NH #539: Woolsey Fire SPECIAL: Radioactive Particles Released into LA Neighborhoods from Santa Susana Field Lab – Peer-Reviewed Study by Dr. Marco Kaltofen, Arnie Gundersen, Maggie Gundersen

Libbe HaLevy 

00:00:01

Nuclear lies, nuclear excuses, the Santa Susana field lab, or SSF L is a nuclear radiation and rocket fuel contaminated former rocket dine site located in the Hills of Simi valley, only 30 miles from downtown Los Angeles in 2018. The massive Woolsey fire started on SSF L grounds and swept through the site and far beyond burning contaminated brush and debris releasing smoke and Ash suspected of containing radiation into the environment. Of course, only nine hours after the fire started while it was still raging. The California department of toxic substances issued a statement, reassuring the public that no radioactive materials had been released by the fire and nothing above normal background, radiation levels have been found, but people were alarmed. Samples were taken. And three years later, a just released peer reviewed scientific study of dirt dust and Ash samples taken immediately after the fire within a 10 mile radius of S S F L has revealed a very different picture of what happened and puts paid to those nuclear excuses as a world renowned scientist involved with the study explains

DTSC

00:01:24

What’s the source, what’s the fingerprint who’s responsible. So even if you do get the radiation data out, the first thing you’ll hear is it’s background it’s okay. Or the second thing would be okay, you found it above background, but it’s not from us. It’s from atomic testing. I mean, why not? Right? Why should there be radiation around SSL? That’s from SS FL, why should it be from a place that burned three years ago? And that’s a few hundred yards away when we can blame it on something that happened 70 years ago, that’s half a world away.

Libbe HaLevy 

00:02:01

Well when Dr. Marco counterfeit, who analyze the environmental samples taken in the immediate aftermath of the fire and discovered alarming levels of radioactivity, as much as nine miles away tells you how the so-called experts always work to cover up alarming, if not damning information about nuclear dangers, you see how purportedly responsible officials will scramble to cover up any public knowledge. That points to that really dangerous seat that we all share

Announcer

00:02:33

Clear hot seat. What are those people thinking? Clear, hot seat. What have those boys been? Braking Clare? Hotsy the Ms. Sinking our time to act is shrinking, but linking nuclear Hotsy

Libbe HaLevy 

00:02:59

It’s the bomb.

Libbe HaLevy 

00:03:05

Welcome to nuclear hot seat, the weekly international news magazine, keeping you up to date on all things nuclear from a different perspective. My name is Leiby Halevi. I am the producer and host as well as a survivor of the nuclear accident at three mile island from just one mile away. So I know what can happen when those nuclear so-called experts get it wrong. Today is Tuesday, October 19th, 2021. And this is a special, full length interview on the just released peer reviewed report, radioactive microparticles related to the Woolsey fire in Simi valley, California. It was published in the journal of environmental radio activity. So let’s get to it. We have three guests this week, all of them world-class and they’re the ones behind this important study. We talk with Dr. Marco Calton of Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He is an environmental scientist with 30 years experience in environmental workplace and product safety investigations, and his nuclear forensics work includes experience in the U S the middle east Russia, India, Japan, and European union countries.

Libbe HaLevy 

00:04:21

Partnering with him for the study are two figures familiar to nuclear hot seat listeners. Arnie Gunderson is a nuclear engineer and expert witness, as well as chief engineer for Fairwinds energy associates. Maggie Gunderson is a journalist paralegal and former atomic power industry spokesperson who serves as president of Fairwinds energy education, as well as a member of their board of directors. After three years of work, the report on the Sadducees Zana field lab was published on October eight. The story released to the media last Thursday, October 14, and I spoke with the principals on Monday, October 18th, 2021, Arnie Gunderson, Maggie Gunderson, Marco counterfeit. Welcome to nuclear hot seat.

Arnie Gunderson

00:05:11

Maybe

Libbe HaLevy 

00:05:12

Let’s have each of you in term. What, if any involvement did you have with the satis Susanna field lab or parents against Santa Susana field lab before the 2018 Woolsey fire?

Arnie Gunderson

00:05:25

I was asked years and years ago to take a look at the quality of the cleanup. And I filed a, a report on behalf of one of the groups out there. I think it was probably 2014 or 2015, and it basically showed that they’d done a pretty poor job of first monitoring the radiation they had on site and second measuring it, and then actually cleaning it up. One of the problems, you know, when you’re working in a radioactive environment, background is higher. Does it take a lot of knowledge? Well, they were proposing to determine if a building was radioactive by taking the sample in the building and measuring it in the building. Yeah, that was just one of many things they were trying to do. And then they were going to ship it to a landfill in California, somewhere, just a public landfill. That, that was my involvement before the fire.

Libbe HaLevy 

00:06:29

What was wrong with taking a sample and measuring it inside the building,

Arnie Gunderson

00:06:33

The problem with taking a sample and measuring it at the same location is that whatever the background is at that location is going to corrupt the sample. So you really should take that sample and go to a clean lab somewhere and measure it. So that was fundamentally something wrong. And then, you know, to ship this concrete and dirt and put it in a landfill that, that gets rained on and runs down into the local water tables. It saved them a lot of money, but it sure wasn’t a good public health practice.

