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Today on the Health and Wellness show we dive into the dark world of radiation. We'll talk about the history of nuclear testing, nuclear accidents, nuclear power, radiation in the environment, what it can do, and what you can do to protect yourself.

While this topic can be hard to discuss, we encourage you to join us for this episode while we face the facts head-on. We'll also discuss how to deal with depressing information while keeping your head on straight. Knowledge is power!

As always, Zoya will share the Pet Health Segment. Make sure to tune into the Health and Wellness show every Friday at 10am EST.

Running Time: 02:04:00

Download: MP3


Here's the transcript of the show:

Jonathan: Welcome everybody. Today is December 4, 2015. My name is Jonathan. I'll be your host for today. Joining me in our virtual studio from all across the planet are Doug, Gaby, Erica and Tiffany, so we have a full set of hosts today. Welcome everybody.

All: Hello's.

Jonathan: Today we have what could be considered a rather depressing topic. We're going to be talking about the radiation situation and we've all mutually agreed that after looking into this information we're like "Oh, damn!" It's hard to talk about. So we're going to start off the show with a little clip from a tune just to add a lighter air and then we'll get into the dark stuff.
Well I'm not uptight
Not unattractive
Turn me on tonight
Cause I'm radioactive
Radioactive

Won't start a fight, Ha!
And I'm not your captive
Turn me loose tonight
Cause I'm radioactive
Radioactive

I want to stay with you
I want to play with you baby
I want to lay with you
And I want you to know

Got to concentrate
Don't be distractive
Turn me on tonight
Cause I'm radioactive

Radioactive
Radioactive
Radioactive

I want to stay with you
I don't want to play with you
I want just to lay with you
And I want you to know

Got to concentrate
Don't be distractive
Turn me on tonight
Cause I'm radioactive oh yeah
Oh yeah radioactive
Don't you stand, stand too close
You might catch it
So that was The Firm. Thanks to Doug for turning us onto that song.

Tiffany: I've never heard that before.

Doug: I thought it was pretty appropriate because we're all radioactive at this point.

Jonathan: Yeah. We have a lot of stats to share with you today and we're going to talk about the history of nuclear testing, some information about nuclear accidents, nuclear power, just how much radiation is in the environment. This is something that you could literally talk about for hours and hours so we will do our best to condense what we've found for you guys today and hopefully in the future on a different show we can have a guest on who can talk more in-depth about the topic. But for today it's just us and we'll be talking about what we've found.

I'm sure most people are aware of the major nuclear incidents. There was Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and of course more recently Fukushima. Some of our listeners might be aware of some of the lesser known nuclear incidents. There are actually quite a few. There have been a lot of criticality accidents at different reactors which is where the material goes critical. There's not necessarily an atomic explosion, but a lot of radiation is released. I have here from the Arms Control Association, the nuclear testing tally. It says, "Since the first explosion in 1945 at least eight nations have detonated 2,053 nuclear test explosions everywhere from Lop Nur in China to the Pacific, to Nevada to Algeria, to France, the South Atlantic, Kazakhstan, everywhere."

Most of these tests were done in rural areas far from populated areas, but as we know, radiation doesn't discriminate. Once it gets into the environment it spreads and it bio-accumulates in the food chain. One of the most unfortunate figures about this is that there have been 528 atmospheric detonations that have taken place since the beginning of nuclear testing which is a staggering number when you think of the amount of radiation that's released by one.

The information is publicly available information about nuclear bomb testing that was going on. You can deduce that there's been a harmful amount of radiation released just from that, but there have also been a lot that have not been publicly talked about. To get us started here I want to play a little clip from a 2003 interview that Michio Kaku - who some our listeners might be familiar with - did on the Art Bell show. I had it I'm just trying to find it in our files here. Michio Kaku is a physicist and he's been making the rounds and has talked quite a bit about Fukushima in the public eye as well as other issues of physics and nuclear radiation. I'm having a hard time finding this, so in the interests of time, Erica would you mind going ahead with some of the information that you have and we'll talk about that first. Then I'll see what I can do about getting this clip on.

Erica: Yeah, no problem. In September of this year the 28th, an article came out from the Anti Media by Carey Wedler and it was called; Top Secret: The Worst Nuclear Disaster in US History. There was an in-depth investigation by NBC4 in Southern California. Some whistleblowers and experts came forward to expose this little-known catastrophe which occurred north of Los Angeles in 1959. There was a lab there called the Santa Susana Field Lab (SSFL). This lab worked on top secret nuclear tests involving rocket engineering, missiles and nuclear power and energy. There was a leak and the leak was over 300 times the allowable amount of radiation in surrounding neighbourhoods. The contamination is now linked to up to a 60% increase in cancer in the area and the government still refuses to acknowledge this colossal mistake.

This happened in 1947, two years after the United States dropped the nuclear bombs on Japan and North American Aviation Corporation opened a 2,800 acre nuclear test site in Ventura County, just miles from San Fernando and Simi Valley, two adjacent valleys located north and northwest of the city of Los Angeles. It produced aircraft and other military/industrial complex-type missiles, rocket engineering, things like that. So they were testing and it was top secret.

They had a meltdown and they decided to start letting the radiation out into the environment and a lot of the men who actually worked at the plant were concerned because of the winds and their families were in the nearby neighbourhoods. The author makes a really good statement in this article. He says that, "The ongoing tragedy was driven by America's darkest demons, from dogmatic militarism to aggressive corporatism, and ongoing government and corporate efforts to cover-up the disaster are nothing short of staggering."
So they're calling it one of the worst nuclear disasters in history.

Tiffany: And hardly anybody knows about it.

Erica: Yeah, and hardly anybody knows about it. I guess this whistleblower John Pace, now in his seventies, started working at the facility in January of 1959 and was present on the day of the partial meltdown. He has spoken out in recent years because of his guilty conscience. He said, "The radiation in that building got so high, it went clear off the scale. They were not able to contain the radiation that was leaking from the reactor. Blaming equipment failure, Pace said the men working at the facility had two choices: let the reactor explode, a nuclear detonation Pace says 'would have been just like the Chernobyl reactor blowing up,' or open he reactor and let the radiation flow out into the atmosphere."
So that's basically what happened.

Tiffany: Didn't he say the radiation leak was so bad he could see it out on the pavement?

Erica: Yeah!

Doug: And also one thing they said in that article was that the radiation got so bad that they started forbidding any of the workers to wear their radiation detecting badges because they knew that the levels were so high, they would be detecting levels above safe levels. Safe levels! Not that there really is any safe level. But I thought that was pretty disgusting. It looks into the whole cover up issue of it.

Erica: Yeah. And in the article they talk about how the North American Aviation knew that this was a possibility and they continued to go ahead and test over 30,000 rocket tests during the decades-long tenure, many were for NASA, as well as advanced weapons.

Tiffany: I think they also knew that according to the wind in that particular area, that if there was an accident, the fallout would be tremendous but they chose to build this area.

Doug: Unbelievable!

Jonathan: It really is incredible!

Doug: Yeah, one of many. But it's really interesting that that is labelled the worst nuclear disaster in US history and nobody knows about it. If you think about the worst nuclear disaster in US history everybody just thinks of Three Mile Island, which was bad in and of itself. Don't get me wrong, but the fact that this one is way worse, nobody knows about it, people are continuing to live in those areas. These things don't break down for thousands of years. So they've completely obliterated this area of the United States and nobody knows. Everybody's still living there as if nothing's going wrong.

Erica: Yeah! Even in 1989 the Department of Energy did a study and they found radiation in the soil, groundwater, bedrock, at the hilltop and a 60% increase in cancer rates of people in that area.

Gaby: That means there is really no organic food from that area especially, because up to 94% of radionuclides get incorporated into the body through food because they are in the soil. So, all our agricultural products are high radioactivity so virtually no organic food grows.

Erica: And that area of California is what they call the bread basket for the United States. That's where they grow a large portion of all foods.

Jonathan: You said that was in '47?

Erica: The plant was opened in '47 but the leak was in '59.

Jonathan: Still, that was 50 years before Fukushima happened, and when people consider California food, radiation, those kind of topics, they think of Fukushima now, but that radiation has been bio-accumulating in the food chain there for 50 years.

Doug: Yeah! That's one thing that is so overwhelming in all of this information, just doing research in the past and doing research particularly for this show, is that you just become overwhelmed with the fact that this stuff is surrounding you constantly. We are always being exposed to this, all the time. It's everywhere and it's inescapable and that's extremely depressing.

Jonathan: Yeah. There are a few things that we can do and we'll touch on that later in the show. There are some things that you can do to protect yourself, specifically against radionuclides but also against different forms of cancers and things like that. But we'll talk about that later. I found this clip that I was looking for. Like Erica mentioned, they have hushed up that accident in California and there's been a long, dark-storied history of nuclear accidents being hushed up and we'll hear some of this now from this Michio Kaku interview with Art Bell. This is almost 8 minutes long, 7 minutes, 50 seconds and you'll hear some beeps throughout the clip and that just indicates a split where it goes from one segment to the next. So here's that and we will be back right after this.
Michio: Two people were actually blown apart and were killed at Los Alamos. One was killed one month after the bombing of Nagasaki. They had the plutonium on a tabletop, believe it or not. They had the atomic bombs...

