Explore every episode of the podcast Nuclear Hotseat

Keystone Photo: President John F. Kennedy signing the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. We haven't had an atmospheric nuclear test since 1962. BUT under Project 2025, atmospheric tests - and their attendant health-destroying radioactive fallout - may soon resume. Journalist Karl Grossman spells it out.

This Week’s Featured Interview Activists from around the world gathering to demonstrate against U.S. nuclear weapons housed at the Buchel Air Force Base in Germany (Susan Crane far right, Nukewatch’s John LaForge behind Nukewatch banner in red hat) Libbe’s Play ATOMIC BILL AND THE PAYMENT DUE Coming to Wilmington Peace Resource Center in Ohio! Numnutz...

This Week’s Featured Interview: Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness) A trifecta! From the Onion… and then unfortunately, NOT the Onion: New Orleans has a National Nucleaer Security Administration helicopter scanning the city for nuclear weapons (say what? In Mardi Gras beads?); and NRC’s updated mission statement turns the already captured regulator into...

THIS WEEK’S FEATURED INTERVIEW: Anti-nuke icon Harvey Wasserman is a veteran of five decades of activism against nuclear reactors. He has authored books, organized demonstrations that deeply impacted the movement, helped successive generations of activists to learn the issues, the talking points, and the actions they can take. In recent years, he has included a...

This Week’s Featured Interview: We all accept as proven scientific and medical fact that human exposure to ionizing radiation from nuclear weapons and their production is damaging to human health. But how do we know that? Who figures out how bad it can be? How much radiation we can be exposed to without risking our...

This Week’s SPECIAL: NUKES AND FIRE – California Wildfires and Nuclear Dangers Libbe’s Story: I live in Los Angeles in the foothills less than a mile away from what became the Eaton (Altadena/Pasadena) fire Evacuation Warning zone. There was no new Nuclear Hotseat last week because after the Eaton fire broke out on Tuesday, I...

This Week’s SPECIAL Year-End Feature: Numnutz of the Year! It’s been a year, all right, with plenty of Numnutzery to go around. We look back on 2024 through the lens of Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness) – the nuclear stories that made no sense, defied logic, infuriated me, touched my “Despair” button,...

The late, great, Sr. Megan Rice. This Week’s Peace Special Year-End Interviews: Sister Megan Rice Susi Snyder: What You Can Do to Help De-Fund Nuclear Weapons

This Week’s Featured Interview: A new book, THE SCIENTISTS WHO ALERTED US TO THE DANGERS OF RADIATION, is a devastating look into the history of radiation harms and the scientists who attempted to reveal the truth by defying political and institutional pressures. It explains how those who tried to warn us were censored and discredited...

Nobel Peace Prize The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Nihon Hidankyo, the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations. Three Hibakusha (A-bomb survivors) were in Oslo, Norway to accept the award. Link: This Week’s SPECIAL Feature: The first ever Outrider Nuclear Reporting Summit drew together more than 100 reporters, editors, nuclear experts, activists...

This Week’s Featured Interview: Physicist and Activist Lynda Williams – a foe of nuclear greenwashing Lynda Williams is a Hawaii-based physicist, activist, writer and performance artist – AKA The Physics Chanteuse. She battles against nuclear greenwashing (aka lying) with public presentations, lectures, theatre, and a ferocious activist spirit. Lynda is bringing her new one woman...

This Week’s Featured Interview: Majia Nadesan’s LINKS: Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz Gunter: Like pie? You won’t enjoy this one and it’s nothing to be thankful for. Links:

SPECIAL PROPOSAL! #Nuclear80 The 2025 Campaign to Reclaim the Nuclear Narrative 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the start of the Atomic Age and all the ensuing nuclear madness covered by the show every week. We already know that the media is going to make a “thing” out of this, because it’s an anniversary that...

