The compensation program was too late for my uncle. Somehow, my father managed to live to 96. He had had all kinds of weird skin cancers, thyroid cancer, strange rashes and burns, but he did benefit from the government compensation. He was involved with the testing in the Pacific when in the Navy and later worked in a government laboratory in the US. As kids, we sometimes went to Dad’s office and played in a huge assembly room where “hot” pieces of equipment were cooling off behind tall walls of lead blocks. All they had to prevent people from going around the other side were radiation signs. We’d sometimes climb up a few feet on the lead blocks. Dad wore a film badge and from time to time would come up “hot” and have to work elsewhere on site for the rest of the month. There was a gong-like bell that rang whenever the beam separator was running. That meant a certain building and roads were off-limits when you heard the bell. There was a chainlink fence gate on the road, but it was certainly climbable if you didn’t have a key. The building was locked, and more difficult to get in, but sometimes Dad would find someone had propped the door open with a bit of a pencil or a small rock. He’d come home from work complaining about it. Nobody would ever admit doing it. It was a bother to go over to the main building, sign out the key, and bring it back, especially if you wanted to go to the cafeteria and have time to eat your lunch. Sometimes, the gate would be left open as well. A few times I was outside the building when the beam separator was running, but I had to stay in the car with the windows up. I was also in the beam separator building during shut downs. It was considered safe. That was in the 1960’s. By the 1980’s, it was no longer permitted and the daily dose of radiation was a fraction of what it had been when Dad first started there in 1959. The lab is still in full operation and it’s very different. There are entire acres designated as Superfund Sites. Security is nearly as tight as the Pentagon! There were numerous dirt roads and paths that cut through the woods surrounding the lab, and just a barbed wire fence! We kids used to ride our bikes on them and then go meet Dad when he finished work. We’d stick our bikes in the back of the station wagon and pile in for a ride home. You could get in the main gate very easily, as well. There was a guard booth, but no gate or barrier. You stopped, showed a family member ID card and got waved in. If you forgot it, you gave the name and phone extension. The guard would call and verify your arrival, and wave you in. There was a lab gym, a pool, and campground with a children’s playground for use by employees and family members. Right behind where the swings were is now a Superfund site full of radioactive soil, a big hill with discarded equipment buried beneath it. We’d spend a week there every summer in our tent trailer. I’ve climbed that hill many times and rolled down it. Lots of kids did. Another now Superfund site was found to have “hot” well water piped into three blocks of houses. Over the years, the woods around the lab was turned into housing developments. In the 1990’s, residents began getting sick and dying from cancer. There were an inordinate number of miscarriages, stillbirths, and birth defects. It was kind of a mini-Love Canal. The houses were closed up and later demolished. The land was annexed to the laboratory in the early 2000’s. Dad received funds from the compensation program, the reason being his absolutely meticulous record-keeping. For my uncle who died of leukemia at age 70, there was no success because of the secrecy involved. He was in the Army in Nevada and New Mexico. The records were long since destroyed. The paperwork asked questions about date of blast, exact distance from the blast, serial numbers of protective equipment issued, like sunglasses! Three of seven cousins have had cancer, two are deceased from it. Four grandchildren have been born with birth defects, two died in infancy and one at age five of lung cancer. Now, two of three great grandchildren have unusual autoimmune disease. I consider our family very, very lucky. I’m 73 and have the same enlarged heart I was born with. Two siblings have the same condition and are still living. Of nine of us, six are living. Our brother was killed in Vietnam in 1968. One sister died at age 12 of leukemia, and another brother passed away in 2015 from complications of diabetes. Our mother passed from heart and kidney failure at age 98. When I think back, an inordinate number of Dad’s colleagues died over the years, but since I was still a child, I didn’t think it unusual because to me, they were “old.” But a lot of men dying of cancer in their 30’s and 40’s wasn’t normal in the 1950’s and 1960’s. (edit-sp. correction)
Thank you so much for sharing your story and in such detail. This was an incredible read. I'm sorry that your family went through this. You detailed perfectly the need for improvements in the program. They put the burden on the worker when really they are the ones that should be seeking these workers out. As you mentioned, many of the facilities are long gone and asking workers and family members to supply such detailed information that the government often doesn't even have themselves is more than frustrating. People need to hear stories like yours. They need to know the history.
Wow. That was quite a read. Sorry to hear about all the problems you're family has faced. My uncle just passed from skin cancer that was likely related to agent orange use during his time in Vietnam. I think he qualified and got some gov compensation, but money couldn't help him by that point. We we're very close, i loved him and he taught me a lot about the world growing up. Was like a second dad to me. He didn't have kids, so i guess i was probably like a son to him. Was terrible to see him going from a big strong guy, withering down to nothing by the end. Cancer sucks. Didn't mean to hijack the thread. It's just that reading this, i can't help but think of him. I wish the gov/military/businesses will heed these lessons and make safety an imperative. Rip to all the pioneers of the atomic age.
thanks for sharing your personal story ! You and your family are part of the living legacy of America's Nuclear FALLOUT ! A sad commentary of the way the GOVT and Military used and disposed it's servicemen and women in it's insane rush to make a stockpile of UNUSEABLE WEAPONS that will forever haunt us to death ! The so called CLEAN-UP of America's nuclear weapons sites will far out strip any budget that was proposed for the making of those weapons!
@@reallifepicturesfilm Thanks for your acknowledgment. I also forgot to mention I learned how to drive at the lab--in government vehicles! Dad and I would ride our bikes over on Saturdays when few people were around. He’d sign out a car or truck and give me lessons, first in parking lots, then roads. There were all kinds of regular paved, gravel, and dirt roads, stop signs, a few traffic lights, merges, hills, curves, etc., but virtually no traffic! I started at age 13 and sat on a phone book for better vision and to make me look taller, more like an adult, in case I did encounter another driver. But even if you did, nobody really looked because it was assumed anyone in a lab vehicle was an employee. Once I got proficient, Dad would go work in his office or the assembly shop for a few hours and I’d practice by myself. Once I learned the car really well, he taught me the truck, light pickups, with a stick. Those I took out on the gravel and dirt roads. By the time I was 15 I got my permit, kept practicing, but took over as the driver in our family car-a Country Squire station wagon with “way-in-the-back” seats and the fake wood paneling on the sides! The day after my 16th birthday, I took and passed my driving test in my brother’s Dodge, a standard. There were no temporary, junior, or age-restrictions on licenses at that time, and the legal age was 16. You either passed the test or you didn’t. What if I’d badly damaged the lab vehicle? Dad would have payed for it. He did have one rule, that I had to wear the seatbelt in the car and not exceed 40 mph. The trucks didn’t have seatbelts, so I had to stay at 30mph. I guess we didn’t really didn’t think about getting seriously injured or killed. A minor dent wouldn’t have been noticed since all the motor pool vehicles had lots of them! Truthfully, I never dented one. I got a minor scratch on a truck from a tree branch sticking out into one of the dirt roads. Dad fixed it with some kind of slightly abrasive rubbing compound and a little polish.
@@ctdieselnut Thank you for your uncle’s service! Agent Orange is nasty stuff. And cancer really sucks, as you say. I recall my Dad trying to help my aunt fill out the paperwork. The questions they asked were ridiculous. They wanted to know things like the serial numbers of the glasses he was issued for every blast, the depth and position of the foxhole in relation to each blast, the date, time, and location on site…in the late 1940’s and 1950’s! What he did and where he was at the time was so tightly classified he never told anyone, not even my aunt! My Dad, on the other hand, wrote down classified information in his minuscule shorthand and told my mother where she could access it just in case of his untimely death or disappearance. Yes, he could have been court martialed, but I think our priest would have gone to prison first. He witnessed some really disturbing stuff in the Marianas when he was in the Navy. A lot of it is now online, but not the worst of it. He later retrieved the papers and hid them somewhere. Even I don’t know where because he and Mom took that secret to their graves. Thanks for your story!
Naw come on, it's a SMART chain link fence, it's been upgraded with some new fangled electronics, the gov would never lie...... Atleast not about that anyways.... Yeah right the gov pretty much never tells the truth, but yet people believe their gov god sent and landed man on the moon so they will believe any stupid thing no matter how dumb.
In 1987 I was a assistant Little League coach in Boulder Colorado. The Head Coach worked at Rocky Flats. He developed cancer and it rapidly went thru his body. By mid season he died. He coached as long as he could which was two weeks before mid season. It was just horrible watching this man fade away till death. He was only 45.
Horrible story. My heart goes out to these workers and all who have been effected. RF was one of the worst contaminated plants in the country. I screened the film in CO back around 2016 and told them that it was one of the only sites with no museum to tell the history of what happened there. I have been all over the country with this film and almost all of them have a museum. Terrible.
We as children played baseball atop an illegal landfill that Westinghouse Electric donated to the community I lived in (Trafford, PA) In the late 1980's this ball field and surrounding area where we played everyday became a Super Fund site, steel drums with PCB & other toxic chemicals were buried just a few inches below the surface. I have cancer today. These big company's like Westinghouse, General Electric, etc budget in fines to their annual budgets, it's far cheaper to pay fines then to do the right thing and protect communities and workers. It's really a sad USA past & present. The nuclear legacy is everywhere. I had looked for homes in a rural area just NE of Pittsburgh, PA and all the homes came with a disclosure statement on one of the disclosure's was Nuclear litigation could be pending. What I found out was a company called NUMEC (Nuclear Materials & Equipment Corporation) had 2 plutonium fuel pellet factory's along RT 66 on the Kiskiminetas River Apollo, PA & Parks Twp, PA, And previously owned by Babcock & Wilcox. There was a news article that ran from the Valley News Dispatch "Buried Legacy" and it described many of the same practices described in your film, only the supervisor workers had dosimeter badges. When the plant was decommissioned several trenches were cut above the plant & above long wall coal mines below & everything radioactive was dumped in these unlined pits & covered over. This contamination of nuclear materials is everywhere and the Feds turn a blind eye. And no I didn't buy property there but down river in Pittsburgh
Thanks for sharing your story and perspective. It is indeed a larger nation wide problem that needs to be addressed sooner than later. Tax payers often end up picking up the tab after a small percentage is paid by the responsible private parties.
One technical oversight: they didn't use uranium for the Trinity bomb. Uranium-235 is hard to separate from its other subatomic forms because chemically it looks exactly the same to whatever chemical you're going to use the separate it. That was what the purpose of oak ridge national laboratory was for was to turn it into uranium hexafluoride and then pass it through several different filtration mechanisms in a huge electromagnetic loop. And I know that one for a fact because the US Treasury had a loan oak ridge all of the silver that we had to spin into wire to be used as the electromagnetic coils. All the copper was being used for bullet jackets for the war effort. But they used in Trinity was plutonium 239 because it was a man-made material and they were not entirely sure if it was going to fission the right way, but they wanted to use it because it was easier to separate from the rest of the uranium. I know this because they produced three spheres of bomb fuel, one for the trinity, one for the fat man, and the third one which inevitably was called the demon core because it ended up killing two scientists in two separate experiments.
This popped up in my feed, and I took a chance and clicked. Glad I did! Absolutely stunning revelations to me. I had assumed the workers would have had the top protection against radiation as possibe. Seeing the tragic stories of lives cut short is hard to watch, but it really connects you to the emotion behind this production. Very well done. I have subbed and look forward to more!