Art: How much of it doctor?

Michio: Again, about the size of your fist. They had two hemispheres of plutonium and Harry Daglian, a 26-year-old worker, walked into the room where they had this atomic bomb sitting on a tabletop and he tripped. He tripped and his shoulder hit the tungsten carbide which was surrounding the plutonium. The tungsten carbide fell into this mass, reflected the neutrons, concentrated the neutrons, and critical mass was attained right in his face.

So we have to realize that a small atomic bomb went off right in front of Harry Daglian's face.

***
And then just a few months later, believe it or not, in 1946, Louis Slotin, a physicist was blown apart in the same way. He had two hemispheres of plutonium on a tabletop. He had an atomic bomb on a tabletop with a screwdriver. The screwdriver would bring these two hemispheres closer and closer and closer together. A Geiger counter needle would go off-scale and then he would untwist/unscrew the two hemispheres. This is called, "tickling the dragon's tail."

They considered themselves hot-rodders. They were pushing the laws of physics. They were making measurements and when Slotin realized that he had turned the screw too many times and the Geiger counter needle went off-scale, he lunged forward and with his bare hands, he separated the two plutonium hemispheres and he took the entire brunt of the atomic bomb in his chest.

Art: Oh, my god!

Michio: And he was again hit with about 5,000 rads of radiation. He too, pretty much disintegrated with enormous burns over his body at the Los Alamos Hospital.

***

You know, the military is quite careless with regards to plutonium. They often wash large quantities of plutonium waste in pipes and sometimes you have criticality in the walls of the building!

Art: Really?!

Michio: I was shocked. At the White Building at Oak Ridge, Tennessee - you can actually look up the file - where critical mass was attained in the wall!

Art: Wow!

Michio: And people walking in and out were hit with a fair amount of radiation as liquid, in and out, went critical then went out of critical, went in and out of critical for a period of hours.

Art: But still in all, people doing that kind of work are required, are they not, to wear badges that would have reflected the dose they were getting, wouldn't they?

Michio: Well believe it or not, in order to reconstruct the dose, they put a donkey in that same room and they had the donkey be exposed to critical mass in the wall to calculate exactly how much radiation the workers got. This is how careless - you'd be shocked when you read the files.

***

Michio: Like for example, in 1961 in Idaho, there was a worker who manually removed the control rod out of the SL1 reactor (stationary low power reactor unit 1) and the reactor went super-critical right under his feet and the reactor exploded.

Art: I've never heard any of this!

Michio: Yeah, this was Idaho Falls, Idaho, January 1961. Three workers were blown apart when a reactor when super-critical. Forget the meltdown. We're talking about a small bomb going off right under the feet of Mr. John Burns, who was shot through the ceiling. The explosion was so great that the control rod went right through his body and impaled his body on the ceiling of the reactor.

Art: My god!!

***

Michio: This was kept hush-hush in the 1960's but Three Mile Island was not our first meltdown. Our first meltdown was Fermi 1 operated by Detroit Edison.

Art: Really?!

Michio: And it was a 2% core melt. Two percent of the core melted. I have pictures of the core showing melted rods of uranium dripping fuel down to the bottom.

Art: Yikes!

Michio: What happened was, it was a breeder reactor which today would be considered criminal if anyone tried to make a commercial breeder reactor. They're very unstable. What happened was a piece of zirconium, a piece of metal about the size of a beer can became dislodged, jammed the cooling system. The reactor overheated as a consequence and began to melt and then radiation alarms were sent off. They immediately stopped the chain reactions and for days they were wondering, 'what is the state of a melted core?' They had never seen a commercial reactor with a melted core before. And so they simply crossed their fingers. They literally crossed their fingers and hoped it wouldn't become super-critical. It was 20% enriched, highly enriched uranium. Today we use only 3% enriched uranium, by the way. A bomb is 90% enriched.

Art: Could it have gone?

Michio: It might have gone. It could have been bad because of two things; one, melting could have started up again in which case you would have a sodium explosion which is quite volatile - sodium will explode on contact with water - a sodium explosion which would rip the whole reactor apart, or a small bomb, that is super-criticality would be obtained with melted fuel and then it would heat up and then again, another sodium explosion would rip the reactor apart. There were evacuation plans to evacuate large portions of Detroit if there was a sodium explosion.

Art: Were they telling the people of Detroit what was going on at the time?

Michio: They heard nothing. I got the file from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission once years ago and there was a letter from the union of the United Auto Workers Union saying that, 'some of the union brothers have heard that there was a massive incident at the reactor. Could you clarify?' And the answer is also there in the file. The answer was, 'Oh, nothing happened.'

***

Michio: Now the greatest nuclear accident of all time, before Chernobyl actually took place in Russia in the 1950s in the Ural Mountains. It was the greatest nuclear catastrophe of all time, and it too was hushed up. By the way, all of these accidents have been hushed up.

Art: What happened there?

Michio: Well in the area called Kyshtym near the village of Ozyorsk, there was a plutonium dump. Stalin had all the excess plutonium from the nuclear program dumped into this one site. And apparently again, super-criticality was achieved and boiling occurred within the plutonium dump and an explosion took place which blew the lid right off the container and plutonium in liquid aerosol form shot into the atmosphere.

***

Michio: And by the way, England about the same time, sustained its first big nuclear accident, which was totally hushed up in England. This was the Windscale Pile #1 in the 1950's. It was actually very much like the Chernobyl accident. It was carbon-moderated. The carbon caught on fire and you had a uranium/carbon fire in the centre of a nuclear power plant in Windscale, England. They'd never seen this before; a reactor actually in flames. The workers shot hose water directly into the core of a nuclear power plant! This is unbelievable! You have to read the files to believe this!

Art: How could...

Michio: A huge explosion took place, gigantic amounts of gas was lofted in the air.

Art: I'm sure!

Michio: And the queen's scientists tracked that radioactive cloud sailing over the English Channel. And they classified the whole thing. Only the queen of England - she was the only civilian to be aware of this accident.
Jonathan: So, there you have it. Now granted, those are only a few of the accidents that have happened.

Tiffany: That's unbelievable!! We learn about these scientists in school and they made it seem like Madam Curie was the only one who died from these radiation experiments that she was doing!?! People were just dropping dead all over the place and nobody knew about it.

Doug: It's unbelievable! Listening to that clip, you really get the impression of how reckless these scientists were at the beginning. I don't know if that kind of thing still goes on at this point. I don't know if it was just out of ignorance or what the deal was. It's almost like they had this feeling of untouchableness about them. They can do all these reckless experiments and it's no big deal. It's just so irresponsible!

Tiffany: Maybe they read too many Superman comics. They thought they would get special powers by dealing with this radioactive material. It seems like they have hubris and on the other hand they absolutely do not know, really, what they're doing with these tiny little atoms and they're splitting them apart and they have no clue.

Jonathan: Obviously in the early days there wasn't a lot of research or perhaps any research about the fact that this radiation would be spread across the planet and that it does not go away. There are some radioactive particles that have a half life of a few seconds, some six months, but a large number of them are for hundreds or even millions of years. Uranium doesn't go away for millions and millions of years; the same with plutonium.

Tiffany: Isn't plutonium's half life 24,000 years, or something ridiculous.

Gaby: It's going to be here for the rest of our lives.

Jonathan: Later in the show we'll play another clip from Helen Caldicott and she mentions that the uranium that has been used in the Middle East during the conflicts that have gone on there - we call them conflicts when they were invasions, genocide - will be there for 4.5 billion years. That's a pretty staggering figure. As to the psychology of these guys messing around with this technology, there are a lot of really weird psychological aspects to this. I also heard some stories about some of the scientists who worked on the bombs. Before they would test the bomb in the desert they would actually go spend the night with the bomb before it was detonated.

Tiffany: Why?!?

Jonathan: And sleep next to the bomb because they were giving birth to this thing that they had made.

Doug: Oh, my god!!

Tiffany: That's just sick!

Jonathan: In another Helen Caldicott clip, which I don't have the for the show here today, she mentions that during the Cold War there was a US politician who had said, "If you take away our nuclear weapons it's like taking away the family jewels" and the family jewels is an aphorism for male genitalia. So there's this psychological/sexual association with having the balls, having the nuclear weapons, like who's bigger. It's a real base impulse. Unfortunately it implies the destruction of the planet. It's not just you guys having a fight with each other.

Doug: That is really insane. Just to look into the psychology of anybody who would hold the world hostage. It's this sense of power, that they have the actual ability to completely wipe out life on the planet. Who wants that kind of power? It's just ridiculous!