This Week’s Featured Interviews: Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness): French household goods made from radioactive metal – what could go wron Links:

This Week’s Featured Interview Part 2 of a talk with Doug Brugge and Aaron Datesman, authors of a brilliant new book, Nuclear Power in an Era of Climate Change. Last week was Part 1. This week, we focus on new information about the health dangers of so-called “permitted” radiation releases from operating nuclear reactors in...

Map of radiation doses at Three Mile Island – new information from the book Dirty Secrets of Nuclear Power in an Era of Climate Change: This Week’s Featured Interview: FREE download of pdf of the book: Dirty Secrets of Nuclear Power in an Era of Climate Change. Numutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness:...

Cold War Horse, sculpture by Jeff Gipe – the only acknowledgement of the radiological history of Rocky Flats nuclear factory present at the site. This Week’s Featured Interview: Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness): Nuclear Regulatory Commission “apologizes” for “misinformation” about – OOPS! – radioactive water from Monticello nuclear in the Mississippi river...

Lead Story: The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2024 to the Japanese organization Nihon Hidankyo. This grassroots movement of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, also known as Hibakusha, is receiving the Peace Prize for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for...

BREAKING NEWS: MARY OLSON IS OKAY! Mary Olson of Gender and Radiation Impact Project (genderandradiation.org) is alive and well! She lives in Asheville, North Carolina, and we hadn’t heard from her since before Hurricane Helene ripped through that town on September 27. As of October 9, Cindy Folkers of Beyond Nuclear reports that Mary is...

This Week’s Featured Interview: TOTALLY FICTITIOUS WESTINGHOUSE ANIMATION OF A 116 WEEK BUILD SCHEDULE FOR THE AP 1000 NUCLEAR REACTOR. Taken from the Westinghouse website in 2014. Westinghouse has long since taken it down.NO WONDER! IThis is a LINK to the video.) Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz Gunter: Let’s applaud climate activists willing...

Three Mile Island This Week’s Featured Interviews: Eric Epstein of Three Mile Island Alert with Nuclear Hotseat’s Libbe HaLevy at the 40th anniversary of the nuclear meltdown – March 28, 2019 Scene of the Crime: Nuclear Hotseat’s Libbe HaLevy in front of the cooling towers at Three Mile Island The Nukewatch Report with John LaForge...

This Week’s Featured Interview: The next United Nations Climate Change conference, COP 29, is scheduled to be held in Baku, Azerbaijan from 11 to 22 November, 2024 – an annual bone tossed to those who are striving to reverse the climate catastrophe despite not having any power to do so. Incessant pro-nuclear doubletalk has infested...

Prof. Robert “Bo” Jacobs and his brilliant book NUCLEAR BODIES: The Global Hibakusha This Week’s Featured Interview: This is a. SPECIAL full-length interview with Prof. Robert “Bo” Jacobs on his book, NUCLEAR BODIES: The Global Hibakusha.

This Week’s Featured Interview: Links from the Interview: Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz Gunter: Russia’s war in Ukraine has put another nuclear power plant in danger: their own. The ICAN Update with Alistair Burnett Monthly update on issues and actions regarding the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear War from ICAN –...

Poster for film FIRST WE BOMBED NEW MEXICO THIS WEEK’S FEATURED INTERVIEW: Downwinder Tina Cordova demonstrating outside entrance to Trinity site. From the film FIRST WE BOMBED NEW MEXICO. Links from Featured Interview: Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness): The Democrats went wild for Harris and Walz… but nobody was talking about nukes!...

Canada Pushing for Nuclear Waste Repository on Indigenous Lands: Tons of radioactive waste from nuclear reactor operation keeps piling up, with no resolution in sight. What to do with the waste? Canada has been making plans… but they’re bad ones. Here to explain how we got ourselves into this problem, what’s wrong with Canada’s current...