Libbe HaLevy 

00:07:06

When did you Arnie Marco Maggie, when did you become aware of the Woolsey fire and the significance of it? Having started at the site of the saddest and field blam.

Maggie Gunderson

00:07:18

I had several calls from different people living near that facility, asking Sherwin’s if they could help see what’s coming up from the site prior to that, I never had any association with the sentences Santa feel that, and I didn’t know anything about it.

Libbe HaLevy 

00:07:35

Soon after the Woolsey fire started, did you become aware of it? And the significance of it having started at the Santa Susana field lab?

Maggie Gunderson

00:07:43

I became aware of it when different colleagues and people living near the site phone. Fairwinds because of our prior work to ask if we could help with any kind of sampling or what we knew about the Santa Susana field lab. And Arnie knew a few things as he said, but I didn’t know anything. I had never researched it and never been there or anything like that.

Libbe HaLevy 

00:08:06

And how soon after the fire started, did you receive these

Maggie Gunderson

00:08:10

Within 24 hours as the fire moved and became associated with the Santa Susana field lab?

Libbe HaLevy 

00:08:18

What’s your immediate reaction to the fact that the fire was ripping through this known to be radiologically and chemically contaminated site?

Maggie Gunderson

00:08:27

I was really scared for me, for us and all the research that we’ve done different sites around the world and working with our colleague, Dr. Marco and we’ve all learned how radiation migrates it’s in micro particles of dust and dirt on it can be inhaled ingested, bio accumulated on plants. It’s really a huge hazard around the world.

Libbe HaLevy 

00:08:58

What was your response? Maggie Arnie. Marco. What was your response when only nine hours after the fire began? And it was still raging wildly out of control as it would for several days at that 0.9 hours in the California department of toxic substances, or DTSC issued a statement saying that there was no danger from radioactive particles being released by this fire.

DTSC

00:09:26

I’m the boring scientist here. And one of the things I rely on is letting the data, tell the story. That’s, that’s what you’re taught. That’s what you grow up with as a scientist. And that’s really what you produce. You produce a lot of data and you’re trying to figure out what the story is. And that’s a good way to lead when you’ve got a fast moving environmental crisis, but in nine hours, you don’t have a lot of time to get David to tell the story. So you have to ask what’s driving that. And the fear is when you come up with an all clear, so soon during an environmental release, it’s possible, you’re relying on your prejudices and not on your data.

Libbe HaLevy 

01:10:11

When and where did the idea of testing for radiation released by the fire come from? And how soon was it discussed?

Maggie Gunderson

01:10:20

I think we discussed it right after we heard the news and people called us. We started discussing it because we’ve done this work before Marco and Arnie authored one paper together on Japan. That’s on, Fairwinds a website. And then the three of us coauthored, another paper together that was published last fall in November, that talks about the Tokyo Olympics and shows how radiation migrates. I began doing the citizen science sampling work and getting in touch with citizen scientists back in 2012, when Arnie first went to Japan about Fukushima, that was the same time we met Marco and we started developing all these protocols and worked with him and the data we’ve uncovered. I think Arnie and Marko can speak to it better than I can because they traveled together and done this research together. Now I write and I do fundraising, but I haven’t been out in the field working with either one of them. Yet.

Arnie Gunderson

01:11:21

We were beginning to put a plan in motion while the embers were still warm. The fire had been put out, but I think it’s important to note that the citizen scientists that did the sampling got in before the rainy season started. So we were able to get on the ground when the samples were still where they landed. And that took an enormous amount of effort between Maggie and Marco and, and me developing sampling protocols and teaching the local teams through public, through PSR LA. All of that was very quickly developed and we were on the ground importantly, because nobody else would get this data now because it’s all washed away. After a couple of years where we were on the ground while the Ash was still on the ground and not running down into a Creek or down a sewer or being washed off the side of a house or something like that, our data is you’re replaceable and irrefutable.

Libbe HaLevy 

01:12:25

You mentioned PSR LA that’s physicians for social responsibility. How were they involved in this process?

Maggie Gunderson

01:12:32

I first spoke with them after Marco Arnie and I had agreed that we wanted to do this process. And Dr. worked on establishing protocols that we had used overseas already on making full procedures with me that were easily understandable by lay people. Let me hand it off to Dr. to really talk about this science and what it entails.

DTSC

01:13:01

I think one of the things that’s happening in science right now is a real movement towards citizen science, where people who are local or indigenous to their communities are really taking a lead in helping develop the kind of data that they need to make important decisions. And there’s a lot of good things happening with that. I think during the pandemic, we figured out that we do science communication poorly that there is needless death and sickness because we’ve failed to communicate what science can and can’t do well. So when you’re the person who is helping to study the problem, develop the data, and you’re also the person who’s talking to your community about what it means. That’s a big plus. And then the, the side benefits of things like the model of sending an elite scientist from an institution out into the field to do work separates that science from the people who need it the most.