Thank you so much for your support and kind words. I assumed the same thing as you, I just simply had no idea. I wasn't even initially trying to make a documentary, I was just investigating why a couple of the workers you see in the film were not compensated in this complicated program that I had never heard of. Once I started speaking with them I felt I had to get their stories out there.
The nuclear death cult protecting workers, while they focus all effort on world wide destruction... ? That sure is an interesting notion. Boy I tell you, my fellow humans never cease to amaze me.
Not to excuse those in charge, but we do know much more now than back then. Sadly, it’s still true the lower down the chain, the less your well-being is taken into consideration. If you think the US is bad on nuclear safety, compare it to the USSR! As someone once joked, “Never trust a crew of chefs to run a nuclear power plant!”
@@mariekatherine5238 They knew what it did to the living tissue and cells loooong before the Manhattan project was implimented. The Radium Girls, Madam Currie herself, as well as her daughter and husband. They knew exactly how much damage radiation did, especially if injested. They even bragged back in the late 1940s on television interviews how a small vial of plutonium could kill every human being on the planet ... and then they popped off a nuclear bomb and tossed to the wind. Which then went into clouds that rained back down all over the nation. They did'nt know as much.. maybe.. but they knew more than enough about its harm. And thats nothing, cause by 1964 they knew exactly what radiation did to DNA structures, yet even after the atmospheric test ban treaty, they still launched satellites with therno-electric reactors on board. Some of which failed to reach orbit, and burned up in the atmosphere, increasing fallout world wide by huge margins. Like the failed SNAP9a sattelite. Look it up.
Excellent points. I wanted to include the Radium girls and Currie, but felt the film would be too long. I speak about those topics when lecturing at schools.
This is a good watch for anyone curious to expand their knowledge. I was born in 1952 and lived through a great part of the Cold War. I've been to the Trinity Site on it's 50th Anniversary and this subject has always been of great interest to me.
I watched this for the first time late last night into the early morning and could not steal myself away from the television screen. Sad to learn how many became ill and died for pioneering nuclear work and the knock on effect it had on their families.
Background music sounds like sometimes (the Thing) scary synthesizer but good . and other back grounds music sounds very good ,Thanks for the docu video
I have a tiny piece of this history, a piece of trinitite from the Trinity blast. Knowing the whole story, it's very humbling to hold and see. So many lives and so much destruction was caused in the name of a weapon. They truly did become the destroyer of worlds, and families, and the environment...
I watched this and realized I've delivered steel to the site in Venice,Ill. Scary how these places are still in use after being uncovered as hot spots. By the way I was last there in December of 2022 .
A very revealing documentary. I am ashamed that commercial interest not only caused the problem, but through legitimate devices avoid any responsibility. The problem only gets worse and involves, ultimately, the whole world.
I never read or heard anything good that the AEC did. They were cavalier with other people's lives and communities. This story only confirms my impression. Great documentary, very informative.
Just remember, the Department of Energy is just the new name of the AEC, and their charter has never changed. They've only added more areas of research and interest to make the their organization less evil and more legitimate.
I get your point and I agree with you. May I remind anyone reading this that Emperor Hirohito and Hitler were both a taaad more cavalier towards ANY life that didn't look like them or fall in line with their form of "government".
I think a documentary about Rocky Flats would be of interest to people. Believe it or not, in many ways it was at an even higher risk for exposure. 2 serious fires in production buildings that were within feet of burning through the roof filters, leaks of plutonium & nitric acid recovery solutions by the hundreds in at least 20 buildings, 35,000 55 gal drums of transuranic waste that were left outdoors with no protection from the elements for over 2 decades - majority of the barrels had corroded and contents soaked into the ground. Just a tiny sample of the environment & the employees were even more compartmentalized and kept ignorant of exposure.
I agree. Rocky Flats is near the top of payouts in compensation for workers of all the sites in the country. Paying out just under a billion in the EEOICPA.
You Tube : ....." SECRETS FROM A BOMB FACTORY " .... all about ROCKY FLATS ! Then read the follow up book , " THE AMBUSHED GRAND JURY ",..... the trial of Rockwell INT. and the management who ignored safety practices in the name of PROFITS !
There are a number of docs about Rocky Flats, all should be watched as each gives a perspective from another person sharing what is hidden there. The doc, ... " SECRETS FROM A BOMB FACTORY " is a must watch ! Also the book, " The AMBUSHED GRAND JURY !" The story of the Special Grand Jury to investigate the environmental crimes by Rockwell Int. and the D.O.E. ,..... 8 people charged,.... and how the Dept of Justice ( INJUSICE ) deliberately killed the case !
I live just twenty minute drive from handford nucleur site. Alot of ppl that worked there,including a uncle of mine have died of cancer and the entire area has a high number if cancer compared to other places. Ontop of that they buried all the spent fuel rods and waste in barrells and they quickly ate through tthe barrels and leaked into the ground. Hundreds of barrels. And the whole damn area will be dangerous for tens of thousand of years. Insane when you really think about it.
It's all good.. the U.S.A. were very kind sharing thier nuclear poison In timebombs internationally, too. Look up camp century and the Runit dome fort worth whose filthy contaminants are waiting to leach out of the century ice- some 200,000 barrels of rusting diesel barrels plus all the Nuclear waste left in the Greenland ice to poison all in its path, and where the Americans exploded the equivalent of l Hiroshima bomb EVERYDAY for 12 YEARS.. After one misfire that filled the water and island paradise with unreached plutonium, workers were left to pick it up by hand, no safety protection whatsoever, and it was thrown in a water- filled bomb crater and covered with concrete panels placed atop, without any type of lining, which is now having the beautiful island lagoon lapping at the half- pie 'Acme Co.' Waste protection system which is already leaking into our home, not thiers, The Pacific ocean. At the time they let the 'Savages' as they called them, go back to thier poisoned home, and then experimenting on what was happening to them due to being exposed to "th gr8 Shitan's" POISONOUS TRAP. there is a truely disturbing doco on the whole story made by veteran investigative Journalist John Pilger. Very good.
I've watche several of the ," KING 5 News, HANFORD'S DIRTY SECRETS " and the AY-102 Tank LEAK and the Faulty Glassification Plant ! The waste of money there is obscene and needs better supervision ! So many corrupt contractors too !
Thanks for asking and supporting the film. I'm not really sure. I think it's taken a while for people to discover the film. I actually got maybe 90% of those subscribers in the last month. The film was just chugging along for the greater part of a year and now it's starting to take off. Thanks for subscribing.
Add this documentary to those that I have seen in the past and will undoubtedly see more of in the future regarding "Nuclear". Very well presented, researched and produced. The hard never ending work by so many people to bring the wrongs into the light. The pain and suffering by so many who did what they believed were the right things for them to do, for our Country, peace, and their families and friends. The continued avoidance, disregard, lack of acceptance of responsibility and not taking all the right steps to help make things right, by the Government and Companies responsible for such great harm to workers, humanity and our earth, continues to be heartbreaking, legally and morally wrong. My thanks and best regards to all who were involved in bringing this to the public attention, and to those who continue this work.
"hmmmm... hey larry where should we build this EXTREMELY unsafe & toxic chemical plant?" "lets see here.........what about RIGHT BESIDE THIS FUCKING HIGHSCHOOL????!!!!!!!!"
I'm so glad YT is recommending these small creators. They make TH-cam great. I often wondered about the first people to work around this stuff in the US. I heard people in the USSR would handle this stuff without protection.
I knew nothing of it either. I wasn't even trying to make a documentary at first. I was just investigating why a few workers were rejected by a government program I had never heard of, and that lead to this film. Thanks for watching.
It was for YOUR gain also. YOU lived in a country that has been safe from the threat of other countries invading and blowing you up. Everybody seems to forget that part..
Wow. I’ve never discovered a channel with such amazing content and so few eyeballs on it. I’m the 139th subscriber and lots of these long videos only have views in the low double digits. Keep up the great work and it is sure to change soon!
Thank you so much for the kind words and sub. When I made this film I really didn't have any money to advertise it. It's all just been word of mouth over the years. It seems like people are starting to discover it now on here and find it informative. Thanks again, I really appreciate your support.
@@reallifepicturesfilm You did outstanding work. The production values are excellent and the narrative is compelling. I have 4000 twitter followers and linked to it last night; hopefully you’ll get at least a tiny boost from that. Thank you for making this.
' They' all want the 2 minute instant payoff tik tok version of everything... kinda hard to do involving almost any subject other than pursing your lips in front of the omnipresent mirror holding a phone, or pulling a prank in public...
@@carlsaganlives6086 Yes, to a certain extent I feel like a dinosaur. It took me 5 years to make this film. Pouring off documents and records trying to get all the facts without trying to sensationalize the subject. I wondered if it was too long for some. Maybe, but it's fine for others and it's nice to see it finding a wider audience.
@@conzmoleman I can't thank you enough for that. I have seen a boost in views and wasn't sure how that happened. Thank you again for the kind words and support. I had no idea where this tiny film would go when I started making it. I just wanted to get these people's stories out there in hopes that it wouldn't happen to workers in the future. They deserve that much at the very least.
@41:51 Father hit the nail on the head. The biggest problem with the Weldon site is that because it’s close to the Missouri River that’s where everyone assumes it drains to. The watershed of the Feed Materials Plant (mound area) shows it drains to one of three lakes that were actually just dammed off creeks. From there it continues onto Dardenne Creek which snakes northeast through the entire county before finally reaching its destination which is the Mississippi River. Its affected way more people than we’ll ever truly know.
Mallinckrodt just settled a lawsuit for $1.7b june 2022, for its role in the opioid epidemic. They've been manufacturing heavy duty opioids since 1898. Just imagine how many lives this company has ruined/impacted between all the drugs and radiation. I know the company isn't all bad, but yikes.
@@alanmeyers3957 Is there legitimate uses for them? Yes, absolutely. Was oxy falsely marketed as safer/much less addictive(even after they knew it wasn't), therefore overprescribed leading to an opioid pandemic with countless lives ruined/lost? Yes, that is verifiably true. "To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell.” -Richard Feynman They didn't just make the stuff, they pushed it, hard, for profit. It's all well documented. Why do you think they lost the $1.7b lawsuit? Brainwashing?
The lives that have been ruined because of opiates, are their OWN faults for abusing them, continuing to abuse them, and not seeking help to get off of them. Nobody's faults but their own.
The Japanese had already started to sue for peace when the bombs were dropped. Gar Alperovitz is just *one* historian who has documented this in his book "The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb". The argument that the bomb precluded the need for an invasion is a popular canard, as Alperovitz explains. Nuclear Pioneer John Gofman was one of the early ones to blow the whistle on the dangers of radiation, and the nefarious relationship between Industry and Government which has led to so much nuclear contamination, cancer, etc., and has spread so much disinformation about the safety of nuclear power and weapons production.
Think about this. These workers and residents that lived in close proximity to these plants and sites are all victims of nuclear arms as much as those at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Though at the time they didn't what else to do to bring the war with Japan to an end as quickly as possible they did know the dangers of exposure to these materials that were produced and as time went on they learned even more but at every turn they chose to do the wrong thing over and over again which exposing more and more people.
