 everyone who has joined us so far. Thanks for being so prompt and on time. It's good to see you here. We're just going to wait a little longer until some other folks can sign on. We're now live on YouTube and Facebook as well, so welcome to everyone who's joining us for the webinar, Understanding the True Cost of Nuclear Weapons. If you're in our Zoom or if you're on YouTube or Facebook, it would be great if people could introduce themselves in the chat like people have started to do. If you want to give us your names and where you're calling in from, that would be great. Can people hear me? Yeah? Okay, I saw in the chat that some people can't hear me, so just making sure. Hi everyone, welcome. Again, we'll get started in just a minute, but if you want to introduce yourselves in the chat box, that would be great. I see some people introducing themselves. Quite a few people from all over the country so far. Welcome. Welcome everyone to the webinar, Understanding the True Cost of Nuclear Weapons. We'll get started in just a short minute here. People are already introducing themselves in the chat box. Great to see so many people here from so many different places. And if you're also watching on YouTube or Facebook, you can also introduce yourselves in the comments. Love to see how many people are watching from around the world. Welcome again, everyone, to our webinar, Understanding the True Cost of Nuclear Weapons. We'll get started in about a minute here. Really excited to see so many people from around the world on the call. If you haven't already, please go ahead and introduce yourselves in the chat box or if you're watching on YouTube or Facebook in the comment section. You can give us your name and where you're zooming in from. All right, I think it's time for us to go ahead and get started. So again, welcome everyone to the Code Pink webinar, Understanding the True Cost of Nuclear Weapons. My name is Carly Town. I'm a co-director of Code Pink and I also work on our Divest from the War Machine campaign. I also want to say that this webinar has been cosponsored by many wonderful organizations, including NuclearWakeUpCall.Earth, The Peace for Okinawa Coalition, No Cold War, Pivot to Peace, and United for Peace and Justice. The important intersections of organizations who have endorsed this webinar and the wide-ranging experiences from the panelists who will be joining us today, who I'll introduce very shortly, is a testament to how cross-cutting an issue like the development and maintenance of nuclear weapons truly is. January 22nd, 2021 marked the day that the ratification of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons came into force after Honduras became the 50th member state to ratify. However, according to the Congressional Budget Office, if the United States carries out all of its plans for modernizing and maintaining the nuclear arsenal, it will cost about $494 billion over the next decade. So $494 billion is a staggering number, but it doesn't truly capture the entire cost of nuclear weapons. Pouring billions into modernizing and maintaining the United States nuclear arsenal, of course, has great implications for the international community. By doing so, the United States continues down a path of military hegemony, effectively for closing the possibility of diplomatic solutions in favor of asserting unilateral power. But this is particularly troubling given important efforts being undertaken right now to pressure the Biden administration to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal. And importantly, the tactics by Warhawks and mainstream media to continue to drive a narrative that we should view China as our enemy. We also see that this narrative that China is dangerous is being used as cover to steadily increase the Pentagon budget and justify pouring more money into our nuclear arsenal. In reality, the only way we're going to adjust climate change, strive towards true internationalism and prevent another cold war with China is by dismantling nuclear weapons entirely. So these global implications are incredibly important, but today I'm really honored to have three women who will also speak to the true impact that nuclear weapons have on local communities who are forced to bear the brunt of the effects of living in close proximity to these weapons in their own communities and backyards. And importantly, to hear the multiple ways that they're already doing really important work to resist the development and maintenance of nuclear weapons, and how we today on the webinar can support that work. So with that, I would like to welcome all three of our speakers. We have Trisha Pratikin, Biata Socipenya, and Joni Arans. So today we'll have a chance to hear from all three panelists who I'll introduce in more detail before their presentations get started. So we'll hear from all three of them. Then we'll have some time at the end, right at the top of the hour to take some questions for any of the panelists from the audience. So while they're speaking, if you have any questions for any of our panelists, or just questions in general that you'd like to be addressed, you can go ahead and type your questions in the chat box and we'll be monitoring them during their presentations. Or you can use the Q&A function and we'll get to as many as we can at the end of all three