DTSC

01:14:04

And it’s also inefficient and it’s a high carbon footprint way to proceed, and that might not be available to us in the future. And as it turns out, it’s pandemic ready, it means that we aren’t sending people traveling when travel is so difficult. And again, it allowed us to get the kind of samples we needed in the quantity where needed, where are the things that scientists does best actually looking at methods, developing the analyses, and then working with the community to talk about what we found, you know, it’s, it’s a very, very nice next we’re asking to answer important questions. And the Goossens brought this up, this idea of background and, and the second idea of source. If we find radiation we’re always asking, is it worse than background? Is this something that is caused by industrial contamination? Or is this just the way our planet is?

DTSC

01:15:01

And a little bit finer question, what’s the source, what’s the fingerprint who’s responsible. So even if you do get the radiation data out, the first thing you’ll hear is it’s background it’s okay. Or the second thing would be okay, you found it above background, but it’s not from us. It’s from atomic testing. I mean, why not? Right? Why should there be radiation around asset SFL? That’s from SS FL, why should it be from a place that burned three years ago? And that’s a few hundred yards away when we can blame it on something that happened 70 years ago, that’s half a world away. So it means that we’re designing studies that determine what the background is that determined what the sources and then use as much of the local knowledge that we possibly can to do a better study. And luckily for us, in this case with LA PSR and others, that helped out, we managed to put all that together. And I think it’s a great model. I think it’s an emerging model for science and I hope a lot more people will be doing it soon. We have not copyrighted this, this is other people’s work. And we’ve just found a case where it was just what we needed.

Arnie Gunderson

01:16:21

You know, maybe it’s important to remember that I’ve worked on a couple of nuclear reactor sites that have been contaminated. And the reflex reaction in the nuclear industry is to blame the bomb. Oh, it’s fallout. It happened 50 years ago. I’ve seen that at Vermont Yankee, I’ve seen that Pilgrim all over the country. The go-to culprit is the bomb. And what we were able to do in this paper is show that that didn’t work. We were able to put a fingerprint on it. That was not a bomb fingerprint.

Libbe HaLevy 

01:16:57

The fingerprint is various readings that come from specific nuclear sites go a little bit further into that.

DTSC

01:17:06

I’m probably going to be the one to help on this question. There are a lot of different things that are happening. And the idea is that we have multiple lines of evidence that prove the point that we see in this data. Very importantly, the highest levels that we’ve found were all around the perimeter of the laboratory. And they tended to generally reduce as you got further away, except for areas where there was contaminated asphalt that we were able to measure. So that was an important thing because bomb follow-up doesn’t know it’s supposed to fall just at the center, Susanna laboratory and not in other places. The other thing that we looked for was we actually isolated the radioactive microparticles individually and looked at the one at the time, took their spectra, took photographs. So we can actually see what these particles are. And you know what?

DTSC

01:17:59

The Santa Susanna fire is bad as it was. It was very hot. It’s not the 100 million degrees hot you have from a nuclear detonation. The material that you release after a nuclear detonation looks very different under the microscope. It’s been vaporized. It condenses. Sometimes it looks like a perfect little sphere. Our particle from nuclear follow-up is extremely distinctive. It’s a rare, exotic, super high energy process. Whereas fire is common. And the things that we see from a fire look completely different. This is a step that not many people take. So because we can see what this particle looks like. We can say this one came from a fire. This one is a natural crystal. This is small metal turnings from an industrial process. This is well from a nuclear detonation, maybe in Polynesia, they’re completely different. So if you say this material that we’re finding is consistent with bomb, follow up. What you’re saying is I either did not read their paper or I’m deliberately ignoring what the paper says. Those are your two choices.

Libbe HaLevy 

01:19:17

So we’ve been talking about testing protocols. What did they consist of? What were the materials collected? Where were the samples collected from and who did the collecting?

DTSC

01:19:29

Well, the collecting of course comes from the people who were local to SSF L so it’s a, it’s a large group of people who’ve been working very hard for years on this project. We’re actually extremely lucky to have been invited, to be part of their team. And I’m grateful for that. Hopefully what we had to offer was some more exotic ways of, of looking at some of these materials. I mean, in the nuclear industry, we work with very exotic materials and this helps so sexually because it helps us tease out these nuclear particles from the vast background of other material that’s there. So we focused on analyses that were to help us do that once the samples arrived and Fairwinds made sure that everything was screened and everything was being done safely, we did multiple analyses on each sample. We counted the amount of beta activity.

DTSC

02:20:26

These are essentially subatomic particles that are given off by these radioactive isotopes that are unique to each isotope. So if it came from cesium, it’s a different kind of beta particle than if it came from another isotope. There’s no quiz everybody after this, after this podcast. So please, excuse me. If I start spewing out all these names too quickly. The other thing that we do is once we’ve looked at beta energies, we look at alpha energies, different kinds of radioactivity from the same sample. And of course, if we’ve done alpha and beta and we want to do gamma, we want to do x-ray. So we keep layering these different analyses, one on top of another, making sure we’re getting the maximum amount of information from each one. So when we’re done, what we have is we can tell you exactly what type of radioactive particle exists at Santa Susanna.