Greatest country in the world unless you are a poor worker. Capitalism only works out for the richest and wealthiest, crushes everyone else. Its a shame how many hard working honorable citizens tolerate such a cruel system on the lie that they actually have a voice in their government and that their votes actually matter. At least dictators tell their people this fact strait up instead of giving the illusion of hope to people stupid enough to believe it. 🇺🇸
@armyofninjas9055 Yikes. 😬 The virus is still around now, are you seriously suggesting no one works until it's gone 100%? Because it won't ever happen. Most everyone survives, if you don't have medical issues. At some point and time, those with medical issues have to do what they need to and let everyone else get on with their life.
Yes, Wendy is great. I relied on her knowledge greatly in making this film and she is very passionate about helping people who have been effected by this work.
Great article! Now, it would be great if someone, or the government, would do something about the Crewdogs that worked with the final products. The US Government would never admit there were nuclear weapons at a certain facility, and will never admit those weapons exposed those who handled with radiation.
This terrible preventable tragedy would never have happened if the company executives and shiny ass pants politicians had to live right next to these industrial safety abominations..
My comment appeared then disappeared 😢 TH-cam has done this several times recently on other videos. I just wanted to say what a fantastic documentary. I'm in the UK and really enjoyed it. It's so important to preserve the first hand interviews of these miscarriages of justice - thank you.
@BarneyRubbleJr it's totally crazy, as I never said anything controversial, there's far worse comments below. The only words it could have picked up on was one beginning with N that's popular to chill with as the documentary is good enough to be on there.
Thank you for the kind words. I'm not sure what happens with comments. This is the first time I have seen your post but I have seen others on the page and then gone. I thought it was my browser.
@@reallifepicturesfilm I think maybe TH-cam has a glitch. Or maybe it does not like it if you refer to platforms other than itself! This documentary would make a fantastic audiobook, and is more than good enough to be on streaming platforms, particularly as nuclear history is something people find interesting. If I was considering conspiracy theories, perhaps TH-cam deletes random comments to affect the logistics - less comments meaning it gets less traffic and that might encourage you to pay to advertise it,?
@@rottsandspots Thanks so much. It's streaming on Amazon and also on Vimeo. I had it on iTunes for a while and then put it on here. I'm new to how YT handles these comments. I have seen a comment and went to reply and then couldn't find it. I thought maybe the person themselves deleted it, but based on your experience I'm beginning to wonder.
Its easy to get people to do things they normally wouldn’t when you convince them there is an existential crisis we have no choice but to address. Ethics go out the window. The need for empirical evidence goes out the window when asserting certain things must be done. You can even convince people to relinquish their freedoms. You dare not question the “greater good” narrative. We still fall for this age old fallacy to this day. It's the backbone of progressive politics.
Its an interesting paradox. When people believe they are on the moral high ground they think they are no longer bound by morality or justification for their actions.
My Father and many workers of the Aluminum Industries have developed Alzheimer's and are today gone. A study came out indicating that the dust and working environment can cause Alzheimer's. I wonder how long we will be ignored, thanks for the hope.
Thanks for sharing your story and sorry to hear about your father. I wanted to get the word out about these worker's stories in hopes that it could help others. And as you pointed out, sometimes in other industries. The health of workers can be protected, just takes the will to do it and that will only comes from pressure.
That's a good start, but unfortunately they want much more than proof that you were employed at a certain facility. They are trying to, "Dose Reconstruct" you in hopes of figuring out, often decades later, how much exposure you may have gotten. Many hoops to jump through, but I appreciate your thoughtfulness.
@@reallifepicturesfilm I got that part, but the one daughter said that her father's employer denied that he ever worked there at all. A similar situation happened once to me in 1981. Ultimately, they were sued out of existence.
Yes, that was Denise Brock. She was indeed fortunate to have documentation that he worked there or who knows what would have happened to her case. I agree with you. Keep as much documentation as you can. You never know when you might need it.
My dad grew up downwind of Hanford. Watch glowing light decend on the back wheat feild. He us3d to weld at the Tank Farm. We moved after the last green run in 72. Tri-cities, Yakima and surrounding areas still has miscarriages, babies born with their organs outside their bodies, and other special needs kids. Current clean up company got workers contaminated.
Thanks for sharing your story. I screened the film in Kennewick back in 2016 and spoke with some of the cleanup workers who were sick. I didn't know about the babies. Just horrible.
I’m not at all surprised. My uncle was in the service in Nevada and New Mexico in the ‘40s and ‘50s. You can see that online, the men in the foxholes with sunglasses and their backs turned for the blast. Then they’d run out to ground zero with Geiger counters! He died of leukemia. Some of his great grandchildren were stillborn and others have bizarre autoimmune problems. One grandson died of lung cancer at age five. That’s NOT NORMAL! No, his parents didn’t smoke!
@@mariekatherine5238 absolutely horrible. I wanted to also tell the story of people like your uncle in this film but just didn't have enough time. It doesn't get near enough attention, what happen to them and of course their loved ones.
It may vary by state but the turnaround for government benefits applications seems generally to be one year, before the first rejection, and this applies to SSI as well. In NY State it seems to be an unspoken rule that rejection is automatic if you don't have a lawyer. There is a legal procedure including things not covered in the instructions on the forms, that the lawyers know. For instance they don't say anything about having an expert witness at the hearing where up-or-down decisions are made about one year after first application. Lawyers work on a contingency that it appears is set by some uniform standard or rule.
20:03 Judging by the early " Battling Tops " game box in the picture, the date would have been 1968 or shortly after. Amazing how many lost their lives due to radiation poisoning.
"Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot that it do singe yourself." - Shakespeare "Is anyone surprised that neither your government nor big corporations is being honest with you or cares about you?" - Me
Watch Karen Silkwood, both the movie Silkwood and the documentary on YT. She tried to blow the whistle on unsafe practices. She joined a union and was outspoken about safety. She was "cooked" three times. Her life ended when she was rear-ended by another vehicle when she was on the way to an important union meeting with paperwork. When the car wreck was found on the side of the road with her deceased body inside, the papers she wanted to present at the meeting were mysteriously gone. Hmmmm..... I wonder who took them? Who hit her? One guess.
My mother worked at oak Ridge. She died at 42 of breast cancer. It affected my life all the way down to my Grandchildren. My mother nor I received nothing for this but hurt and sadness.
I'm in the UK & I worked for Staveley Chemicals in the early 2000's, it was called Mallinckrodt - we all knew they were an American company & they has a nuclear reactor onsite, but I knew nothing about their foundations 🤔
Yes, they put in some cooling loops a few years back that seem to have been effective. We still wait while the EPA goes through their process of testing areas of the site and ground water beneath the site, and they finalize their Remedial Design Phase.
Except not, because I didn't have sht to do with any of it, nor any say. I didn't vote for it. I didn't fund it. I didn't even pay the taxes used to build it. So no, there wasn't some bullsht "cosmic balance".
This is absolutely insane, the greedy powers in control over the years need to be in prison, and all of their assets liquidated to the people that live in North County. Screw them!!! This is murder!
Hehe. I love it when people (especially those vehemently anti-communist) don't realise that they sound like Marxists. Redistributing the wealth of greedy powers to those most responsible for creating that wealth, huh ... ? ;)
Good comments, all of them. But also remember there is no gain without sacrifice, and humans are born with both good and bad natures. Deliberately harming the innocent is morally wrong when seen on the personal level. When seen from a purely objective macro viewpoint, the innocent are just unfortunate collateral. As my grandmother used to remind me, “Life in this world isn’t fair. Offer it up (a Catholic saying) and march on!”
In comparison to any other energy he's correct. And if it wasn't for #Retardistan we'd have thorium plants, which after start up and in usual running are very clean and can burn previous wastes. You do have to prime them with uranium to start them off, but after that they'll run off thorium producing no dangerous waste.. But hey, don't do your research and follow off your assumptions and guesswork and what you want to be true. Enjoy voting for Trump.
Thorium plants do produce waste. While it is different than uranium -235 it still produces alpha and beta emitters. What this film shows is how private companies often cut corners to save money and that behavior puts us at risk. I have no reason to believe that companies that wold run Thorium plants would be any different. Do you?
@@reallifepicturesfilm I'm not nuclear engineer but I know that all fission based nuclear reactors will produce radioactive waste. Problem is the nuclear waste decaying half life that is constant, waste is radioactive and how to storage that safely for really long time so that nature / future generations would not to suffer for it.
@@olliaalto5638 Yes, that's the question. Up to this point these materials have often been mishandled and workers unprotected, not only in the past but right now. Seems to me that we have a lot of work to do before considering moving forward.
I live next to the nuclear site of Babcock International and 12 decommisioned nuclear subs here in Plymouth,UK.I am now very woorried.A nuclear alert siren is tested every week,but,what good would it do?
My heart goes out to you. I hope you are able to be safe. I don't know much about that location but I have spoken with a worker who was sick from one of their plants here in the states. She had disturbing stories about the work place.
Unfortunately there are hundreds of these sites across the United states. Everywhere from closed army bases to underneath individual small buildings that were used as subcontractors to the government. Some will never be found and the contamination will be there for thousands of years. Others might be found and a window dressing made to clean it up. Even large Laboratories like Lawrence livermore, use the basic idea of it's on our property it's under our concrete so it's our problem and we pretend to monitor it. Or if it's in round water they make sure that they measure it so far away from the source that it's been diluted to where the levels will always test safe.
I totally agree. I told people when I was traveling with the film from city to city that "I could have made the same film in your city, I just happened to live in St. Louis".
@Real Life Pictures that is the truth, even in the San Francisco Bay Area there are gleaming examples of this. One of which was Hunters Point Naval base in San Francisco California. Was heavily contaminated, also Treasure Island which is right in the middle of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, also was contaminated with radioactive material, due to the fact they had a maintenance building that worked on glow-in-the-dark watch dials and cadmium glow-in-the-dark markers for aircraft carriers. Or dumped into buckets, and then later thrown into at open-pit assuming that the water would evaporate and then they would just bury the minor-league radioactive material and it wouldn't be a problem. So now I'll Treasure Island is being turned into residential housing. There has been for cleanup efforts to remediate the radioactive material left underneath two maintenance facilities. One of the lesser-known is Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories in Tracy California, their test range well one time being very remote, will now be on the doorstep of 1,500 residential homes that are currently being constructed including three sites for schools an area that's already been surveyed and marked for shops and stores. The major contaminant out there is thousands upon thousands of pounds of beryllium. Were used in various tests, not to mention other heavy metals. Another facility that you cleaned it up will cost hundreds of millions of dollars if it ever gets cleaned up. I wonder if the homeowners buying the multimillion-dollar homes right off of the main Road will be told anything about it
@@allen_steel1236 All great information. Thanks for sharing. As I was screening the film around the country I visited Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. If you go to the film's actual website www.thesafesideofthefence.com and then click on travel blog you can see the different sites I visited. Each place has its own set of issues with contamination. So much bigger than many want to acknowledge.