presentations. So without further ado, I'm really excited to introduce our first speaker today, Trisha Pratikin. So Trisha is an attorney and former occupational therapist. She was a personal injury plaintiff in the now concluded Hanford Downwinder Mass Toxic Torque Consolidated Litigation, known as the Hanford Nuclear Reservation Litigation. She's the author of the Hanford Plaintiffs, Voices from the Fight for Atomic Justice, published in 2020 by the University Press of Kansas. The Hanford Plaintiffs was the winner for history in the 2020 San Francisco Book Festival and for nonfiction in the 2020 New England Book Festival. So I'm really honored to have you here today, Trisha. Welcome. Thank you so much, Carly. I'm starting my timer here. Keep on the schedule. Hi, everyone, and thank you very much for including the Voices of the Downwinders in this important webinar. I wanted to tell people a little bit about Hanford when we start because not everyone knows where that is or what it did. Hanford was a very silent site as compared to sites like the Nevada Test Site where there were huge mushroom clouds or the Trinity Test Site with one huge mushroom cloud or tests in the Pacific. So it was the place where the plutonium was produced for the Manhattan Project and the Cold War. It was the major plutonium production site for the Manhattan Project and the Cold War. And it produced the plutonium for the Trinity Test, which is the world's first test of an atomic bomb, and it also for Fat Man. And Hanford's plutonium was also used in many of the tests conducted in the Pacific Proving Browns and the Nevada Test Site. So unfortunately, its product was spread far and wide. But from the start of Hanford in late 1944, the site began to release secret emissions into the air and waters of a whole range of radionuclides. We got more than 750,000 curies of radioiodine, and we got a vast range of other radionuclides, including ruthenium particles and solid waste dumped in the Columbia River, which traveled all the way down to the Pacific Ocean. And they're still trying to clean it up. You've probably heard about the leaking tanks and the collapsing tunnels full of trains, full of radioactive waste. It's a mess. So I was born right next to Hanford in Richland because both my parents were workers there at Hanford. And at first, when I was young, I really loved living there because they created what Kate Brown calls a plutopia. If you've read that book, it's an excellent book comparing the two sites, the two plutonium production sites in the former Soviet Union and Richland or Hanford. And I loved it. And we had wonderful schools. They created a lot of social activities for the adults, so they were happy in the middle of the desert. We had nine production reactors out there. They were spaced out by a mile, mile and a half in between each reactor in case one of them blew up, which was a great concern of many of the people who helped to sort of design Hanford. So if any of the reactors had blown, we were the sacrificial population out there in the middle of the desert. It's kind of hard to think about that in retrospect. That could have happened. It didn't luckily, but my father was a nuclear engineer, so he oversaw the reactors in the 100 area. A lot of people don't quite understand where the radiation came from in a place like Hanford. It was from separations primarily. It's a chemical separations process that happens after the fuel rods were bombarded in the production reactors. They're shoved out the back of the reactors into a cooling pool where they're supposed to be cooled for an x period of time. Then they're taken by train to the chemical separations areas, and that's where most of the stuff went up the stacks and out. And they realized after it started happening that iodine is heavier than air. So it started sinking down onto the ground and creating hot spots, particularly with one experiment called the Green Run in 1949 that a lot of people know about two days in 1949. The Air Force and Hanford operators co-ran an experiment to track, to see whether they could track airborne radiation because the Soviet Union had just started testing in August of 1949. And they wanted to see if they could figure out how much plutonium was being produced there. But that wasn't the largest of the releases from Hanford. And I see no difference between, I mean, ethically, there's a difference between an intentional release like the Green Run and the negligent releases that happen all the time. But my body didn't know any difference. I mean, we were exposed to both negligent releases and intentional releases. So just to give you a picture of what happened to so many of us. As a child, because I was conceived in Richland, radioiodine crosses the placental barrier at about starting the fifth month of gestation. So I was getting radioiodine from that, which my mother was ingesting from dairy products and the air. Then when I was born and growing up, I got radioiodine and baby milk because my mother, most of the mothers didn't nurse their babies back then. And I also got it from the air. Plus I got everything else that was in the air and on the produce and in the water. And I also swam a lot in the Columbia River, which was full of radio nuclides. Okay, so nothing happens for a while after low dose. These are called low dose ionizing radiation