pestilence that’s held much of the World at bay is waning. Or, so we’re told. The green lamp is lit – sort of – with Spain, one of the countries worse-effected by Covid, announcing last month its “deconfinement plan” roll out, beginning in earnest Monday, May 11. It’s the first stage of a phased emergence from the virus, and as elsewhere it’s a policy fraught with doubt and controversy.

Pablo Ouziel is a Postdoctoral fellow at the University of Victoria’s Political Science Department and Centre for Global Studies whose Fellowship Project at UVic, ‘Democracy Here and Now: The Exemplary Case of Spain’ was interrupted by the Covid-19 closure of the University. He is currently in his native Barcelona.

Dr. Pablo Ouziel and Spain’s planned emergence from crisis.