Presentations

Presentations

Karl Grossman

2018 Tom Twomey Series in Local History at East Hampton Library

October 13, 2018

I’ve been to many beautiful islands—Bora Bora, Paros, Mykonos, Nantucket, Cuttyhunk, Tahiti, Moorea, Santorini, Virgin Gorda, Tobago.

But just off Long Island’s shores is a gem, splendorous, an exquisite island that excels any. It’s been aptly called a paradise. And it’s a time capsule of what the best of Long Island once was.

Gardiner’s Island—an ecological and historical jewel.

According to East Hampton Town’s 1984 comprehensive plan, Gardiner’s Island “stands as a unique expression of unspoiled terrain, at a time when few such areas exist.”

The 3,300-acre island is home to hundreds of bird species, freshwater ponds, a 1,000-acre white oak forest, Bostwick Woods, the largest stand of White Oak in the Northeast.

It is the oldest English settlement in New York.

I first went to Gardiner’s Island nearly 50 years ago.

Robert David Lion Gardiner, who always described himself as the “16th Lord of the Manor” of the island, which for nearly 400 years has been privately held by his family, welcomed a large camp-out of Boy Scouts on it in 1971.

I was a big Boy Scout, indeed an Eagle Scout, had seen the island from afar, and I thought this would be a great event. I covered the camp-out for the daily Long Island Press. And interviewed Mr. Gardiner for the first time, on the island.

The next year, 1972, I got to know Mr. Gardiner pretty well—when he ran for Congress in the lst C.D. on the Conservative Party ticket against incumbent Otis Pike as a protest to Pike’s effort for federal acquisition of the island.

Gardiner was no Conservative. Indeed, he ran for the State Senate in 1960 as a Democrat.

It was quite a scene when he ran for Congress—this kind-of an American aristocrat with his near-British manner of speech and sporting a blue blazer with breast pocket medallion—mixing with Conservative Party members, in Ronkonkoma, Babylon, and so forth, some of them Trumpsters of the time.

Mr. Gardiner told American Heritage magazine in 1975: “The DuPonts, Rockefellers and Fords, they are nouveaux riche. The DuPonts came in 1800; they’re not even a colonial family.”

Gardiner lost, of course, but there was also a letter-writing campaign—80,000 letters opposing Pike’s bill were sent to the House Committee on the Interior—and Pike withdrew it.

Mr. Gardiner was subsequently a guest on my weekly TV show, “Long Island World,” on WLIW/21, the Long Island PBS station. And I did more interviews with him for print.

Meanwhile, in 1974, my family had been living in Sayville for a decade, and I saw parts of that pleasant hamlet being hit by development sprawl, the sprawl that had enveloped so much of western Long Island.

Although raised in the city, I always loved the country. My wife, Janet, who grew up in what was then country-like Huntington Beach, and our two boys, moved in 1974 to Sag Harbor, where, in fact, I had roots.

My paternal grandfather, an engraver, came to Sag Harbor more than a century ago, from Hungary and worked at Fahy’s watchcase factory. Engraving was an art for Hungarian Jews, and Joseph Fahy recruited Hungarian and Italian engravers, too, transporting them from Ellis Island to Sag Harbor. This is where my grandfather met my grandmother, who had been staying with her sister, who had married into the Spitz family, many of its members watchcase factory workers.

Thinking about development in Suffolk as we moved east, I got the idea of making a TV documentary. “Can Suffolk Be Saved?”

Others were thinking the same. After Suffolk County Executive John V.N. Klein, raised in what was then country-like Smithtown, took a trip in a helicopter and, looking down, saw the sprawl blanketing so much of western Suffolk and then the green expanses of the East End, his innovative Suffolk County Farmland Preservation Program got started in 1974.

I envisioned ten half-hour TV programs and of starting the series on Gardiner’s Island as a sort of baseline. Mr. Gardiner graciously gave me permission.

In my stand-up on the island I describe it as a “time capsule” for Long Island, and ask whether Suffolk can be exempt the 100-mile swath of sprawl from Boston running through New York down to Washington.

Gardiner’s Island, its nature, Bostwick Woods, its fields and meadows, its birds and other animal life, its creeks, lagoon, its historic buildings —breathtaking.

Lion Gardiner bought it from the Montaukett Indians in 1639 for—as has been reported—”one large dog, one gun, some powder and shot, some rum and several blankets.”

I wonder whether the Montauketts and their chief, Wyandanch, really knew what was happening as Native Americans never considered land something that can be bought and sold.

Another factor here: the Pequots of Connecticut and their war with the Montauketts and English settlers. There was an alliance between the settlers and the Montauketts to counter the Pequots.

Among its structures is a windmill, brilliant white, built in 1795, by Nathaniel Dominy 5th of East Hampton, on the National Historic Register.

There is a carpenter’s shed, built in 1639, said to be the oldest surviving wood-frame structure in New York State.

There’s the Manor House, originally built in 1774, but it burned down in 1947. Its replacement built that year is splendid.

To witness the shoot, Mr. Gardiner invited actress Gloria Swanson, star of the film Sunset Boulevard, and her husband, William Dufty, author of Sugar Blues. We all met at the Gardiner mansion in East Hampton where Mr. Gardiner proudly showed the portrait—”by Salvatore Dali,” he emphasized—of the stunning red-haired former British model, Eunice Bailey Oakes, whom he wed in 1961.

Then we took off from Three Mile Harbor on Mr. Gardiner’s boat, he at the wheel, talking as he drove.

On the island, in what is called in TV a “stand-up,” I introduced the series and then interviewed him. And then we got on to the beds of two trucks for a tour of the island which Mr. Gardiner narrated.

He knew the island’s history in depth.

He told us how Captain Kidd came to the island in 1699, buried treasure in a ravine, said Gardiner, and warned John Winthrop Gardiner that if the treasure wasn’t there when he returned, he’d kill the Gardiner family. Captain Kidd then headed off to Boston where he was captured, put on trial for piracy and executed. The Gardiners were ordered to return the treasure of gold dust, silver bars, gold Spanish coins, rubies and diamonds. One diamond somehow wasn’t immediately found to be returned, it’s said, and was given later to daughter Elizabeth Gardiner. Also, a piece of cloth embroidered with gold had been given by Captain Kidd to her mother and is now part of the Long Island Collection at this library.

Mr. Gardiner took us to the marked site where he said the treasure had been buried.

He spoke about Julia Gardiner, born on the island, who became President John Tyler’s second wife and the First Lady of the United States in 1844.

As he continued with his fascinating talk and we traveled around the island, my director, Bob Civiello, told me we had run out of film—what should we do? Bob and I felt that Mr. Gardiner was having such a fine time—especially directing his words at Ms. Swanson, who he seemed to be in awe of—that the cameraperson should just keep rolling.

Then we had a gala lunch at the Manor House. At a centerpiece table was Mr. Gardiner, and he had positioned on one side of him, Ms. Swanson, on the other, the other woman in our group, environmentalist Lorna Salzman. I kind of got the feeling of being at a ceremonial meal of an English royal centuries ago.

Thereafter, a feud developed between Mr. Gardiner and his niece, Alexandra Creel Goelet, who stood to inherit the half-share of the island held by Gardiner’s sister, Alexandra Gardiner Creel.

Their battle continued for years.

Gardiner accused his niece and her husband, Robert Goelet, of planning to sell the island for development. He refused to pay his share of the $2 million a year in upkeep and taxes.  At one point, Mr. Gardiner accused Mr. Goelet of trying to run him over with a truck on the island.

And, Gardiner switched and said he was not opposed to ownership of the island by the government or a private conservation group. Then Mr. Gardiner, was barred starting in 1980 by a Surrogate Court’s ruling from visiting the island for not paying his share. In 1992 this was overturned.

Also, because Mr. Gardiner had no heirs, he sought unsuccessfully in 1989—to smite Mrs. Goelet—to adopt as his “son” a Mississippi businessman, George Gardiner Green, Jr., a distant descendant of Lion Gardiner.

Mrs. Creel’s ownership went to her daughter when she died in 1990.

Mr. Gardiner died in 2004 at 93 at his mansion here in East Hampton. His wife Eunice subsequently died.

Meanwhile, total ownership passed to Mrs. Goelet.

What will be future of Gardiner’s Island?

A few months after Mr. Gardiner’s death, a 20-year conservation easement covering more than 95% of the island was arranged with the Town of East Hampton.

Said my old and very missed friend, Tom Twomey, attorney for the Goelets: “This is a way for the family to keep their longstanding pledge not to develop the land for the foreseeable future.”

The easement arrangement was contingent on a promise from the town that it would not further upzone the island, change its assessment, or attempt to acquire it by condemnation.

Twomey stressed: the Goelet family believes that “maintaining the island’s existing yield” increases the island’s value and discourages the government from attempting to buy it without compensation.”

Mrs. Goelet opposed a 1993 upzoning of the island from one to five acres—but that happened anyway. In 2001, there was a move by the Town of East Hampton for more restrictive zoning—to 25 acres per house.

Lee Koppelman, executive director of the Long Island Regional Planning Board and long-time Suffolk County planner, recommended then that the “development rights” for the island be purchased by government—this is the basis of the Suffolk County Farmland Preservation Program.

Or, the island could become a limited access national park or a national wildlife refuge, he said in an interview with my reporter buddy John Rather that appeared in an article in The New York Times headlined: “Gardiners Island: The War of Wills.”

Mr. Koppelman comments in it that the island’s uniqueness and historic and environmental importance would make a federal commitment “not unlikely.”

He described Gardiner’s Island as “perhaps the most important offshore island on the entire Atlantic seashore from Maine to Florida.”

John quoted Koppelman as saying that the Goelets had done “a magnificent job in properly protecting and maintaining the island.”

Lee, incidentally, knew Gardiner who had served on the Suffolk County Planning Board after Lee first became Suffolk planner.

Koppelman emphasized: “The overriding concern is for the long-term future.”

Still, Mrs. Goelet, in the article, stressed that the Goelets had “willingly and by ourselves supported the island for more than 20 years. My children intend to carry on this tradition.”

Koppelman said the town that more restrictive 25-acre zoning was not a solution. Five-acre zoning would allow for 650 homes. Under 25-acre zoning, 130 homes.

And, said Koppelman: “Even 130 homes would irretrievably change the unique character and environment of the island.”

Gardiner’s attorney, Joseph R. Attonito, said that Gardiner would welcome a government role in the island’s future. He was quoted as saying: “Mr. Gardiner has consistently said, almost like a mantra, that the island has to be preserved as it is today. He would be supportive of Dr. Koppelman’s proposals and even of a national park, provided that he would not want a Jones Beach because the ecology of the island is way too fragile.”

The lawyer went on, “The island is an extremely expensive place to run as a private second home.” He said Mr. Gardiner was “convinced that the Goelets would develop the island because they would be unable or unwilling to pay maintenance costs.”

But Mrs. Goelet was quoted in the article as saying she did not foresee needing government help. She said: “I respect the concern of those who live in East Hampton for the long-term continuation of the current use of Gardiner’s Island. Nevertheless, the island is my home. Proposal for changes in ownership of it through governmental action, however well-intentioned and however limited, are very troubling to me and my family.”

Mrs. Goelet is an environmentalist. She has a master’s degree from the Yale School of Forestry. Mr. Goelet is a former chairman of the American Museum of Natural History. The Goelet family has enormous wealth based on New York City real estate.

The Goelets have been—and Mr. Gardiner, too, of course—excellent stewards of Gardiner’s Island.

But for me, I worry: will wonderful Gardiner’s Island, in future years, in another 400 years, be saved?

Karl Grossman

Professor of Journalism

State University of New York/College at Old Westbury

There have been two key problems regarding an understanding of the linkage between Judaism and the environment even though as Rutgers University biology professor, David Ehrenfeld, and Rabbi Philip J. Bentley wrote in their important essay “Judaism and the Practice of Stewardship”—“Judaism was one of the first great environmental religions.”

One problem involves how over centuries Jews were cut off from their deep roots in nature, as the late Josef Tamir explained. Tamir, often described as the father of the environmental movement in Israel, was a member of the Knesset from 1965 to 1985.

In an interview, Tamir shared with me a meeting he had with Prime Minister Golda Meir in the 1970s at which he pushed for creation of a Ministry of the Environment. Each time he raised the issue of threats to the environment of Israel, he said, Meir responded by discussing the plight of Jews in the Soviet Union.

Tamir knew about that, too, having been born in what was then the Russian Empire, now part of Ukraine (as was Meir). He came to Israel in 1924. He told me about Jews not being welcome, for example, in parks there.

Indeed, widely in the Diaspora. said Tamir, “Jews were disconnected from the environment, the environment belonged to the non-Jews. Jews could deal with their kitchens, their homes, but not with the common places. They were not welcome. They were despised by the non-Jews when they came. So they became estranged from nature.”

Nevertheless, said Tamir, “The link between Judaism and the environment is greater than any other faith.” These remarks by Tamir were included in an article I wrote titled “How Green Are the Jews?” in The B’Nai B’rith International Jewish Monthly in 1991.

Tamir devoted his life to the link. As a member of the Knesset, he was especially concerned with the preservation of farmland and open space in Israel.

In one fight over this, he commented: “What we are seeing is a crawling extermination of Israel’s most prized and irreplaceable asset. Land cannot be imported.”  In his later years, Tamir saw change in Israel. “Today there is increased recognition that development and environmental protection do not contradict one another but rather that a balance must be struck between them,” he said in 2008, a year before his death.