Dawn Chapman of Just Moms StL (l) and Nuclear Hotseat host Libbe HaLevy at symposium on West Lake Landfill issues in North St. Louis, February 19, 2016. Keystone Photo – activists Dawn Chapman and Kay Drey on-site at radioactively contaminated Coldwater Creek in N. St. Louis, MO. February 19, 2016. This Week’s Featured Interview: Nuclear...

The remains of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb destroyed the city, 1945 ATOMIC COVER-UP – Director Greg Mitchell is the award-winning author of a dozen books including 2020’s “The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood–and America–Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” His previous books on the atomic bombings were “Hiroshima in America“ (with...

A map of the San Onofre nuclear waste station, showing earthquake faults and the 50 mile radius that would be most impacted by an accident with the current on-site storage of radioactive waste. This Week’s Special Feature The Samuel Lawrence Foundation, in cooperation with the Scripps Oceanography Institute, held a one-day symposium on Radioactive Wastes...

The shuttered Zahn’s Corner Middle School, shuttered for contamination with nuclear materials from the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, only 3 miles away. And now the school district is trying to auction it off “AS-IS” without explaining what the “AS-IS” is?!?!??? This Week’s Featured Interview: To contact Dr. Michael Ketterer and Others Re: PORTS: Links: Fukushima...

Annual walk to commemorate Church Rock uranium tailings pond disaster on Navajo Nation land – from 2019. Site of the mine and tailings pond in the background. This Week’s Featured Interviews: Trinity Downwinders Advocating for Justice – Tina Cordova: Trinity Downwinder Tina Cordova grew up in her family home in the Tularosa Basin, 40 miles...

This Week’s Features: LINKS from this feature: Radioactive Contamination of U.S. Food and Water and What Congress Can Do About It – Upcoming Webinar An interview with Kimberly Roberson, founder/director of Fukushima Fallout Awareness Network (FFAN) and lead organizer for this Congressional briefing. WHERE & WHEN? The briefing will be held via Zoom on Monday, July 15...

A symbol of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons Anti-nuclear activists are often isolated from each other because we focus on what’s most important to us – a local issue with radioactive waste dump, or uranium mining, or weapons, or a spike in health...

This Week’s Featured Interview: Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness): Fukushima saki? That’s right – get drunk to ignore the radionuclides that might be in your alcohol! Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz Gunter: The ADVANCE Act will gut nuclear safety and keep the Nuclear Navy happy. Hardly anyone on Capitol Hill opposed...

Welcome to the start of the 14th year of Nuclear Hotseat! This Week’s Featured Interview: Hinamoeura Cross of Polynesia and Tina Cordova of New Mexico, both winners of the 2023 Nuclear Free Future Award, embrace in congratulations and commiseration, as both are Downwinders from different parts of the world. Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda...

This Week’s First Featured Interview: Alfred Meyer of Physicians for Social Responsibility, mid-Zoom interview This Week’s Second Featured Interview: Dr. Gordon Edwards, addressing the United Nations What Scares Me Most about Nuclear: Excerpts from last year’s Halloween feature: “What Scares Me Most about Nuclear.” I spoke with more than 30 activists and concerned citizens about...

The Miller Map. The path radioactive fallout took from the 100 above-ground nuclear tests in Nevada. Actually, it took three or more nuclear fallout clouds overhead to make it onto this map. Compiled by Richard Miller, author of Under the Cloud: The Decades of Nuclear Testing. This Week’s Featured Interview: PHONE NUMBERS TO CONTACT CONGRESS...

Patti Ameno (also Patty, Patricia) grew up in Apollo, Pennsylvania, 35 miles NE of Pittsburgh, not realizing that her childhood home was directly across the street from the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation.  NUMEC manufactured fuel for commercial nuclear power plants and the Navy’s nuclear submarines, leaving behind a legacy of uranium and plutonium waste...

This Week’s Featured Interviews: Some weeks, it’s time to catch up with a number of stories. So here we present a series of short interviews covering a range of issues that are up for us right now. International Uranium Film Festival co-Founder and Director Norbert Suchanek, seen here hard at work from his North American...