DTSC

02:21:23

How big is it? What is it made of what’s its elemental composition? What’s your dose. If you breathe that particle where traveled, where it landed, whose house it is, what their dose is from being exposed to that particle, what would happen if someone breathed this particle and retain that for years, remember you can go to Santa Susanna, walk on the site and be exposed for day, or you could be in one of these unlucky homes, breathe the particle, and haven’t retained it in your body for years or even decades. So pretty much what we’ve done is we’ve looked at the entire life cycle of the radioactive particle from where and how it was created to what it’s brother and sister particles look like that actually land on people’s homes. And yes, the first answer from the state is well, background followup from Bob tests and Polynesia. You want to throw up your hands, but in the end, you know, in the boxing ring of the information marketplace, we know rich, which report is ultimately going to emerge.

Arnie Gunderson

02:22:34

You know, it’s important to know too, that the work that we did is cage better than, than the work that Boeing has done. The current site owner, Rocketdyne the owner before them or the state, the department of toxic substance control. They did not do this kind of detailed analysis. And instead they blamed the bomb. I think that’s what one of the recommendations in our report is is that other parties, when they find this radiation should not gloss it over, but go to the sophisticated analysis that we did and make a link. And that’s what differentiates our study from all the studies that went before,

Libbe HaLevy 

02:23:18

In terms of the system itself, how were they collected? What was done to the samples to ensure that you knew where they were coming from and that they weren’t contaminated with something else. And how many of these samples were taken?

DTSC

02:23:34

We had about 360 samples. The samples came to meet blind. This is important. I didn’t know where the sample came from. If a sample was collected next step to Susanna. I didn’t know. So what happened was the people who actually collect these individually in the field, they’re recording in their notebooks, where it is, what house it is, what address it is, getting the latitude and longitude by GPS, making sure that every sample is uniquely labeled. It gets an ID number that it’s referenced to at that point, Fairwinds has it, they take down all of the information they have and then they send me the samples after they’ve been screened for safety, but it’s missing all of that personally identifiable information. And so I’m looking at what are just identification numbers, which just then get converted to a new identification number. At my end, I generate numbers that are unknown to Fairwinds.

DTSC

02:24:34

So we keep the system blind. This is one of the things that is not well known about these research projects is that these people who are donating samples, they don’t get anything more in return than being able to read the report when it comes out. So we’ve completely separated folks from the individual data and it protects their confidentiality. This was a huge fight in the prior administration, because we want to make sure that this is how science is done, or we won’t be getting samples in the future. So we’ve worked probably hardest to make sure we’ve identified each sample for science and prevented any person from having the information needed to know what actual individual that data belongs to. So again, that doesn’t help individuals, but the idea is that it helps the community and that the individual is protected and their confidentiality and privacy are respected. That’s probably as big a part of the process as, as the actual physical going up, getting it as that,

Arnie Gunderson

02:25:40

You know, Libby, there’s another piece of it at the front end, Maggie put together a sampling protocol. That’s still on the Fairwinds website. If a, if another group were to start, one of these up that protocol would, would work for all of them. And basically the collectors wear gloves and they take a sample and put it in a plastic bag and label the plastic bag with the GPS. First of course, if it wasn’t a public location, we never took from somebody’s property who hadn’t approved. Our taking a sample had actually asked for us to take a sample. There are no owners that didn’t want to be part of this sampling effort, except for in the public locations, parks and along the fence, posts that Santa Susanna and stuff like that.

Maggie Gunderson

02:26:30

And because of my paralegal work, we’ve followed protocols that prove chain of custody. So the samplers have their books. It came to us, we created a database and then sent the separate to Marco and his graduate students to, to work with. And that was all protected. And they had assigned all different numbers. You know, no one looking at it could say, oh, this is near here. This is near there. The testing was done blind.

DTSC

02:27:00

This is an important part of the process because there’s a lot of things we’re juggling. We’re juggling the privacy of the donors, safety of the people who are involved in the process. There’s a lot of setup time. This is why, unfortunately we can never take unsolicited samples. People will send us a package. I’m sorry, if it’s not part of, one of the studies we’ve approved in advance and designed this kind of system, it’s going to be sent back to you. I don’t open. No one will see it because it’s so important to do that. All of that set up maintain chain of custody and maintain safety at every step on the way

Maggie Gunderson

02:27:33

You had said that there were 360 samples, is that enough to draw meaningful conclusions in the data?

DTSC

02:27:41

That’s an interesting question. I know that the state of California collected about 36 samples and the way I’d like to see it, that means between the two of us, we collected 393 samples as opposed to, well, then we got 360 and they only got 36. It’s not that kind of contest. And that actually worked out when we looked at the data, because in our view, the data from the, yeah, I’ll be at smaller sample set from the state of California, the data matches extremely well with what we found. They had the same percentage positivity rate for similar isotopes that we fought. Now, I realized that there’s a difference in how they’ve chosen to characterize the data. I’m more confident in ours because there are far more samples in our data set, but in the end, because citizen science doesn’t rely on that expensive use of elite labor hours, traveling great distances.

DTSC

02:28:45

Hopefully that means that we get more samples and yes, my universal answer to, should we have done more samples? It is always yes, but the engineer in me knows that you can’t take an infinite number of samples. You will always have to figure out what is the best you can do to get the data that you want. A good example is the vaccine trials that went on for COVID. I participated in trap. There were 40,000 people in my trial. We have really good data from that trial, but now we have a couple of billion people who’ve been vaccinated. So the data is even better. So although the trial pointed out that it was probably safe and effective. Now we know that the vaccines is certainly safe and effective because of the huge number of people that have been able to get doses. And it’s better science because we have a history.

