Thank You: 2021—A Year in Review
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Dear Friends of Fairewinds,
Thank you, thank you, thank you—for recognizing our needs and supporting our work!
Your donations and sweet notes sustain us and give us the emotional energy the Fairwinds Crew needs to continue its work!
Every year, we meet and hear from hundreds of people living amidst overwhelming radiation burdens when we study, monitor, research, and track radioactivity. The people living and working in nuclear host communities suffer the devastating health effects of radiation-induced illnesses. Daily they face contaminated food, water, and even the air they need to breathe is contaminated.
Doing this work challenges our emotional stamina daily. However, the studies and research take time, and most of the incredible people we meet need answers much faster than we can research and study!
In 2022, we will be connecting with those communities that are reaching out to us for help. Each community deals with possible contamination from atomic power, nuclear waste, uranium fuel, and bomb manufacturing facilities. We hope that the Fairewinds Crew and its scientific colleagues will be able to help investigate. In addition, many community groups wish to use our methodology to mobilize and train new community-volunteer citizen-scientists. Each time citizen scientists learn how to collect samples from radiologically contaminated areas, Fairewinds and its colleagues will receive the data needed to produce scientific peer-reviewed research and educational materials that Fairewinds and our scientific colleagues freely share with the world community.
The Fairewinds Energy Education Website is a fact-based hub of scientific research that will enable you to learn what forms of energy are unsafe and not viable. We also share research on the best paths all of us must choose to have an adequate supply of economically feasible and environmentally compatible energy sources worldwide.
In case you missed any of our material, let us give you a quick overview of some of the blog posts and presentations Fairewinds created and shared with you during 2021. You may follow the links below to catch any topics you may have missed, and you will find Fairewinds 2021 Annual Report here.
First, Fairewinds’ Nuclear Spring Series focused on 15 areas of significant concern for people monitoring essential aspects of the risks of atomic power reactors and nuclear weapons leaking waste dumps. Second, we also presented remotely via the internet at several important events, including a panel discussion for Humanity Rising on Radiation and Gender: The Effect of Radiation on Women. The second presentation was at the NEC2021 Conference hosted in Austria,where Arnie Gundersen gave a presentation entitled: How to Dismantle an Atomic Lie—taking apart the nuclear falsehoods. Arnie’s presentation focused on Regulatory Collusion between the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the nuclear industry in our Meltdowns and Shakedowns Series, which will be ongoing in 2022.
Additionally, Fairewinds Energy Education accomplished many critical goals during 2021, including original community-volunteer citizen-science sampling research about the Woolsey Wildfire and the radioactive Santa Susana Field Lab located only 35-miles outside of Los Angeles. We began this citizen-science-based project in 2018 with Denise Duffield of PSR-LA (Physicians for Social Responsibility) and our scientific colleague and Journal co-author Dr. Marco Kaltofen. This citizen-science-based project collected radioactive ash from California’s 2018 Woolsey Fire that began at the highly radioactive Santa Susana Field Lab (SSFL) site. After being approached by local concerned citizens near LA, Fairewinds, PSR-LA, and Dr. Kaltofen created a program for citizen scientists to collect and analyze more than 350 dust and dirt samples. Let us be clear, the sample size of this project is a vast, scientifically meaningful set of data.
One of our findings is that the Woolsey Fire caused radiation from the Santa Susana Field Lab (SSFL) to become airborne and travel as far as 9-miles into the Thousand Oaks community. So, then, what makes our study unique? Using sophisticated radioactive measuring devices on a huge sample set, we found radioactivity on the public side of the SSFL fenceline that positively matched the radioactive ash particles we found downwind in the Thousand Oaks community. Furthermore, the data we studied showed the magnitude of radioactive migration in highly populated, chiefly residential locations.
Furthermore, in Fairewinds Blog, entitled Demystifying Nuclear Power, you will find three crucial Blog Posts about the Santa Susana Field Lab-induced Woolsey Wildfire.
The first post describes the actual Journal paper published in the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity and why it is crucial to understand how radiation moves so fluidly as it contaminates our planet.
In Take these Beautiful Words, Carmi Orenstein unveils the history and ongoing Federal and State Government coverups of SSFL radiation leaks that have persisted for more than 60 years. We are so grateful for her assertions and background information.
Fairewinds now has three peer-reviewed scientific Journal articles. These papers detail the migration of microparticles (only seen with a microscope) of toxic radiation from nuclear sites in heavily contaminated dust and dirt. These particles are so small that no one sees them, smells them, or tastes them. Yet these microparticles grossly pollute the food people eat, the water they drink, and the air they breathe! Look at our peer-reviewed papers here!
If you want to know more about our work and are tired of reading, listen to the podcast: Woolsey Fire Project: Citizen Science & the Way Forward. Hosted by Libbe Halevy, the Nuclear Hotseat podcast is an interview with Arnie, Maggie, and Marco (Dr. Kaltofen) about the Woolsey Fire Project citizen-based-science.
The sampling data mined by the Fairewinds Crew and community-volunteer citizen-scientists is only possible with donations from people like you who are supporting Fairewinds cause—bringing reliable research data to the table for communities to see, discuss, and study openly and transparently. The peer-reviewed research we prepare brings us closer to identifying environmental justice issues faced daily by radiation-contaminated communities.
Thank you for joining us on this journey to empower those whose lives are threatened every day by radioactive contamination. Your support of Fairewinds helps us inform those whose policy work can help communities survive and thrive.
Stay safe and be well in 2022.