Not only an MK, Tamir also founded several Israeli environmental organizations including the Council for a Beautiful Israel and the Life and Environment Organization. He also began the environmental journal Green Blue and White.

The other problem regarding an understanding of the Judaism and environment link involves a dubious translation of a passage in Genesis—1:26, 28—which relates that God said, “Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air.” The issue: although dominion has been the common English translation of the Hebrew word yirdu—it is a poor translation, say some scholars.

Among the critics of this translation are Ehrenfeld and Bentley who speak in “Judaism and the Practice of Stewardship” of the “inadequacy” of the translation. They cite the words of Rashi: “’The Hebrew [yirdu] connotes both ‘dominion’ (derived from radah) and ‘descent’ (derived from yarad); when man is worthy, he has dominion over the animal kingdom, when he is not, he descends below their level and the animals rule over him.’ Here is the whole dimension of meaning which cannot be conveyed by an English translation.”

They write of the “superficial nature of the interpretation and its lack of content. There is no evidence, that we are aware of, that these verses of Genesis were ever interpreted by the rabbis as a license for environmental exploitation.” They say “such an interpretation runs contrary to their teaching and to the whole spirit” of Jewish law.

As Dr. Norman Lamm, longtime president of Yeshiva University, writes in a chapter titled “Ecology in Jewish Law and Theology” in his book Faith and Doubt: “This is the passage that, it is asserted, is the sanction for the excesses of science and technology, the new ecological villains.” It’s been “proclaimed” as “the source of man’s insensitivity and brutality to the subhuman world” and “equated with the right to foul the air.”

Lamm says: “It does not take much scholarship to recognize the emptiness of this charge against the Bible, particularly as it is interpreted in the Jewish tradition.”

Ehrenfeld and Bentley cite passages in the Bible “that stress God as creator and owner, and humankind caretaker or steward of the earth. ‘And…God…put him into the garden of Eden to till it and to keep it.’ (Genesis 2:25) “The land shall not be sold for ever; for the land is Mine; for you are strangers and sojourners with Me.’ (Leviticus 25:23.)” They say “many other biblical texts can be construed as being relevant to the idea of stewardship.”

“There are, in Judaism, a number of specific rules—together constituting a kind of ‘Steward’s Manual’—setting forth humanity’s particular responsibilities for its behavior toward natural resources, animals, and other parts of nature,” they write. “First among these rules is the commandment of bal tashhit.”

The Bible declares that “when thou shall besiege a city a long time, in making war against it to take it, thou shall not destroy” the fruit trees. “From this source,” they relate, “is derived the notion of bal tashhit (do not destroy), an ancient and sweeping series of Jewish environmental regulations that embrace not only the limited case in question but have been rabbinically extended to a great range of transgressions including the cutting off of water supplies to trees, the over-grazing of the countryside, the unjustified killing of animals or feeding them harmful foods, the hunting of animals for sport, species extinction and destruction of cultivated plant varieties, pollution of air and water, over-consumption of anything, and the waste of mineral and other resources.”

Lamm emphasizes how the prohibition in Deuteronomy on cutting down an enemy’s fruit trees was “expanded.” He quotes Maimonides: “And not only trees, but whoever breaks vessels, tears clothing, wrecks that which is built up, stops fountains, or wastes food in a destruction manner, transgresses the commandment of bal tashhit.”

“It is also the Sabbath alone,” Ehrenfeld and Bentley write, “that can reconcile the Jewish attitude towards nature.” It’s a time that “we create nothing, we destroy nothing, and we enjoy the bounty of the earth. In this way the Sabbath becomes a celebration of our tenancy and stewardship in the world.”

And then there is the Sabbatical year –as we have this year—in which Jews are to have land lie fallow to restore itself. And every 50 years, the Jubilee, when in ancient Jewish tradition land is to revert to its original owners without compensation, underlining God’s declaration in Leviticus that the land is the Lord’s, people are just its stewards.

Judaism on many levels, concludes Lamm, “possesses the values on which an ecological morality may be grounded.”

In the United States, Jews have been deeply involved in environmental issues.

Jeremy Rifkin, author of many books on  environment and technology, has said: “You look at the Bible, Jewish tradition—we have a tremendous environmental ethic. It is part of the covenant with the creator to take proper care of the creation. There is a tradition of caretaking that includes Noah and the ark protecting God’s creatures. Reverence, respect, indebtedness are imbedded in Jewish tradition. We only borrow from nature, and when we secure something for our survival from God’s creation, we express that indebtedness in blessings.”

Or as Ernest Sternglass, a physicist and leading opponent of nuclear power, the author of Secret Fallout and other books, told me “the essence of Judaism” is “being pro-life in a real sense. I am deeply committed to the tradition of our great prophets who put the sanctity of life above all else.”

There are many others: biologist Barry Commoner whose books include Making Peace With the Planet and The Politics of Energy; Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb; Harvey Wasserman, senior advisor to Greenpeace U.S.A. and author; Judi Bari, a principal organizer of Earth First!—and here on Long Island, Murray Barbash, a leader of the successful battles for a Fire Island National Seashore and blocking the operation of the Shoreham nuclear power plant, and longtime chairman of the Israel Oceanographic and Limnological Research Institute. The list goes on. As does the list of Jewish environmental organizations in the U.S.including Hazon, founded by Nigel Savage, a close friend of this temple’s rabbi emeritus, Leon Morris, and his wife, Dasee Berkowitz, who has given presentations here. Most recently, Nigel spoke about the importance of this Sabbatical year and how it might be observed.

And then there are the Jews in America who have gone to the dark side. Among every people, in every faith, there are those who go diametrically opposite the ideals of their people and faith.

The New York Times a few weeks ago ran a story about Richard Berman, president of the Washington consulting firm of Berman & Company, giving a speech in Colorado to energy industry executives, one of whom was so disgusted with what he heard he gave a recording of the talk to the Times.

The lead of the Times article: “If the oil and gas industry wants to prevent its opponents from slowing its efforts to drill in more places, it must be prepared to employ tactics like digging up embarrassing tidbits about environmentalists and liberal celebrities, a veteran Washington political consultant told a room of industry executives in a speech that was secretly recorded.”

Berman, the piece continued, said “company executives…must be willing to exploit emotions like fear, greed and anger and turn them against the environmental groups. And major corporations secretly financing such a campaign should not worry about offending the public because ‘you can either win ugly or lose pretty.’” That quote was weaved into the headline of the Times story.

The piece said “Berman repeatedly boasted about how he could take checks from the oil and gas industry executives…and then hide their role in funding his campaigns.” He said “we run all of this stuff through nonprofit organizations that are insulated from having to disclose donors. There is total anonymity. People don’t know who supports us.”

Richard Berman. Shandah.

And Berman’s own son feels that way, too. David Berman of the musical group Silver Jews has spoken of “my gravest secret…My father…a despicable man…[a] human molestor…an exploiter…a scoundrel.”

And there was physicist Edward Teller, who proudly accepted the title of “father of the hydrogen bomb,” a zealot for nuclear power and Reagan’s Star Wars scheme. Teller was insistent that a nuclear war could be successfully fought and won. I tangled with Teller when I wrote my book, Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power, about using in it several lines that he wrote about the feasibility of nuclear war. Survivors, he wrote, could emerge “from their shelters” after a nuclear war between the U.S.and Russia and “re-establish economic strength sooner than Russia.” He wouldn’t give me permission, but I used this and other Teller inanities anyway.

As Teller aggressively pushed to develop a hydrogen bomb, another Jew, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director and Teller’s boss at the Manhattan Project, with Teller’s drive central, spoke in a critical 1947 speech about how “physicists have known sin.”

Shandah.

The environmental movement in Israel, beyond now the days of Josef Tamir, is going strong—with Israel still facing big challenges. There are many environmental organizations in Israel. And, since 1988, a Ministry of Environmental Protection.

And there’s a Green political movement.

I first met Alon Tal, a co-founder of the Green Movement political party of Israel, a few years ago, in Jerusalem. He is founder of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies which brings together students from Israel, Palestine, Jordan and the U.S. He’s a professor at Ben-Gurion University and author of Pollution in a Promised Land: An Environmental History of Israel.

Tal made aliyah in 1980 at 20, served as a paratrooper in the Israel Defense Forces, received a law degree from Hebrew University and founded the Israel Union for Environmental Defense, a public interest law firm. He also has a Ph.D. from Harvard. He has been described as Israel’s leading contemporary environmentalist.

Over lunch (he was on his way to challenging a housing development proposed for an ecologically important hillside of Jerusalem) he spoke of how Israel is “blessed with unbelievable biodiversity—and we are losing it.”

As Tal concluded in Pollution in a Promised Land: “Before he went to his lonely death, Moses wrote a farewell letter to the people of Israel that is otherwise known as the book of Deuteronomy. He offered them the options of a blessing or a curse. The choice has been woven into Judaism’s central prayer, the Shema.”

“According to the Scriptures: ‘The land that you go to possess is not like the land of Egypt that you just left….No, the land you will…inherit is filled with hills and valleys, and it drinks the water of the rains of heaven’”

Tal continues, “It is instructive to imagine what the Creator might see, peering down from on high upon this promised land four thousand years after.”

“Jews returned en masse to their ancestral homeland, making much of it a greener place. The renewed forests, the abundant agriculture, and the reserves set aside for the other creatures would surely be a source of happiness. Yet other omens would be troubling. Watering so many fields has sapped and sullied many of the reservoirs. The toll that the farmers’ and the factories’ chemicals took would also not be overlooked. Asphalt strips crisscrossing the hills and plains added little to the landscape, except perhaps the acrid exhaust of cars…”

“Who would expect the people to turn the good rivers of their land into streams of squalor? Who could imagine producing such copious quantities of garbage and toxins with no serious plan about how to dispose of them? Or allowing a land so venerated to be paved and built into submission?”

“Rationalizations would be duly noted,” Tal goes on. “There had been poverty and refugees and wars to overcome; a modern state was created. But these cannot temper a deep sense of sorrow at what has been lost.”

“And so it is important to remember that it is not divine decree, but human ambition, myopia, negligence, and sometimes greed that brought these curses to the land. Precisely because the people of Israel created their many environmental problems, they were also blessed with the collective wisdom, wealth, laws, technologies and passion to solve them.”

“The same Zionist zeal that allowed an ancient nation to defy all odds for an entire century can be harnessed to confront the newest national challenge,” says Tal. “More than any of their ancestors, the present generation stands at an ecological crossroads—offered the choice of life and good, or death and evil. This ‘last chance’ to preserve a healthy Promised Land for posterity is a weighty privilege indeed. Surely as it writes the next chapters in its environmental history, Israel will once again choose life.”

Israel dodged an atomic shell with a declaration by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, after the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, that Israel would not build a nuclear power plant. Netanyahu announced “we’ll go for the gas and skip the nuclear.” (Offshore, new gas discoveries had just been made but the gas will eventually run out.)

A more sustainable option: Israel harvesting renewable, never-ending, carbon-free energy—solar and wind power. That was the vision, the prescient view, of Netanyahu’s predecessor, David Ben-Gurion.

Today in Israel some 80 percent of homes have solar panels that heat water. Israel leads the world in solar thermal energy.

And it is at the cutting edge of developments in generating electricity from sunlight, including at the Ben-Gurion National Solar Energy Center at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. The center is located near the graves of David and Paula Ben-Gurion and a few miles from their humble home at Kibbutz Sde Boker where hangs Ben-Gurion’s1955 declaration: “In the Negev the creative ingenuity and pioneering vitality of Israel will be tested. Scientists must develop…applied solar energy [and] wind-power for producing energy.”

But four years ago, the minister of National Infrastructures announced that a nuclear power plant would be built in the Negev. I wrote articles on it in the Jewish-American press and, in Israel, The Jerusalem Post.

I pointed out that the cost of building one nuclear plant—$12 to $15 billion—would match the $13 billion yearly budget of the Israel Defense Forces. And, moreover, the nuclear plant would be a “sitting duck” for Israel’s enemies. Note how in this summer’s Gaza War, Hamas desperately sought to hit Israel’s nuclear reactor at Dimona with rockets.

I questioned where Israel would get the massive amounts of water—a million gallons a minute—needed to cool a nuclear power plant, where the deadly radioactive waste would be disposed of in little Israel, and the consequences of a catastrophic nuclear accident.

After my articles appeared, the National Infrastructures Ministry telephoned seeking additional information. My journalism was not the reason for Netanyahu’s subsequent decision—the cause was the Fukushima catastrophe. But it was refreshing to get the call from the ministry. The U.S. Department of Energy or Nuclear Regulatory Commission haven’t ever made any such requests as they, never open to criticism, try to force nuclear power on the U.S.

As the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs says on its website, in a section titled “Innovative Israel”—“Since its founding, Israel understood the potential of generating power from plentiful sunshine. Its new technologies promise an even brighter future for the entire world.” The multi-page review of Israel’s record and advances in solar energy is headed: “A solar-powered ‘light unto the nations.’”

How appropriate for the Jewish state.

The springboard for this morning, the first session here in Jewish Book Month, is Ellen Bernstein’s book, Ecology & the Jewish Spirit, Where Nature & the Sacred Meet.” Published in 2000, a collection of essays, the book begins with Bernstein writing about her own “spiritual quest…I began to study Jewish texts and found…that Judaism was rich in spirit and wisdom concerning humanity’s relationship with nature.”

She found how the “Creation story” and Jewish law and other elements of Judaism “all reflected a reverence for land and a viable practice of stewardship.”