Arnie Gunderson

02:29:41

So it’s a, it’s a nice indication that even if you go all the way to 40,000, you can still do better. There’s another piece to this. The report talks about a particle attached to, to Ash in thousand Oaks and other particles in a Sumi valley and throughout the area. That doesn’t mean that there’s nothing beyond that. That’s where we stopped looking because we ran out of people and 360 samples is a huge number to process. So when you look at this data and people say, well, I’m beyond thousand Oaks or whatever, that doesn’t mean that they are safe. It just means that we didn’t go out that far to analyze more samples.

Libbe HaLevy 

03:30:25

We’ll continue with this week’s special interview on the peer reviewed report, radioactive microparticles related to the Woolsey fire in Simi valley, California in just a moment. But first, you know, the radiation being found from Santa Susana field lab after the Woolsey fire is a great example of one of those stories, the nuclear industry, and the government agency officials who protect them just want to go away. Eyes closed fingers in their ears, LA LA, LA LA. They don’t explain themselves. They don’t respond to requests for comment left to their own devices. They’ll never clean it up or even apologize. And as you heard from Dr., they’ve got a playbook of platitudes and cliches to pacify the public. What I like to call the bare there, Missy, you don’t worry your pretty little head about it. Gambit, except people, parents, residents are worried, concerned, and angry. That includes me.

Libbe HaLevy 

03:31:22

I live less than 30 miles from SSL and smoke from that fire reached me inside my home on the very first day. So this is personal. I, we deserve the truth. We need our officials to take responsibility. And when they don’t, that’s when citizen science joins with citizen anger, demonstrations, and actions, the demand for accountability in cleanup and a podcast that shares the information. That’s why you need nuclear hot seat for more than 10 years. This show has been on stories just like this one that may flare in the mainstream media for a moment, but then disappear. Not here. We stick with it providing context and continuity. We’re the one place where every week you can hear interviews with genuine experts, news activist, acknowledgements updates, a steady drum beat of verifiable information to counter nuclear industry coverups and lies, but we can’t get by without your assistance.

Libbe HaLevy 

03:32:24

So we can keep doing this work. Here’s what you can do. Go to nuclear, hot seat.com, click on the big red donate button and help us with a donation of any amount. You can also set up a recurring donation as little as $5 a month. So if you value in-depth reports like this one, please do what you can now and know that however much you can help. I’m deeply grateful that you’re listening and that you care. Now we returned to this week’s special program on radioactive microparticles related to the Woolsey fire in Simi valley, California, with Dr. Marco and Arnie Gunderson, and Maggie Gunderson of Fairwinds energy education. You’ve been calling this process, citizen science, and I’m certain that there are people, especially allied with the nuclear industry who just based on that term will dismiss what you’ve done and cast dispersions on the results. Throw some shade on the process you use implying, or even stating that because it’s citizen science, it must be amateurish, sloppy and not to be trusted. What would you say to those people?

DTSC

03:33:32

And it comes down to let the data, tell the story, what story does the data say? What’s the standard deviation. What’s the number? What’s the statistical significance? The idea of being to remove people from the process of producing meaning from all of the scientific information. And yes, we’re people, people have, I don’t call them frailties or problems. People have properties, they behave in certain ways. It’s okay. I understand that the idea of science is to get past step. So you can have the citizen scientists somehow they’re less valued to the nuclear science than say the paid employee of a, of a nuclear operation or the shareholder who wants dividends from a utility. I don’t think so. The idea of science is that we’re looking at physical evidence and physical evidence is physical evidence. I’m not interested in deconstructing the personality and life history of everybody who’s involved in the process because we’re all human.

DTSC

03:34:33

We all bring ourselves to these reports. What I do know is it, citizen scientists are close to the action. They get samples in real time. They are interested in communicating results back to their community. And because they’re a citizen scientists, they’re always under a tougher microscope and they realize it’s their responsibility to be clear and credible and truthful because people fear that maybe there’s some more emotional content and a story that’s told by someone who lives next to one of these facilities. They realize they have a greater necessity, to be honest, and actually carry that data’s story without putting their personal flavor into it. That’s what helps people understand the data better. And that’s what motivates so many of these citizen scientists. You know, there’s another piece to that. The teams that did the sampling did

Arnie Gunderson

03:35:37

Not have Geiger counters with them. They were out looking for dust or Ash. We didn’t prospect to find radioactive particles. These teams didn’t go out prospecting with the Geiger counters. Oh, there’s one. Let’s send that on. They simply found Dustin Ash on the ground, took a sample and sent it to us. So the argument that we were looking for hotspots, I don’t know how you can do that when you don’t have a Geiger counter. So it’s important to remember that we were not, the teams were not prospecting.