exposures, as opposed to the high dose burst from a detonation of an atomic bomb. Nothing usually happens for a while after these exposures. There's something called a latency period and it can last for decades. Sometimes a little less, but in my case, I didn't start getting sick until I was around 18. At the time we lived in Spain, because my dad had been transferred to Europe, where they were building reactors, because in the US, there was less call for reactors, which is a great thing. But what they did was just ship all their nuclear engineers over to Europe. So I was there and I started to get the very first symptoms of autoimmune thyroiditis, which is something a lot of us have. I began to go between or vacillate between being hyperthyroid, which means too much thyroid hormone and hypothyroid. And I got sicker and sicker and nobody really knew what was wrong because the Department of Energy never told anyone about these releases. Didn't tell us until 1986 after Freedom of Information Act requests and articles by Karen Dorn Steele in the spokesman review. She wrote the foreword for the book, which is really nice. I was honored to have her do that. So as I became sicker and sicker, I was sent back to the United States for treatment, but no one knew what to do. I was losing weight and then gaining it for no good reason, which is all really typical of autoimmune thyroiditis, but no one knew that's what I had. And so I was sick for a long time, like a lot of us, and I just became less and less functional. But finally, in 1988, I was visiting my grandmother in Spokane and I read an article by Karen Dorn Steele talking about the radio iodine releases. And finally it was explained what had happened to me and I was able to get treatment. But a bit later in 2009, a nodule developed on my thyroid, which contained hurdle cells. And hurdle cells are a type of thyroid cancer. And my dad had just died of aggressive thyroid cancer himself, so that I was considered very high risk. They took out my thyroid. I lost all my parathyrites because of the autoimmune mass in my neck. So now I have hypoperidism, which causes calcium, serum calcium levels to crash and also can cause kidney failure if I'm not monitored carefully. I'm also fatigued all the time. That's typical of a lot of the Downwinders. And in the book that we just published, the Hanford plaintiffs, the stories of 24 Hanford plaintiffs, all of them have more than one disease. It's a cluster. It's not one disease. It's autoimmune plus cancer or two cancers plus autoimmune and fertility issues. At least they're also mentioned by Kate Brown in her book. It's sort of a cluster of what happens to you when you've been exposed to low disionizing radiation. My mom died of malignant melanoma, which both thyroid cancer and malignant melanoma have been associated with radiation under the Nuclear Workers Compensation Act, EEOICPA. I mentioned that because I think that will be a very useful pattern for us for a national compensation program. If we can just say that the same radiogenic diseases that are recognized for nuclear workers can be compensated in Downwinders who were known to have lived in areas where releases were known to have happened. If they have any of those diseases that are recognized under the Nuclear Worker Compensation Act, then I think that's a much better route to take than fighting amongst groups over RICA, this is Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which is going to expire soon. There's always congressional representatives trying to get their constituents added and it's a mess and people start fighting with each other. I really think we need a national program. Okay, now my only sibling died as part of a spike of mysterious neonatal deaths within Hanford's Downwind region. Okay, I would like to do something a little different for my last few minutes here if you don't mind. I told you a little bit about the Ruthinian flakes, which rained down during the summer under the kids and the people in rich and I've found that writing has helped me a lot sort of in a healing fashion and that's one reason I wrote the book to try to let people understand what we've gone through, but I've also turned to poetry a little bit. So I have a fairly short poem about the Ruthinian Flakes and this poem is based on a document, a Hanford engineering works document that's about these Ruthinian flakes that fell all over Richland. It's called Children of the Summer Snow. Hold on, there we go. Can you hear me okay? So softly snow falls on the children of Hanford, so softly snow falls on this hot summer day. It's snowing they cry as they dance with abandon. It's snowing they sing at the flakes drifting down. It's snowing they sob as the flakes start to burn them. These snowflakes of summer are radioactive. These snowflakes of summer that fall on the town. Ruthinian flakes that is later acknowledged. Ruthinian flakes that have come on the winds. Pure magic these snowflakes, these flakes of enchantment, bones seeking skin burning snowflakes from hell. No warning is given to safeguard the children. No warning to hide from the poisonous snow. No warning is issued by those in control. They say don't advise them. They say give no warning. If warned then the workers would leave with their families and then and then that would slow down the great work we do. So