“Judaism supported the values that I was teaching,” wrote Bernstein, then a teacher of biology—she has since become a rabbi, “that Creation is sacred and humanity has the awesome and wonderful responsibility to guard and preserve it.”

L’chayim.

KARL GROSSMAN

Presentation on October 14, 2016

Long Island Metro Business Action

It was nearly 40 years ago that as a journalist I began concentrating on nuclear power.

The preface: I hosted a TV program—“Long Island World”—in the 1970s on WLIW/21, Long Island’s PBS station, and was asked to do one on nuclear power. With my crew I visited Brookhaven National Laboratory set up on Long Island in 1947 by the U. S. Atomic Energy Commission to conduct research into atomic science and develop civilian uses of nuclear technology. The labs such as Los Alamos built during World War II as part of the atomic bomb-making program, Manhattan Project, which the AEC succeeded, would continue working on military uses of atomic technology. And here on Long Island this new lab would focus on developing and promoting civilian uses—extending what was done during the war.

The scientists at Brookhaven Lab I interviewed downplayed the dangers of nuclear power. They said to the camera that there might be a minor accident over many years but nuclear power plants were extremely safe because of having redundant systems.

Then in 1979 the Three Mile Island accident—no minor accident—happened. And hearing the news, I thought of those scientists and how they tried to bamboozle me and TV viewers.

I committed myself that day to writing a book, based on investigative reporting, presenting the realities of nuclear power.

A description used in the Investigative Reporting class I’ve taught and in many other classes in Investigative Reporting is that it’s an effort through journalism to tell “how things really work.”

Cover Up

It took a year to write the book. Those who assisted me included atomic physicist Dr. Richard Webb. He read every word of the manuscript. Dr. Webb served under Admiral Hyman Rickover in the construction of the first U.S. nuclear power plant, Shippingport, in Pennsylvania, and authored the book The Accident Hazards of Nuclear Power Plants. Other journalists reviewed what I found including John Rather who for many years reported for The New York Times.

The book was titled Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power. The latest edition, issued after the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe began, is available for free, courtesy of the publisher, on my website, www.karlgrossman.com

Cover Up was the first of several books I’ve written on nuclear technology. I’ve written thousands of articles, too, and hosted and written many TV programs on nuclear power broadcast on the nationally-aired TV program I’ve hosted for 27 years, Enviro Close-Up.

Since Cover Up’s publication in 1980, I’ve also been on the lecture circuit—including being paired by my lecture agency with a leading advocate of nuclear power, John Sununu, the former New Hampshire governor. I’ve spoken at colleges and universities across the U.S. and also overseas, including making presentations in six trips to Russia in the 1990s and early 2000s as Russia sought to create a new energy program—before Vladimir Putin’s iron fist came down.  My last presentation in Russia, a keynote address at a conference in Siberia on nuclear power, in Tomsk, a so-called “atomic city,” a center of Russian nuclear activity, was supported by the U.S. State Department.

I start Cover Up declaring: “You have not been informed about nuclear power. You have not been told. And that has been done on purpose. Keeping the public in the dark was deemed necessary by the promoters of nuclear power if it was to succeed. Those in government, science and private industry who have been pushing nuclear power realized that if people were give the facts, if they knew the consequences of nuclear power, they would not stand for it.”

“Equal to that of the State of Pennsylvania”

For example, although those Brookhaven Lab scientists downplayed the dangers of nuclear power, studies I obtained from BNL itself projected huge and dire consequences of an accident. For example, over and over again in BNL’s report, WASH-740 Update, is the line that “the possible size of the area of such a disaster might be equal to that of the State of Pennyslvania.” This was written a decade before the Three Mile Island accident almost turned that BNL projection into fact.

I reprint in Cover Up this line and many other passages from government documents on the dangers of nuclear power as facsimiles—reprinting the actual documents themselves—so nuclear promoter could not deny them.

Covering up, deception, continue today.

The push for nuclear power has been—and is—a huge con job, one of the biggest the world has ever seen. From the claim of Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss that nuclear power would be “too cheap to meter,” to the insistence of nuclear promoters through the years that nuclear plants are safe, to what the some nuclear scientists have advanced as the  “hormesis” theory—that radioactivity is good for you; it exercises the immune system—the falsehoods run deep. It almost makes the tobacco industry look like pikers.

$7.6 Billion Bail-out Plan

And now we have in New York State a $7.6 billion plan advanced by Governor Andrew Cuomo and supported by the state’s Public Service Commission, the members of which the governor appoints, to bail out four aged upstate nuclear power plants.

The bail-out would be part of a program that includes a “Clean Energy Standard” under which 50 percent of electricity used in New York by 2030 would come from “clean and renewable energy sources”

To subsidize the upstate nuclear plants, there would be a surcharge for 12 years on electric bills paid by the state’s residential and industrial customers. Business owners, because of their larger use of electricity, would be particularly hard hit.

Nuclear power is dirty, dangerous and expensive—very expensive. And these days, nuclear power cannot compete economically.

As Jessica Azulay, program director of the state’s Alliance for a Green Economy, explains about the bailout: “Without these subsidies, nuclear plants cannot compete with renewable energy and will close. But under the guise of ‘clean energy,’ the nuclear industry is about to get its hands on our money in order to save its own profits, at the expense of public health and safety.”

What are the arguments made by the bail-out plan’s promoters?

The four nuclear plants are needed to offset climate change. A nuclear plant doesn’t emit carbon or greenhouse gasses, they say, a key nuclear industry argument in a time of great concern over climate change for nuclear plants nationally and worldwide. What is never mentioned by these nuclear promoters, however, is that the “nuclear cycle” or “nuclear chain”—the full nuclear system—is a major contributor of carbon emissions and greenhouse gasses.

“Nuclear is NOT emission-free!”

As Manna Jo Greene, environmental director of the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, wrote to the state Public Service Commission on this: “Nuclear is NOT emission-free! The claim of nuclear power having ‘zero-emission attributes’ ignores emissions generated in mining, milling, enriching, transporting and storing nuclear fuel.”

Or as Michel Lee, head of the Council on Intelligent Energy & Conservation Policy, told the PSC: “Nuclear power is not carbon-free. If one stage,” reactor operation itself, “produces minimal carbon…every other stage produces prodigious amounts.” Thus the nuclear “industry is a big climate change polluter…Nuclear power is actually a chain of highly energy-intensive industrial processes which—combined—consume large amounts of fossil fuels and generate potent warming gasses. These include: uranium mining, milling enrichment, fuel fabrication, transport” and her list went on.

To combat climate change what’s needed is really green energy led by solar and wind.

Then there is the argument that the 2,000 jobs in the four upstate plants must be saved.

But as Dr. Mark Z. Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program at Stanford University, wrote in an op-ed in Albany Times Union, “allowing the upstate nuclear plants to close now and replacing them with equal energy output from…wind and solar power would be cheaper and would create more jobs.” The closure of the upstate plants “would jeopardize fewer than 2,000 jobs, approximately half of which would remain for years because of the required decommissioning and decontamination of the facilities and the securing and monitoring of the nuclear waste.” A “peer-reviewed study” he has done “about converting New York State to 100 percent clean, renewable energy—which is entirely possible now—would create a net of approximately 82,000 good, long-term jobs above the number lost,” he said.

Dr. Jacobson also stated that “I was among many who were shocked by the Public Service Commission’s proposal that the lion’s share of the Clean Energy Standard funding would be a nuclear bailout.”

And there’s the claim the power the upstate nuclear plants provide is needed for continuity of supply. Not true, says as Michel Lee, head of the Council on Intelligent Energy & Conservation Policy, “Upstate New York is flush with energy,” she notes.

Renewable Energy Revolution

And, moreover, there is a renewable energy revolution now well underway.

Just last month, for example, a new firm, Insolight, announced development of solar photovoltaic panels with 36% efficiency. The most advanced solar panels NASA uses in space have 25% efficiency. When I wrote Cover Up, the efficiency of solar panels was in the single digits. Now most are 18% to 20%, and the SunPower company last year began manufacturing panels with 24% “world record” efficiency. With such jumps in efficiency, less space for panels is needed. More panels can be deployed harvesting more sunlight and converting it to electricity. Meanwhile, the price of solar panels has gone down dramatically.

Wind has become the world’s fastest growing energy resource.

Deepwater Wind is now completing America’s first offshore windfarm east of Long Island. It seeks to follow that up with a 200-turbine windfarm south of Long Island—the turbines placed beyond the horizon so there’s no aesthetic issue as there has been in early offshore windfarm plans. Then Deepwater Wind seeks to build a 200-windfarm south of New York City off New Jersey.

Here on Long Island the Town of East Hampton is moving ahead to have 100% of its electricity come from safe, clean, green, renewable energy by 2020. That’s just four years away!

East Hampton Town Supervisor Larry Cantwell says: “Making the switch to clean energy is just the right thing to do, both for the environment and for keeping more money in the local economy and creating jobs here.”

“We’re doing it!,” he told me recently:

East Hampton is to meet its 100% renewable energy goal through solar energy, from panels on town-owned land and rooftops, and from wind energy from Deepwater Wind’s off-shore wind turbines.

East Hampton has become the first municipality on the East Coast to adopt a 100% renewable energy goal but other governments in the U.S.—including cities such as San Francisco—have done the same, as have nations around the world.

Every town on Long Island and through New York State could do it, too. There’d be different mixes—like there needs to be different mixes globally depending on energy resources, although solar power runs through all.

“The World Can Transition…”

“The World Can Transition to 100% Clean, Renewable Energy,” declares the website of The Solutions Project headquartered in California. “Together ,” it continues, “we can build a stronger economy, healthier families, and a more secure future. 100% clean is 100% possible. Join us.” The website—http://the solutionsproject.org—is full of information on 100% renewable energy programs happening.

Among the articles: “139 Countries Could Be 100% Renewable by 2050.” The Solutions Project, supported by leading U.S. foundations including the Park Foundation, last month launched “The Fighter Fund, a new grant-making program for community-based groups on the front lines of the fight for clean energy and climate justice.”

And a fight is occurring. “Holding Clean Energy Hostage,” was the title of a recent  article by Cathy Kunkel of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis and M.V. Ramana of the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University in the journal Reason in Revolt. Companies tied to “traditional” energy—nuclear, coal, oil, gas—seek to block “renewable energy every step of the way.”

The sun does not send bills.

Neither does the wind.

Once the infrastructure for renewable energy is built, energy flows—freely. And this threatens the old power order.

But there are new companies—like Insolight and Deepwater Wind—making huge advances in renewable energy technologies that the old order can’t put a lid on.

Regarding wind, the United Kingdom has just given the go-ahead for what’s to be the world’s largest offshore wind farm. An this August 7, Scottish wind turbines generated “the total amount of electricity used by every home and business” in Scotland, reported the U.K. newspaper The Independent. 

There are big advances in energy storage—to end criticism of renewable energy being intermittent. “Holy Grail of Energy Policy in Sight as Battery Technology Smashes the Old Order,” was the recent headline of the U.K. newspaper The Telegraph. Storage is a component of the Deepwater Wind bringing electricity to Long Island.

Said Bill Nye, the “Science Guy,” on CNN recently: “There’s enough wind and solar to power the world.”

And there are other renewable sources including those involving water—tidal power and wave power as we see daily on Long Island, now being tapped around the world, biomass, geothermal and on and on.

East Hampton by “setting these bold renewable energy goals,” says Gordian Raacke, executive director of Renewable Energy Long Island, is “a visionary leader in the fight against climate change and an example of how we can all become part of the solution.”

“Imagine what New York could do if Cuomo…”

Says Jessica Azulay of Alliance for a Green Economy: “Imagine what New York could do if Cuomo would go all-in on the thriving renewable energy sector instead of dumping more money into the nuclear industry. We could put more funding into wind and solar…and make tens of thousands of homes more energy efficient, creating jobs and saving people money. We could put real dollars into the geothermal industry and get ourselves off fracked gas and other fossil fuels…We’d save money to help with worker retraining and transitioning communities into the green economy. In short, we could accelerate our transition to 100 percent renewable energy, getting there faster, cheaper and safer.”

The Cuomo $7.6 billion nuclear bail-out plan, as Blair Horner, legislator director of the New York Public Interest Research Group, says “is like subsidizing the horse-and-buggy industry while Henry Ford is rolling cars off the assembly line.”

Beyond Dollars—It’s About Life

And this, most importantly, is beyond dollars—it’s about life.

The most comprehensive study of the consequences of a nuclear plant meltdown with loss of containment was done for the U.S. Nuclear Regulation Commission, which succeeded the Atomic Energy Commission, by Sandia National Laboratories in 1982. It’s title: Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences or CRAC2.

The study projected “peak early fatalities,” “peak early injuries,” peak cancer deaths” and  “scaled costs” in the billions of dollars for such a meltdown at every nuclear plant in the United States.  In “scaled costs” the study itemizes “lost wages, relocation expenses, decontamination costs, lost property” but it is noted that “the cost of providing health care for the affected population” is not included. The nuclear industry and nuclear promoters in government were so upset with the release of this analysis that I doubt there will ever be anything like it again. I’ve distributed a breakdown of the CRAC2 numbers done by the House Subcommittee on Oversight & Investigations for your review.

The figures—and we’re speaking here of lives not mere numbers—for the four nuclear plants that would be bailed out under the Cuomo plan are:

Ginna — 2,000 fatalities, 28,000 injuries, 14,000 cancer deaths and $63 billion in costs—based on the value of the 1980 dollar. It would be three times that now.