Maggie Gunderson

03:36:12

Oh, I hired you to do this testing. And how were you paid

Maggie Gunderson

03:36:19

Three leading scientists? You know, all of us donated our time. We have seven organizations for similar projects and we’re trying to fundraise. We need donations. We’re also interested in grants, both Dr. and I have written grants in the last several weeks and talked to grantors. And we’re hoping that someone will come through. A lot of our funding was cut during the pandemic because rightfully so, a lot of money was from different philanthropic organizations was moved to go as a, as a COVID issue. But for the work we’re doing against radiation is a worldwide effort. We’ve worked together in Japan. We’re working together in the UK and we’re working together here in the U S and it’s an environmental justice issue. It’s racial discrimination, racial justice, because many of the sites are indigenous or in low income areas that can’t afford to fight back. And in Hispanic.

Maggie Gunderson

03:37:24

And as I said, indigenous areas, the sites that are asking for this help cover everything from uranium mines to communities where manufacturing of radioactive materials is concerned and they’re leaking out and contaminating water supplies and food supplies to every nuclear site, nuclear power, atomic power reactor site in the U S and overseas, because all of them leak and the monitoring Arnie and I have done this work monitoring it sites. For example, with the nuclear regulatory commission, the papers they get in are absolutely untruthful. And there’s no methodology to compare site a, to B, to C to D you can’t see what the industry is doing. We’ve looked at this, we started a study on that. We didn’t have the funding to finish it, but we have more than half the sites track for a period of what Arnie is it two decades. And it just really appalling that you can look at what, when a particular site had one reactor built and what it was releasing and what was listed in all its releases. And then what happened when they put up a second reactor and even a third. And when the numbers to ever change, that’s scientifically impossible. And yet the nuclear regulatory commission says, whoops, okay. They turned the paperwork in, here’s the check in the box, and nobody looks at it. And it’s very difficult to access.

Arnie Gunderson

03:38:58

You know, your question is who paid for this? We volunteered our time, Marco Maggie, and I, that’s a very poor business model I might have, but it was important to do for Santa Susanna. But when we turn on the scanning electron microscope, so you’ve got to take a look at the peer reviewed report, that’s up on the web. And you’ll see some very sophisticated photographs of these particles, the analysis of these samples outside of what the three of us did, the photographs cost tens of thousands of dollars. We had a couple of donors stepped forward and fund some of that. But then the nonprofit that Maggie founded, Fairwinds also funded as well. And frankly, it made our life financially incredibly difficult, but you know, it was important. And we made a promise to the people in California, that they would get a competent scientific analysis. At the end of the day, it’s very expensive to turn a scanning, electron microscope on once, let alone the number of times we had to use it on these samples, thanks to donors and thanks to donors to Fairwinds. We did it, but we can’t do it again. There’s seven or eight groups that have approached us to do something similar. And we just, there’s nothing in a tank to do something like this over again.

Maggie Gunderson

04:40:20

And everyone in these groups that have asked for assistance from us, I live in communities that are contaminated. They’re indigenous communities, where there’s been mining and the mines are closed down and they’re leaking and people are inhaling the dust there. It’s coming out in water, the contaminated water from out of their pipes, in their homes. It’s so contaminated. There’s a whole film on that zero hot water. And we know the principals who made that film. There are a number of communities that have both nuclear waste dumps. Marco, Dr. Cal Topen has done an enormous amount of work at the Hanford reservation, which is a world war II facility from developing the bomb. And we have similar waste dump and repository here in South Carolina, the Savannah river, which is adjacent to the Vogel nuclear power plants. So you look at all of that area and people are really sick there we’ve been up there to speak Arnie.

Maggie Gunderson

04:41:23

And I, we met a lot of the people that are working in the community and a number of churches are trying to get funding together to do a study like this, but it costs a lot of money, whether it’s the science that Dr is doing, whether it’s the collection work that we would be doing and the groups that we would work with to do the citizen science. And you asked earlier about citizen science and that’s a 2000 year old process. You know, we D we didn’t say that. We said how it works now, but 2000 years ago, it was started to collect samples of locusts and see how they were decimating food supplies. And it’s been used all over the world, and it’s being used much more now because our planet is being so heavily impacting.

DTSC

04:42:14

The most important thing to get from this is that the data’s very clear. We can look at the type of radioactive material that’s on the Santa Susanna field laboratory. We can track where it goes. We can track where it ends up, and we understand the dose and health damages that that radioactive material can cause. So there’s going to be another wildfire. There’s going to be more, they’re going to be bigger, hotter wildfires as our climate changes and what our responsibility is to make sure that the contamination at Santa Susanna is cleaned up before the next event that could spread radioactivity in the community.

Arnie Gunderson

04:42:51

My takeaway at the end of the day is that citizens have a right not to trust their government. If you look at say the California and the misstatements they’ve made about Santa Susanna, or if you look at the government of the United Kingdom, talking about the releases from the Sellafield Nucor, if you look at the Japanese government and focus, Shima, citizen science takes the responsibility away from the government and puts it in the hands of independent scientists with information from people really, really have the hands on understanding of what’s happening in the community. But when you want to play hardball with the big boys, you do have to spend some money. And that’s what makes it so frustrating and so difficult for us with seven or eight communities lined up for the same process. We just can’t do it without some help.

Libbe HaLevy 

04:43:44

And we’ll all park. What would each of these studies cost?

Arnie Gunderson

04:43:48

If the state of California hired experts to do what we did, it would be $200,000. And we did it for about one 10th of that.