Jonathan: Yeah. Of course we haven't had the full-scale nuclear winter scenario. We've actually come very close to it a few times. They say that during the Cuban missile crisis we were 10 seconds away from the missiles being launched. And of course as Kaku talked about some of these accidents, that reactor that melted in Detroit fortunately was only two percent melted, but it could have gone critical and destroyed the entire city.
There were other ones. I didn't want to make that clip too long but there were some other ones about scientists who wanted to build a breeder reactor in downtown New York and they were shut down from doing that because at that point they realized how unstable they were. There are reactors that are very close to populated areas. I guess that brings us to talking about some of the modern incidents that have been going on. Of course everybody's aware of Fukushima. Maybe not everybody is aware of just how dire the situation is, but I'm sure that everybody has heard of it.

Tiffany: Wasn't Fukushima built on an earthquake fault?

Jonathan: Yes.

Tiffany: I mean, talk about some really stellar planning right there!

Jonathan: There are two reactors in the United States that are built on earthquake faults. Like Einstein said, "A nuclear plant is one hell of a way to boil water" which is one heck of a way to talk about it because that's what it's for. It's not some mysterious process by which energy just kind of magically comes out of a reactor. They use the extreme heat of the nuclear materials to boil water to turn turbines that are steam and generate electricity. So, it's like a giant coal engine powered by nuclear radiation.

Doug: Which is insane when you think about it; there's all this spin that gets put on nuclear energy about it being a clean means of generating energy. It's so much cleaner than something like coal because you're not burning anything and you don't have all this soot and stuff going into the atmosphere, but the consequences of it are just so dire. It's such propaganda! It's just so frustrating whenever you hear the idea of nuclear power being equated with being a green energy, a safe, environmental energy. Just the waste alone is just unbelievable and what you have to do to that waste to try and segregate it from the population, from the surrounding area, is just crazy!

Erica: I think too Doug, what Dr. Caldicott talked about in one of her videos is that with radiation you can't see it, smell it, or taste it, unlike coal where people actually see the soot and whatnot, this is not visible. So it's like, "out of sight, out of mind". If you can't see it then you're not going to be concerned about it.

Doug: Meanwhile cancer rates are going through the roof.

Gaby: Yes.

Jonathan: People wonder where the cancer epidemic came from. There are a number of causes. There's certain evidence that points to the polio vaccine as being one of the root causes of that, but all of this radiation in the environment I'm sure is not helping.

Doug: No, it's smoking Jonathan. Its smoking, don't you know that? All cancers can be blamed on smoking.

Jonathan: Oh yeah, right! I forgot, {Laughter} nothing to see here, move along.

Erica: Move along, move along.

Gaby: Just to put some perspective on that, there was this professor Chris Busby who was the scientific secretary of the European Community on Radiation Risk and he explained in 2009 that the global death yield of the nuclear age to 1992 would be horrifying. So according to their calculations made by the European Community on Radiation Risk, there have been, up to 2003, 61 million cancer deaths including 2 million foetal deaths. There have been a loss of life quality of 10% in terms of illnesses and aging effects and the blame can be squarely placed at the door of those scientists and administrators who develop and support with their scientific risk models, we're talking about WHO; ISRP. Busby explains that people have to realize that this is a war crime far greater in magnitude than any that have occurred in recorded human history, just to put some perspective on that.

Jonathan: And they're not going to be held accountable for this any time soon. Again, as Helen Caldicott mentioned - and this is in one of the clips that are coming up but I'll just reiterate - the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, has an agreement with the WHO, the World Health Organization, that they will not investigate nuclear accidents. So the WHO has signed off. With as much ridiculous information as has come from them, they are the standard for worldwide health investigation. They're the biggest organization that can actually do anything about that. And of course they're co-opted.

Tiffany: They're just saying all the cancer is due to red meat.

Erica: Bacon.

Jonathan: Yeah, and smoking.

Gaby: Oh, my god! It's so bad. {Laughter}

Jonathan: So talking about some of the modern things that are going on - and people may not be entirely aware of - I had heard about it from scouring the web about six months after it happened. In Carlsbad, New Mexico in February of 2014, this article says: Officials are monitoring the levels of airborne radiation at the deep underground facility in south-western New Mexico where the government disposes of its low grade nuclear waste. It is called the waste isolation pilot plants (WIPP). The monitoring system detected traces of radiation on the underground levels of the facility and the 139 workers above ground at the time of the incident were ordered to remain where they were as a precaution. None of the employees tested positive for radioactive contamination; however there is a leak of nuclear waste that's going on there.

Of course they say that the leak was not significant, but as we've heard, even the major, major accidents are hushed up so of course they're going to try to dampen the effect of this in the media. But what happened was the plutonium contaminated waste from Los Alamos is stored in a salt mine and part of the mine collapsed and cracked open one of the barrels. So it's basically just sitting there wide open, leaking out.

Unfortunately I don't have a reference for this. If I find it I will bring it up, but I remember reading at the time of this that within 100 square miles hospitals were giving CAT scans to patients who came in and requested them because of this radiation contamination which again, is slightly and sadly ironic too because CAT scans are radiation in and of themselves and you don't want to get one unless you absolutely need to.

In St. Louis there's an underground fire that is creeping and moving all over the place, but this particular one is creeping towards an underground nuclear waste dump and there's a chance that it could reach and set that waste on fire. This is happening all over the place. It's not isolated things that happened in the 50's and 60's.

Tiffany: That that Carlsbad, New Mexico one the same one where there was a barrel that was leaking because it had organic cat litter in it instead of non-organic cat litter?

Jonathan: Yes.

Doug: They suspect that might be the case, yeah. I read somewhere that it was kind of a comedy of errors, if you can call this kind of thing a comedy. There was that combined with the fact that the ventilation system was malfunctioning as well and that the filter that was supposed to be filtering out the radiation actually wasn't. So again, just complete recklessness. You can blame it on budgets or whatever the case may be, but you really shouldn't feel safe about how the authorities are handling these waste products.

Jonathan: That's the dark, unspoken truth of nuclear power, like you said Doug, they say it's clean and it may be clean for a time while it's operating safely without breach, without meltdown or any criticality, but they end up with a lot of active nuclear waste that is still putting out radiation that has to be contained. It has to be buried somewhere. It has to be monitored and they have to essentially cross their fingers and hope that it stays where it is for thousands of years.

Doug: Another thing that came out in this whole Carlsbad was that they were saying that the plant was already behind by two years in processing nuclear waste material, so there's a backlog of two years for them to take waste from nuclear power plants and contain it in a safe manner. And they're all concerned because this incident has made them have to shut down a plant. I can't remember how long they had to shut it down for, something like 18 months. So they're concerned that they're not going to be able to meet their quotas for containing waste.
You just hear things like that and think how anybody could call this a, "clean energy system?" It's just ridiculous.

Tiffany: That makes me ask, if there's a two-year backlog, where is the waste sitting at now? Where is it?!

Doug: Good question.

Tiffany: Is it sitting on a truck somewhere?

Doug: Yeah!

Jonathan: And this stuff has to be moved, so it's obviously moved through the United States either in trucks or on railways and of course accidents happen all over the place. I was going to say fortunately that hasn't happened yet but we may not know. Things like that may have been spilled that nobody is even aware of.

Erica: Yeah, like the article we started out with. It took 70 years for them to come out about this Santa Susana field lab experiment gone wrong.

Doug: Yeah, it takes one of the workers being at the end of his life and feeling a guilty conscience to actually expose this.

Jonathan: Erica, when we were talking before you said you had a little bit of data about Fukushima that you wanted to share. Would you mind going over that?

Erica: Yeah, no problem. For our listeners, Fukushima happened in March 2011. There were actually six nuclear reactors and according to Dr. Helen Caldicott, Japan is many times worse than Chernobyl. There were two articles that had some stats. One is; Fukushima radiation producing cancer clusters in children at more than 50 times that of the normal population. This was carried back in October of 2015 by the Daily Sheeple. This was actually on NPR, National Propaganda - I mean Public Radio. {Laughter} They were talking about children developing thyroid cancer at an elevated rate. Fukushima Health surveyed more than 150,000 children and they've had up to 25 suspicious or malignant causes of thyroid cancer. Thyroid cancer can be caused by radioactive iodine and children are particularly susceptible because their thyroids are rapidly growing. There is a 35% spike in infant mortality rate in the north-western cities since the accident and more than 2,000 people have died during the evacuations and another 5,000 are expected to die from future cancers. There's also an increased suicide rate and mental health consequences and also a drop in the number of live births.

Then a second article called; The legacy of Fukushima-Thousands dead since evacuations with suicide and cancer rates on the rise. This is carried by The Ecologist. They talk about how the health toll from Fukushima is horrendous and at minimum over 160,000 people were evacuated, most of them permanently. There are many cases of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety disorders are arising from the evacuation. About 12,000 workers were exposed to high levels of radiation, some up to 250 mSv. I'm not really sure what that stands for.