FitzPatrick – 1,000 fatalities, 16,000 injuries, 17,000 cancer deaths and $103 billion in costs.

Nine Mile Point which consists of two nuclear power plants.

Unit 1 — 700 fatalities, 11,000 injuries, 14,000 cancer deaths, $66 billion in costs.

And Nine Mile Point 2 – 1,400 fatalities, 2,600 injuries, 20 000 cancer deaths, $134 billion in costs.

Also, as we have seen from Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukishima, nuclear accidents are not rare events, like the BNL scientists told me, and not minor. With a little more than 400 nuclear power plants in the world, 100 in the U.S., disaster has occurred nearly every decade.

And if the next nuclear disaster is to strike anywhere, it could easily happen at these four old nuclear plants. Nuclear plants were only seen as operating for 40 years. After that, the metals would become embrittled from radioactivity creating unsafe conditions. So they were given 40-year operating licenses. But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has gone ahead in recent times and given 20-year license extensions to now more than 80 of the nuclear plants in the U.S.—including the four upstate plants. This would allow them to run for 60 years. And the NRC is considering having an additional license extension program to allow nuclear plants to run for 80 years. It’s just asking for disaster. Considering taking a 60-year car on to the LIE or an Interstate and driving it at full speed—and that’s also part of the NRC program, allowing the nuclear plants given extensions to “uprate”—run hotter and harder to produce more electricity.

In terms of age, Nine Mile Point Unit 1 went online in 1969 and is one of the two oldest nuclear plants in the U.S., tied with Oyster Creek in New Jersey. Ginna started operating in 1970. FitzPatrick in 1975.  These are from-the-past machines prone to mishap.

Excelon: 800 Pound Nuclear Gorilla

But there’s an 800 pound nuclear gorilla heavily involved in the bail-out plan—a company called Excelon. It’s the major owner of three of the plants—Ginna and the two Nine Mile Point plants—and Excelon has made a $110 million deal to buy FitzPatrick from Entergy with the bail-out deal in mind.

I’ve written articles on Excelon and notably its role in President Barack Obama’s flip on nuclear power. Running for his first term as president Obama declared: “I start off with the premise that nuclear energy is not optimal and so I am not a nuclear proponent. My general view is that until we can make certain that nuclear power plants are safe, that they have solved the storage problem…and the whole industry can show that they can produce clean, safe energy without enormous subsidies from the U.S. government, I don’t think that’s the best option. I am much more interested in solar and wind…”

Or as he told the editorial board of the Keene Sentinel in 2007: “I don’t think that there’s anything that we inevitably dislike about nuclear power. We just dislike the fact that it might blow up…and irradiate us…and kill us.”

Then, after his election, he began talking about “building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this county.”

What happened in between? Key influences on Obama on nuclear power were Rahm Emanuel, who became his chief of staff, and as an investment banker was in the middle in 1999 of the $8.2 billion merger of Commonwealth Edison of Chicago and Peco Energy to put together Excelon, and there was David Axelrod, who became Obama’s senior advisor, who had been an Excelon PR consultant. Obama also received sizeable campaign contributions from Excelon executives. Indeed, Forbes magazine in 2010 ran a piece on Excelon and Obama headlined: “The President’s Utility.”

Excelon is now the biggest nuclear utility in the U.S.

Its fingerprints are on the $7.6 billion nuclear bail-out deal. As a filing with the PSC by a coalition of groups including Physicians for Social Responsibility, Indian Point Safe Energy Coalition, the Council on Intelligent Energy & Conservation Policy, Sierra Club-Lower Hudson Valley, and public officials, states: “There have been constant ongoing closed door negotiations with Entergy and Excelon nuclear reactor owners, discussing ways to protect and subsidize New York State’s nuclear industry….Some sort of deal for Excelon to purchase the FitzPatrick reactor from Entergy was worked out.” The “deal was predicated on the [Public Service] Commission approving the ratepayer subsidies…to bolster Fitzpatrick and the other financially failing nuclear plants in upstate New York.”

The two Indian Point nuclear power plants 26 miles north of New York City—45 miles west of us here today—are not now included in the bail-out plan. Governor Cuomo says he wants to those plants closed citing their danger. But, notes Jessica Azulay of Alliance for a Green Economy, the plan “leaves the door open to subsidies” for them and this would mean “the costs [of the bail-out] will rise to over $10 billion.”

Rickover: “Outlaw Nuclear Reactors”

The bottom line when it comes to nuclear power comes from Admiral Rickover,

considered the “father” of the U.S. nuclear navy as well as being in charge of building Shippingport. When he retired from the Navy in 1982 he addressed a Congressional committee and said—his remarks are included in Cover Up—that until several billion years ago “it was impossible to have any life on Earth; that is, there was so much radiation on Earth you couldn’t have any life—fish or anything. “ Then, “gradually, “the amount of radiation on this planet and probably in the entire system reduced and made it possible for some form of life to begin.”

“Now,” he went on, by utilizing nuclear power “we are creating something which nature tried to destroy to make life possible…every time you produce radiation,” a “horrible force” is unleashed, “in some cases for billions of years.” In other words, nuclear power plants recreate the very radioactive poisons that precluded life from existing. “And,” said Rickover, “I think there the human race is going to wreck itself.”

We must, for the sake of life, Rickover told the Congressional committee, “outlaw nuclear reactors.”

Rickover, deeply involved in nuclear technology, finally saw—as we all must—the light.

Karl Grossman

Professor of Journalism, SUNY/College at Old Westbury and investigative reporter

What’s been called investigative reporting for the past nearly 50 years—a century ago it was called muckraking—is a specific branch of journalism.  It isn’t just answering the questions—who, what, when, where, why and how—but digging deep.

A definition and a good one for investigative reporting, from Paul Williams, author of a basic book on investigative reporting and a founder of the organization Investigative Reporters & Editors, is “to tell how things really work.”

Not how some government official or corporate executive might claim things work but what you, the journalist uncovers through intensive investigation. Truth with a capital T. You then write or air an expose. This sometimes takes the form of a journalistic crusade.

It’s a form of journalism highly compatible with Judaism.

As Isaiah said: “Seek justice, defend the oppressed.”

Investigative reporting fits perfectly with the Jewish tradition of always questioning…and of challenging authority.

It’s a branch of journalism loaded with Jews.

It wasn’t happenstance that Joseph Pulitzer, a Jew from Hungary, was one of the two major publishers in the mainstream press whose papers engaged in muckraking in the Muckraking Era in the United States, between 1900 and 1914.

George Seldes, from a Jewish utopian agricultural community in New Jersey, who lived through most of the 20th century, passing away at 104, is regarded as the father of contemporary independent investigative journalism.

And Seymour Hersh; I.F. Stone; Carl Bernstein; David Halberstam; Fred Friendly (Edward R. Murrow’s investigative partner); Don Hewitt, creator of 60 Minutes, long the leading investigative TV program; Mike Wallace; Daniel Schorr—Schorr wrote, “We Jews are searchers for truth, sometimes called investigative reporting”—Gloria Steinem; Lowell Bergman; Eric Nadler; Bob Simon…

Jill Abramson, with a background in investigative reporting, was the top editor at The New York Times between 2011 and 2014,, the first woman to hold that post, and in it directed The Times to do more investigative reporting.

The list goes on.

The most important work of journalist Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, could be considered investigative journalism. Writing for his newspaper about the Dreyfus affair in France and virulent anti-Semitism there and elsewhere in Europe, the truth became clear to this Hungarian Jew about how things really worked for Jews in Europe. He concluded that Jews must remove themselves from Europe. And his mighty crusade was for Jews to create their own state.

I’ve been at investigative reporting for more than 50 years.

This is a corny store but it’s about how I got into investigative reporting. In college, I got an internship at the Cleveland Press. It was the first newspaper started by E.W. Scripps who was the other major mainstream press figure highly active during the Muckraking Era. Pulitzer and Scripps were special because much of the press of the day—and our day—were compromised like other institutions in society. In the Muckraking Era, the investigative reporting was largely carried out by independent magazines that sprung up.

The culture Scripps created was still very much present at the Cleveland Press. Every few days the paper ran an expose. Scripps wasn’t Jewish but in his views could have been. As he declared: “Whatever is—is wrong.” And must be changed. The title of his autobiography:  I Protest.

Above the entrance to the paper, etched in stone, were a lighthouse and the words: “Give Light and the People Will Find Their Own Way.”

And every day I saw this happening. It was 1960 and the term investigative reporting wasn’t yet used. It came a few years later. But there was a group of reporters at the Cleveland Press who did this. I was a copyboy and working at night, nearly alone in the city room, when there was a phone call advising the paper about some event in Shaker Heights, for example, you passed on a note to the suburban desk. A call about something happening in the city—the note went to the city desk.

But if someone called with a horror story, a tale of injustice, inequity, danger—you gave it to this group of investigative reporters.

And the amazing thing to me, at 18, was seeing how when the information was documented by one of these investigative reporters and published—half the time the situation was resolved.

This was just the neatest thing, I thought, so I headed back east with my girlfriend from Antioch College, the former Janet Kopp of Huntington,  we’ve been married for 56 years, to become an investigative reporter.

My first big story was as a reporter for the Babylon Town Leader—which for decades had opposed various schemes of Babylon resident and public works czar Robert Moses (who otherwise had most of New York media in his pocket). It was 1962 and Moses had just announced he wanted to build a four-lane highway on Fire Island.

I wrote about how the Moses road would devastate the human and natural communities on the fragile 32-mile long barrier beach. The crusade pointed to a Fire Island National Seashore as a way to stop Moses, considering his enormous power in New York State.

It wasn’t just me, but I did my part, and the highway was stopped and the seashore created.

I went to the Long Island Press (my plan was to move up the journalistic ladder to what was my favorite newspaper as a kid in the city, the New York Herald Tribune, but it closed in 1967.)  I was promoted to doing investigative reporting at The Press and my pieces including this beaut: George Semerjian, who’s still around in Southampton, was excavating a square mile of Long Island up in Jamesport claiming he was building a deepwater port. In fact, it was a mammoth sand mine with the sand being barged over to Connecticut to make concrete for highways. I did an expose, received the George Polk Award for it, and most important, this rape of Long Island was stopped.

I investigated, before we moved out to Sag Harbor in the Town of Southampton, the Town of Southampton, revealing, among other things, that if you wanted to turn wetlands into buildable lots for houses, you just needed to hire as your engineer Rudolph Kammerer, otherwise the Suffolk Department of Public Works commissioner, and as your surveyor, Marvin Raynor, otherwise president of the Southampton Town Trustees. And lo and behold, the county Department of Public Works dredge would come, suck up bay bottom and spit it out on the wetlands, now with bulkheading to hold the “fill” that was laid out by Raynor, who also voted for the bulkheading. The county dredge was sold, Raynor resigned.

I broke the story of the oil industry seeking to drill in the Atlantic and traveled from off Nova Scotia, where the first rig was placed, down the U.S. coast—investigating the consequences of spillage.

After The Press ceased publication, I accepted an offer from the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury—established in 1965 with a commitment to social justice and where the first college or university course in Investigative Reporting in the U.S. began—to be a professor and teach it.  I’ve been teaching Investigative Reporting every semester since 1979, and continuing to do it—functionally locally, continuing the column I had at The Press in Long Island weekly papers, and nationally and, indeed, sort of cosmically.

Of my major stories through the years, a big one, has involved the use of nuclear power in space. That started with my learning that the next mission of the ill-fated Challenger space shuttle involved lofting a space probe containing plutonium fuel. With all the debris that ended up over Florida when the Challenger exploded in 1986, consider the impacts if plutonium, the most toxic radioactive substance, was also dispersed. I wrote about accidents that had happened involving nuclear in space and plans for bigger nuclear payloads. My book on this: The Wrong Stuff.

This led me to investigate President Reagan’s Star Wars program which was based on orbiting battle platforms with onboard nuclear power systems providing the energy for hypervelocity guns and laser and particle beam weapons. My book on this: Weapons in Space.

As to nuclear power on Earth, my first book was Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power. Regarding Long Island, for years I investigated the Shoreham nuclear power plant—which was to be the first of seven to 11 nuclear plants on Long Island. My book on this: Power Crazy.  Again, many others were involved—pressing politically, utilizing civil disobedience, among other strategies. But I did my part through investigative journalism. And Shoreham was stopped from operating. The scheme to turn Long Island into, in nuclear establishment parlance of the time, a “nuclear park” was ended.

I’ve also done much investigative reporting on television. For nearly 25 years I’ve hosted the nationally-aired program Enviro Close-Up. I’m the chief investigative reporter for WVVH-TV. TV documentaries I’ve written and presented have included: Three Mile Island Revisited, The Push to Revive Nuclear Power, Renewables Are More Than Ready and Nukes in Space: The Nuclearization and Weaponization of the Heavens.

In recent year, with the arrival of the Internet, I’ve done extensive investigative reporting on websites including CounterPunch, Enformable, The Huffington Post and The Times of Israel.

I write regularly for the Jewish press in the New York area: for the Long Island Jewish World, Manhattan Jewish Sentinel and The Jewish Tribune.

I’m still amazed how the process of investigative reporting works—how the exposure of injustice, inequity, danger works to resolves the situation—about half the time.  And if there is no immediate resolution, you keep at it.  “It is not incumbent on thee to complete the task,” says the Talmud.  But “thou must not…cease from pursuing it.”

The big problem has been getting air or ink considering the dysfunction of much of media. A course I developed at SUNY Old Westbury is Politics of Media.