that kind of concludes my comments. It's really hard being a downmender as everyone will tell you. But thank you very much for including our voice in this seminar. Thank you so much Trisha for that. That was really powerful. I've added the link to your YouTube channel so people can also follow you in the chat box and we'll also make sure it's in the YouTube link as well. So next I would like to welcome our second speaker, Beata Sosipenya, who's from Santa Clara Pueblo and has a background as an educator development specialist, developmental specialist, Jula, and an indigenous sustainable design. The realities of living next to a nuclear weapons complex has called her into environmental health and justice work with the non-profit organization Tewa Women United for over a decade. As part of her work with Tewa Women United she's currently managing the creation of the Espanola Healing Food Oasis demonstration garden project and seed library. So I'd like to welcome Beata. And I'll start sharing your slides. Okay, sure. Good to be here. Thank you for sharing your story, Trisha. That was really powerful. So I'm here in Northern New Mexico and we do live with nuclear weapons prediction in our ancestral homelands and the Pajarito Plateau, which is part of the larger Heman's Plateau, which is also located on adjacent to the vice caldera, which is a dormant supervolcano area. So some context of where we are Los Alamos National Laboratory has been occupying our ancestral sites in Los Alamos since the production of the encroachment of the nuclear agent in Northern New Mexico. So this slide is next to our river called Posonga or the Rio Grande. And it's really to draw attention to the intersections of the environmental and reproductive health impacts living next to a facility, as Trisha mentioned already. So these are some of the only contaminants that can cross placental boundaries. And we are looking at cumulative and multiple exposures over long periods of time, because we are indigenous and land based communities living next to this facility. There is hundreds of contaminated sites that we're concerned about, not only that, but just access to our sacred sites. And then wondering what the impact is health wise, you know, it's always our word against the powers that be. So with this slide, whom be I can deal with your respect, we must protect those most vulnerable. Navatoygia is land worker mother, and if we protect her from toxicity and ecocide, we protect us all. We all come here through water as our first environment. In one pregnancy, three generations are held as one. Our intergenerational health is dependent on the health of our homelands. Next slide. Let's see if the next slide comes. So this is a picture of Area G, the nuclear waste dump located on top of our watershed. And it contains over 30,000 barrels of mixed radioactive waste above ground and below ground. And the below ground barrels and waste are in unlined dirt pits. This was also on top of one of our ancestral sites. And what I mean by ancestral site is a place that is still very much alive in our way of knowing and cosmology as Tewa peoples. We don't like to use the word ruins or, you know, talk about these places like they're in the past, they're very much living. And so this is one of those places and hundreds of those kind of sites are all around this land. Let's see. So a culture of violence has desecrated our sacred sites with nuclear waste. This petroglyph etched in stone is now behind armed guards and razor wire. Nuclear weapons produce waste that kills next door to the spiritual, cultural, and physical life ways of the first peoples of this place. We have only one shared body of water that we must respect and love. And so again, this site is because it's in a volcanic plateau, the rocks are very porous, made with tuft. And we have a soul source aquifer in New Mexico, which means that more than half of the population in New Mexico depends on it for drinking and agriculture. And we just have to maintain that access to our clean water. Next slide. The Pacific Ocean poisoned by nuclear gas trophy, there's the same to our waters from local laboratories and industries. Next to our Rio Grande River, PCBs and chemicals continue to migrate. A mile long hexavalent chromium plume is contaminating Pueblo lands. There are 21,000 oil and gas wells in Rio Reba County alone in sacred sites like Chaco or Fracking zones. So it's compounded, the nuclear colonialism we face is compounded with a lot of extraction industries in our area. And so we really are dealing with being labeled as a sacrifice zone in the Southwest for not just nuclear colonialism, but also other toxic industries. And the hexavalent chromium is already in our aquifer and groundwater. Next slide. This is a picture of the Healing Foods Oasis Garden. It's based off of indigenous technology of dry land farming. You can see examples of these kind of gardens all throughout all of our mountain ranges in New Mexico or these ancient gardens exist. And so just to show how we still are very much land-based, we still are very much a living part of our ecologies and using these same systems to feed ourselves to this day. So we must put back what has been taken reclaiming reciprocal relationships to plants, stone, air, soil and animals. Look to indigenous technologies of dry land desert