Tiffany: Micro-sieverts or something like that?

Erica: Yes, an estimated 5,000 fatal cancers from radiation in the future, plus similar unquantified numbers of radiogenic stroke, cardiovascular disease and hereditary disease. Between 2011 and 2015 about 2,000 deaths from radiation-related evacuations due to ill health and suicides, a yet unqualified number of thyroid cancers and again, and increased mortality rate in 2012 and a decreased number of live births in 2011.
Then they mention two non-health effects that included eight percent of Japan, about 30,000 square kilometres, including parts of Tokyo, are contaminated by radioactivity and the economic loss is estimated anywhere between $300 and $500 billion.

And they're kind of like what we've been discussing in the show. It's not discussed. It's pooh-poohed, put to the side. There was an interesting quote by a Kyoto University professor, Hiroki Kyoti and he said, "The clock cannot be turned back. We live in a contaminated world."

Doug: It was amazing, all the propaganda that was coming out at the time too, of Fukushima. You'd see all these different articles saying things like, "oh, there's nothing to worry about." "Don't worry about it. You can still eat fish. You can still go about your life as if it was normal. The radiation reaching California is not that bad" when it's such propaganda. If you look at anybody who's really looking into the situation and read some of the articles about what's actually happening, it is extremely alarming. The whole, "nothing to see here folks, just go back to sleep" is extremely frustrating.

Erica: When that article came out about the Fukushima radiation producing cancer clusters in children, the author said a tightly controlled state media has been actively countering the report, unleashing other experts who are claiming the study is not reliable and making them not supported by evidence.

Gaby: Typical.

Jonathan: We'll touch on this a little bit later too, we don't want to simply fear-monger by talking about this topic. We want to bring it up as something to face as a fact that people need to know about and not freak out about. It certainly is easy, and I've had my moments too, where I'll freak out for a little while just thinking, "Oh my god! The world is done for!" It can go that way but then you're not going to operate or do anything useful in your life. So I think it's necessary to look at some of this dark information, really realize what the situation is and use that to galvanize your actions and your intent.

Doug: I think that's a very good point. It's very easy to get overwhelmed by this information. I can understand why people will cling onto these life preservers that are tossed out the powers that be and the mainstream media, with messages like, "don't worry about it. Just go about your life" because it can be so overwhelming and you can get very depressed by looking into this darkness. But I think you're very right Jonathan, that you need to use this sort of information as a means of galvanizing, as you said, using the information and knowledge to build yourself up more than become overwhelmed by it. It can be a huge tidal wave that can send you into a negative dark spin. It should actually be motivating you to action in some way.

Gaby: Yeah, even if it's one step at a time. It's better than nothing. They are relying on us to conform to believe their lies. Even if it's just one little step, that is a huge thing to do.

Erica: And it also gives you perspective about the things that you worry about in your day-to-day life. "Oh, I can't buy that Christmas present for my friend." That's small.

Doug: Yeah.

Erica: It's interesting that several years ago there was a really good video created. It's called the time lapse map of every nuclear explosion since 1945. It came out in 2011 on YouTube and it was actually a Best of the Web on SOTT. This Japanese artist, Isao Hashimoto, created a beautiful, undeniably scary time lapse map of the 2,053 nuclear explosions which have taken place between 1945 and 1998, beginning with the Manhattan Project Trinity Test near Los Alamos and concluding with Pakistan's nuclear test in May of 1998. He began the project in 2003 and he created it with the goal of showing the fear and folly of nuclear weapons.

So people are moved by this material in such a way that they want to get the information out there and as a way to really show and for people to see how overwhelming it can be and how the build up happened. For those who want to watch the video, it's about 14 minutes long and you can skip to the 1960s and see blurps all over the screen of all the stuff going on. And as you said, it's not something so much to be afraid of, but just having the knowledge that it's out there and then when you hear that smoking causes cancer, or bacon, it kind of puts things into a different perspective.

Doug: One thing I was struck by when watching that video is how much of a pissing contest it seems. The US is doing all their nuclear explosions and then Russia is countering with all their nuclear explosions. "Oh we're doing lots of nuclear explosions. Oh yeah? Well we're doing lots of nuclear explosions too!" And then France, "Yeah, we're doing it too!" And Britain is like, "Yeah, us too! We're in on the action too!" The build up blows my mind, and all these different countries racing to get this ability to cause these detrimental explosions on the face of the planet. It just makes me so mad watching it!

Erica: As Jonathan mentioned, it's a pissing contest. Who's got the bigger balls, right?

Jonathan: Yeah, the race for developing more and more deadly weapons has a very clear and unambiguous goal of killing people. You can get into the whole debate as to whether or not some wars are justified and others are not. There is self-defence and there is aggression. There are all these different points about it, but we're not talking about a village or a city defending them against an invasion or even a country defending itself. We're talking about the potential destruction of the entire planet. It's that MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) scenario which is just insane. There is a certain cold logic to it, "If you try to destroy me, I'll destroy you and we'll all be gone." But that's really psychotic thinking.

Doug: Yeah, it's completely pathological. I think we could safely say that there is no such thing as a justified use of a nuclear weapon, absolutely none. There is no situation that could be called for where it could be, "Yeah, that nuclear missile launch was justified." No way!! There is absolutely no situation where you could possibly justify that.

Tiffany: Well there's a small portion of psychopathic mad scientists out there who just get off on death and destruction and that's just the way it is. If it wasn't nuclear power, it would be some other kind of power or something else that they could do. They just get off on death and destruction. There's pretty much nothing that we can do about it. That's just the way their minds work which is bad in itself, but it's a fact.

Doug: We can spread information. That's what we can do about it.

Jonathan: And I think also be careful to spread information and to not cram it down peoples' throats. I could very easily just go out on the street and walk up to people and say, "We're screwed" and just start listing off all these things, but that's not the way to do it. We've talked about this on previous shows too. Wait for an opportunity to arise. Spread information where you can. Use social media when you can and use personal conversations when you can, but you also need to retain your ability to have discourse with people, just like this topic we're talking about today. If you pick any one person who didn't know any of this information and just started listing off all of these factors as to how much radiation there is in the environment, you can cause somebody to go into anaphylactic shock.

So I think we need to spread information with consciousness about the effects that it's going to have. I want to be very clear that I'm not agreeing with hushing up any of these accidents. I think that all this stuff should be public information but we are at a point now where peoples' ability to deal with negative information is so fragile. We see it in the news day-to-day. You see a negative event and then you puppets and so you're made to feel better.

Doug: Yeah, exactly. I think it really comes down to a choice, right? You don't want to bypass somebody's ability to choose whether or not they wish to be informed or ignorant on the subject. So forcing information on people is an abridgement of their free will. Some people want to remain in the dark and that's their right, but if you put the information out there in such a way that somebody is choosing whether or not they want to expose themselves to it, social media is a good example. If you post things on your Facebook page, then the people read the headline and they have a choice whether or not they want to pursue that or not whereas if you're cornering somebody at a party and laying all this information on them, it really is an abridgement of their free will. You can't make the decision for them as to whether or not they should be an informed individual. They have to make that decision themselves.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Erica: And then you get labelled, "Oh, here comes Debbie Downer with all those stats". {Laughter}

Doug: Exactly.

Jonathan: I had an interesting experience a couple of years ago with a sushi chef in California who was there. My girlfriend and I ate at a restaurant and we were looking on the menu and all of the sushi that they had was inland river caught fish. We were like, "Okay, we'll try it". We ended up by chance, outside having a cigarette later and talking to the chef himself who was on his way out and was outside and mentioned Fukushima and he went off, not against me, but in a supportive way. He was like, "Yeah, I will never, ever, ever serve a fish from the Pacific Ocean again in my life!"

Doug: Wow.

Jonathan: Because he was aware of the situation that was going on and he was talking about how that hard saying, "This is my livelihood so for now I've got to keep doing it, but at least I can do that."

Doug: And I guess through that he was able to spread information too. If anybody asked, "Well, why are you serving all this river caught fish?" then it's an opportunity for him to inform somebody who might actually be interested in the information.

Tiffany: A lot of the Fukushima apologists will say, "Well, it doesn't matter that the nuclear runoff is going into the ocean. The ocean is so vast and so large it all gets polluted". But they don't think about how the algae soaks up all the radiation and the crustaceans and the little fish and the big fish and it just goes on and on and on. It doesn't matter how large the ocean is.