@Real Life Pictures I wouldn't say that LLNL, one set of issues, I would say more of the entire chart of the nuclear lies, would be an easier directory to figure out what's contaminated out there. And then go 35 miles towards the Sacramento River delta, and you come across the Concord Naval weapons station. Now well not radiologically contaminated at least not in a major part. It is been the storage and dumping grounds of thousands and thousands of pounds and gallons of diesel heavy oil grease lead paint scrapings, and everything else that the United States Navy could generate. There is one lost Source at the weapons station. That's approximately the size of a baseball and I believe was cobalt-60. And extremely high-level gamma source. According to the technician who last operated the building it broke off of the stainless steel cable that is hung from in a water tank, but acted as a shield barrier. They would pull a railroad car loaded with Naval shells into the building, x-ray film was put on the opposite wall everyone evacuated the area and the source was raised, and time with a stopwatch. And then lowered back into the water tank. According to the operator about six months before the facility was shut down. The cable snapped and the source fell to the bottom of the water tank. The operator was told by his supervisor that a nuclear cleanup specialty team, would retrieve the source later so the pipe was capped, Landmark with the last known information about the source and its level. My knowledge nobody has been in that building to check the source or as levels in over 30 years.
@@reallifepicturesfilm by the way I wanted to say I really do love the title of your documentary, really does speak a thousand words. When I went to Hanford Washington State, to work as a television engineer in nearby Yakima Washington. I thought it would be an interesting place to drive through. I was amazed by the red and yellow piece of rope with the faded tariff oil on it, as long as you were on one side of that quarter inch rope you are perfectly fine, but if you stepped over the Rope you were dead. That's also where I found two different buildings completely unsecured and unlocked. On a Sunday back in the early 2000s, baby. Started for mediation of B reactor. And although shut down the building was not even secured with a padlock. The gates were open and you could drive right up to it. But again as long as you stayed on the right side of the fence you were perfectly fine
We in the mid west were sprayed with radiation to see what effects radiation has on long term health issues... anyone seen a rise in cancer in their neighborhoods? Hmmmm?
YES ! Early atmospheric nuke tests at the Nevada Test Site , ( Jan. 1951 to mid 1963 ) 12 years, there were 100 open air shots ,... of the worst were shot SMOKEY and Shot HARRY ( aka, DIRTY HARRY ) that spread a radioactive cloud and rained FALLOUT on St. George ,Utah and surrounding communities with devastating effects to all ! Read the book , " FALLOUT" and see for yourself what the Govt/ A.E.C. tried to keep quiet from the public !
The photo at 35:33, strage towers of radioactive blocks stacked upon concrete pipe segments; some sort of game, or why? The early signs of radiation brain damage?
Can't really answer that for sure, but they could have been stacked tighter with more groups of barrels when they first did it, and over time as they fell apart from corrosion many could have toppled over. I don't understand why they were allowed to just walk away and leave that stuff there like that in the first place.
1:11:11 "until it meets these goals": that means in plain language there is - as always when talking about nuclear waste - a compromise between health risks and cleanup costs.
No demonstration of the atomic bomb would've convinced the Japanese to surrender. They had already been firebombed in other cities resulting in just as many deaths, if not more. Then, after Hiroshima was nuked, they still wouldn't surrender. Truman had no other viable choice.
A 3rd bomb was shipped to the San Francisco bay for delivery as was the ," DEMON CORE " ! Japan still hadn't surrendered so Gen. Grove was preparing the 3rd bomb for use when word of surrender finally came and the components shipped back to Los Alamos where the "DEMON CORE" would take it victims !
This sounds like some type of fictional lore from the Fallout universe. Its sad to hear the disappointment in people's voices who realize that the government they trusted and believed in was responsible for the destruction of their own health through complete negligence and carelessness.
11:45 Chicago Pile 1 ("CP-1") lacked radiation shielding and a cooling system. It needed neither. The reactor operated for 5 minutes at a power level of less than a watt, not even enough heat to warm a single drop of water. In spite of it's bulky size it was only an experiment to verify that a reactor could work. Very extensive precautions were taken in case of a potential runaway reaction.
That's because it didn't melt down. The best case scenario happened. They didn't want to build it there originally themselves. They felt it would be safer way out in the woods. I just found it fascinating that instead of just paying striking workers out there, they decided to take it to the University of Chicago. They had the full purse of the United States of America. You couldn't pay those guys what, an extra nickel an hour?
@@reallifepicturesfilmIt did, indeed, go critical. But without cooling it wasn't safe to go further than bare criticality. They were very concerned about safety and would have preferred the remote location for that reason. But speed and secrecy were as important. Groves was in charge by then and would have paid whatever but wouldn't have had the time and patience to negotiate with Jimmy Hoffa types.
@@beryllium1932 I have no knowledge that they were "Jimmy Hoffa types" whatever that means, or how long it would have taken to settle it. the ended up doing Chicago Pile 2 outside the city a few short months later anyway. They had time. The fact is, they took the less safe route over settling with workers.
1:09:37 hey I’m a radiation protection specialist at a nuclear plant in Canada and just so you know 0.2mrem/yr is not 2 hundred milla rem per year that zero point two milla rem per year, other than that I loved the video
It's such a disgrace that these dedicated workers and their families and communities were put through so much suffering. I'm a supporter of nuclear energy, but with safety ensured at every step! These stories show a failure at every level in terms of protecting the people...
Please help me learn how someone can donate money or other help to any of these organizations that support these horribly mistreated workers. If the government wont do it then perhaps some of us with the means to do so can. I will look for opportunities, but if others can look as well it might help. This is a disgusting chapter in our history. Help those who can help to do so....that is very very American. This is a very important documentary.
Thank you so much for the kind words and support of the workers. The Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act that's in the film is administered through the Department of Labor, so they have our tax dollars to pay the workers, but many workers have never heard of the program. I made the film mainly to get the word out to people who are deserving of this help and also those struggling to get through the hoops they have them jumping through. If you can spread the word to workers that may qualify that would be a big help. Thanks again.
love how the guy gets cancer due to them exposing him to radiation and they fire him, so he can't afford treatment, lose his car, home etc. and have no way to support himself or his family.
Yes, as all plants and trees will absorb radioactive materials. HOWEVER,.... the plant will UPTAKE the radionuclides into it's stem and blossom which is NOW ABOVE GROUND ! The plant dies and falls on TOP OF THE GROUND where the decaying flower gets WINDBLOWN or RAIN carries it elsewhere,... AGAIN ABOVE TO SOIL ! And if someone EATS the RADIOACTIVE SUNFLOWER SEEDS,... then what ??? Did you know that TOBACCO is among the HIGHEST Radioactive plants in the world ? Yes,... and people SMOKE TOBACCO,... along with all the other POISONOUS CHEMICALS the Industry puts into their cigarettes !
What blows my mind is how several of these employees, betrayed and lied to by their own country then suffer their own demise (cancer, etc) and suffering and exposure of their loved ones will still comment "best country in the world'! Some of them even burying their children dying cancer from exposure I wonder, have they lived anywhere else? Why is this acceptable?
It's not easy to explain, but I sat with these folks and got to know them and they are all great people. They see the good in this country as well and see people like Denise Brock who the government did ultimately hire to help them. There's more to this country than the people who are selfish and take advantage of others. There are people like him that put their lives on the line for this rest of us. He sees that. I see it too, even though it's hard sometime. Thanks for your comments and taking the time to view the film.
@@reallifepicturesfilm I understand your point and you're right. There are a lot of great people in our country and I don't debate this fact. My point is that the govt and the greedy elitists that control them are pure evil and this is not acceptable. It has become like a dysfunctional family where the parents are addicted to more and the other family members act out more and more until the social structure is all but collapsed.
I have worked at several of the nation's nuclear weapons facilities in the radiation safety role. The nuclear aspect is only a small part of the hazards. We testing for Mercury which is an essential material in the processing of nuclear materials. Mercury is now one of our biggest concerns. I have worked onsite at Fernald in Ross, Ohio, The Mound in Miamisburg, OH, Been onsite at Portsmouth, in Ohio, Oak Ridge, TN, Paducah Gaseous Diffusion plant, in KY, Los Alamos in Albuquerque, NM, and now work at Savannah River Site in SC. I know that people have suffered because of radiation work, however, many of these people also chain smoked. This muddies the water in determining if the work in the Nuclear Facility caused cancer or tobacco. In Asbestos work, smoking and working with Friable Asbestos increases the chance of Cancer or Mesothelioma FIFTY TIMES over working with asbestos alone. The reason we changed from street clothes to coveralls and special shoes was because it was difficult to detect low levels of contamination on the skin so we had to shower out.
Many of this plants didn't take a reasonable amount of care in protecting workings. Often they withheld information from them that would have protected them. They didn't do their due-diligence in safety so can't fall back on workers now. Certainly nothing "muddy" about falsifying health records and tossing badges in the trash.
We would have had relatively clean energy, had people not gone into a hysterical fit in the beginning days and it's more energy. Just like with every technology there is a learning curve it may not be pretty, and I admit that yes we did a lot of stupid things. By the 1970s we had gotten actually very good at generating nuclear power. It was stupidity and lack maintenance by third-party operators Idyllwild accidents at places like Three Mile Island to occur. The Scandal about The Love Triangle / murder suicide at the SL1 plant has been long proven a fantasy. And there were problems with that style reactor. However there are hundreds of reactors operating all around the world, currently one of the biggest power plants in the world is operating beautifully in the middle of a war zone. Son has a spectacular safety record most of the plants that are in Europe spectacular safety records. Unfortunately here in the United States by the time of plant reaches the age where it needs to be recertified, it is no longer cost effective go through the process to recertify it it's easier to shut it down and allow it to be dormant. And then store the fuel. It's sad that some 40 reactors were built across the United States and we're never put into operation because of unfounded Hysteria.
@grahamstevenson1740 you seem to forget that half of Europe was contaminated (and partly still is!) from a nuclear power plant in Czernobyl. You seem to forget that there is still no striking solution to the waste problem (and in trying to find the solution we have created problems like in the Asse mine).
@@cymbala6208 The contamination from Chernobyl (NOT a western designed reactor) was fairly low level and now essentially negligible. There ARE solutions to waste disposal. Sweden and Finland in particular are at the forefront.
@@grahamstevenson1740 A blown open, fully out of control nuke reactor is spewing out massive amounts of radioactivity, Hot Fuel Rods, and HIGH LEVEL CONTAMINATES is NOT LOW LEVEL ! It is High enough to cause evacuation of the entire city of Pripyat for eons, destroyed the forest between Pripyat and Chernobyl ( now known as the RED FOREST ) and has been causing countless damage and death to it's former residents and surrounding towns !
I’m a U.S. Navy submarine Nuke 4 years on 2 submarines about 3 REM documented. I was out of the nuclear industry for about 4 years and then back into it at Hanford in the 9 months in early ‘82 I saw a LOT OF SPECIAL NEEDS CHILDREN in Hanford. I saw a picture of Trench 1 and we know what’s in Trench 94. I wonder what’s in Trench ¿ 1 ?-93 For years the 4 reactors at Naval Reactors Facility Idaho Falls just sat there with no phuel onboard then I saw a picture of PARTS being drug to a burial pit and they are all gone. First nuclear powered vessel (submarine) first Air Craft carrier first natural circulation in a war ship
Thank you for your service and for sharing your story. I visited the B reactor in 2016 and screened the film out there for workers. Way too many people still getting sick working out there on the cleanup.
@@SteveWright-oy8ky Indeed. I was brought out to Idaho Falls to screen the film back in 2016 by the environmental group "The Snake River Alliance". They told me about that incident. I had never heard of it before. Thanks for sharing that.