But the Internet has made a great contribution to investigative reporting—suddenly there is this enormously powerful instrument to, so far freely, communicate information globally.

As to deciding on what I investigate and report on, there are so many horror stories out there I need to handle what I select through a kind of journalistic triage. I focus on stories involving life-threatening issues—one of my books is about toxic chemicals and the close connection between environmental pollution and cancer. I keep investigating nuclear power on land and overhead and how it threatens life. That’s also about what we as Jews hold dearest— l’chayim.to life.

Shabbat sholom.

Presentation at Center for Jewish Life

Chabad

Sag Harbor, New York

Karl Grossman, May 25, 2018

Professor of Journalism, State University of New York/College at Old Westbury

What’s been called investigative reporting for the past nearly 50 years—a little over a century ago it was called muckraking—is a specific branch of journalism.  It isn’t just answering the questions—who, what, when, where, why and how—but digging deep.

A definition and a good one for investigative reporting, from Paul Williams, author of a basic book on investigative reporting and a founder of the organization Investigative Reporters & Editors, is “to tell how things really work.” Not how some government official or corporate executive might claim things work, but what you, the journalist uncovers through intensive investigation. Truth with a capital T. You then write or air an expose. This sometimes takes the form of a journalistic crusade.

It’s a form of journalism highly compatible with Judaism.

As Isaiah said: “Seek justice, defend the oppressed.”

Investigative reporting fits perfectly with the Jewish tradition of always questioning—and of challenging authority. And of Tikkun Olam, repairing the world.

It’s a branch of journalism loaded with Jews.

It wasn’t happenstance that Joseph Pulitzer, a Jew from Hungary, was one of the two major publishers in the mainstream press whose papers engaged in muckraking in the Muckraking Era in the United States, between 1900 and 1914.

George Seldes, from a Jewish utopian agricultural community in New Jersey, who lived through most of the 20th century, passing away at 104, is regarded as the father of contemporary independent investigative journalism.

And Seymour Hersh; I.F. Stone; Carl Bernstein; David Halberstam; Fred Friendly (Edward R. Murrow’s investigative partner) and Daniel Schorr who also worked with Murrow; Don Hewitt, Murrow’s young television director and creator of 60 Minutes, long the leading investigative TV program with, from its outset, Mike Wallace; Frank Rich; Gloria Steinem; Lowell Bergman; Bob Simon; Wolf Blitzer; Jake Tapper; Michael Wolff; Ted Koppel; Jill Abramson, with a background in investigative reporting and last top editor at The New York Times, the first woman to hold that post and in it directing The Times to do more investigative reporting.

As Daniel Schorr, responding in 2003 to the question, “Did being Jewish have anything to do with it?” said: “We Jews are searchers for truth, sometimes called investigative reporting.”

The most important work of journalist Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, could be considered investigative journalism. Writing for his newspaper, Neue Freie Presse, about the Dreyfus affair in France and virulent anti-Semitism there and elsewhere in Europe, the truth became clear to this Hungarian Jew about how things really worked for Jews in Europe. He concluded that Jews must remove themselves from Europe. And his crusade was for Jews to create their own state.

The words of Isaiah ring through investigative journalism.

“If you shall pour yourself out for the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted,” he said, “then shall your light shine in the darkness and your gloom be as the noonday.”

Writing in the Journal of Halacha & Contemporary Society in 2001, Steven Oppenheimer addressed the question, “How should a Jewish newspaper conduct its investigative reporting?…Does Halacha take a position on whether and how stories should be reported in the press?”

In exploring the issue, he explores Talmudic lessons.

These include “The Mitzvah to Admonish.”

“The Talmud explains,” he writes, “that should one see his fellow Jew behaving improperly, he must rebuke him privately, even multiple times….Rambam contends that in matters bein adam laMakom (between man and G-d), after unsuccessful attempts at private coercion, one may publicize and embarrass the individuals until they change their behavior. Sefer hachinuCH (mitzvah 240) concludes that one is required to do this.”

He continues, “If you are aware that someone is sinning against someone else, you are permitted to publicize the offense and embarrass the individual if there is no other way to stop the offensive behavior.”

“The requirement to give rebuke applies to spiritual as well as mundane matters. Therefore, if you see someone mistreating, exploiting or stealing from another individual, you must, if you are able, rebuke the perpetrator and prevent him from committing this transgression.”

“While it is now clear that some action must be taken, can a newspaper publicize the inappropriate actions of an individual or an organization?” asks Oppenheimer. “There are times when the Torah commands us to take public action to warn against and prevent certain behavior.”

Referring to Ramban, he writes: “A person is required to provide for his children. Should be refuse, he is pressured, scolded and embarrassed. If this is not effective, a public announcement is made that this person is cruel and despicable.”

“In previous times,” notes Oppenheimer, “when people lived in small towns and newspapers were not accessible, the public embarrassment might have taken the form of an announcement from the pulpit. Today, newspapers are readily accessible….”

Still, there need to be “Halachic Guidelines.”

These include making “sure that the information is accurate” and “the nature of the offense should not be exaggerated,” Further, “The motivation in writing a story should be to to pursue the truth and to assist those in need of help. The intention should never be to harm anyone,” “Should the subject of the investigative story suffer harm greater than he deserves, it is forbidden to publish the story in such a way that the damage would not be reversible,” and “Even if all the above requirements have been met, prior to publicizing the information, the reporter must carefully review his motives and intentions since peoples’ lives and reputations are at stake.”

“The Talmud tells us that we should expose the hypocrites, i.e. those people who pretend to be righteous. Otherwise, people might emulate such an individual, believing his flawed behavior to be proper.”

“Rabbeinu Yonah writes that it is a mitzvah to publicize the misconduct of habitual offenders to that people will be revolved when they hear of the miscreants’ misconduct.”

As for Jews challenging authority, as Professor Jerome Groopman of Harvard commented in the Jewish journal Moment in an article in 2011 titled “What does it mean to be a Jew today? What do Jews bring to the world today?”—“One of the wonderful legacies of Jewish thought is challenging authority and doubting….You don’t accept things at face value and you demand a great deal of yourself regarding the validity of knowledge.”

Tikkun Olam goes back far in Judaism and with kabbalistic literature broadening the use of the term to the concept now that Jews bear responsibility not only for their own moral, spiritual and material welfare, but also for the welfare of society at large.

Demonstrations of how investigative journalism is placed in respect in Judaism is the creation of The Jewish Week Investigative Journalism Fund in 2012 to, as The Jewish Week says on its website,

“tell the truth about the community, to the community, for the community….We believe that accountability and transparency are at the roots of progress.” And there is the Daniel Pearl Investigative Journalism Initiative to, as the website of its sponsor, Moment, states, “provide for independent journalists to conduct in-depth reporting on difficult subjects.” The initiative is named, of course, for the Jewish journalists killed by terrorists.

I’ve been at investigative reporting for more than 50 years.

This is a corny store but it’s about how I got into investigative reporting. At Antioch College in Ohio, I got internship at the Cleveland Press. It was the first newspaper started by E.W. Scripps who was the other major mainstream press figure highly active during the Muckraking Era.

Pulitzer and Scripps were special because much of the press of the day—and our day—were compromised like other institutions in society. In the Muckraking Era, the investigative reporting was largely carried out by independent magazines that sprung up.

The culture Scripps created at the turn-of-the-century was still very much present at the Cleveland Press when I worked there in 1960.

Every few days the paper ran an expose. Scripps wasn’t Jewish but in his views could have been. As Scripps declared: “Whatever is—is wrong.” And must, he said, be changed. The title of his autobiography:  I Protest.

Above the entrance to the Cleveland Press, etched in stone, were a lighthouse and the words: “Give Light and the People Will Find Their Own Way.”

And I constantly saw this process, this dynamic happening. The term investigative reporting wasn’t yet used. It came a few years later. But there was a group of reporters at the Cleveland Press who did this. I was a copyboy and, working at night, nearly alone in the city room, when there was a phone call advising the paper about some event in Shaker Heights, for example, you passed on a note to the suburban desk. A call about something happening in the city—the note went to the city desk.

But if someone called with a horror story, a tale of injustice, inequity, danger—you gave it to this group of investigative reporters.

And the amazing thing to me, an 18-year-old kid from Brooklyn and Queens, was seeing how when the information was documented by one of these investigative reporters and published—half the time the situation was resolved.

This was just the neatest thing, I thought, so I headed back east with my girlfriend from Antioch College, the former Janet Kopp of Huntington, we’ve been married for 57 years as of last week, to become an investigative reporter.

My first big story was as a reporter for the Babylon Town Leader—which for decades had opposed various schemes of Babylon resident and public works czar Robert Moses (who otherwise had most of New York media in his pocket). It was 1962 and Moses had just announced he wanted to build a four-lane highway on nearby Fire Island.

I wrote about how the Moses road would devastate the human and natural communities on the fragile 32-mile long barrier beach. The crusade pointed to a Fire Island National Seashore as a way to stop Moses, considering his enormous power in New York State.

It wasn’t just me, but I did my part, and the highway was stopped and the seashore created.

I went to the Long Island Press (my plan was to move up the journalistic ladder to what was my favorite newspaper as a kid in the city, the New York Herald Tribune, but it closed in 1967).  I was promoted to doing investigative reporting at The Press and my pieces including this beaut: George Semerjian of Southampton (who not long ago died) was excavating a square mile of Long Island up in Jamesport claiming he was building a “deepwater port.” In fact, it was a mammoth sand mine with the sand being barged over to Connecticut to make concrete for highways. I did an expose, received the George Polk Award for it, and most important, this rape of Long Island was stopped.

I investigated, before we moved out to Sag Harbor in the Town of Southampton, the Town of Southampton, revealing, among other things, that here if you wanted to turn wetlands into buildable lots for houses, you just needed to hire as your engineer Rudolph Kammerer of Westhampton Beach, otherwise the Suffolk Department of Public Works commissioner, and as your surveyor, Marvin Raynor of Quogue, otherwise president of the Southampton Town Trustees which since Colonial times had jurisdiction over the Southampton Town waterfront.

And lo and behold, the county Department of Public Works dredge would come, suck up bay bottom and spit it out on the wetlands, now with bulkheading to hold the “fill” that was laid out by Raynor, who also voted for the bulkheading. The county dredge was sold, Raynor resigned.

I broke the story of the oil industry seeking to drill in the Atlantic and traveled to off Nova Scotia, where the first rig was placed, down the U.S. coast—investigating the consequences of spillage in off-shore oil drilling.

After The Press ceased publication, I accepted an offer from the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury—established in 1965 with a commitment to social justice and where the first college or university course in Investigative Reporting in the U.S. reputedly began—to be a professor and teach it.  I’ve been teaching Investigative Reporting every semester since 1979, and continuing to do it—functionally locally, continuing the column I had at The Press in Long Island weekly papers and now in LI news websites—and nationally and, indeed, sort of cosmically.

Of my major stories through the years, a big one, has involved the use of nuclear power in space. That started with my learning that the next mission of the ill-fated Challenger space shuttle involved lofting a space probe containing plutonium fuel. With all the debris that ended up over Florida when the Challenger exploded in 1986, consider the impacts if plutonium, the most toxic radioactive substance, was also dispersed. I wrote about accidents that had happened involving nuclear in space and plans for bigger nuclear payloads. My book on this: The Wrong Stuff.

This led me to investigate President Reagan’s Star Wars program which was based on orbiting battle platforms with onboard nuclear power systems providing the energy for hypervelocity guns and laser and particle beam weapons. My book on this: Weapons in Space.

As to nuclear power on Earth, my first book was Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power. Regarding Long Island, for years I investigated the Shoreham nuclear power plant—which was to be the first of seven to 11 nuclear plants on Long Island. My book on this: Power Crazy. Again, many others were involved—pressing politically, utilizing civil disobedience, among other strategies.

But I did my part through investigative journalism. And Shoreham was stopped from operating. The scheme to turn Long Island into, in nuclear establishment parlance of the time, a “nuclear park” was ended.

I’ve also done much investigative reporting on television. For more than 25 years I’ve hosted the nationally-aired program Enviro Close-Up.

I’ve been the chief investigative reporter for WVVH-TV here on Long Island.

TV documentaries I’ve written and presented have included: Three Mile Island Revisited, The Push to Revive Nuclear Power, Renewables Are More Than Ready and Nukes in Space: The Nuclearization and Weaponization of the Heavens.

In recent year, with the arrival of the Internet, I’ve done extensive investigative reporting on websites including CounterPunch, Enformable, NationofChange, OpEd News, Common Dreams, The Ecologist, Huff Post, Truthout and The Times of Israel.

I write regularly for the Jewish press in the New York area: for the Long Island Jewish World, Manhattan Jewish Sentinel and The Jewish Tribune.

I’m still amazed how the process of investigative reporting works—how the exposure of injustice, inequity, danger works to resolves the situation—about half the time.  And if there is no immediate resolution, you keep at it.  “It is not incumbent on thee to complete the task,” says the Talmud.  But “thou must not…cease from pursuing it.”

The big problem has been getting air or ink considering the dysfunction of much of media. A course I developed at SUNY Old Westbury is Politics of Media.

But the Internet has made a great contribution to investigative reporting—suddenly there is this enormously powerful instrument to, so far freely, communicate information globally.

