2019 EON Report to Funders and Supporters
Dear EON Friends,
Despite the scandals and atrocities du jour, our EON team continues to be focused on key existential issues that directly impact all planetary life – man-made ionizing radioactivity (nuclear) and manmade non-ionizing wireless radiofrequency/electromagnetic (RF/EMF) radiation and the election integrity reforms of our voting system necessary to deal with them. We’re increasing the flow of accurate information by documenting the political processes that decide how these toxins are managed. We’re taking action, testifying and officially commenting on government policy. We’re joining forces with wonderful, committed people on the local, state and national levels advocating sane, sustainable solutions and working to reduce risk.
Your on-going support is what allows us to continue to confront these key planetary crises. Please read our Report and contribute what you can.
Our Work in the Past Year
Aerial view of San Onofre’s dangerous waste-dump-by-the-sea.
Google Earth
SHUTDOWN - The Documentary
The Age of Nuclear Waste Begins
Nuclear is the quintessential tyrannous, totalitarian technology, terminally inimical to democracy and to life itself. Fukushima is the future, if nuclear abolition is not soon achieved. At San Onofre and at Diablo Canyon, Californians are fighting to prevent two potential Fukushima’s from happening here. Our Shutdown documentary project is a part of that fight.
Nine years in the making, SHUTDOWN - The Age of Nuclear Waste Begins is on pace for completion next year as a feature-length documentary. (SHUTDOWN now has a new official website, plus FaceBook and Twitter pages)
The SHUTDOWN Team –
Executive Producer Mary Beth Brangan,
Director James Heddle,
Co-Director, Editor Morgan Peterson
The Power of Informed Citizen Action
SHUTDOWN is a dramatic, character and issue-driven story showing the power of informed citizen action dealing with the gripping national conundrum now confronting nuclear reactor communities across the country. What to do with the accumulated tons of lethal radioactive waste now stranded on reactor sites, as the nation’s and world’s fleet of aging nuclear reactors face a cascade of looming shutdowns?
The San Onofre Saga
It focuses on the story of San Onofre, where 3.6 million pounds of accumulated waste are in the process of being buried on the beach in fragile 5/8 “ thin metal canisters, 100 feet from the rising sea, straddling the only north-south freeway, I-5 and the rail corridor, in a tsunami and earthquake zone, in the midst of a dense population of 8.5 million people. What could possibly go wrong? The precedent being set here insures waste management around the country will become another ‘existential threat.’
Chernobyl Soup Cans
The canisters are being gouged along their entire length as they are put into the concrete holes on the beach. This increases the corrosion rate and threatens to open them up to the elements and to radioactive releases. Each of the 72 canisters holds more radioactivity than was released by the Chernobyl accident.
Captive ‘Regulatory’ Agencies
This insanity is perpetuated by collusion of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Southern California Edison and its contractor, Holtec. The U.S. government promised that the gov’t would take the waste by the mid 1990’s directly from the utility cooling pools to a permanent repository. The reality now is that there is no permanent repository possible for a long, long time, if ever, due to both political and technical challenges. Onsite dry storage was not thoroughly studied or planned for and is being done quickly and cheaply by corporations looking primarily for profit, not safety.
EON’s Mary Beth Brangan and Jim Heddle interview Acoma Pueblo elder Petuuche Gilbert at one of the over 500 abandoned uranium mines that continue to contaminate Navajo tribal lands in New Mexico. Photo by Libbe HaLevy
Mobile Chernobyls?
Shutdown portrays the interstate solidarity between SoCal and NM and Texas activists who oppose CIS, Centralized Interim Storage and the attempted reboot of Yucca Mountain – both disastrous plans. Yucca Mountain will never be agreed to by the Western Shoshone nation, whose land it is, nor by the state of Nevada. (It’s a volcano and is full of water.) The CIS plan would move thousands of tons of high-level waste, so lethal a minute’s exposure would kill you, over roads, railways and barges throughout the country from every nuclear power site to NM and Texas. It would be stored “temporarily” in an area experiencing earthquakes and subsidence from the extensive fracking and oil extraction there. And then it would theoretically be moved again to a “permanent” geological burial site that may never exist.