Oppenheimer Opens in Japan: Prof. Robert “Bo” Jacobs of Hiroshima Peace Institute After a delay of more than one year, the Oppenheimer film has opened in Japan. To learn what the response has been, we spoke with Prof. Robert “Bo” Jacobs of the Hiroshima Peace Institute and the Graduate School of Peace Studies of Hiroshima...

This Week’s Nuclear Hotseat CLASSIC: Independent W.H.O.’s Alison Katz on World Health Organization’s Chernobyl Cover-up We continue our commemoration of the 38th year since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster with a reprise of one of Nuclear Hotseat’s most CLASSIC episodes. Chernobyl Truth – Other Excellent Information Sources: No official Numnutz of the Week this week, but...

The Elephant’s Foot – solidified melted fuel core at Chernobyl in Ukraine. Still highly radioactive, still dangerous. SPECIAL: Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster 38th Anniversary – Stories of its Deadly Legacy This Week’s Featured Interviews: The Chernobyl nuclear disaster began on April 26, 1986 – another of those dates that will live in infamy. Here is a...

WHY WE DO IT: Linda Seeley of San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace shows off a picture of her 3-week old great grandson – the next generation of reason for working against nukes. KEYSTONE PHOTO: Dream Team of Activists at the UCSB Global Legacies conference: (l-r) Jane Swanson, Libbe HaLevy, Linda Seeley, Melissa Bumstead, Heidi...

Erwin TN Nuclear Fuel Nightmare – People’s Hearing for Nuclear Awareness features Lodge, Ketterer, Olson, McNeill, Inoue This Week’s Featured Interviews: Erwin, Tennessee is a small town with a big problem: Nuclear Fuel Services, Inc., known as NFS, a company that since the 1960’s has been a major supplier of fuel for the United States...

Nuclear Bailout chart compiled by Environmental Working Group. This Week’s Featured Interview: Kevin Kamps Links from Interview: The Monthly ICAN UPDATE on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons Alistair Burnett, Head of Media for the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) reports the latest on the Treaty from ICAN headquarters in Geneva,...

Three Mile Island Alert’s Eric Epstein (l) and Nuclear Hotseat’s Libbe HaLevy, pictured at TMI’s 40th anniversary conference held in Harrisburg, PA, in late March, 2019. This week’s full-length Three Mile Island Anniversary SPECIAL features interviews with: Our thanks to filmmaker Robert (Robbie) Leppzer, producer of the two-hour audio documentary Voices from Three Mile Island,...

SPECIAL: Navajo Nation Hosts Launch of Int’l Uranium Film Festival’s N. American Tour Sometimes a film festival is about more than just the films. The International Uranium Film Festival (IUFF) kicked off its 2024 North American tour in Window Rock, Navajo Nation, with not only powerful films but an informational and emotional space where Navajo...

This Week’s Featured Interview: Mary Beth Gallagher Links mentioned during the interview: Nuclear Hotseat Hot Story with Linda Pentz Gunter A Hollywood letter calling for an end to nuclear weapons was the initiative of an organization that promotes nuclear power. No two thumbs up to that. And here’s a LINK to Linda Pentz Gunter’s article on this...

Nuclear Hotseat’s annual Fukushima Anniversary SPECIAL: VOICES FROM JAPAN this year considers earthquake dangers to Japan’s nuclear reactors. In addition to an update on Fukushima, it focuses on the January 1, 2024 Noto Peninsula quake which shook the two Shika nuclear reactors, one of them beyond what it was built to be able to sustain....

This Week’s Featured Interview: A networking session, with trade booths, at the 2024 Nuclear Deterrence Summit in DC. Each of those tables costs $6,000 – $7,500 for 90 minutes of branding. Logo keychains, anyone? Links referenced in this interview: NEW FEATURE: The ICAN Update – From the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons The ICAN...