As to deciding on what I investigate and report on, there are so many horror stories out there I need to handle what I select through a kind of journalistic triage. I focus on stories involving life-threatening issues—one of my books is about toxic chemicals and the close connection between environmental pollution and cancer. I keep investigating nuclear power on land and overhead and how it threatens life. That’s also about what we as Jews hold dearest— l’chayim.to life.

Shabbat shalom.

Keynote Address

Karl Grossman

Professor, State University of New York/College at Old Westbury

Russian-American Women’s Leadership And Nuclear Safety Activism

Exchange of the Initiative for Social Action and Renewal in Eurasia

Tomsk, Siberia, May 24, 2002

We—the people of the United States and you, the people of Russia—live in parallel atomic universes. Our nuclear establishments rose from similar roots: the development of atomic bombs.

They continued and expanded for the same reason: to perpetuate themselves mainly. In the United States an additional interest was greed, money to be made through capitalism. In the former Soviet Union, an additional motive was communism’s worshipful commitment to technology.

As the 1958 book Atom For Peace of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences stated: “Atomic energy is a powerful tool of technical progress. The speediest and fullest utilization of this new source of power is thus in the interests of humanity.”

“Atomics, like science and technology in general, finds its natural home in socialism, which alone makes possible social planning, and, therefore, the use of productive forces for the benefit of the people,” declared the Marxist analyis Atomic Energy and Society published by International Publishers.

But whether atomic technology was developed under U.S.-style capitalism or Soviet communism, the end result was the same: nuclear pollution destroying life and contaminating the environment in both our nations.

In the United States, atomic technology began with a letter to our president in 1939, Franklin D. Roosevelt, from Albert Einstein—written in Peconic on Long Island, New York. (I live 15 kilometers away.)

In late 1938 fission was accomplished in Nazi Germany. Physicists Leo Szilard and Edward Teller, like Einstein refugees from the Nazis, fearing Hitler might develop a bomb based on the energy unleashed by fission, with others asked Einstein to write the letter. Einstein wrote to the president about information that “leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future,” how “it may be possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium” and of “this new phenomenon” leading “to the construction of bombs…extremely powerful bombs of a new type.”

Out of that letter came the Manhattan Project run by the U.S. Army. Scientists and engineers were gathered and put to work at facilities secretly built at locations across the U.S. The biggest were laboratories and manufacturing plants in Los Alamos, New Mexico; Hanford, Washington; Argonne, Illinois; and Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Large corporations and universities were retained to manage the facilities. Indeed, Einstein’s letter had suggested that “government departments” join with “university laboratories” and “industrial laboratories” for this crash program to beat the Nazis to nuclear weapons.

General Electric and Westinghouse—which were to become the Coke and Pepsi in the U.S. manufacture of nuclear power plants—got their start in atomic technology as Manhattan Project contractors.

By 1945 four atomic bombs had been built, one used for a test and two dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.

Also by 1945, 600,000 people had become part of a program on which two billion dollars, in 1940’s dollars, had been spent. The Manhattan Project had become a major part of the U.S. economy.

With the war’s end there was anxiety among many of those involved in the Manhattan Project. Many of the scientists and government officials didn’t want to see the endeavor and their jobs over; corporations didn’t want to see their contracts ended.

As James Kunetka writes in his book City of Fire about Los Alamos Laboratory, with the war over there were now problems of”job placement, work continuity…more free time than work…hardly enough to keep everyone busy…without a crash program underway.”

Some of the people and corporations could continue building nuclear weapons, and they did. And they built even bigger bombs—the “super,” the hydrogen bomb, Teller’s project. Nuclear weapons do not lend themselves to commercial spinoff. What else could be done with atomic technology to perpetuate the nuclear establishment that rose with the Manhattan Project? In the first nuclear reactors, built at Hanford to turn uranium-238 into plutonium-239, fissionable atomic bomb fuel, lay a clue for commercial use of atomic technology: use the heat caused by fission to boil water to turn a turbine and generate electricity.

There were other schemes: using nuclear devices as substitutes for TNT to blast huge holes in the ground. Indeed, the U.S. in the 1950s planned to string 250 nuclear devices across the isthmus of Panama to create a new canal—dubbed the Panatomic Canal. If would, though, rain radioactive debris on a large section of Central America. Finally, what the Manhattan Project became in 1946, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, withdrew the project because of “prospective host country opposition to nuclear-canal excavation.”

There was even a scheme to close the Straits of Gibraltar with nuclear devices. The Mediterranean would then rise and desalinate so its waters could be used to irrigate the Sahara Desert. Atomic scientist Glenn Seaborg who went on to become AEC chairman acknowledged that “of course, the advances of a verdant Sahara would have to be weighed against the loss of Venice and other sea level cities.”

There were plans, too, to use nuclear technology to radiation-expose food to extend shelf life, to build nuclear-powered airplanes and nuclear-powered rockets.

The nuclear establishments in my country and here pushed on and on and on…

In the U.S.S.R., it was a letter sent by physicist Georgii Flerov to Joseph Stalin in 1942 that, as the book Red Atom: Russia’s Nuclear Power Program from Stalin to Today relates, began your atomic program. “In the same way Albert Einstein’s letter to President Franklin Roosevelt gave impetus to the Manhattan project, Flerov’s letter convinced Stalin to pursue an atomic bomb,” notes Paul R. Josephson.

Out of that letter came your nuclear establishment. You know better than I of its devastating costs, costs that parallel the price we in America have paid in lives lost, parts of our nation left horribly polluted.

As Josephson states in Red Atom: “The physicists desired energy ‘too cheap to meter’ through power-generating reactors. They sought new ways to produce nuclear fuel—plutonium—cheaply through liquid metal fast breeder reactors…They built small nuclear engines intended to power locomotives, rockets, airplanes, and portable power plants…They sterilized various food products with low-level gamma radiation to prevent spoilage and increase shelf life. They pioneered the so-called tokamak reactor in pursuit of fusion power. And they used ‘peaceful nuclear explosions’ for various mining, excavation, and construction purposes. Nuclear technology was at the center of visions of a radiant communist future.”

He continues, “whether nuclear reactors or food irradiation programs, small nuclear engines or factories spitting out…liquid sodium or isotope separation equipment, each of these technologies developed significant momentum. As if divorced from human control, the programs expanded.” Just like in the U.S.

In 1954, in a race with the United States, the first Soviet reactor to produce electricity, Obninsk, started up—despite what Josephson says were problems causing the reactor to be “unstable and in need of constant attention.”

The first commercial nuclear plant in the U.S., Shippingport in Pennsyvlania, started up in 1957. It was built by the U.S. government under the direction of Admiral Hyman Rickover, the “father” of our nuclear navy. The private utilities in the U.S. were reluctant to build atomic power plants, fearing their exposure, their liability in the event of an accident. With the opening of Shippingport, Lewis Straus, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, declared that “it is the commission’s policy to give industry the first opportunity to undertake the construction of power reactors. However, if industry does not, within a reasonable time, undertake to build types of reactors which are considered promising, the commission will take steps to build the reactors on its own initiative.”

This was the stick to compel the U.S. utility industry to build nuclear plants. The carrot was the Price-Anderson Act, a law passed in 1957, supposedly as a temporary measure to encourage a nuclear industry to start, which severely limited liability in the event of a catastrophic accident. But the Price-Anderson Act continues to this day, indeed the U.S. Congress recently voted to extend it another 15 years. Meanwhile, also in 1957, the first U.S. report on the consequences of a nuclear accident was released. The AEC’s WASH-740 report projected the potential impacts as 3,400 killed, 43,000 injured and $7 billion in property damage.

That, however, was based on a nuclear plant with a fifth the power of those that actually were built in the 1960s and 70s. In 1982, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the successor agency of the AEC, issued a report reflecting the increased power. This analysis, Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences, projected consequences such as, for the Indian Point 2 and 3 nuclear plants 28 miles north of New York City—over which, might I note, one of the jets that crashed into the World Trade Center September 11 flew—46,000 “early fatalities” if Indian Point 2 underwent a meltdown with breach of containment; 50,000 “early fatalities” from a meltdown at Indian Point 3. Peak “early injuries” from 2: 141,000. From 3, 167,000. Cancer deaths, 13,000 from 2; 14,000 from 3. And as to property damage, the study estimated $274 billion—in 1980 dollars—as a result of a meltdown at 2; $314 billion as a result of a meltdown at 3.

Another important U.S. government admission, on the “likelihood of a severe core melt” accident, came in 1985: “In a population of 100 reactors operating over a period of 20 years, the crude cumulative probability of such an accident would be 45%,” said the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Your nuclear whistle-blower Lydia Popova has written how “the Soviet nuclear industry began with the creation of deadly weapons in secret cities and secret laboratories.” Your counterpart to our governmental nuclear regulatory agencies, the Ministry of Atomic Power, as Popova states, “acquired the privileges of the [nuclear] weapons program—including its secrecy and totalfinancial dependence on the taxpayer. Its commitment was to serve the interests of the industry and a select group of nuclear specialists at the expense of ordinary people.”

We had our Three Mile Island accident about which our nuclear establishment is still in denial. A TV documentary I’ve done is called Three Mile Island Revisited in which it is revealed that despite the claim of our nuclear establishment that “no one died” as a result of the TMI accident, the owner of the plant has quietly been giving cash settlements to people who suffered impacts including the loss of loved ones.

Here Chernobyl brought horrific devastation and as Popova has written, your nuclear establishment is also “unrepentant,” seeking to have Chernobyl “forgotten.”

And both Russian and U.S. governments are now pushing for a “revival” of nuclear power — many more nuclear power plants in both nations. As one official in the U.S. process, Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, has said: “If you set aside Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the safety record of nuclear power really is good.” Really.

Your government would establish Russia as a repository for much of the world’s nuclear waste. My government is now moving to dump U.S. nuclear wastes in Yucca Mountain which is on or near 32 earthquake faults and is 100 miles from Las Vegas. Speaking of a big gamble.

In their 1992 book Ecocide in the USSR, Murray Feshback and Alfred Friendly, Jr. wrote: “When historians finally conduct an autopsy on the Soviet Union and Soviet Communism, they may reach the verdict of death by ecocide…No other great industrial civilization so systematically and so long poisoned its land, air, water and people. None so loudly proclaiming its efforts to improve public health and protect nature so degraded both. And no advanced society faced such a bleak political and economic reckoning with so few resources to invest toward recovery.”

They write about how the Soviet Union endangered “the health of its population—especially its children and its labor force—the productivity of its soil and the purity of its air and water.

Ten years later, the people of Russia are examining alternative systems. There are those in my country who would sell you on our system. Capitalism, they say, is the answer.

Life, I say, is the answer. To life, to the preservation of life—that is what a nation should aspire.

In my country, cancer is now epidemic. Nearly one in every two Americans is expected to get cancer. And analysis after analysis has attributed a majority of cancer cases to environmental pollution: the toxic soup of air pollution, water pollution, the impacts of dangerous chemicals and radiation.

As a Presidential Toxic Substances Strategy Committee reported: “Environmental factors…are significant in the great majority of cancer cases seen.”

As the First Annual Report to Congress by the Task Force on Environmental Cancer and Heart and Lung Disease stated: “The environment we have created may now be a major cause of death in the United States.’

Rachel Carson whose 1962 book Silent Spring sparked the modern environmental movement in the U.S. spoke of a “barrage” of toxics “hurled against the fabric of life” and causing widespread death. That barrage continues.

The government is of little use in protecting its citizens.

That’s the way it has always been.

Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, a physician known as the “father” in the U.S. of pure food regulation (there’s even a U.S. postage stamp bearing his likeness), came to Washington, D.C. in 1883 to become chief chemist of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The U.S. was changing—from a rural to an industrial society—and dangerous chemicals had begun to be put into processed food. These chemicals, Dr. Wiley determined, were “real threats to health.” So he formed Dr. Wiley’s “Poison Squad,” a group of Department of Agriculture volunteers who under the gaze of the press ate doses of chemicals being used to color and preserve and otherwise treat food, to show their negative effects on human beings.

The populace became alerted and alarmed by Dr. Wiley’s campaign and the publication of the book, The Jungle, by crusading writer Upton Sinclair, about the filthy, unhealthy way meat was beginning to be processed in the U.S. And there was citizen action led by an early consumer group, the National Consumer League.

This led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906. It could be regarded as the first environmental law in the U.S.

But passage of laws and their implementation are two different things.

Government inspectors did not enter food processing plants—unless allowed to do so by plant management. Penalties were light. Pesticides, including those containing poisons like arsenic, had come into use, but attempts to deal with pesticides under the law were beaten back by industry. In 1912, as a matter of conscience, Dr. Wiley resigned from U.S. government service. He decided he would be able to more effectively fight against poisons in food outside of government.

He wrote a book: The History of a Crime Against the Food Law. In it, he stated: “There is a distinct tendency to put regulation and rules for the enforcement of the law into the hands of industries engaged in food and drug activities. I consider this one of the most pernicious threats to pure food and drugs. Business is making rapid strides in the control of all our affairs….It is never advisable to surrender entirely food and drug control to business interests.” The Pure Food and Drugs Act had been “perverted,” Dr. Wiley declared.

This conflict, this dialectic—between efforts to protect the health of people from poison put into the environment and the power of those who do the poisoning—continues in my country. The big difference is that in recent decades the poisoning, the pollution has become far more severe. And the toll in illness and death, especially from cancer, has become more and more intense in the U.S.

As for U.S. government regulation of atomic power, forget it. Neither the Atomic Energy Commission or Nuclear Regulatory Commission ever denied an application to construct or operate a nuclear power plant anywhere, anytime in the U.S. Our regulatory agencies have been lapdogs not watchdogs.