Doug: It really doesn't. That stuff does bio-accumulate, like you were saying, up the food chain. There was actually an article on SOTT in March of 2011 from the Physicians for Social Responsibility and the title was; Radioactivity in food - there is no safe level of radionuclides exposure whether from food, water or other sources. It doesn't matter how diluted it is. If you play the lottery and you get exposed to these radionuclides, and somebody will, then suddenly you're the one who's going to develop cancer. I remember reading one article where they were talking about how if you take a machine gun and spray it into a crowd, some of those people are going to get hit. It's kind of like pulling the wool over someone's eyes to say, "Your chances are pretty slim". Well it doesn't matter! You're in a crowd that's being fired upon by a machine gun. You might be one of those people and even if you're not, somebody else is! So that whole argument about dilution is just completely irrelevant.

Gaby: And from one perspective, the Fukushima disaster was actually worse because sea products, fresh ocean fish, algae, are really very important from a nutritional perspective. From an evolutionary perspective, we have brains thanks to the fatty acids in fish and iodine in algae. So Fukushima polluted all our resources of sea products and oddly, we're really totally in trouble.

Erica: And then what can you really do about it? We lived in Hawaii during the Fukushima disaster and I remember reading the news about cows in California and Canada. It's in the milk. I thought, "Oh, my gosh! We've already been exposed for years before!" People were saying, "Oh, you're not going to go swimming in the water, right because it's in the water?" And this is after I had watched that time lapse map of very nuclear explosion since 1945 and it's like what can you really do? Are you going to stay in your underground bomb shelter for the rest of all time? Dr. Helen Caldicott talks about how it could be five years, it could be 10 years and it could be 30 years before you're going to start seeing the effects of this. Maybe it's in the video. As everyone shared, it just depends on the person and their diet and how they're living their life. But you can't hide from it I guess is my point because it's all around you and having the awareness about it to take care of your health is something that you can do, instead of compounding.

Gaby: I think from mainstream medicine's perspective, the most well-recognized disaster in health effects is the Chernobyl event. In 2009 eastern European doctors managed to publish their research on Chernobyl in the Annals of the European Academy. The publication is called Chernobyl-Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment. They did a very good job researching all the effects, all of which we've been covering in the show so far. It's just that it is a scientific publication and I have very interesting data. It is recognized in scientific circles which is interesting how they manipulate the public awareness where most people don't know about these publications and how well documented they are. It's all scientific. It's not like, "out there conspiracy theory" or anything like that. It is really literally very bad. Actually the effects of Chernobyl were seen after 10 years and that it's known that it's going to get worse as the years go by because this stuff just cycles in the environment and we get it mostly through the foods that we eat.

If you guys want to read a review of the book and the research I'm going to post a link in the chat. It's an article that was published on SOTT in 2011 called; Detoxify or Die-Natural Radiation Protection Therapies for Coping with the Fallout of the Fukushima Nuclear Meltdown. It's really a review of the Chernobyl research.

Jonathan: I think Caldicott mentions that book as well. She also mentioned the fact that before that book had come out, there was no effort by the IAEA or anybody else to look into the actual Russian data about Chernobyl and that was a big reason why it didn't become widespread, because it was all in Russian and nobody bothered to translate and spread it to the rest of the world. So the Russians have been aware of this for some time.
The bio-accumulation, the silent effects of radiation are something that needs to be taken into account when you're thinking about this because it can seem like, "Well, I don't see any negative effects from it and I'm not one of those scientists in the '40's who got super-critical release right in my face and melted in 48 hours". That doesn't happen to you when you get a little piece of plutonium or strontium or caesium or something like that, into your body.

Helen Caldicott, who we're referencing a lot here - and just as a quick aside I would recommend our listeners who want to look into this more, to go search on YouTube for Helen Caldicott. She has a lot of videos where she talks about the medical indications of the radiation in our environment. She mentions that Three Mile Island actually happened quite near to a Hershey dairy farm where they take milk from the cows to make their chocolate. They were actually at the time concerned about the radiation in the milk and so they freeze-dried all of the milk and supposedly according to some process - and I'm not intimately familiar with this - allowed time for the radiation to escape from the freeze-dried milk. However, that radiation was also on the ground and in the plants that the cows were eating, so it's not like they can just get rid of it. It bio-accumulated into the milk and then further into the products that were made from that milk. She mentioned at one point some day down the road, you feel a lump in your breast and you don't realize that it was from a molecule of strontium 90 that was in a piece of Hershey's chocolate that you ate 20 years ago.
That's another way that this can really cause irrational fear about this topic because when you really start thinking about all the possibilities - I've eaten some crap in my life and I don't know where it came from.

Tiffany: Some of those Hershey's kisses.

Jonathan: Yeah. {Laughter}So it's a possibility for everyone. Like Erica said, it can help you to make your attention more immediate. We have our lives right now. None of know how long we have anyway. Accidents happen; car accident. All these things happen. So I think that it should galvanize us to take the moment, carpe diem, and use the time that we have to do good in the world.

Gaby: Just to put it in another perspective, due to the Chernobyl research, there were lots of diseases that we now know as fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome and all these weird diseases that never existed before. The Russian researchers say that basically it enriched their medical vocabulary after Chernobyl. They also report from autopsies made from that time how the radionuclides incorporate in our bodies, but especially they get concentrated in the glands, like the thyroid gland, the adrenal glands, pancreas, thymus, spleen and liver and also the heart and muscles. That is interesting because a lot of these diseases come from failure of glands, imbalances in the hormones like adrenal fatigue and fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome.

Also another thing that most people ignore is that radiation intensifies infectious and parasitic behaviours, like viral hepatitis, respiratory viruses but also many dying from all kinds of diseases. So one could question to what point all these increasing academic diseases like Lyme's disease and all these diseases that we're plagued with nowadays, it's not only our changes but also accumulation of radionuclides in the environment changing the whole flora and fauna of the earth basically.

Doug: That's one thing that doesn't really get looked at. People will look at the consequences of acute exposures. What is the immediate effect of being exposed to this sort of radiation? But they don't tend to look very much at the long-term type consequences. I think like you were saying Gaby, a lot of these chronic conditions that people develop might have their root causes in some of this radiation exposure. That's the kind of thing that you'll never really prove. You'll never really find out for sure that that's what was at the root of these things. It's very silent in that way. It's kind of devious.

Erica: Well it's interesting too because America in particular, has been testing with experiments, radiation on humans. Back in 2011 there was an article on SOTT-Best of the Web; America's history of chemical weapon experiments against its own people over 4,000 radiation experiments poisoned hundreds of thousands of its citizens over 4,000 radiation experiments poisoned hundreds of thousands of its citizens and this was carried by New Dawn Magazine. This was 2011, but only recently top secret documents were released that detailed the unethical and inhumane radiation studies conducted during the Cold War years from 1944 to 1974. Some of the classified government experiments included: exposing more than 100 Alaskan villagers to radioactive iodine. That happened in the 1960's; feeding 49 retarded and institutionalized teenagers with radioactive iron and calcium in their cereal.

Doug: Jesus!

Erica: That went on from 1946 to 1954. In the late '40's; exposing over 800 pregnant women to radioactive iron to determine the effect on the foetus.

Doug: Unbelievable!

Erica: Injecting newborns with radioactive iodine, administering radioactive material to psychiatric patients in San Francisco and prisoners in San Quentin.

Tiffany: And radiating their testicles I hear.

Erica: Yeah, and exposing almost 200 cancer patients to high levels of radiation from caesium and cobalt. That test was finally stopped by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1974. So, in 1995 the energy department admitted to over 430 radiation experiments conducted. By then over 16,000 people were radiated, some of whom did not even know the health risks or were not even giving consent. So the experiments were designed to help atomic scientists understand the human hazards of nuclear war and radiation fallout. These experiments were all stamped, "secret" and allowed to take place under the, "protecting national security" shtick.

Tiffany: Well why were they secret if they were so hopeful to advancing knowledge about what happens to human beings under radiation? Again, it just comes back to people who get off on torturing people and sickening people and seeing people suffer. I could see maybe one or two. That kind of gives you what you want to know, but 400-some experiments? Come on!! And that's the ones we know about.

Doug: Animal experiments on these kinds of things are bad enough, torturing animals. But these are people who are torturing human beings. Ah! It's just- (Big sigh).

Erica: And all in the name of national security.