Where'd all that Uranium oxide come from in 1945? Those cubes the Germans had that were found at the end of the war in May 1945 were pure uranium metal and they had literal tons of it - I personally believe thats what fed the cyclotrons and thats why the bomb was ready many months earlier than it was projected. All respect to the people who worked on the Manhatten project but this aspect of the story (the uranium metal sourcing) has always sounded strange to me.
@@reallifepicturesfilm The Uranium came from the St. Joachimthal mine in Czechoslovakia as it had a long history of pitchblende mining . Thanks for your fantastic documentary about yet another of the Govt/ Private Industry co-op of the nuclear fuel and it's radioactive legacy ! For more info about this subject and it's deadly results, read the book, " ATOMIC ACCIDENTS " !
Well that was very interesting and very well done, I mean some of the explanations about how uranium was/is used was a little simplistic, and just wrong at times, but I can forgive that as iot wasn't the main thrust of the film. Also showing a man who's nearly 90 who is sharp as a tack and the picture of health, probably doesn't serve the point you are trying to make that well, lol.
Thank you for your thoughts on the the film. I actually think those gentlemen served my point quite well, as they were actual eyewitnesses to the work at the time. That's old school journalism. Going directly to the source instead of an opinion from someone who wasn't even there 😉 They battled illnesses and survived to tell about it. some of the people I interview unfortunately died before the film was completed. The film doesn't claim that everyone who worked at these plants died, clearly many didn't, but that doesn't justify the irresponsible way they were treated. That's the main thrust of the film. Not sure which uranium section you thought were "wrong". Best.
Proud Americans disgust me.. this is nothing to be proud of. I want out. I moved to NH to be part of the solution. There should be at least one place that prioritizes freedom, discourages patriotism and excuses that lead to injustices, and respects peoples individual rights to exist free from government and coercion. No victim no crime. Government is the problem, not the solution. #NHexit
I don't know if you watched this film, but there is plenty of blame to go around. Private companies cut corners, often behind the government's back and put the public at risk. The documents you see in the film are government documents, open to the public.
@@Indrid__Cold It's the one thing I wish I had clarified in the film. I thought it got too far into the weeds, but you have not been the only person asking about it, so I wasn't in the weeds enough. Thanks for your interest in the topic.
in the US people got payed and were free to leave if they had alternatives . in the great opponent the USSR people were eighter forced or payed a minimum compensation for their sacrefice and the polluted areas are probably worse than in the west ... The UK polluted half europe to build their bombs... all very worrying
The compensation program was too late for my uncle. Somehow, my father managed to live to 96. He had had all kinds of weird skin cancers, thyroid cancer, strange rashes and burns, but he did benefit from the government compensation. He was involved with the testing in the Pacific when in the Navy and later worked in a government laboratory in the US. As kids, we sometimes went to Dad’s office and played in a huge assembly room where “hot” pieces of equipment were cooling off behind tall walls of lead blocks. All they had to prevent people from going around the other side were radiation signs. We’d sometimes climb up a few feet on the lead blocks. Dad wore a film badge and from time to time would come up “hot” and have to work elsewhere on site for the rest of the month. There was a gong-like bell that rang whenever the beam separator was running. That meant a certain building and roads were off-limits when you heard the bell. There was a chainlink fence gate on the road, but it was certainly climbable if you didn’t have a key. The building was locked, and more difficult to get in, but sometimes Dad would find someone had propped the door open with a bit of a pencil or a small rock. He’d come home from work complaining about it. Nobody would ever admit doing it. It was a bother to go over to the main building, sign out the key, and bring it back, especially if you wanted to go to the cafeteria and have time to eat your lunch. Sometimes, the gate would be left open as well. A few times I was outside the building when the beam separator was running, but I had to stay in the car with the windows up. I was also in the beam separator building during shut downs. It was considered safe. That was in the 1960’s. By the 1980’s, it was no longer permitted and the daily dose of radiation was a fraction of what it had been when Dad first started there in 1959. The lab is still in full operation and it’s very different. There are entire acres designated as Superfund Sites. Security is nearly as tight as the Pentagon! There were numerous dirt roads and paths that cut through the woods surrounding the lab, and just a barbed wire fence! We kids used to ride our bikes on them and then go meet Dad when he finished work. We’d stick our bikes in the back of the station wagon and pile in for a ride home.
You could get in the main gate very easily, as well. There was a guard booth, but no gate or barrier. You stopped, showed a family member ID card and got waved in. If you forgot it, you gave the name and phone extension. The guard would call and verify your arrival, and wave you in. There was a lab gym, a pool, and campground with a children’s playground for use by employees and family members. Right behind where the swings were is now a Superfund site full of radioactive soil, a big hill with discarded equipment buried beneath it. We’d spend a week there every summer in our tent trailer. I’ve climbed that hill many times and rolled down it. Lots of kids did.
Another now Superfund site was found to have “hot” well water piped into three blocks of houses. Over the years, the woods around the lab was turned into housing developments. In the 1990’s, residents began getting sick and dying from cancer. There were an inordinate number of miscarriages, stillbirths, and birth defects. It was kind of a mini-Love Canal. The houses were closed up and later demolished. The land was annexed to the laboratory in the early 2000’s.
Dad received funds from the compensation program, the reason being his absolutely meticulous record-keeping. For my uncle who died of leukemia at age 70, there was no success because of the secrecy involved. He was in the Army in Nevada and New Mexico. The records were long since destroyed. The paperwork asked questions about date of blast, exact distance from the blast, serial numbers of protective equipment issued, like sunglasses! Three of seven cousins have had cancer, two are deceased from it. Four grandchildren have been born with birth defects, two died in infancy and one at age five of lung cancer. Now, two of three great grandchildren have unusual autoimmune disease. I consider our family very, very lucky. I’m 73 and have the same enlarged heart I was born with. Two siblings have the same condition and are still living. Of nine of us, six are living. Our brother was killed in Vietnam in 1968. One sister died at age 12 of leukemia, and another brother passed away in 2015 from complications of diabetes. Our mother passed from heart and kidney failure at age 98.
When I think back, an inordinate number of Dad’s colleagues died over the years, but since I was still a child, I didn’t think it unusual because to me, they were “old.” But a lot of men dying of cancer in their 30’s and 40’s wasn’t normal in the 1950’s and 1960’s. (edit-sp. correction)
Thank you so much for sharing your story and in such detail. This was an incredible read. I'm sorry that your family went through this. You detailed perfectly the need for improvements in the program. They put the burden on the worker when really they are the ones that should be seeking these workers out. As you mentioned, many of the facilities are long gone and asking workers and family members to supply such detailed information that the government often doesn't even have themselves is more than frustrating. People need to hear stories like yours. They need to know the history.
Wow. That was quite a read. Sorry to hear about all the problems you're family has faced.
My uncle just passed from skin cancer that was likely related to agent orange use during his time in Vietnam. I think he qualified and got some gov compensation, but money couldn't help him by that point. We we're very close, i loved him and he taught me a lot about the world growing up. Was like a second dad to me. He didn't have kids, so i guess i was probably like a son to him. Was terrible to see him going from a big strong guy, withering down to nothing by the end. Cancer sucks.
Didn't mean to hijack the thread. It's just that reading this, i can't help but think of him. I wish the gov/military/businesses will heed these lessons and make safety an imperative. Rip to all the pioneers of the atomic age.
thanks for sharing your personal story ! You and your family are part of the living legacy of America's Nuclear FALLOUT ! A sad commentary of the way the GOVT and Military used and disposed it's servicemen and women in it's insane rush to make a stockpile of UNUSEABLE WEAPONS that will forever haunt us to death ! The so called CLEAN-UP of America's nuclear weapons sites will far out strip any budget that was proposed for the making of those weapons!
@@reallifepicturesfilm Thanks for your acknowledgment. I also forgot to mention I learned how to drive at the lab--in government vehicles! Dad and I would ride our bikes over on Saturdays when few people were around. He’d sign out a car or truck and give me lessons, first in parking lots, then roads. There were all kinds of regular paved, gravel, and dirt roads, stop signs, a few traffic lights, merges, hills, curves, etc., but virtually no traffic! I started at age 13 and sat on a phone book for better vision and to make me look taller, more like an adult, in case I did encounter another driver. But even if you did, nobody really looked because it was assumed anyone in a lab vehicle was an employee. Once I got proficient, Dad would go work in his office or the assembly shop for a few hours and I’d practice by myself. Once I learned the car really well, he taught me the truck, light pickups, with a stick. Those I took out on the gravel and dirt roads. By the time I was 15 I got my permit, kept practicing, but took over as the driver in our family car-a Country Squire station wagon with “way-in-the-back” seats and the fake wood paneling on the sides! The day after my 16th birthday, I took and passed my driving test in my brother’s Dodge, a standard. There were no temporary, junior, or age-restrictions on licenses at that time, and the legal age was 16. You either passed the test or you didn’t. What if I’d badly damaged the lab vehicle? Dad would have payed for it. He did have one rule, that I had to wear the seatbelt in the car and not exceed 40 mph. The trucks didn’t have seatbelts, so I had to stay at 30mph. I guess we didn’t really didn’t think about getting seriously injured or killed. A minor dent wouldn’t have been noticed since all the motor pool vehicles had lots of them! Truthfully, I never dented one. I got a minor scratch on a truck from a tree branch sticking out into one of the dirt roads. Dad fixed it with some kind of slightly abrasive rubbing compound and a little polish.
@@ctdieselnut Thank you for your uncle’s service! Agent Orange is nasty stuff. And cancer really sucks, as you say. I recall my Dad trying to help my aunt fill out the paperwork. The questions they asked were ridiculous. They wanted to know things like the serial numbers of the glasses he was issued for every blast, the depth and position of the foxhole in relation to each blast, the date, time, and location on site…in the late 1940’s and 1950’s! What he did and where he was at the time was so tightly classified he never told anyone, not even my aunt! My Dad, on the other hand, wrote down classified information in his minuscule shorthand and told my mother where she could access it just in case of his untimely death or disappearance. Yes, he could have been court martialed, but I think our priest would have gone to prison first. He witnessed some really disturbing stuff in the Marianas when he was in the Navy. A lot of it is now online, but not the worst of it. He later retrieved the papers and hid them somewhere. Even I don’t know where because he and Mom took that secret to their graves.
Thanks for your story!
It's so awesome how a chainlink fence is the perfect shielding for radiation. And we thought we needed inches of lead, steel, or water.
Naw come on, it's a SMART chain link fence, it's been upgraded with some new fangled electronics, the gov would never lie...... Atleast not about that anyways....
Yeah right the gov pretty much never tells the truth, but yet people believe their gov god sent and landed man on the moon so they will believe any stupid thing no matter how dumb.
Maybe that's a lead fence 😂😂😂
@@daviddaves1544 time to lick it.
In 1987 I was a assistant Little League coach in Boulder Colorado. The Head Coach worked at Rocky Flats. He developed cancer and it rapidly went thru his body. By mid season he died. He coached as long as he could which was two weeks before mid season. It was just horrible watching this man fade away till death. He was only 45.
