NH #787: CALLS NEEDED: Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant Survivors in line for RECA Compensation – Vina Colley + Mangano on PORTS Cancer Rate Spike
This Week’s Featured Interview:
Vina Colley
- Vina Colley is President and Director of Piketon/Portsmouth Residents for Environmental Safety and Security (PRESS), and co-founder of National Nuclear Workers National Nuclear Workers for Justice. For more than 40 years, she has fought for the rights of workers at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, or PORTS, and for members of the community contaminated with radiation and other toxins released from that site.
Now, with the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) listing the Piketon area as potentially being included in RECA, Vina is calling for help in contacting Congress members to support the bill. In this interview, she shares the background of the facility, where she worked for seven years; her own story of battling for health and against a nuclear infrastructure that didn’t care; and the current final push to include Piketon-Portsmouth in RECA. - TO CONTACT VINA COLLEY:
PRESS/NNWJ
PO Box 136
Portsmouth, Ohio, 45662
VColley888@gmail.com
Epidemiologist Joseph Mangano on Elevated Cancer Rates Around Piketon:
Joseph Mangano
- Joseph Mangano is a health researcher who has served as head of Radiation and Public Health Project (RPHP, Radiation.org) since 1989. Mangano managed the study of Strontium-90 in baby teeth, and is author or co-author of 33 medical journal articles on radiation health, as well as the books Low Level Radiation and Immune System Damage: An Atomic Era Legacy (1998) and Radioactive Baby Teeth: The Cancer Link (2008). He is featured in the documentary: “Silent Fallout: Baby Teeth Speak,” which covers the Cold War era study of atomic bomb radiation in 320,000 baby teeth by St. Louis scientists.
As you will hear, Joe has been crunching the health statistics on cancer in Piketon and surrounding counties since 2021. He has published three reports on cancer rates in the areas adjacent to the defunct-but-being-resurrected Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant.
This is an excerpt from our interview from Nuclear Hotseat #700 from November 19, 2024. I spoke with him on November 15, 2024
Links:
- RPHP Reports Finds Soaring Death Rate Near Ohio Uranium Plant – Piketon/Portsmouth Diffusion Plant reports by RPHP on cancer and other illnesses for 2021, 2022, 2023
The Nuke Resister with Jack Cohen-Joppa
Here for another nuclear “milk and cookies” storytelling time is Jack Cohen-Joppa of the Nuke Resister with another story from our shared history of activist resistance to nuclear reactors and weapons. This week: In the wake of the first U.S. war on Iraq, a quartet of nuclear abolitionists faced hostility from a federal judge and prosecutors in North Carolina as they spoke truth to power.