Atomic Legacy
We’ve been documenting unfolding events, including the scandalous permitting by the California Coastal Commission of this disastrous waste mismanagement plan by Southern California Edison. We also attended the national conference on nuclear waste in Albuquerque in November. There we heard heartbreaking stories of the Trinity atomic bomb test on unsuspecting Native Americans, uranium mining disasters and other rampant environmental racism and nuclear devastation.
Exposing California’s National Nuclear Bomb Shop
Posted on EON’s YouTube Channel
As we have done for the last several years, we have partnered with Tri-Valley CAREs and the Western States Legal Foundation to report on yearly non-violent rallies and demonstrations at Livermore Laboratory commemorating Hiroshima Day. This year we produced YouTube posts and cable programs covering the riveting talks at the event. These talks contain crucial information that is rarely heard yet avoiding planetary destruction hinges on people understanding it and taking action.
Catalyzing Push Back to Wireless 5G “Small Cells”
Helping to build 5G public awareness in San Rafael, CA. EON photo
Victoria Sievers, EMF Safety Network San Rafael and EON’s Mary Beth Brangan speak on Marin TV
On May 15, 2019 a rally was held on the Plaza in San Rafael, CA organized by community leaders opposed to the rush to roll out 5G technology without first having safety studies. Two of those leaders Victoria Sievers of EMF Safety Network San Rafael and EON’s Mary Beth Brangan went to the Community Media Center to further voice their concerns. Produced by .Ginger Souders-Mason
The Five G Follies
Telecom Tyranny
The trillion dollar wireless telecom industry wants to force cities and counties to allow installation of powerful microwave and millimeter wave emitting antennas (called ‘small cells’) along the public rights of way close to homes, schools, businesses, parks, day care centers, health facilities, etc. AT&T, Verizon, etc. want to use publicly owned streetlights and utility owned poles to install these 5G (fifth generation) antennas every 500 ft or so. If one carrier is allowed to install, all other carriers must be allowed, according to law. There are at least seven carriers in the Bay Area, for instance. Every pole could be loaded with bristling electronics; overloaded poles have already caused many fires throughout California.
A Captured Agency Gone Rogue
The FCC is mandating rules that prevent oversight, appropriate fees and any health considerations by local government officials. Studies show people within a 1,500 ft. radius of cell towers are dramatically sickened. Thousands of peer reviewed studies are showing health and environmental damage from manmade wireless radiation. Densifying intense microwave radiation from wireless 3G & 4G antennas in spray patterns plus adding phased array directed millimeter beams to people holding devices along the streets and into close by homes, businesses, schools, etc., would be a public health and environmental disaster! Industry says it needs this for the internet of things and for providing HD TV and internet wirelessly to compete with Comcast.
Pushback Is Happening
This past year, we supported many cities and county efforts to write Urgency Ordinances to help protect against the onslaught of 4G/5G ‘small cells.’
It’s important to also note that PG&E’s electricity shut offs are exacerbating the already existing fire dangers from ‘smart’ meters.
EON Media Year in Review
Our YouTube Channel has several new video reports, approximately 750 total – and nearly 8,000 subscribers.
Our EON3.org portal page has been redesigned and updated. Many new posts on the following blogs:
Daily EON posts on FB and Twitter
EON Published articles this year at:
Counterpunch, Reader Supported News and the Columbus Free Press:
EON’s list of fiscally sponsored and flow-funded projects is growing:
EMF Safety Network
Positive News, US
EMF Analysis
Electronic Silent Spring
Napa/Sonoma Neighborhood Association
The Irregulator’s Lawsuit against the FCC