Horrible story. My heart goes out to these workers and all who have been effected. RF was one of the worst contaminated plants in the country. I screened the film in CO back around 2016 and told them that it was one of the only sites with no museum to tell the history of what happened there. I have been all over the country with this film and almost all of them have a museum. Terrible.
We as children played baseball atop an illegal landfill that Westinghouse Electric donated to the community I lived in (Trafford, PA) In the late 1980's this ball field and surrounding area where we played everyday became a Super Fund site, steel drums with PCB & other toxic chemicals were buried just a few inches below the surface. I have cancer today. These big company's like Westinghouse, General Electric, etc budget in fines to their annual budgets, it's far cheaper to pay fines then to do the right thing and protect communities and workers. It's really a sad USA past & present. The nuclear legacy is everywhere. I had looked for homes in a rural area just NE of Pittsburgh, PA and all the homes came with a disclosure statement on one of the disclosure's was Nuclear litigation could be pending. What I found out was a company called NUMEC (Nuclear Materials & Equipment Corporation) had 2 plutonium fuel pellet factory's along RT 66 on the Kiskiminetas River Apollo, PA & Parks Twp, PA, And previously owned by Babcock & Wilcox. There was a news article that ran from the Valley News Dispatch "Buried Legacy" and it described many of the same practices described in your film, only the supervisor workers had dosimeter badges. When the plant was decommissioned several trenches were cut above the plant & above long wall coal mines below & everything radioactive was dumped in these unlined pits & covered over. This contamination of nuclear materials is everywhere and the Feds turn a blind eye. And no I didn't buy property there but down river in Pittsburgh
Thanks for sharing your story and perspective. It is indeed a larger nation wide problem that needs to be addressed sooner than later. Tax payers often end up picking up the tab after a small percentage is paid by the responsible private parties.
That's where Israel got their first "stolen" uranium for their bombs from. NUMEC in PA.
One technical oversight: they didn't use uranium for the Trinity bomb. Uranium-235 is hard to separate from its other subatomic forms because chemically it looks exactly the same to whatever chemical you're going to use the separate it. That was what the purpose of oak ridge national laboratory was for was to turn it into uranium hexafluoride and then pass it through several different filtration mechanisms in a huge electromagnetic loop. And I know that one for a fact because the US Treasury had a loan oak ridge all of the silver that we had to spin into wire to be used as the electromagnetic coils. All the copper was being used for bullet jackets for the war effort. But they used in Trinity was plutonium 239 because it was a man-made material and they were not entirely sure if it was going to fission the right way, but they wanted to use it because it was easier to separate from the rest of the uranium.
I know this because they produced three spheres of bomb fuel, one for the trinity, one for the fat man, and the third one which inevitably was called the demon core because it ended up killing two scientists in two separate experiments.
But they used a portion of uranium as well, and that uranium's first stop was St. Louis, before it went anywhere else.
you have to get more accurate, there is no U239 ! , because U238 becomes plutonium 239 and if you make mistakes the whole story becomes useless
Denise is doing amazing work. Keep kicking ass.
She is indeed
i discovered this by accident yet i found it very captivating i love these type of documentaries i think they are very educational.
Thank you for watching and appreciate the kind words.
Check out Silkwood. Movie with Kurt Russel Cher and Meryl Streep. It is said to be an accurate retelling.
This popped up in my feed, and I took a chance and clicked. Glad I did! Absolutely stunning revelations to me. I had assumed the workers would have had the top protection against radiation as possibe. Seeing the tragic stories of lives cut short is hard to watch, but it really connects you to the emotion behind this production. Very well done. I have subbed and look forward to more!
Thank you so much for your support and kind words. I assumed the same thing as you, I just simply had no idea. I wasn't even initially trying to make a documentary, I was just investigating why a couple of the workers you see in the film were not compensated in this complicated program that I had never heard of. Once I started speaking with them I felt I had to get their stories out there.
The nuclear death cult protecting workers, while they focus all effort on world wide destruction... ? That sure is an interesting notion.
Boy I tell you, my fellow humans never cease to amaze me.
Not to excuse those in charge, but we do know much more now than back then. Sadly, it’s still true the lower down the chain, the less your well-being is taken into consideration. If you think the US is bad on nuclear safety, compare it to the USSR! As someone once joked, “Never trust a crew of chefs to run a nuclear power plant!”
@@mariekatherine5238 They knew what it did to the living tissue and cells loooong before the Manhattan project was implimented. The Radium Girls, Madam Currie herself, as well as her daughter and husband. They knew exactly how much damage radiation did, especially if injested. They even bragged back in the late 1940s on television interviews how a small vial of plutonium could kill every human being on the planet ... and then they popped off a nuclear bomb and tossed to the wind. Which then went into clouds that rained back down all over the nation. They did'nt know as much.. maybe.. but they knew more than enough about its harm. And thats nothing, cause by 1964 they knew exactly what radiation did to DNA structures, yet even after the atmospheric test ban treaty, they still launched satellites with therno-electric reactors on board. Some of which failed to reach orbit, and burned up in the atmosphere, increasing fallout world wide by huge margins. Like the failed SNAP9a sattelite. Look it up.
Excellent points. I wanted to include the Radium girls and Currie, but felt the film would be too long. I speak about those topics when lecturing at schools.
This was excellent and fair. Anyone involved with the nation’s nuclear industry should watch it.
Thank you for the kind words.
This is a good watch for anyone curious to expand their knowledge. I was born in 1952 and lived through a great part of the Cold War. I've been to the Trinity Site on it's 50th Anniversary and this subject has always been of great interest to me.
@@timmotel5804 thank you for watching.
I watched this for the first time late last night into the early morning and could not steal myself away from the television screen. Sad to learn how many became ill and died for pioneering nuclear work and the knock on effect it had on their families.
It is indeed very sad. Thanks for watching the film.
Background music sounds like sometimes (the Thing) scary synthesizer but good . and other back grounds music sounds very good ,Thanks for the docu video
Thanks for the support.
I have a tiny piece of this history, a piece of trinitite from the Trinity blast. Knowing the whole story, it's very humbling to hold and see. So many lives and so much destruction was caused in the name of a weapon. They truly did become the destroyer of worlds, and families, and the environment...
I'm a Thyroid Cancer survivor and am just watching this. Good job and well done.
I'm glad you are doing better. Thank you for our support of the film.
Very informative video , all nuclear weapon production facilities of any kind were never concerned about the workers health of any kind ....
Thank you for your comments and for taking the time to watch the film.
I watched this and realized I've delivered steel to the site in Venice,Ill. Scary how these places are still in use after being uncovered as hot spots. By the way I was last there in December of 2022 .
Funny they mention Fernald… it’s also got quite the history of radiation incidents
A very revealing documentary. I am ashamed that commercial interest not only caused the problem, but through legitimate devices avoid any responsibility.
The problem only gets worse and involves, ultimately, the whole world.
I never read or heard anything good that the AEC did. They were cavalier with other people's lives and communities. This story only confirms my impression. Great documentary, very informative.
Thanks so much
Just remember, the Department of Energy is just the new name of the AEC, and their charter has never changed. They've only added more areas of research and interest to make the their organization less evil and more legitimate.
I get your point and I agree with you. May I remind anyone reading this that Emperor Hirohito and Hitler were both a taaad more cavalier towards ANY life that didn't look like them or fall in line with their form of "government".
@@ijustpostedth1s724 Agreed
@@ijustpostedth1s724 Hitler was already dead when the bombs were dropped, and Hirohito was ready to surrender. It was completely needless.
I think a documentary about Rocky Flats would be of interest to people.
Believe it or not, in many ways it was at an even higher risk for exposure.
2 serious fires in production buildings that were within feet of burning through the roof filters, leaks of plutonium & nitric acid recovery solutions by the hundreds in at least 20 buildings, 35,000 55 gal drums of transuranic waste that were left outdoors with no protection from the elements for over 2 decades - majority of the barrels had corroded and contents soaked into the ground.
Just a tiny sample of the environment & the employees were even more compartmentalized and kept ignorant of exposure.
I agree. Rocky Flats is near the top of payouts in compensation for workers of all the sites in the country. Paying out just under a billion in the EEOICPA.
You Tube : ....." SECRETS FROM A BOMB FACTORY " .... all about ROCKY FLATS ! Then read the follow up book , " THE AMBUSHED GRAND JURY ",..... the trial of Rockwell INT. and the management who ignored safety practices in the name of PROFITS !
Yes, Rocky Flats almost has to be worse. It’s certainly more well known.”
There are a number of docs about Rocky Flats, all should be watched as each gives a perspective from another person sharing what is hidden there. The doc, ... " SECRETS FROM A BOMB FACTORY " is a must watch ! Also the book, " The AMBUSHED GRAND JURY !" The story of the Special Grand Jury to investigate the environmental crimes by Rockwell Int. and the D.O.E. ,..... 8 people charged,.... and how the Dept of Justice ( INJUSICE ) deliberately killed the case !
See DARK CIRCLE - 1983 on Rocky Flats. . .
I live just twenty minute drive from handford nucleur site. Alot of ppl that worked there,including a uncle of mine have died of cancer and the entire area has a high number if cancer compared to other places. Ontop of that they buried all the spent fuel rods and waste in barrells and they quickly ate through tthe barrels and leaked into the ground. Hundreds of barrels. And the whole damn area will be dangerous for tens of thousand of years. Insane when you really think about it.
Hanford is among the top sites in compensation in the EEOICPA, at 2.1 Billion.
It's all good.. the U.S.A. were very kind sharing thier nuclear poison In timebombs internationally, too. Look up camp century and the Runit dome fort worth whose filthy contaminants are waiting to leach out of the century ice- some 200,000 barrels of rusting diesel barrels plus all the Nuclear waste left in the Greenland ice to poison all in its path, and where the Americans exploded the equivalent of l Hiroshima bomb EVERYDAY for 12 YEARS..
After one misfire that filled the water and island paradise with unreached plutonium, workers were left to pick it up by hand, no safety protection whatsoever, and it was thrown in a water- filled bomb crater and covered with concrete panels placed atop, without any type of lining, which is now having the beautiful island lagoon lapping at the half- pie 'Acme Co.' Waste protection system which is already leaking into our home, not thiers,
The Pacific ocean.
At the time they let the 'Savages' as they called them, go back to thier poisoned home, and then experimenting on what was happening to them due to being exposed to
"th gr8 Shitan's"
POISONOUS TRAP.
there is a truely disturbing doco on the whole story made by veteran investigative Journalist John Pilger. Very good.
CERCLA , Hanford is one of the dirtiest. Superfund doesn't even begin to cover it. It should be under an Uberfund because it's FUBAR
I've watche several of the ," KING 5 News, HANFORD'S DIRTY SECRETS " and the AY-102 Tank LEAK and the Faulty Glassification Plant ! The waste of money there is obscene and needs better supervision ! So many corrupt contractors too !
No amount of money is worth thousands of years😢
How it's possible that you have only 543 subscribers?
Thanks for asking and supporting the film. I'm not really sure. I think it's taken a while for people to discover the film. I actually got maybe 90% of those subscribers in the last month. The film was just chugging along for the greater part of a year and now it's starting to take off. Thanks for subscribing.