resistance and resiliency. Clean environments and heirloom seeds ensure our existence. Values respecting water, renewable energies wasting nothing and only taking what we need. Next slide. And that's after a rain event showing how you can catch that rainwater. So this is in a community garden field at the Espanola Farmers Market where high levels of or exceedance levels of RDX and perchlorates were found from an intern that came to work with us one summer. And you can find her study. Her name is Morgan Juniani and her study is called Red Dust, a Soil Scientist Journey. And so she took soil samples of this field and found elevated levels of RDX which can only come from high explosives testing. So again, it's not just the radionuclides we're concerned about, it's the chemicals, it's the other releases that happen because of it, all the other military activities happening at the labs where it's not just nuclear weapons but also biological and chemical weapons research taking place. And so RDX is water soluble and because it's on the mountains you can see on the background where they're doing these detonations and the spring and the weather the weather events we have, we have really high winds and all that gets depositioned into our soil and our irrigation systems. So it's water soluble and ends up in our fields and then in our plants which can have the potential for coming into our bodies and accumulating. It is time for a story of abundance. Our Cornweathers taught us what it means to love, respect and take care of one another. Our sovereignty is our ability to grow our own food and save our own seeds. To the waters of the world we are sorry, please forgive us. A culture of peace awaits us as we enter our gardens with only good thoughts honoring an ancient evolution. Next slide. So this is the child that was I was carrying in the first picture born from a mate of water and relational love and respect. So thinking about why we need to center Indigenous pregnant families when we think about this work and the policies and if they're protected everyone's protected. Thinking about how what that parent is exposed to while they're carrying that pregnancy and how that is impacting so much that we don't realize and just how it's such a microcosm for the other layers of the culture of violence that we're dealing with. So I'll close with that and just really want to center our deep love and respect for water here in the desert where we live and not just the usage of water that we're dealing with these military activities but um when we have Indigenous communities here that don't even have access to running water or electricity and on some of the mining communities that out where we're from. So it goes through all levels of the production cycle where Indigenous and poor communities are going to get hit the hardest. So I'll end with that and I'm happy to answer more questions later. Thank you. Thank you so much Biaf. That was wonderful and we definitely will have some questions at the end. Really appreciate that. So up next I did want to welcome our last speaker, panelist, Joanie Arends, who serves as the Executive Director of Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety, which she co-founded in 1988 to address community concerns about the proposed transportation of radioactive toxic and hazardous waste from Los Alamos National Laboratory. Through the Center of Santa Fe on St. Francis Drive to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant so she graduated from St. John's College Santa Fe in 1994 and earned a JD from Vermont Law School in 1998. Her work focuses on the environmental, civil rights, and public health issues surrounding the Department of Energy sites in New Mexico. So welcome Joanie and I can go ahead and start sharing your presentation. Hey thank you Carly so much and thank you to Code Pink for this opportunity to tell the story. It's specifically about the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. So this is a this is a plutonium pit. This is the trigger for a nuclear weapon and we're going to be talking about where the waste from the plutonium pits go. Next slide. So this is the location of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant which is 26 miles east of Carlsbad, New Mexico in the southeastern part of the state. It is the disposal site for transuranic or true waste and transuranic means that the particles are heavier than uranium in the periodic table. After years of litigation WIP opened in March 26, 1999 and it's scheduled to close in 2024. Next slide. To give you some sense of where WIP is located, it's located in the Permian Basin which is sometimes called the Saudi Arabia of the US and you can see that there's 500 oil and gas wells within 2.5 miles of the WIP site and some of the slant wells actually go underneath the WIP site where the plutonium contaminated waste is disposed. Next slide please. So now let's look at the underground. So WIP is 2,150 feet below the surface of the earth in salt formations. DOE claims that it's just gloves and booties and some tools from nuclear weapons testing, research development testing and manufacturing but in reality there are classified shapes for nuclear weapons as well as many dunnage drums because they don't get their shipments together properly. All of the waste is buried in steel containers of different