"Knocking on the Devil's Door: Our Deadly Nuclear Legacy"

A screening of Gary Null's new documentary, "Knocking on the Devil's Door: Our Deadly Nuclear Legacy," will take place on Sept. 21st at the Ethical Culture Society in New York City. Beyond Nuclear staffpersons Kevin Kamps and Cindy Folkers appear in the documentary, as does board member Karl Grossman and founding president Helen Caldicott. Karl will speak on the panel at the Sept. 21st screening, alongside Dr. Vandana Shiva, Harvey Wasserman, Greg Palast, and the Sato family from Fukushima Prefecture in Japan, who are leading grassroots efforts to demand the Japanese federal government fund a much larger evacuation given the extensive and severe Fukushima Daiichi radioactive fallout. Beyond Nuclear will have an information table at the event. See www.knockingonthedevilsdoor.com for more information about the documentary and its upcoming screening in New York City.

To obtain a free copy of the DVD, see below.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 26, 2011

Gary Null Productions

2307 Broadway, New York, NY 10024

Contact:
Richard Gale  646-926-5436 Rgale@garynull.com
Valerie Van Cleeve 646-926-5441 Valerie@garynull.com

www.knockingonthedevilsdoor.com

“Knocking on the Devil’s Door”
Free Offer for New Documentary About the Deadly Legacy of Nuclear Power
 
Following the catastrophe of the Fukushima nuclear reactors in Japan, Dr. Gary Null, an award-winning film director and public radio talk show host, began production for a new documentary to address the history and disasters of nuclear power, the health risks of low level radiation, and the rampant corruption and deception employed by the corporate energy complex to keep nuclear power a favorite source of energy in the halls of Washington.
 
His new documentary, Knocking on the Devil’s Door: Our Deadly Nuclear Legacy, launched its theater premiers in New York and Los Angeles on August 5-11, 2011. Due to the overwhelming positive response and the film’s potential to mobilize anti-nuclear projects to educate the public, legislators and media, it is being offered free to anti-nuclear and environmental organizations, journalists, community groups, and legislators. Dr. Null and his team hope organizations will take advantage of this opportunity to utilize the information and power of this documentary to galvanize opposition to the relicensing of nuclear reactors and to call an end to nuclear power.
 
To receive a free copy of Knocking on the Devil’s Door, please visit this secure page (only accessible via invitation) to request a DVD copy.
 
The film’s trailer can also be viewed at www.knockingonthedevilsdoor.com

Please click here for a film description.

OPPD submits post-flooding recovery plan to NRC for Ft. Calhoun

Complete with a three minute PR video focused on the need to re-paint lines for parking lot spaces on asphalt, and to replace dead trees in landscaping long underwater on the historically flooded Missouri River, Omaha Public Power District (OPPD) has submitted a 113 page "Post-Flooding Recovery Plan" to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). Ironically, the video does not show the vital areas of the plant, such as the reactor containment building, or auxiliary building housing safety and cooling systems, which at points in the past couple months -- like when its AquaDam was punctured by a piece of heavy machinery -- have been surrounded by waist-deep flood waters (see photo, left) literally lapping at their doors. OPPD claims "plant operations remain focused on providing reliable electricity," not seeming to notice the irony of dubbing Ft. Calhoun "reliable" when it has been shut down for four months due to flood risks. OPPD also speaks of "assuring the health and safety of the public and employees," when a mere 6 feet of margin existed between the floodwaters and an inability to continue provided cooling to vital safety systems -- a margin that could have been instantly erased if any one of a half dozen severely strained dams upstream had failed.

Tepco nows says that Unit 3 blew up Unit 4 at Fukushima Daiichi

The Mainichi Daily News now reports that Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) is asserting that hydrogen gas from the Unit 3 meltdown(s), rather than being vented out the stack shared with Unit 4, flowed instead into the Unit 4 secondary containment reactor building, blowing it up. So much for the "hardened vent" retrofits constituting a "safety improvement" on the General Electric Boiling Water Reactor Mark 1 containment system! If this is truly what caused the "mysterious" Unit 4 explosion, then not only did the "hardened vents" fail to prevent meltdowns and containment failures at Units 1, 2, and 3, but they also caused a large explosion in Unit 4 -- a reactor that had been de-fueled, and was not operating -- which now risks the release of large-scale amounts of hazardous radioactivity directly into the environment if its high-level radioactive waste storage pool boils dry, allowing the irradiated nuclear fuel within to catch on fire.

New report on zombie reactor at Bellefonte, Alabama

On August 10th, 2011, Fairewinds Associates published a report commissioned by Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE) regarding the Tennessee Valley Authority's proposal to attempt to resurrect a long abandoned nuclear power plant project at Bellefonte, Alabama. Arnie Gundersen summarizes his report in a video posted on the Fairewinds website. SACE published a media release, which includes a link to the full report by Gundersen.

NRC slaps FirstEnergy for safety violations at Perry

NRC file photo of FirstEnergy's Perry nuclear power plant on the Lake Erie shore northeast of ClevelandThe Plain Dealer of Cleveland has reported that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has cited the FirstEnergy nuclear utility with a "white finding" of "low to moderate" safety significance after four contract workers were briefly exposed to high radiation levels due to poorly written procedures involving a task near the reactor core. The article quotes Beyond Nuclear's Kevin Kamps: "Kevin Kamps, a radioactive waste specialist at Beyond Nuclear, a group opposed to nuclear energy, said Perry's problems are not as isolated from Davis-Besse's past problems as one would think. 'All the hooting and hollering about the need to improve FirstEnergy's 'safety culture' after the Davis-Besse hole-in-the-head fiasco of 2002 comes to mind,' he said. 'Apparently that 'safety culture' isn't as fixed as FirstEnergy and even the NRC would like the public to believe.' "

FirstEnergy's Davis-Besse nuclear power plant came closer than any other U.S. reactor since the Three Mile Island meltdown of 1979 to a major accident, due to severe corrosion of its reactor lid. Beyond Nuclear, in coalition with Citizens Environment Alliance of Southwest Ontario, Don't Waste Michigan, and the Green Party of Ohio, has won standing and the admittance of several contentions against the 20 year license extension sought by FirstEnergy at Davis-Besse.