Jonathan: That leads me into this clip. We've been talking about Helen Caldicott here on the show and here's a clip from her which is a little over five minutes long. Again, like the first one, you'll hear some beeps. That just indicates a transition, but this is her talking about the effects of radiation and the use of radiation in war, its effects on children and what's happening at the current moment. So as I said at the beginning, we could talk about this for many hours so this is really condensed, but I believe this gives some good insight into the issues that are going on. We'll be back right after this clip.
The International Atomic Energy Agency which controls nuclear power and supports it around the world, says that only 4,000 people died because of Chernobyl. The World Health Organization has an unholy alliance with the IAEA, an agreement signed in '57 saying that the WHO can't investigate any atomic accidents unless the IAEA says so. So the WHO has never investigated Chernobyl, didn't investigate Three Mile Island and it's not investigating Fukushima, which is really more than medically irresponsible.
***
And it was Timothy Mousseau who got the New York Academy to translate 5,000 articles written in Russian in the peer reviewed literature, epidemiologists, physicians and the like, into English for the first time because the IAEA had never even looked at Russian articles. They hadn't even studied the people. So this book is imperative reading and it shows that by now, 25 years post-Chernobyl, over a million people have died. And they've died of various things. There are homes full of the most severely deformed children and what radiation does to a developing embryo in the first trimester is it can kill a cell that's going to form the left half of the brain or the right arm, like thalidomide did. And that's called teratogenesis, a genetically chromosomally normal foetus, is damaged by radiation. And we have never seen in the history of paediatrics such children and there's a photograph here of them and it's really tragic.
There's a film called Chernobyl Heart which documents, and you can download it on the internet, what's happened to these children. Children are aging prematurely. They're getting diseases that old people get. There's a very high incidence of cataracts induced by radiation. Children are getting heart disease because caesium 137 concentrates in the heart muscle and they are dying of heart disease. There's a high incidence of diabetes because caesium 137 concentrates in the endocrine glands, including the pancreas. And of course there's a very high incidence of cancer and leukaemia.
***
So what you need to know is children are 20 times more radio-sensitive than adults. Little girls are twice as sensitive as little boys. We don't know why. Foetuses are thousands of times more radio-sensitive. One x-ray to the pregnant abdomen doubles the incidence of leukaemia in that baby. Radiation is cumulative. Each dose you get adds to your risk of getting cancer. No dose is safe. Do not have an unnecessary x-ray. Do not have your teeth x-rayed every year. You don't need it and it's really criminal to x-ray you every year. {Applause}
My ex-husband was a radiologist. They make a lot of money. Don't walk through those x-ray machines in the airports. They're criminal and I have to call the president of the AMA and tell him or her that they have to be banned because they're radiating foetuses and little children! And old people are very sensitive to radiation, as are immunosuppressed patients. So it's very serious. Don't have CAT scans unless you absolutely require one. Doctors are not gods. And so question this. If they say you need an x-ray say, "Why?" and "How?" and be tough with your doctor.
***
Now PSR, Physicians for Social Responsibility did a study whereby they dropped 3 hydrogen bombs on two uranium facilities because they're buried so deeply and you can't destroy them just with conventional weapons, at Nahance and Istahance and released so much radiation. Uranium, which is causing cancers in Basra now and in Falluja and gross birth deformities and the radiation from the nuclear weapons produce so much fallout that within 48 hours, 2.6 million people died, all the way over to Afghanistan, India and Pakistan. And Israel would get it too. Yet those medical consequences are never discussed. Isn't that interesting? They talk about, "They've got them and we haven't" or "What about this and that?" They don't ever talk about what happens during war.
***
Uranium is poisonous and they've used it in Falluja and Baghdad and in Falluja 80% of the babies being born are grossly deformed. They're being born without brains, single eyes, no arms. The doctors have told the women to stop having babies. The incidents of childhood cancer have gone up about 12 times. This is genocide. It's a nuclear war being conducted in Iraq. The uranium that they're using lasts for more than 4.5 billion years. So we're contaminating the cradle of civilization; the coalition of the willing.
That's Helen Caldicott and of course that was just a small sampling of what she talks about. It's pretty incredible. And just to clarify because it might not have been totally clear, the PSR study that she mentioned where 2.6 million people died in 48 hours, that was a study. That didn't actually happen. They studied what would be the effect if bombs were dropped on these uranium facilities. However, as she pointed out, these statistics are not generally released and people don't understand that it doesn't take a giant nuclear bomb to irradiate a country. It takes the destruction of one or two nuclear facilities. Of course, that's not to denigrate what's actually happening. As she said, in Iraq the incidents of child cancer have gone up 12 times. So that's 1,200 percent which is incredible.

Gaby: They've noted that radioactivity released from the Chernobyl power plant was hundreds of times higher than from the Hiroshima atomic bomb.

Jonathan: And there was more yet than Chernobyl that was released at Fukushima. There's another statistic. Referring back to Michio Kaku's clip, that accident that happened in the Ural Mountains in Russia, liquid aerosolized plutonium was sprayed into the atmosphere. In another Helen Caldicott video she mentions that it would take one pound of plutonium, which is 2.2 kilograms, to give cancer to every single person on the planet. And each nuclear warhead contains something like 200 kilograms of plutonium. So plutonium is nothing to mess around with and there have been tonnes of it released into the atmosphere and into the water.
There was another statistic she gave which I tried really hard to find, but I couldn't find it. I clearly remember her saying that according to her own research, she postulates that every male in the northern hemisphere has at least one molecule of plutonium in their testicles because of the way it travels through the body. It's one of those inescapable things. Like we've been talking about, you may not want to know about it and if you don't then that's your choice. But if you're looking to know as much as you can about the environment around you, this is a big part of it.

Gaby: And will explain the decrease in sperm count of gentlemen nowadays, infertility.

Erica: We talked about this in a previous show, but the largest cancer in children now is leukaemia.

Jonathan: Yeah, and as she said, the children are hypersensitive and foetuses even more so. And forget not a lone x-ray at the hospital, which are done regularly, people that travel and going through the TSA screeners. You're getting small doses of radiation. And the sides of the dose, of course it matter when you consider how quickly you're going to die, but it doesn't matter when you consider the accumulation in your body. So every time you get that dose, your risk is increased and even more so for children.

Erica: And as hard as it is to listen to her speak and read her material, basically the take home message is she believes that this is the greatest public health hazard the world has ever witnessed, apart from the threat every day of nuclear war.

Jonathan: It's something that begs to not be ignored, something that we should discuss. When we were talking about things that you can do, like she said in that clip there, when you're at your doctor's be frank with them and be tough with them and if they say, "Well we're just going to give you an x-ray" say, "Is that really necessary? Do I really need one? Do I really need a CAT scan?" And there are cases where you do, but these regular doses of radiation that people are getting oftentimes are not needed. Diagnoses can be made without them.
And the same in the airports; if you're going through the airport they do have the off-belt option for the scanners. It might be kind of a pain. You might get harassed or get some looks or something like that, but that's a small price to pay for avoiding the radiation dose.

Tiffany: I'd rather get felt up than get irradiated. I always opt out. {Laughter}

Doug: Absolutely. I have opted out in the past and it really wasn't that big a deal, just a pat down. I didn't feel violated or anything like that. The funny thing was is that I was just proceeding through the security section and they said, "Okay, go here and put your feet on the stencils on the floor there". It took me a second to realize what was actually going on. I was like, "Wait a minute! Is this the body scanner?" And they're like, "Yes." I said, "No, I don't want to do this. I'm opting out." And it wasn't that big a deal. I had to wait 10 minutes before somebody came to pat me down but it was fine. I know there are incidents where people feel violated from it or something, but my experience was not that big a deal and I would much rather have that like you said Tiff, than get myself irradiated.

Tiffany: Every time I opt out they don't even ask me why.

Doug: No.

Tiffany: They just do it.

Erica: Well you just start stating the stats. {Laughter}

Tiffany: I'd be willing to tell them why but they don't ask so I don't say anything. I just put my arms up and get it done and move on.

Gaby: I'd much rather not travel.

Doug: Yeah, seriously. Go by car.

Jonathan: Well let's talk for a few minutes about the response of the powers that be to this kind of thing. As we've seen and heard, the nuclear accidents are hushed up. A lot of the information, especially about Fukushima, has been downplayed. There's an article here on SOTT that is from The Ecologist. It says; Is Radiation Good for You-The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission Says Yes. It says here:The well-founded idea that nuclear radiation is dangerous even at the lowest levels is under attack, writes Karl Grossman. Three determined nuclear enthusiasts have filed petitions to the NRC calling on it to apply the doctrine of 'radiation hormesis' - that low levels of radiation actually stimulate the immune system and promote better health. If implemented, the hormesis model would result in needless death and misery", says Michael Mariotte, NIRS (Nuclear Information and Resource Service based in Washington, D.C.) president.

Emergency planning zones would be significantly reduced or abolished entirely. Instead of being forced to spend money to limit radiation releases, nuclear utilities could pocket greater profits. In addition, adoption of the radiation model by the NRC would throw the entire government's radiation protection rules into disarray, since other agencies, like the EPA, also rely on that model.
So it's very interesting that this is a proposed change at the policy level of the government, to say, "We need more, not less radiation". It's not entirely mind-blowing, but it is a little bit mind-blowing. {Laughter}

Gaby: It's disturbing.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Doug: Very much so.

Erica: They reported in Nuclear News in the same article, that no protective measures or public safety warnings would be considered necessary. Clean up measures could be sharply reduced. In a sense this would legalize what the government is already doing - failing to protect the public and promoting nuclear radiation.