One thing I have learned clearly in being an environmental journalist for more than 35 years is that virtually all polluting processes and products are unneeded. They can be replaced—indeed, many have been and are—by clean, unpolluting, safe, sustainable processes and products. The threat to peoples’ lives, the environmental destruction is unnecessary.

A classic example: PCBs, polychlorinated biphenyls. The U.S. company Monsanto started churning out PCBs in 1929 producing 85 million pounds of the stuff by the 1960s, after it had become obvious that PCBs impact on health, were carcinogenic.

PCBs main use: insulating fluid in electric components such as capacitors and transformers. Insisted Monsanto in a press release in 1970 as it tried to prevent the U.S. from following Japan which in 1968 banned PCBs after rice oil became contaminated withPCBs and poisoned a thousand people, several fatally: “There are no substitutes available.” Monsanto insisted that PCBs have an “irreplaceable role” for industrial society.

Well production of PCBs in the U.S. was banned the following year. Industrial society in the U.S. has continued. What has been the major substitute for PCBs? Not an exotic substance at all but mineral oil.

In fact, whether it is production of electricity with cancer-causing, lethally dangerous nuclear power—for which solar, wind, geothermal, appropriate hydropower and a host of sustainable, safe alternatives can substitute—to agriculture with toxic, synthetic chemicals which increasingly is being shown to be counter-productive and highly expensive compared to organic farming, to the replacement of ozone-damaging chloroflourocarbons in spray cans, safe alternatives, substitutes in harmony with nature are here today. The central problem: the vested interests that gain from polluting processes and products.

Those on the left in my country like to point to big business, giant corporations as the cause of environmental destruction. Under capitalism, they say, the bottom line is profit. So what if people die and pieces of the planet are destroyed in the process? And the left is not incorrect.

On the other hand, look at the mess at virtually all the U.S. government-owned national nuclear laboratories in the U.S.—including Los Alamos and Oak Ridge.

No matter what the system—and we all have our preferences—whether it be the “market economy”/capitalism or socialism or communism (or nudism), foremost is that we must be ecocentric. Life first.

Life, and not to be anthropomorphic, all life, must come first!

What’s to be done? Democracy; transparency; independent, honest science; independent, honest epidemiology—desperately needed. In the U.S., we must end the current system of accommodating pollution. We must say “no” to death by contamination. We must eliminate bad environmental actors—and substitute processes and products in harmony with nature, with life. We must prosecute criminally those who cause injury and death by pollution. In the words of an American singer, U. Utah Phillips: “The earth is not dying, it is being killed. And those who are killing her have names and addresses.”

Fundamental change is needed.

Citizen activism is critical. We must engage politically. We must organize, agitate and creatively litigate.

We must prohibit media ownership by corporate environmental wrongdoers. Nuclear plant manufacturer and corporate outlaw General Electric today owns the NBC, MSNBC and CNBC TV networks. GE should be watchdogged by the press, not own the press. A media that challenges power, that honestly and properly informs the public, is crucial. Conveying the information through the educational system, too, is vital.

Above all: democracy! Let an informed public make the decisions. They are far too important to be left to corporate executives and scientists and government bureaucrats.

Admiral Hyman Rickover, in the end, regretted what he had done. In a farewell address before a committee of the U.S. Congress in 1982 he said: “I’ll be philosophical. Until about two billion years ago, it was impossible to have any life on earth; that is, there was so much radiation on earth you couldn’t have any life—fish or anything. Gradually, about two billion years ago, the amount of radiation on this planet and probably in the entire system reduced and made it possible for some form of life to begin…Now when we go back to using nuclear power, we are creating something which nature tried to destroy to make life possible…Everytime you produce radiation, you produce something that has life, in some cases for billions of years, and I think there the human race is going to wreck itself, and it’s far more important that we get control of this horrible force and try to eliiminate it. I do not believe that nuclear power is worth it if it creates radiation.” The man who built America’s first commercial nuclear power plant, recommended that “we outlaw nuclear reactors.”

Indeed, we must shut down every nuclear plant.

This is my fourth visit to Russia in four years. I have been working with the Center for Russian Environmental Policy and its leaders, Alexey Yablokov and Vladimir Zakharov. I have been impressed by the Center’s calls for the adoption of the precautionary principle here, the “greening of the economy,” establishing “an integrated system to assess human health and environmental health,” the stress on the paramount importance of health and development of clean, safe alternative energy sources.

I attended the Second Annual All-Russia Congress on Nature Conservation. There I heard Dr. Tamara Zltonikova of the State Duma declare: “To protect the environment is to protect life on Earth.” And I heard speaker after speaker—from all walks of life—espouse the kind of wisdom for which people here are known.

Sixty years ago, we of the United States of America and you of Russia were allies in the Great Patriotic War, what we call World War II, against forces that would destroy life. As during the Great Patriotic War, we and you again face the same enemies—forces that would destroy life.

Some of our experiences in the U.S. —our environmental successes (we do have a wonderful national park system) and our failures—might be helpful to you. We and you are again pitted against a common foe. We much achieve victory, both of us, to survive—for life to survive. There is a way: a wise, life-affirming, eco-centric, green way.

Spaceeba.

***

Karl Grossman is professor of journalism at the State University of New York who for more than 35 years has pioneered the combining of investigative reporting and environmental journalism in a variety of media. He coordinates the Media & Communications Program at the State University of New York’s College at Old Westbury. A special concentration is nuclear technology. Among the six books he has authored aPower Crazy; The Wrong Stuff: The Space Program’s Nuclear Threat To Our Planet; and Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed To Know About Nuclear Power.

He has given speeches on nuclear technology and other energy and environmental issues around the world. He gave presentations at the Center for Russian Environmental Policy’s International Conference on “Toward a Sustainable Russia: Environmental Policy” in Voronezh in 1998, at the Second All-Russia Congress on Protection of Nature in Saratov in 1999, and in 2000 at the conference on “Health of the Environment” at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

He has long been active in television and is program director and vice president of EnviroVideo, a New York-based TV company that produces environmental documentaries and interview and news programs. He narrated and wrote EnviroVideo’s award-winning documentaries The Push To Revive Nuclear Power; Nukes In Space: The Nuclearization and Weaponization of the Heavens and Three Mile Island Revisited. He is now in the process of putting together an EnviroVideo documentary on the great strides in safe, clean, renewable energy technologies and how they are ready to be implemented. His EnviroVideo TV programs are aired across the U.S. on cable TV and via communications satellite by Free Speech TV.

His magazine and newspaper articles have appeared in numerous publications. He is a member of the board of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service-WISE Amsterdam. He is secretary of the board of the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting. He is a charter member of the Commission on Disarmament Education, Conflict Resolution and Peace of the International Association of University Presidents and the United Nations. He can be reached by email. His home address is: Box 1680, Sag Harbor, New York, USA, 11963.

Karl Grossman

Professor SUNY College at Old Westbury

Presentation at SUNY College at New Paltz

October 21, 2010

Energy we can live with. Yes. It’s here, it can sustain us, it can allow us to thrive—without life-threatening power.

But getting from here to there will not be easy. It will take individual and group action because the energy deck is stacked—from pressure especially from the oil, coal and nuclear industries.

Let me make some remarks—and then let’s have a discussion with you saying what you think we can do to implement safe, renewable energy technologies.

They are here today. As this magazine, the respect British journal New Scientist declared in a special issue not long ago, “The UN says the renewable energy that can already be harnessed economically would supply the world’s electricity needs 15 times over.” Clean renewable power technologies can be employed to “achieve a colossal environmental win…It’s time we…got on with making it a reality.”

New Scientist goes on to present details on solar power, wind energy, tide-power, geothermal energy and other technologies that are here today.

It declares: “A world run on renewables is no longer a hippy’s fuzzy green dream. “It’s time, it says, we “make it a reality.”

But we don’t live in the fairest of energy worlds.

Take oil. Do you remember—just two years ago—when the price of gasoline was skyrocketing: to $4 and $4.25 and $4.50 a gallon and more.

The oil companies were claiming the fault was China and India going car-crazy and guzzling up gas, problems in the Middle East, then it was refinery capacity, and all along—if the ban on drilling in areas on the continental shelf offshore was only lifted, everything would be different.

Meanwhile, filling up a car, at 40 or 50 bucks a shot, was hurting people badly, impacting an already bad economy. And the oil companies were raking in record profits—billions upon billions of dollars.

People were getting angrier and angrier thinking some kind of price-rigging was going on. You think?

Then, suddenly, the price of gas went down. And ever since it’s been down to about $3 a gallon. That’s the price I just paid on the Thruway coming here. The price of a barrel of crude has dived—from a high of $145 two years back to half that.

Yet people are still car-crazy in China and India, problems continue in the Middle East, no new refineries have been built, and after the mammoth oil spill in Gulf of Mexico, restrictions on offshore oil drilling have been expanded.

Do you think the oil industry is manipulating the market, grabbing our money to make windfall profits when it can, and is deep in deception?

I’ve thought so for years.

Let me tell a story—of how decades ago I broke the story of the oil industry exploring in the Atlantic—and received my first lesson in oil industry honesty, an oxymoron.

I was a reporter for the daily Long Island Press and got a tip from a fisherman out of Montauk who said he had seen the same sort of vessel as the boats he observed searching for oil when he was a shrimper in the 1940s in the Gulf of Mexico. I spent the day telephoning oil company after oil company. Public relations people for each said, no, we’re not involved in looking for oil in the Atlantic. In the Atlantic? they scoffed.

I was leaving the office when there was a call that a PR guy from Gulf was on the phone. He said he checked and, yes, Gulf was involved in searching for oil in the Atlantic—in a “consortium” of 32 oil companies. These included the companies that all day issued flat denials.

As to oil spillage at offshore rig, I worked the Atlantic offshore oil drilling story for years which included visiting the first rig set up—off Nova Scotia. Offshore drilling is dangerous in the Atlantic or the Gulf or anywhere. My article began: “The rescue boat goes round and round…as the man from Shell concedes, ‘We treat every foot of hole like a potential disaster.’” On the rig were capsules to eject crew members in an accident. I wrote, “Workers may all be kept in one piece, but erupting oil won’t, the man from Shell admits.” He acknowledges that “booms and other devices the oil industry flashes in its advertising ‘just don’t work in over five-foot seas.’” So, he says, there are “stockpiles of clean-up material on shore. Not straw as in the States,” he says. “Here we have peat moss.”

I found spills in offshore drilling and consequent damage to fisheries and other life as chronic—although we’re not supposed to know that. We’re to believe the Gulf disaster was an isolated incident. In fact, it’s drill, baby, spill.

Might I recommend a very well-researched recent book, The Tyranny of Oil: The World’s Most Powerful Industry—and What We Must To Do Stop It by Antonia Juhasz.

She writes: “The masters of the oil industry, the companies known as ‘Big Oil,’ exercise their influence…through rapidly and ever-increasing oil and gasoline prices, a lack of viable alternatives, the erosion of democracy, environmental destruction, global warming, violence, and war.”

She cites a Gallup poll on “public perceptions of U.S. industry” and reports the oil industry “earned the lowest rating of any industry.” Americans are on to the oil industry—and they need to do a lot about it! And it’s not just Big Oil.

When it comes to energy, it’s Big Oil and Big Coal and Big Nuclear which manipulate U.S. policy, says S. David Freeman, and he should know.

Freedman headed the New York Power Authority and also the Tennessee Valley Authority and authored the book Winning Our Energy Independence: An Energy Insider Shows How.

Freeman calls oil, coal and nuclear “The Three Poisons.” And he stresses that we don’t need any of these poisons.

He declares that the solar power that could be harnessed on 1 percent of the land in the U.S. “could generate electricity that, if converted to hydrogen, could completely replace gasoline,” that “our vast solar and wind potential…could meet all our energy needs, from driving our motor vehicles to heating our homes and other uses now being supplied by coal, nuclear, oil…We would have our renewable energy when, where, and however we liked it.”

There’s a windfall at hand of safe, renewable, clean energy—if only it would be fully pursued. But there are industrial interests working with their partners in the U.S. government, who fight that.

These renewable energy technologies—are energy that we can live with, energy that can unhook us from oil, coal and nuclear. But those industries don’t like that possibility.

Consider hot dry rock geothermal energy. It turns out that below half the earth, two to six miles down, it’s extremely hot. When naturally flowing water hits those hot rocks and has a place to come up, you get geysers like in California or Iceland. But also water can be sent down an injection pipe to hit the hot dry rock below and rise up second production pipe as super-heated water that can turn a turbine and generate electricity or furnish heat.

Scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory built a model hot dry rock facility at Fenton Hill and showed that the technology can work.

Here’s a television piece I did: (A THREE-MINUTE ENVIROVIDEO TV NEWS PIECE ON HOT DRY ROCK GEOTHERMAL IS SHOWN.)

That was some statement from Dave Duchane, a respected, careful scientist, that “hot dry rock is has an almost unlimited potential to supply all the energy needs of the United States and all the world.”

The New York Times said about hot dry rock geothermal: “The estimated energy potential of hot dry rock nationwide is 10 million quads…more energy than this country uses in thousands of years.”

So what happened?

A request for proposal—an RFP—was prepared by Los Alamos inviting industry to take over the Fenton Hill facility that you just saw and “produce and market energy” from it. But on its way to Washington, the RFP was cancelled by the Department of Energy under pressure, I’ve been told, by conventional energy industries. And the Fenton Hill facility has been decommissioned. And now there are claims being made that hot dry rock geothermal might be great but the initial drilling could cause earth tremors. The hot dry rock scientists say if that happens the tremors cease pretty quickly. But the technology is to a large degree stalled.