Maggie Gunderson

04:43:59

We’ll be more than that. Arnie. It’s much more than that. That doesn’t involve a lot of the other tests. The last analysis I did with Marco puts it at two 50 to 300,000 at a minimum

Libbe HaLevy 

04:44:11

NBC Los Angeles carried an excellent report. The day the press materials were released. I find it interesting if not expected that none of the agencies involved with the story, not DTSC not Cal EPA, and certainly not Boeing were willing to comment on camera for it. What of pushback are you expecting from DTSC Cal EPA and Boeing? And what do you say back to them?

DTSC

04:44:39

You know, sometimes when you use scientific data to tell a story, someone leaves you a bad Yelp review, and this is not something I worried about getting into science.

Libbe HaLevy 

04:44:53

How long after you started testing, did you discover radioactive particles in the dirt dust, Ash and air filters?

Maggie Gunderson

04:45:01

I think it was at least a month or six weeks after all the samples were taken then, and we taught them the protocols to ship them so that if there’s any dirt or dust that’s contaminated, and the state had said it wasn’t, there was no contamination, but if there was then anyone who was handling that postal carriers or anyone else would be protected, so everything was shielded and it was shipped on. Then we opened it in a setting that allowed the air to move. It was open air to look at all the bags, and we did have a detector then, so we could know what was coming in and whether it was safe to continue to ship it. As we did that whole process, that took time, we were setting up the database of the, the woman who helped us set up the database has run radioactive lab before. So having her as part of our crew was just really amazing. And she had already, and I would work together in person, parents, South Carolina, and then we would take everything and ship to the university that Marco was working with. That’s

Libbe HaLevy 

04:46:11

Where the actual equipment was,

Maggie Gunderson

04:46:12

All the equipment, except the scanning electron microscope. Those are private labs that have that. And so that’s why we had to fundraise for that money. Separately is 750. I think it’s gone up now it’s $800 an hour just for one particle at the lab. So, you know, you carefully scope it by that point. You see? Okay, well, these are very similar to background. These particles are similar to background. Okay. So, but, well, this one is 19 times background. Let’s do an analysis and see what that particle is. Where did it come from? Is it natural somehow? Or is it man-made? And if it’s man-made, where do you tie it to? That’s the sampling Dr. was explaining to you earlier in the process.

Arnie Gunderson

04:46:59

You know, me, the samples did not come in as one block of 360. We would get a week short, 50 samples, and then we would make sure that they were safe to ship before we sent them to the control facility that did the sophisticated analysis. So, you know, I had a Geiger counter measure, an alpha beta gamma on the outside of the container, because we didn’t want to irradiate the ups man, for instance, and was doubly packed and Tripoli pack was seals in between to make sure nothing got out. So we got, we would get 50 and then we get 40, and then we got 60. So over the course of about four months, these samples trickled in and were analyzed by Fairwinds before being shipped on to Dr. Caltough Finch university. And then every one of those samples then had to be put in a measuring device for eight hours to look for radioactivity given off.

Arnie Gunderson

04:48:01

And then the more interesting ones, the ones that either emitted high radiation or had alpha beta and gamma or whatever were separated out and then sent on to the scanning of electron microscope lab, then you’ve got 360 pieces of desperate data that you have to make sense out of. The process took essentially three years likely with better funding. I think we cut that in half, but certainly not the nine hours that the state of California did saying, oh, don’t worry. Be happy. Nothing was released from the site. It’s a, it’s a time consuming, accurate process, and you just can’t push it too fast.

Libbe HaLevy 

04:48:46

Your findings were written up and submitted to the journal of environmental radioactivity for peer review. Explain what that process consists of, how long it takes and the importance of submitting your results there.

Maggie Gunderson

04:49:00

During the pandemic, we noticed that the process was taking longer. We had a prior journal article published during that time with Mary Liebert publishing about the Tokyo Olympic sites that was published in November, 2020. Now we’ve move on to 2021. It takes a long time to break everything down, to write it for all of us to do the analysis and write different parts of it. As we each see it and discuss it and then say, okay, this is what we see as the major finding. This is how we need to present it, go through it. Then you send it out for peer review and it takes them a few weeks since people were working remotely during the pandemic to even sort it they’ll, they’ll acknowledge they’ve received it, but then they’ll sort it. And then they’ll find out who’s available from their pure reviewers. We don’t know who any of those people are and they’ll pick them and ask them to review it. And it came back very positive, but with requests also for more information. So we expanded what we had done. We, we wrote more about the citizen science portion and more about the climate crisis, threat of wildfires and what that means to migrating radiation.

Arnie Gunderson

05:50:23

When you submit a paper for peer review, Maggie and Marco, and I, me for a lesser degree, putting enormous amount of time into writing the paper after analyzing all this data seven ways to Sunday. But then when you send it in for peer review, you don’t know who those reviewers are. There’s three or five reviewers who have the credentials to take a look at this. And they took a couple months to analyze our paper and they sent back comments saying, this is a really good paper, but you’ve got to expand this piece, or we don’t understand that. So then it comes back to us for a couple months and we rewrite the portions that they didn’t understand and send it back, which is the normal process in peer review. We still don’t know who those three or five individuals who had first crack at this work. And we’ll never know who they were.