Doug: Let's bus all our kids into this nuclear spill. A little bit of radiation will be good for them! It's kind of ridiculous. There is some basis to the idea of hormesis. Radon is a naturally occurring element in the earth and there have been reports of people who have small exposures to radon actually getting some benefit from it. So hormesis is just the idea that exposing your body to something negative it will mount a response and that response actually has a health benefit. So even some herbs work this way; you take an herb that actually has a minor toxic effect on the body and the response from the body is actually what gives you the benefit from that herb.

So apparently people will visit things like radon caves and come out of there saying, "Yeah, my arthritis got better!" So there is some precedent for it, but there has never been any evidence that exposure to radionuclides will have a hormetic effect. All you have to do is look at the evidence of peoples' increased cancer rates and all the evidence from Chernobyl. You can see that this effect that they're talking about is not present. We didn't get any super-healthy people coming from Chernobyl or even from Fukushima. It's so ridiculous!! It's so obviously a play by the powers that be to lessen their financial burden as far as things like clean up go. It's so aggravating!

Tiffany: And there's a big difference between naturally occurring radiation and radiation from a nuclear bomb or a nuclear power plant.

Doug: Yeah, totally.

Jonathan: Yeah, contamination of the environment, as we've been mentioning, bio-accumulation, the fact that it does not go away. It's in the water table. It's in the food. It's just moving around and we're being negatively affected by it. And so I think that you're right Doug; anything that they can do to mitigate any response to this situation, and not only that but have people say, "Well it's kind of good for you".

Doug: I read one article where they were talking about the difference between a naturally occurring radiation exposure versus something like exposure to nuclear waste and they were saying that it's kind of like the difference between getting hit by ping pong balls versus getting hit by bullets.

Jonathan: Yeah, except the ping pong balls don't lodge in your muscle tissue and then kill cells over years.

Doug: Exactly.

Gaby: There's nothing minor about the negative exposures we have nowadays.

Tiffany: So the question is, do cometary bombardments followed by ice ages get rid of radioactive nuclear waste. {Laughing}

Doug: That's a good question. I have to wonder if there are actually going to be any future civilizations on this planet, if we haven't messed things up completely. They're just going to look back on our civilization as being a bunch of complete and total idiots; the level of irresponsibility. They're going to look at us like we were a bunch of monkeys with technology. That's our legacy basically.

Tiffany: That and plastics.

Erica: And Styrofoam.

Gaby: Not to justify or dispute but iodine deficiency might play a big role there in this.

Doug: It could.

Jonathan: Speaking of that, let's get into a little bit of what we can do. We've had a pretty dark show so far. We've been talking about how much radiation is in the environment, just how careless the powers that be have been with it, but there are some things that we can do to protect ourselves and one of them is using iodine. Gaby, do you want to talk about that a little bit? We'll probably do a future show entirely about iodine. It's a deep topic. There's a lot to be gone over so we could do an introduction.

Gaby: Sure. Iodine is very important for our bodies, for every single cell, every single organ and the problem that we have nowadays is that most of the population is deficient in iodine. The main sources of iodine like ocean fresh fish products, seaweed have been mostly polluted by Fukushima, by the Gulf oil spill and so forth. When we are deficient in iodine, we have an increased risk of cancer and also infections of all sorts and problems with our glands, hypothyroidism, autoimmune diseases and so forth.

I mention this because when there is a nuclear accident like what happened at Chernobyl and Fukushima there is radioactive iodine released and our glands are so thirsty for iodine that they will take up that very readily in people who are deficient. The glands will take the radioactive iodine and what happens is that the radioactive part of this will destroy the glands. People will have cancer, all kinds of problems. As we have seen, there was an increase in fibromyalgia introduced in Ukraine and all these areas after the Chernobyl accident.

So one of the things that has been used to protect people against radioactivity and all these health problems has been to give iodine tablets or iodine solution after the accident. When you have your body and your glands saturated with natural, healthy iodine, your body will not absorb the radioactive iodine. They have proven to be very effective. It was given in Poland, for example, after the Chernobyl accident. It was seen that those people had less cancer long-term compared to populations who didn't receive any iodine at all. It was also given even in Japan. So this is one of the things that we do have to protect ourselves. In fact, I think we mentioned this before when we made a comment that after the Fukushima accident suppliers of iodine supplements and solutions ran out. That's very good to know that people know about this stuff and that even if their doctors didn't recommend it they knew about it and bought it.

And yet it is very important because as we have seen, the thyroid gland is the most affected gland since radioactive iodine binds to it. So make supplemental, non-radioactive iodine a key therapy in case of any nuclear radiation. So the natural iodine binds to the thyroid, blocks the radioactive iodine from binding to it and not only the thyroid gland but also other glands that concentrate iodine radioactivity like the adrenal glands, the pancreas, the heart, the spleen, liver and so forth. This is one thing to have in your medical cabinet, definitely!

Jonathan: It's quite important. And iodine deficiency, like you said, is a huge topic that we'll get into more. We are trying at the moment, to book a guest on that topic but that won't be fore a month or two, but we will keep everybody posted on that. There is a great book that people can check out by Dr. Brownstein?

Gaby: Yes, Brownstein.

Jonathan: What is the title of that Gaby?

Gaby: Iodine-Why You Need It and Why You Can't Live Without It. It's now the 5th edition and it's very important because the information in that book and what most people don't know is that the iodine experts have tested thousands and thousands of people and 96% of patient test low for iodine. This is giant disaster because when you are low in iodine, everything will be much more toxic for you, not only nuclear toxicity but also toxicity from fluoride in water and bromide in pesticides and all these toxic elements in the environment.

This is according to their information. But if you want to go even more main stream, if that is necessary, the World Health Organization has recognized that iodine deficiency is the world's greatest single cause of preventable mental retardation. That's why I was commenting on human history being a big example of idiocy and cretincy, but how much of that can be due to low iodine.

Doug: Seriously!

Gaby: And it's estimated that 72% of the world's population is affected by an iodine deficiency disorder.

Doug: Gaby, did you find anything about how efficient iodine is at actually detoxifying radioactive particles once somebody actually has been exposed?

Gaby: How much is the protection you mean?

Doug: I know it has a protective quality where if you take in iodine you're less likely to take up the radioactive iodine. But will it detoxify the radioactive iodine if you've actually already absorbed it?

Gaby: Oh, I see what you mean. Well there is research on that, especially from the Chernobyl area and only from the health effects, that might be the case; especially they claim that it prevents the radioactive iodine from getting absorbed, but people who had supplemental iodine fared better in health in general. So it's not only like less thyroid cancers seen but also they had better health. As we know, the nuclear radiation exposure doesn't necessarily involve only radioactive iodine. There's strontium, caesium and all these elements that are impossible to pronounce. So iodine has a very detoxifying effect in your body and most research is concentrated on the toxic halides that are found in pesticides and food additives, which from this show's perspective is very mild in general compared to the nuclear exposure.

It enhances your body's ability to detoxify and enhances your body's health in such a way that I could be hopeful that yes, it will detoxify nuclear radioactivity.

Jonathan: Well if I'm not mistaken, iodine has been shown to fight certain types of cancers so if something like that had already taken root, you can combat against it by taking iodine. I know there's quite a bit of research that shows that iodine can be used to destroy melanomas with topical use and there are some pretty incredible case studies about that.

Gaby: It also makes me wonder because iodine is something that was widely used in the 19th century. It was the first medical treatment of choice and from what I've been reading from the literature and experiences in general, it is my impression that detox symptoms are more pronounced lately, like in people who tried iodine in the last few years so to speak, as opposed to the '90's. So one wonders how much of that is due to our increased exposure to all these toxic elements.

Jonathan: As far as detox goes, I know that bentonite and montmorillonite clay have been shown to be very effective for detoxing heavy metals and radioactive isotopes, if it can get to them. Of course there are certain parts of them where clay will not necessarily reach but as far as detoxing your intestinal tract it works quite well. There's a great website that I'd like to push called Eytonsearth.org and that is run by a guy named Jason Eyton who sells this clay but also does a lot of research. He wrote a book called Upon an Clay Tablet-the Definitive Guide to Healing with Homeostatic Clays. He has a couple of different types of clays that are used for different applications. There's internal/external. I've been using the internal clay for some time and have noticed some benefits from it. I know that historically bentonite clay was used in Chernobyl. They gave it to people in the local area in chocolate bars after Chernobyl happened. They also used it to clean the muscle tissue of cows that had been irradiated and were able to make the meat edible after giving the cows' bentonite clay, so it's got some really interesting properties.

Gaby: What was the website?

Jonathan: I guess I may have mispronounced it. It's; eytonsearth.org and I'll post that in the chat. That has a lot of good research and a link to the book. It's pretty chock-full of information.