What do we do?

Some things can be done individually. The sun shines on where I live on Long Island, and up here and all over New York State, indeed throughout the U.S. and the world. As Sharp, a major manufacturer of solar panels, says: the sun is the answer.

Last year, my wife and I had solar photovoltaic panels installed on the roof of our house. And now, most of the time, our electric meter spins backwards. The panels on the roof are not only supplying all the electricity we use but excess is sent back into the grid, for which we are paid. Our electric bill is now $5 a month, the minimum charge for the meter reader to come.

Meanwhile, the price of solar photovoltaic panels has been dropping fast and their efficiencies rising. SunPower Corp. of California this year announced new panels with a remarkable 24.2 percent efficiency—the rating NASA’s solar panels have in converting sunlight to electricity.

Also, we not only now have solar panels to generate electricity but thermal panels to heat water. And it is just amazing to see, in the middle of last winter, a cold winter, the water coming down from the roof at 100 and 120 days—on frigid days.

Technology can be very good.

Solar is also a key to generating an optimum fuel—hydrogen—for locomotion. As Lester Brown, founder of Worldwatch Institute says in his book, EcoEconomy: Building an Economy for the Earth, “In the eco-economy, hydrogen will be the dominant fuel…Since hydrogen can be stored and used as needed, it provides perfect support for an energy economy with wind and solar power as the main pillars.”

There’s a very, very good U.S. Department of Energy Laboratory, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado. It’s a beacon for a sustainable energy future. At NREL, they’re working on using solar to produce hydrogen from water. Here’s my interview with John Turner, senior scientist, at NREL. (AN ENVIROVIDEO TV INTERVIEW WITH TURNER IS PLAYED.)

Here’s Dr. Turner, a respected, careful scientist speaking of “sunlight to hydrogen—basically an inexhaustible fuel…the forever fuel.”

The hydrogen-through-solar-energy approach of NREL is the way Volkswagen envisions a hydrogen infrastructure. It has opened a solar hydrogen filling station in Germany, built in collaboration with the German solar energy company Solvis. You drive up and see a large solar array which, through electrolysis, produces hydrogen from water. And you fill’er-up—with hydrogen.

That combination of endless hydrogen from water and endless solar from the sun to produce it is being called green hydrogen.

But, again, those vested interests would get into the act. A scheme started under the administration of President George W. Bush—with its cronies in the oil, coal and nuclear industries—involves construction of a nuclear power plant at Idaho National Laboratory to make hydrogen.

To get clean hydrogen there’s this push to use atomic power with all its dangers: the potential for catastrophic accidents, routine radioactive emissions, the production of nuclear waste that somehow must be safeguarded for millennia, problems of nuclear proliferation, and so forth.

Talking about screwing up a great idea.

There’s a coalition—the Green Hydrogen Coalition—which includes Greenpeace, Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth and other groups—fighting for the hydrogen/solar economy, not the hydrogen/nuclear scheme.

What I’ve been most impressed in visiting the National Renewable Energy Laboratory is that whatever division I went to there, the vision is of boundless safe, clean, renewable energy energy.

Not only by using solar to generate hydrogen but through a new amazing solar energy technology called “thin film photovoltaic.” Developed at NREL, rather than conventional rigid solar panels, it involves flexible membranes impregnated with high-efficiency solar collectors.

These sheets of solar-collecting membranes can be applied over glass buildings. Skyscrapers that rise in Manhattan or buildings here on the New Paltz campus can serve as electricity generators. “Thin film photovoltaic” is now being widely used in Europe.

Scientists at NREL’s Solar Energy Research Facility say that through solar we could get all the energy we’d ever need.

But then you go to NREL’s National Wind Technology Center where the scientists speak about wind providing all the energy we’d ever need.

They were pioneers in the great advances in wind energy in recent years—especially the development of turbines with highly-efficient blades and wind turbines that can be…and are…being placed on land and increasingly, in Europe, offshore.

Bluewater Wind is getting set to build the first offshore wind farm off Delaware. It would be this country’s first.

Wind is now the fastest growing energy technology. It has been expanding 25 percent a year and that kind of future annual growth is predicted. Wind energy costs a fifth of what it did in the 1980s—and is now fully competitive with other energy technologies—and a continuing downward cost trend is anticipated.

And at NREL’s National Bioenergy Center, the scientists say biomass could fulfill a huge portion of the world energy needs—and we’re not talking here about using food stocks, corn, but switchgrass and poplar trees and other, again, non-food energy crops.

The scientists at NREL might not be right on any single energy source—but all together these and other renewable energy sources, can, in a mix, provide all the energy we need. And energy we can live with.

As NREL declares on its website: “There’s no shortage of renewable energy resources.”

And there’s so many more:

Consider: wave power. In Portugal, a wave power project has just begun. Pelamis Wave Power, a Scottish company, has engineered it—a line of machines will be tapping nature’s constant ocean power.

And tidal energy. The government of Nova Scotia is moving ahead with tapping the enormous power of the 40 and 50 foot tides that twice a day rush in and out of the Bay of Fundy—driven by the moon.

And energy from algae.

And micro or distributed power, smart grids, cutting energy loss from transmitting electricity over long distances.

And throughout, we must remember efficiency, a key across the board.

Here’s my interview with energy analyst Amory Lovins. (ENVIROVIDEO TV INTERVIEW WITHLOVINS TAPE IS SHOWN)

Renewables Are Ready was the title of a book written by two Union of Concerned Scientists staffers in 1995. They’re more than ready now. But there’s much work to do challenging the manipulation and, yes, tyranny of Big Oil, Big Coal and Big Nuclear to make that possible.

Now, let’s have a discussion on what you think we should and can do to bring on safe, renewable energy technologies.

***

Karl Grossman is a full professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury. Among the six books he has authored are: Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed To Know About Nuclear Power and Power Crazy. He has given presentations on energy and environmental issues around the world.

He hosts the nationally-aired Enviro Close-Up produced by EnviroVideo, a New York-based TV company. He narrated and wrote EnviroVideo’s award-winning documentaries The Push To Revive Nuclear Power; Nukes In Space: The Nuclearization and Weaponization of the Heavens and Three Mile Island Revisited.

He is the chief investigative reporter of WVVH-TV on Long Island.

His articles have appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, USA Today, The Miami Herald, The Village Voice, Extra!, E, The Environmental Magazine, The Globe and Mail, The Nation, The Progressive, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Newsday, The Christian Science Monitor, The Crisis, Mother Jones and The Ecologist. His column appears weekly in newspapers of The Southampton Press Group and other newspapers on Long Island.

Honors he has received for journalism include the George Polk, James Aronson and John Peter Zenger Awards.

He can be reached by email. His home address is: Box 1680, Sag Harbor, New York, USA, 11963.

5th International Conference

Problems and Practice of Engineering Education

Tomsk Polytechnic University

Tomsk, Siberia

May 26, 2002

Karl Grossman

Professor, State University of New York, College at Old Westbury

Doobrahye Ootrah.

The Patriarch of Russia, Alexey II, spoke here yesterday afternoon about the importance of combining learning in science and engineering with education in the humanities.

I would like to humbly add to that wise man’s counsel with some thoughts.

We have come to a time in my country and yours, indeed in the world as a whole, that education in the humanities—especially in understanding and applying ethics and moral principles—is critical, vital, indeed should be required in science and engineering.

First, I am a professor of journalism and let me say that education in the humanities—in history and culture and values—is also critical for journalists.

And some journalists are, unfortunately, remiss in this central area for their work, too. At my college of the State University in New York, in classes I and others teach for future journalists, we try to educate them in this regard. The problems of ethics and journalism must be the subject of another day. But I do want to make it clear, I am not picking on another profession.

I have written several books and done much investigating into nuclear technology—including the role of nuclear engineers and scientists.

My subject today at this conference on “Problems and Practice of Engineering Education” is, in specific, “Nuclear Engineering, Ethics and Public Health.”

Several weeks after the 1986 catastrophe at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, Morris Rosen, a nuclear engineer from the United States—formerly with our government—who moved on to become long-time director of nuclear safety at the International

Atomic Energy Agency, the Number 2 man at this agency—said, and I have his statement in my hand:

“There is very little doubt that nuclear power is a rather benign industrial enterprise and we may have to expect catastrophic accidents from time to time.”

To this day, the nuclear engineers and scientists of the International Atomic Energy Agency—created by the United States to somehow promote and regulate nuclear power at the same time—have sought to minimize, indeed deny, the terrible public health impacts of Chernobyl.

They maintain that but 31 people died, that the main health effect has been psychological.

Chernobyl was not an anomaly, a unique event.

I have in my hand an official analysis by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission projecting the impacts—in “early fatalities,” “early injuries,” “cancer deaths” and property damage—in the event of a meltdown with breach of containment at every nuclear plant in America.

This analysis, “Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences,” estimates for the Indian Point 2 and 3 nuclear plants—just north of New York City:

  • 46,000 “early fatalities” from 2 and 50,000 from 3.
  • 141,000 “early injuries” from 2 and 167,000 from 3.
  • 13,000 “cancer deaths” from 2 and 14,000 from 3.
  • And property damage — $274 billion from 2 and $314 billion from 3 (and these are in 1980 dollars; a trillion each today.

And these are not just numbers. These represent people’s lives.

Before our Three Mile Island accident in 1979, American nuclear engineer Norman Rasmussen, professor of nuclear engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said getting injured or killed in a nuclear plant accident was “like getting hit on the head by a meteor while crossing a street.”

Some meteor. Some street.

Later, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, under pressure of a U.S. Congressional committee, admitted in this statement that the “likelihood of a severe core melt accident” in “a population of 100 reactors operating over a period of 20 years” was 45%—and that this might be off by 5 or 10%. So the chances, it said, are about 50-50.

Nuclear technology—and engineering and science in general—are not value-free. At the end of the Manhattan Project, the U.S. program which first invented the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, its scientific director, told Edward Teller, who was pushing on to develop the hydrogen bomb, “We physicists have sinned.”

Today, good engineering and science have revolutionized safe, clean, sustainable, non-nuclear energy technologies. Generating energy from the wind is now far cheaper than nuclear power. Huge strides have been made in solar energy, geothermal power, there is appropriate hydropower, tidal power, wave power, the production of hydrogen fuel by using solar energy to separate hydrogen and oxygen in water—and on and on.

Still, in my country, what has been called the “nuclear establishment,” drives on. Nuclear engineers and scientists working for the government and industry in the U.S. push the technology that gives them money and power—and forget about good science.

Forget about ethics. Forget about morality. Forget about honest, independent epidemiology. Forget about life.

In medicine, all over the world the first principle for all doctors under the Hippocratic Oath is “do no harm.”

This is not the case, I submit, for many nuclear engineers and scientists.

In my country, with many nuclear engineers and scientists involved, there is a push to “revive” nuclear power.

There has not been a nuclear plant sold in America since our Three Mile Island accident.

Fifty new nuclear plants would be built.

The operating years of existing reactors would be extended from 40 to 60 years—inviting catastrophe from machines never viewed as running that long.

Some nuclear waste would be smelted down and incorporated into consumer items like car bodies, pots and spoons and forks. High level waste would be sent to Yucca Mountain in Nevada, a place on or near 32 earthquake faults.

The huge terrorist threat against nuclear plants is not being realistically dealt with. One of the jets piloted by terrorists that flew into the World Trade Center minutes before flew over the Indian Point nuclear plants.

But U.S. government agencies and corporations—and engineers and scientists with a vested interest in nuclear technology—continue pushing.

Here in Russia, where your Ministry of Atomic Energy wants to build 10 new reactors and make your wonderful country a garbage dump for large amounts of the world’s nuclear waste, there is a comparable situation.

The brave Lydia Popova, who broke from your Ministry of Atomic Energy, has written about the ministry and “its commitment…to serve the interests of the [nuclear] industry and a select group of nuclear specialists at the expense of the people.”

What’s to be done?

Education—sound, solid education imbuing moral values and broader understanding pioneered here at Tomsk Polytechnic University—for scientists and engineers must occur. Widely and intensely. At the least.

Education and democracy, of course, go hand in hand.

The kind of critical issues I’ve spoke about today are too important to be left to nuclear engineers and scientists—many who would prefer to work in secret.

We need transparency. We need openness. We need full public participation and democratic involvement.

We need to make sure life is put first.

As the environmental plan for Russia advanced by the Center for Russian Environmental Policy, led by your great scientist and my friend, biologist Alexey Yablokov, states: the “environment must be healthy for both long-time successful existence of the living nature and assurance of human health.”

Or as another great Russian scientist of conscience, nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov, has said: “The [long-term] effect of radioactive carbon does not reduce the moral responsibility for future lives. Only an extreme deficiency of imagination can distinguish the suffering of contemporaries [from] that of posterity.”

In respect to the Holy Father’s comments on integrating religion and education, we have in America a principle of separation of church and state. But as an American Jew, there’s nothing wrong, I believe, in considering a passage from the Bible—important to Russian Orthodox and Christians of all kinds, and Jews, who, I mention in all humility, wrote the book.

In Deuteronomy it is written:

“I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse.

Therefore, choose life, that you and your descendants may live.”

People from around the world, lawyers and plumbers, professors and bus drivers, musicians and engineers and scientists, must choose life—and learn about why.

Spaceeba.