Libbe HaLevy 

05:51:20

Paper itself was published on Friday, October 8th. And the story released to the media on Thursday, October 14, what has been the response so far, be it from the media, or

Maggie Gunderson

05:51:31

I think the response has been phenomenal from the public. They were waiting to hear the results of our research for a long time. And this is a community where children are sick and they’re trying to find out what is causing these illnesses. It’s a community that has more than a million people now in a whole proximity and the fire ravaged part of the site. It hasn’t even hit the part that’s heavily, heavily contaminated. That was the side of a meltdown. So as the wildfire moved across it and moved all the way to the Pacific ocean, radiation was carried there in smoke and Ash. And that means people are breathing it in and ingesting it. And they don’t know where it is. One person said to me, well, how can you guarantee that our location is clean? I said, we told you, there’s no guarantee to that.

Maggie Gunderson

05:52:29

It would cost more than the value of your home to strip every inch of Dustin soil off that property and take away all the plants and everything else, trees. And they’d all have to be analyzed and cleaned and put back to be sure that that site was clean. And then the next major wind storm rain storm or wildfire, we’ll bring it all back in. And that’s the thing. Once radiation leaves the area where it’s supposed to be contained it’s in the environment and depending on the particle, it lasts up to 250,000 years. So it’s really a problem that corporations and the government are trying to cover up because they don’t want to put the funding into the cleanup.

Arnie Gunderson

05:53:17

This could have been a lot worse. The Santa Susanna site has a highly contaminated area that did not burn. And, you know, we’re one fire away from much worse Ash deposition into the surrounding communities because the fire swept across the Santa Susanna site, but miss the worst contaminated areas just by luck. So global warming is going to be with us. Climate change is here and we’re one fire away from a much worse disaster than the one we measured.

Libbe HaLevy 

05:53:57

Is there anything we haven’t covered that you think it’s important to put in at this time?

DTSC

05:54:03

I think the most important parts about what makes this study interesting and not at all unique have come up.

Libbe HaLevy 

05:54:10

And what would that be?

DTSC

05:54:12

That citizen science is an emerging and better, more credible model for creating the scientific data that we need to help us solve the seemingly, but not really intractable problems of climate change, nuclear science and environmental justice.

Libbe HaLevy 

05:54:33

Anything else you want to add?

DTSC

05:54:35

The American chemical society says, don’t trust us, test us. And I say, deal.

Libbe HaLevy 

05:54:43

This has been an important study that you did a really thorough interview that you provided. And speaking as someone who lives less than 30 miles away from the Santa Susana field lab, I deeply appreciate the work that you have been doing and that you continue to do. And in addition to that, I want to thank all three of you. Maggie Gunderson, Ernie Gunderson, Dr. Marco counterfeit for being my guest this week on a very special interview for nuclear hot seat. Thank you levy for having all of us we’d greatly appreciate it. That was Dr. Marco Cal Tiffin and Arnie Gunderson and Maggie Gunderson of Fairwinds energy education. We’ll have links to the peer reviewed study, the press release Fairwinds energy education and the group parents against the Sadducees and a field lab up on our website, nuclear hot seat.com under this episode, number 5 39, and next week, we will continue this story interviews with Denise Duffield of physicians for social responsibility.

Libbe HaLevy 

05:55:49

See me mother and activist, Melissa Bumstead and information on the award-winning documentary film about Santa Susana field lab in the dark of the valley, which will be shown on MSNBC on November 14. This has been nuclear hot seat for Tuesday, October 19th, 2021. Our thanks to our guests, along with each of the citizen scientists around the Santa Susana field lab, who took samples and participated in this study, we encourage you to visit fairwinds.org. And that’s spelled F a I R E w I N D s.org, check out the material and they have posted there, including a history going back of articles that they have posted about the Santa Susana field lab and do what you can to help them out. As I’ve said, we will continue to cover the story of the Santa Susana field lab in all of its various ins and outs. And that means you’re going to want to listen to nuclear Hotsy.

Libbe HaLevy 

05:56:51

So if you want to make certain that you don’t miss a single episode, it’s easy to get the show delivered to you via email every week. Just go to nuclear hot seat.com, scroll down for the yellow box, fill in your first name and your email address. And we will send you a link every week to the show, along with a brief discussion of what’s included in it. Now, if you have a story lead, a hot tip or suggestion of someone to interview, let me know about it. Send an email to [email protected]. And if you appreciate weekly verifiable news updates about nuclear issues around the world, take a moment, go to nuclear, hot seat. God com look for that big red button, click follow prompts. Anything you do will help. And we will really appreciate your support. This episode of nuclear hot seat is copyright 2021 Leebee Halevi and hardest streak communications, all rights reserved, but fair use allowed. As long as proper attribution is provided. This is Leiby Halevi of heart history, communications. The heart of the art of communicating, reminding you that the true role of government is to manage panic. And if use anger in the population, no matter how justified that reaction is, and that especially goes for nuclear issues, that’s it? That is your nuclear wake up call. So don’t go back to sleep because we are all truly in the nuclear hot seat,

Announcer

05:58:26

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