Doug: I'm going to be looking up a recipe for bentonite chocolate bars. {Laughter}

Jonathan: The internal clay is not bad. It's not gritty like you would think. It's a really, really super-fine powder. So today after the pet health segment - I think I may have done this once in the past for the show - but I'll just go over the practice of taking the clay, in case anybody's curious. So we've talked about the dark side. We've talked about a few things that you can do to combat this. One is psychological resilience, keeping your head on straight after learning about ostensibly depressing information, using that to clarify your thoughts and your intent in your daily life and just in general using it to help you appreciate the moment. The world may be going to hell in a hand basket but that doesn't mean that we all have to curl up in a foetal position in the corner. In fact I think that's what the powers that be would like us to do and just allow them to run amok and have nobody speaking positive things or trying to share the truth about what the situation is.

And then of course, physically there's iodine, there's clay and as I said, we'll talk more about iodine in the future. We have in past episodes talked about other methods of fighting cancer like high doses of vitamin C, which of course you have to be careful about if you have hemochromatosis but there's a lot of information on that; using turmeric and using other herbal supplements to increase your immune response. We're not completely helpless here. We're not just being bombarded with having no options at hand. We do have options to help treat ourselves and to make our bodies stronger.

So with that, let's go to the pet health segment. We have a segment from Zoya today talking about EMF radiation and animals. This is about 12 minutes long and then when we come back I'll just talk briefly about taking bentonite clay internally and then we'll wrap it up. So we'll be right back after this.

Zoya: Hello and welcome to the pet health segment of the Health and Wellness Show. My name is Zoya and today I would like to share with you a very interesting snippet from a lecture about the harmful effects of electromagnetic radiation. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find out the exact name of the speaker but the information comes from the site; emfnews.com dedicated to collecting scientific research on this topic.

It's true that electromagnetic radiation may seem less scary than the radiation from the disasters like Chernobyl or Fukushima, but as we could learn from several previous health and wellness shows dedicated to this topic, manmade electromagnetic radiation is extremely dangerous, not only because it reaches every square centimetre of earth's surface every moment, harming animals, people, insects and plant life. Electromagnetic pollution has been imposed upon us by military and industrial interests with devastating health, environmental and social consequences, from microwave and radio frequency radiation to extremely low frequency fields.

So in the following snippet that by the way ends with a cliff hanger - sorry about that - the speaker shares what is happening to us at a microcellular level. It may seem complicated, but just listen up since he explains it in a very simple and clear way. Also since humans and animals share the same physiology, the same processes and structures can be applied to our pets as well and also the consequences and the influence of the harming electromagnetic radiation. We are all like fish swimming in a poison tank and doing our best, unaware that things could be so much different and better. So here it is. I hope you'll find the information interesting and useful.

... And that there was nothing surrounding cells, through the microtubules; it says we're under attack. We're under siege. Protect yourself. We're going to protect ourselves. And one of the things that the cell membrane does is send a message that results in closing down active transport channels in the cell. We call that hardening of the cell membrane. The permeability of the membrane is compromised. Nutrients cannot get in the cell. Waste product cannot get out of the cell.

Now, because nutrients cannot get into the cell, the cell loses energy, so the cell becomes energy deficient. And when the cell is energy deficient, it's not able to communicate through microtubules. The reason is because microtubule communication is like sending a laser. It's instantaneous light energy. It takes a lot of power, a lot of energy, to push that signal through the microtubule so that the intercellular communication, the rapid intercellular communication gets shut off.

So now the cells are not able to talk to each other. And when the cells are not able to talk to each other, the tissues are not able to be efficient and the organs are not able to be efficient and the organism gets sick. And that's why when you intervene with a subtle energy intervention, immediately you get a positive response because the intercellular communication is restored because the subtle energy comes in and it vibrates on the microtubules.

Now the microtubules are usually full of water. Now in order for there to be energy communication, the microtubule has to contract and expand. It has to go "{gasping sound}", like that and when that happens there's a little hole in the water channel and that's where the signal goes. Now when you bring in the subtle energy from the outside, it causes the microtubule to go "{gasping sound}" and that's what restores the intercellular communication.

Now the other thing that happens is that waste product can't get out of the cell so now you have a build-up of waste and in that waste you have free radicals. Now free radicals are interesting. I trust I'm not the only person in the audience who participated in the '60s. {Laughter} It has nothing to do with whether I inhaled or anything like that. And a free radical always likes a party. A free radical will always go where the action is. And inside the cell, the action happens at the mitochondria. The mitochondria are always having a party. That is where all of the energy from the cell is developed. It's the respiratory centre of the cell.

So what happens is these free radicals go to the mitochondria. They crash the party. And when that happens, the mitochondria whose job it is to provide energy for the cell, becomes further compromised. So energy in the cell goes down more.

Now the other thing that happens is that inside the cell you have something called messenger RNA. Now mRNA is part of the genetic material and what the mRNA does is it floats around in the cell and it just is sort of like the bouncer at a party. You want to make sure everything's going fine and if it sees something that is not going fine, it folds itself in a certain way so it can carry a message to the DNA.

Now what happens when the cell is under siege and the active transport channels are closed down, the mRNA takes that information from the inside of the cell membrane and they take that information to the DNA, both in the nucleus and in the mitochondria. When the mRNA comes in and starts to convey that information, it results in a whole bunch of pieces of mRNA and DNA to be unbound inside the cell. And when those pieces of mRNA and DNA are unbound, they're highly reactive. They are viewed by the free radicals as a party. The free radicals go and now they disrupt the process of information transfer from the mRNA to the DNA.

A result of that is the formation of something called micronuclei. And micronuclei are pieces of DNA or mRNA that function well enough to form a membrane around them. So now what you have inside in the cell are these pieces of DNA that have formed a membrane around themselves and they're floating around in the cell. And that would be fine except that because the free radicals have disrupted the mitochondria, the mitochondria now sends a message to the rest of the cell saying, "I cannot do my job anymore. I'm going down. The ship is going down." And that triggers something called apoptosis and apoptosis is when a cell commits suicide to make room for a fresh cell.

And when you have that premature triggering of apoptosis, now you have the cell bursting open and under normal circumstances, that would be fine because the pieces of waste and the pieces of micronuclei that are released into the interstitial fluid, the river between cells, would normally be gobbled up by globulins from the immune system. But somebody's got to make the call to the immune system and we have compromised intercellular communication. That call is never made. So now what happens is you have these micronuclei who are released into nutrient-rich intercellular fluid and they have a ball and they proliferate and they clone themselves. And that is a mechanism that leads to the development of tumours.

When the intercellular communication is disrupted, depending on when in life that occurs, you have different symptoms. If that occurs in utero, the symptom you have might be autism. And if that occurs during teenage years, the symptom you have might be attention deficit disorder or unexplained anxiety. And if that occurs in very late decades of life you may have Parkinson's or Alzheimer's disease.

So the disruption of intercellular communication leads to all of those clinical conditions so that when you disrupt intercellular communication, you can lead to a whole host of serious diseases.

But the situation is worse than that because what happens is that depending on where the cell is in its life cycle, it may not trigger premature apoptosis.

Gaby: That was interesting.

Doug: It was interesting, yeah.

Jonathan: Thank you Zoya for that segment. We learned a little bit about free radicals and apoptosis there, of course germane to the topic of radiation.

So let's wrap up the show here today. I just wanted to mention using bentonite clay internally. If you check out that site I mentioned earlier, there are a number of different types of clay available there and there are several that are specified for internal use. The process is quite specific.
What you do is start out for the first week-to-two weeks, but at least a week, by taking about 1/4 teaspoon of the clay and putting it in water. Stir it up and then allow it to sit overnight. That allows the clay to absorb the water and plump up the small particles of clay. For this first week, all you do is drink the water off the top and you leave the sediment on the bottom and then discard the sediment. What that does is prime your system because if you take all of the clay internally without having done it before, it can cause constipation and some GI issues.

So you just drink the water off the top for the first week or so and then after that you can begin to stir the clay into the water the next morning. But you always want to let the clay sit in the water overnight so use a glass jar. Don't use plastic. The clay is extremely absorbent so it's important not to have it come into contact with metal. So always use glass for this. But then after that, you can use that quarter teaspoon-size dose in the water, stir that up and drink it down.

It actually imparts quite a bit of energy I've found. It's similar to the energy that you get from iodine and it helps with detoxing. It helps with digestion. It has a number of really beneficial effects. So again, there's more information on that website. I don't want to go into too much detail right now but I encourage people to check it out.

So that's our show for today. We'd like to thank everybody for tuning in and hanging with us through this kind of depressing topic, although as we talked about, it's good to know about and just use the information if it comes up with other people. Get into a conversation. Spread the truth about what the situation is in the world today, just to help spread more awareness about health and wellness and what people can do to keep their bodies healthy.

So we'd like to thank everybody for tuning in. Thanks to our chat participants and be sure to tune in to the other two shows on the SOTT Radio Network, the Truth Perspective tomorrow at 2:00 p.m. eastern and Behind the Headlines on Sunday at 2:00 p.m. eastern as well. We will see you next week.

All: Good-byes.