Add this documentary to those that I have seen in the past and will undoubtedly see more of in the future regarding "Nuclear". Very well presented, researched and produced. The hard never ending work by so many people to bring the wrongs into the light. The pain and suffering by so many who did what they believed were the right things for them to do, for our Country, peace, and their families and friends. The continued avoidance, disregard, lack of acceptance of responsibility and not taking all the right steps to help make things right, by the Government and Companies responsible for such great harm to workers, humanity and our earth, continues to be heartbreaking, legally and morally wrong. My thanks and best regards to all who were involved in bringing this to the public attention, and to those who continue this work.
I can't thank you enough for your thoughtful words and support of the film, workers and their families.
"hmmmm... hey larry where should we build this EXTREMELY unsafe & toxic chemical plant?"
"lets see here.........what about RIGHT BESIDE THIS FUCKING HIGHSCHOOL????!!!!!!!!"
I'm so glad YT is recommending these small creators. They make TH-cam great. I often wondered about the first people to work around this stuff in the US. I heard people in the USSR would handle this stuff without protection.
Thanks for the support.
Mallinckrodt makes a great generic Vicodin!! Hats off to you sir.
Thanks for posting this. I knew nothing of this. First time I have heard of it. Those poor people. Just terrible.
I knew nothing of it either. I wasn't even trying to make a documentary at first. I was just investigating why a few workers were rejected by a government program I had never heard of, and that lead to this film. Thanks for watching.
It's sad when truth and justice is the biggest threat to your own government
It’s amazing how government will disregard the human costs for their own gains!!!
It was for YOUR gain also. YOU lived in a country that has been safe from the threat of other countries invading and blowing you up. Everybody seems to forget that part..
@@davelowets you make a good point!
Wow. I’ve never discovered a channel with such amazing content and so few eyeballs on it. I’m the 139th subscriber and lots of these long videos only have views in the low double digits.
Keep up the great work and it is sure to change soon!
Thank you so much for the kind words and sub. When I made this film I really didn't have any money to advertise it. It's all just been word of mouth over the years. It seems like people are starting to discover it now on here and find it informative. Thanks again, I really appreciate your support.
@@reallifepicturesfilm You did outstanding work. The production values are excellent and the narrative is compelling. I have 4000 twitter followers and linked to it last night; hopefully you’ll get at least a tiny boost from that. Thank you for making this.
' They' all want the 2 minute instant payoff tik tok version of everything... kinda hard to do involving almost any subject other than pursing your lips in front of the omnipresent mirror holding a phone, or pulling a prank in public...
@@carlsaganlives6086 Yes, to a certain extent I feel like a dinosaur. It took me 5 years to make this film. Pouring off documents and records trying to get all the facts without trying to sensationalize the subject. I wondered if it was too long for some. Maybe, but it's fine for others and it's nice to see it finding a wider audience.
@@conzmoleman I can't thank you enough for that. I have seen a boost in views and wasn't sure how that happened. Thank you again for the kind words and support. I had no idea where this tiny film would go when I started making it. I just wanted to get these people's stories out there in hopes that it wouldn't happen to workers in the future. They deserve that much at the very least.
@41:51 Father hit the nail on the head. The biggest problem with the Weldon site is that because it’s close to the Missouri River that’s where everyone assumes it drains to. The watershed of the Feed Materials Plant (mound area) shows it drains to one of three lakes that were actually just dammed off creeks. From there it continues onto Dardenne Creek which snakes northeast through the entire county before finally reaching its destination which is the Mississippi River. Its affected way more people than we’ll ever truly know.
Mallinckrodt just settled a lawsuit for $1.7b june 2022, for its role in the opioid epidemic. They've been manufacturing heavy duty opioids since 1898. Just imagine how many lives this company has ruined/impacted between all the drugs and radiation. I know the company isn't all bad, but yikes.
Yikes indeed.
But don’t blame the ordinary workers. Most are just trying to earn a living and provide for their families and themselves.
Imagine how many people they helped with their pain, people are easily brainwashed.
@@alanmeyers3957 Is there legitimate uses for them? Yes, absolutely. Was oxy falsely marketed as safer/much less addictive(even after they knew it wasn't), therefore overprescribed leading to an opioid pandemic with countless lives ruined/lost? Yes, that is verifiably true.
"To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell.” -Richard Feynman
They didn't just make the stuff, they pushed it, hard, for profit. It's all well documented. Why do you think they lost the $1.7b lawsuit? Brainwashing?
The lives that have been ruined because of opiates, are their OWN faults for abusing them, continuing to abuse them, and not seeking help to get off of them. Nobody's faults but their own.
The Japanese had already started to sue for peace when the bombs were dropped. Gar Alperovitz is just *one* historian who has documented this in his book "The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb". The argument that the bomb precluded the need for an invasion is a popular canard, as Alperovitz explains.
Nuclear Pioneer John Gofman was one of the early ones to blow the whistle on the dangers of radiation, and the nefarious relationship between Industry and Government which has led to so much nuclear contamination, cancer, etc., and has spread so much disinformation about the safety of nuclear power and weapons production.
Think about this. These workers and residents that lived in close proximity to these plants and sites are all victims of nuclear arms as much as those at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Though at the time they didn't what else to do to bring the war with Japan to an end as quickly as possible they did know the dangers of exposure to these materials that were produced and as time went on they learned even more but at every turn they chose to do the wrong thing over and over again which exposing more and more people.
When has this country ever cared for its workers?
Greatest country in the world unless you are a poor worker. Capitalism only works out for the richest and wealthiest, crushes everyone else. Its a shame how many hard working honorable citizens tolerate such a cruel system on the lie that they actually have a voice in their government and that their votes actually matter. At least dictators tell their people this fact strait up instead of giving the illusion of hope to people stupid enough to believe it. 🇺🇸
They still don't. Look at the Covid response.
"OkAy EVeRYoNe, vIruS iz DoNe. Go BAcK tO wOrK nOw."
There is so much wrong with that question. And then I saw the response about covid.. "OMG quick, Govern me harder!"
@armyofninjas9055 Yikes. 😬
The virus is still around now, are you seriously suggesting no one works until it's gone 100%? Because it won't ever happen. Most everyone survives, if you don't have medical issues. At some point and time, those with medical issues have to do what they need to and let everyone else get on with their life.
When has *any* country cared for its workers?
28:37 I could listen to her voice for days! Such a nice and soothing voice
Yes, Wendy is great. I relied on her knowledge greatly in making this film and she is very passionate about helping people who have been effected by this work.
Great article! Now, it would be great if someone, or the government, would do something about the Crewdogs that worked with the final products. The US Government would never admit there were nuclear weapons at a certain facility, and will never admit those weapons exposed those who handled with radiation.
Agreed. Thank you.
One of those legacy management sights is VERY close to where I live . . .
I'm not surprised. There are so many of them spread out around the country.
This terrible preventable tragedy would never have happened if the company executives and shiny ass pants politicians had to live right next to these industrial safety abominations..
Well said.
My comment appeared then disappeared 😢 TH-cam has done this several times recently on other videos.
I just wanted to say what a fantastic documentary. I'm in the UK and really enjoyed it. It's so important to preserve the first hand interviews of these miscarriages of justice - thank you.
@BarneyRubbleJr it's totally crazy, as I never said anything controversial, there's far worse comments below. The only words it could have picked up on was one beginning with N that's popular to chill with as the documentary is good enough to be on there.
Thank you for the kind words. I'm not sure what happens with comments. This is the first time I have seen your post but I have seen others on the page and then gone. I thought it was my browser.
@@reallifepicturesfilm I think maybe TH-cam has a glitch. Or maybe it does not like it if you refer to platforms other than itself!
This documentary would make a fantastic audiobook, and is more than good enough to be on streaming platforms, particularly as nuclear history is something people find interesting.
If I was considering conspiracy theories, perhaps TH-cam deletes random comments to affect the logistics - less comments meaning it gets less traffic and that might encourage you to pay to advertise it,?
@@rottsandspots Thanks so much. It's streaming on Amazon and also on Vimeo. I had it on iTunes for a while and then put it on here. I'm new to how YT handles these comments. I have seen a comment and went to reply and then couldn't find it. I thought maybe the person themselves deleted it, but based on your experience I'm beginning to wonder.
TH-cam full on censors comments and adjusts the algorithm to keep certain topics hidden from the public eye.
I cannot fathom how this could happen
It's the US government... I would be more surprised if it didn't happen
Its easy to get people to do things they normally wouldn’t when you convince them there is an existential crisis we have no choice but to address. Ethics go out the window. The need for empirical evidence goes out the window when asserting certain things must be done. You can even convince people to relinquish their freedoms. You dare not question the “greater good” narrative. We still fall for this age old fallacy to this day. It's the backbone of progressive politics.
Its an interesting paradox. When people believe they are on the moral high ground they think they are no longer bound by morality or justification for their actions.
It’s easy. We’re the human race. We’re infallible. We can do no wrong. That’s what we want to believe.
Easy, it's just 'buck passing'. Pure negligence.
My Father and many workers of the Aluminum Industries have developed Alzheimer's and are today gone. A study came out indicating that the dust and working environment can cause Alzheimer's. I wonder how long we will be ignored, thanks for the hope.
Thanks for sharing your story and sorry to hear about your father. I wanted to get the word out about these worker's stories in hopes that it could help others. And as you pointed out, sometimes in other industries. The health of workers can be protected, just takes the will to do it and that will only comes from pressure.
Where can I get some of this mysterious radiation proof chain link fencing?
I am from Europe. Quite informative documentary.
Thank you so much. I screened the film in Berlin a few years back before Covid.
This is a reason folks should keep tax records in order to prove employment at businesses that deny that a worker spent time at a facility.
That's a good start, but unfortunately they want much more than proof that you were employed at a certain facility. They are trying to, "Dose Reconstruct" you in hopes of figuring out, often decades later, how much exposure you may have gotten. Many hoops to jump through, but I appreciate your thoughtfulness.
@@reallifepicturesfilm I got that part, but the one daughter said that her father's employer denied that he ever worked there at all.
A similar situation happened once to me in 1981. Ultimately, they were sued out of existence.
Yes, that was Denise Brock. She was indeed fortunate to have documentation that he worked there or who knows what would have happened to her case. I agree with you. Keep as much documentation as you can. You never know when you might need it.
My dad grew up downwind of Hanford. Watch glowing light decend on the back wheat feild. He us3d to weld at the Tank Farm. We moved after the last green run in 72. Tri-cities, Yakima and surrounding areas still has miscarriages, babies born with their organs outside their bodies, and other special needs kids. Current clean up company got workers contaminated.
Thanks for sharing your story. I screened the film in Kennewick back in 2016 and spoke with some of the cleanup workers who were sick. I didn't know about the babies. Just horrible.
I’m not at all surprised. My uncle was in the service in Nevada and New Mexico in the ‘40s and ‘50s. You can see that online, the men in the foxholes with sunglasses and their backs turned for the blast. Then they’d run out to ground zero with Geiger counters! He died of leukemia. Some of his great grandchildren were stillborn and others have bizarre autoimmune problems. One grandson died of lung cancer at age five. That’s NOT NORMAL! No, his parents didn’t smoke!
@@mariekatherine5238 absolutely horrible. I wanted to also tell the story of people like your uncle in this film but just didn't have enough time. It doesn't get near enough attention, what happen to them and of course their loved ones.