sizes and shapes in these underground cells that you can see the gray areas in this slide. Next slide. So we can see that WIP is here in the southeastern corner of New Mexico and most of the waste right now is coming from the Idaho National Laboratory so it's traveling on the interstate because that's the route that they can use so it goes down to near Salt Lake, goes over on 80 to Cheyenne, goes south through Denver to New Mexico. So one of the concerns about this is that DOE is required to provide emergency preparedness and emergency response funding for the states where the waste travels from. The trucks are inspected at the New Mexico border and in other states as well. Next slide. DOE had a 25-year mission and DOE, the Department of Energy which runs the waste isolation pilot plant, they were supposed to start clean and stay clean to demonstrate that they could dispose of 6.25 to 6.2 million cubic feet of defense from the nuclear weapons industry and its contractors at WIP and that they would close in 2024. Next slide. So environmental justice is an issue with regard to the movement of the waste through New Mexico as well as the permitting for the facility. And the New Mexico Environment Department which is abbreviated here as NMED does not take environmental justice issues seriously. It does not consider the history needs and concerns of the affected communities in their WIP permits. They don't provide, they don't make DOE the studies of the short and long-term effects on communities. They don't require a disparate impact for communities of colors and low income communities because they don't do the studies. And because the Environment Department doesn't understand the affected communities they don't understand what effect their permits will have on these facilities or on the communities excuse me. So DOE and the Environment Department cannot create permits for WIP that are truly protective of public health and the environment. I also want to say that New Mexico is a, I don't like this language but I'll use it, minority majority state. And that 22% of the people here live below the poverty rate and many times were the 50th state in the nation. Just to give you an idea of the impacts of the nuclear weapons industry in New Mexico that their budget for DOE is about equal to our state budget every year. Next slide please. So DOE is reneging on its promises. It no longer wants to close WIP in 2024. They want to keep it open forever. They want to bring all this new waste including 34 metric tons of what they call surplus plutonium. Next slide. And there's a number of studies and strategic plans that have been written in the last couple of years that let the public know what their plans are. So they want to keep WIP open for the surplus plutonium as well as other things and all of these reports have no mention of an end date and no other repositories are discussed. Next slide. So since the late 1970s the Congress has said that we need more than one repository for this defense transuranic waste, plutonium contaminated waste. And DOE's been on notice since 1979 at least that there needed to be multiple sites but they haven't done anything to create other repositories. And this is different than Yucca Mountain which is for commercial nuclear power waste. This is defense related plutonium contaminated waste. One of the reasons that they wanted multiple sites was to reduce the transportation costs and the risks and to share the risks across the United States. And no state including New Mexico is willing to host the only repository. Next slide please. So this is the plan right now that DOE is considering for these 34 metric tons of plutonium. The pits, the plutonium and the plutonium pits are stored at the Pantex plant which is north of Amarillo, Texas. They want to ship it to Los Alamos National Laboratory to oxidize it. And then they want to ship it back to Savannah Riverside to add an adulterant to it called Stardust that nobody knows what it is except for DOE because it's classified. And then ship it to WIP in order to dispose of this 34 metric tons. But one thing I haven't mentioned so far is that all of the space in WIP right now is taken by DOE's commitment to clean up the sites around the country that we saw on the previous map. And so we need your help. There's a comment period right now. Next slide. I'm sorry, Carly. Where you can comment on the scope of this draft environmental impact statement to bring 34 metric tons of surplus plutonium to WIP. And you can go to nuclearactive.org. There's action alerts and sample public comments that you can modify on the right side of the home page. And get those in as soon as you can. We need your help. And thank you so much for listening to this. My contact information is on the next slide. And I want to thank Don Hancock of Southwest Research and Information Center and Deborah Reed designed for helping me with the PowerPoint. So thank you. Thank you so much, Joni, for that great presentation. And I see that somebody has posted the link to that website in the chat box. So thank you so much. And we can also make sure everyone who attended today gets those resources and resources from everyone, all of the panelists here today. So thank you very much. So I wanted to move in. We have about 10 minutes for the Q&A section here. And if it's okay, I'm going to