It may vary by state but the turnaround for government benefits applications seems generally to be one year, before the first rejection, and this applies to SSI as well. In NY State it seems to be an unspoken rule that rejection is automatic if you don't have a lawyer. There is a legal procedure including things not covered in the instructions on the forms, that the lawyers know. For instance they don't say anything about having an expert witness at the hearing where up-or-down decisions are made about one year after first application. Lawyers work on a contingency that it appears is set by some uniform standard or rule.
20:03 Judging by the early " Battling Tops " game box in the picture, the date would have been 1968 or shortly after. Amazing how many lost their lives due to radiation poisoning.
"Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot that it do singe yourself." - Shakespeare
"Is anyone surprised that neither your government nor big corporations is being honest with you or cares about you?" - Me
Watch Karen Silkwood, both the movie Silkwood and the documentary on YT. She tried to blow the whistle on unsafe practices. She joined a union and was outspoken about safety. She was "cooked" three times.
Her life ended when she was rear-ended by another vehicle when she was on the way to an important union meeting with paperwork. When the car wreck was found on the side of the road with her deceased body inside, the papers she wanted to present at the meeting were mysteriously gone. Hmmmm..... I wonder who took them? Who hit her? One guess.
Thanks for bringing up Karen Silkwood. Certainly an important person who fought for worker rights to the end.
My mother worked at oak Ridge. She died at 42 of breast cancer. It affected my life all the way down to my Grandchildren. My mother nor I received nothing for this but hurt and sadness.
I'm so sorry to hear this. Did you apply for the EEOICPA?
This was a great watch, thank you. Now I see where the Simpsons radioactive waste jokes come from. Tragic.
Thank you for the support Dylan.
These people are all heroes, I'm sorry that they were not told the risk , never the less there is a good chance that their work prevented ww3
Maybe they did, but they def made that defense contractor rich. It's just wrong to treat people this way, not any different from the russians
That's what gov does, creates heroes
I'm in the UK & I worked for Staveley Chemicals in the early 2000's, it was called Mallinckrodt - we all knew they were an American company & they has a nuclear reactor onsite, but I knew nothing about their foundations 🤔
That's interesting. Who called it Mallinckrodt, the workers?
I'm in the UK - that's really interesting. I didn't realise private companies had nuclear reactors, but it makes sense. Thanks for your comment.
So have they built that isolation barrier?
Yes, they put in some cooling loops a few years back that seem to have been effective. We still wait while the EPA goes through their process of testing areas of the site and ground water beneath the site, and they finalize their Remedial Design Phase.
The green energy people never talk about this side of the nuclear industry. Not quite so green.
Indeed.
What we did to others in milliseconds, we are doing to ourselves over decades. The universe always finds its balance.
Except not, because I didn't have sht to do with any of it, nor any say. I didn't vote for it. I didn't fund it. I didn't even pay the taxes used to build it. So no, there wasn't some bullsht "cosmic balance".
My friend, Edward Campbell worked in this industry after retiring from the USAF. He died earlier this year from Leukemia. Sad.
So sorry to hear that. So many people lost to this work when they could have, and should have done a better job protecting these workers.
This is absolutely insane, the greedy powers in control over the years need to be in prison, and all of their assets liquidated to the people that live in North County. Screw them!!! This is murder!
Do recall that involves being 'anti-capitalist', or communist as many Americans see it.
@@grahamstevenson1740 yeah, and it's wild because I am usually a right leaning liberal.
@@stlpkdeathryde Beware of untrammelled pursuit of profit. At what point does it become unethical ? This is why we have safeguards.
Hehe. I love it when people (especially those vehemently anti-communist) don't realise that they sound like Marxists. Redistributing the wealth of greedy powers to those most responsible for creating that wealth, huh ... ? ;)
Good comments, all of them. But also remember there is no gain without sacrifice, and humans are born with both good and bad natures. Deliberately harming the innocent is morally wrong when seen on the personal level. When seen from a purely objective macro viewpoint, the innocent are just unfortunate collateral.
As my grandmother used to remind me, “Life in this world isn’t fair. Offer it up (a Catholic saying) and march on!”
Send this to "Nuclear Jesus" Kyle Hill that always praising nuclear industry & how clean + safe it is.
In comparison to any other energy he's correct. And if it wasn't for #Retardistan we'd have thorium plants, which after start up and in usual running are very clean and can burn previous wastes. You do have to prime them with uranium to start them off, but after that they'll run off thorium producing no dangerous waste..
But hey, don't do your research and follow off your assumptions and guesswork and what you want to be true.
Enjoy voting for Trump.
Thorium plants do produce waste. While it is different than uranium -235 it still produces alpha and beta emitters. What this film shows is how private companies often cut corners to save money and that behavior puts us at risk. I have no reason to believe that companies that wold run Thorium plants would be any different. Do you?
@@reallifepicturesfilm I'm not nuclear engineer but I know that all fission based nuclear reactors will produce radioactive waste. Problem is the nuclear waste decaying half life that is constant, waste is radioactive and how to storage that safely for really long time so that nature / future generations would not to suffer for it.
@@reallifepicturesfilmWould you want your kids playing next to them?
@@olliaalto5638 Yes, that's the question. Up to this point these materials have often been mishandled and workers unprotected, not only in the past but right now. Seems to me that we have a lot of work to do before considering moving forward.
New sub here. Us small channels need to stick together. Great video.
Thanks so much for the support and agreed.
I live next to the nuclear site of Babcock International and 12 decommisioned nuclear subs here in Plymouth,UK.I am now very woorried.A nuclear alert siren is tested every week,but,what good would it do?
My heart goes out to you. I hope you are able to be safe. I don't know much about that location but I have spoken with a worker who was sick from one of their plants here in the states. She had disturbing stories about the work place.
Unfortunately there are hundreds of these sites across the United states. Everywhere from closed army bases to underneath individual small buildings that were used as subcontractors to the government. Some will never be found and the contamination will be there for thousands of years. Others might be found and a window dressing made to clean it up. Even large Laboratories like Lawrence livermore, use the basic idea of it's on our property it's under our concrete so it's our problem and we pretend to monitor it. Or if it's in round water they make sure that they measure it so far away from the source that it's been diluted to where the levels will always test safe.
I totally agree. I told people when I was traveling with the film from city to city that "I could have made the same film in your city, I just happened to live in St. Louis".
@Real Life Pictures that is the truth, even in the San Francisco Bay Area there are gleaming examples of this. One of which was Hunters Point Naval base in San Francisco California. Was heavily contaminated, also Treasure Island which is right in the middle of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, also was contaminated with radioactive material, due to the fact they had a maintenance building that worked on glow-in-the-dark watch dials and cadmium glow-in-the-dark markers for aircraft carriers. Or dumped into buckets, and then later thrown into at open-pit assuming that the water would evaporate and then they would just bury the minor-league radioactive material and it wouldn't be a problem. So now I'll Treasure Island is being turned into residential housing. There has been for cleanup efforts to remediate the radioactive material left underneath two maintenance facilities. One of the lesser-known is Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories in Tracy California, their test range well one time being very remote, will now be on the doorstep of 1,500 residential homes that are currently being constructed including three sites for schools an area that's already been surveyed and marked for shops and stores. The major contaminant out there is thousands upon thousands of pounds of beryllium. Were used in various tests, not to mention other heavy metals. Another facility that you cleaned it up will cost hundreds of millions of dollars if it ever gets cleaned up. I wonder if the homeowners buying the multimillion-dollar homes right off of the main Road will be told anything about it
@@allen_steel1236 All great information. Thanks for sharing. As I was screening the film around the country I visited Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. If you go to the film's actual website www.thesafesideofthefence.com and then click on travel blog you can see the different sites I visited. Each place has its own set of issues with contamination. So much bigger than many want to acknowledge.
@Real Life Pictures I wouldn't say that LLNL, one set of issues, I would say more of the entire chart of the nuclear lies, would be an easier directory to figure out what's contaminated out there. And then go 35 miles towards the Sacramento River delta, and you come across the Concord Naval weapons station. Now well not radiologically contaminated at least not in a major part. It is been the storage and dumping grounds of thousands and thousands of pounds and gallons of diesel heavy oil grease lead paint scrapings, and everything else that the United States Navy could generate. There is one lost Source at the weapons station. That's approximately the size of a baseball and I believe was cobalt-60. And extremely high-level gamma source. According to the technician who last operated the building it broke off of the stainless steel cable that is hung from in a water tank, but acted as a shield barrier. They would pull a railroad car loaded with Naval shells into the building, x-ray film was put on the opposite wall everyone evacuated the area and the source was raised, and time with a stopwatch. And then lowered back into the water tank. According to the operator about six months before the facility was shut down. The cable snapped and the source fell to the bottom of the water tank. The operator was told by his supervisor that a nuclear cleanup specialty team, would retrieve the source later so the pipe was capped, Landmark with the last known information about the source and its level. My knowledge nobody has been in that building to check the source or as levels in over 30 years.
@@reallifepicturesfilm by the way I wanted to say I really do love the title of your documentary, really does speak a thousand words. When I went to Hanford Washington State, to work as a television engineer in nearby Yakima Washington. I thought it would be an interesting place to drive through. I was amazed by the red and yellow piece of rope with the faded tariff oil on it, as long as you were on one side of that quarter inch rope you are perfectly fine, but if you stepped over the Rope you were dead. That's also where I found two different buildings completely unsecured and unlocked. On a Sunday back in the early 2000s, baby. Started for mediation of B reactor. And although shut down the building was not even secured with a padlock. The gates were open and you could drive right up to it. But again as long as you stayed on the right side of the fence you were perfectly fine
We in the mid west were sprayed with radiation to see what effects radiation has on long term health issues... anyone seen a rise in cancer in their neighborhoods? Hmmmm?
YES ! Early atmospheric nuke tests at the Nevada Test Site , ( Jan. 1951 to mid 1963 ) 12 years, there were 100 open air shots ,... of the worst were shot SMOKEY and Shot HARRY ( aka, DIRTY HARRY ) that spread a radioactive cloud and rained FALLOUT on St. George ,Utah and surrounding communities with devastating effects to all ! Read the book , " FALLOUT" and see for yourself what the Govt/ A.E.C. tried to keep quiet from the public !
The photo at 35:33, strage towers of radioactive blocks stacked upon concrete pipe segments; some sort of game, or why? The early signs of radiation brain damage?
Can't really answer that for sure, but they could have been stacked tighter with more groups of barrels when they first did it, and over time as they fell apart from corrosion many could have toppled over. I don't understand why they were allowed to just walk away and leave that stuff there like that in the first place.
This is an excellent film.
Thanks for the support Sharon.
1:11:11 "until it meets these goals": that means in plain language there is - as always when talking about nuclear waste - a compromise between health risks and cleanup costs.
But we must have atom bombs. Main reason for atomic power plants, the electric is a by product.
No demonstration of the atomic bomb would've convinced the Japanese to surrender. They had already been firebombed in other cities resulting in just as many deaths, if not more. Then, after Hiroshima was nuked, they still wouldn't surrender. Truman had no other viable choice.
A 3rd bomb was shipped to the San Francisco bay for delivery as was the ," DEMON CORE " ! Japan still hadn't surrendered so Gen. Grove was preparing the 3rd bomb for use when word of surrender finally came and the components shipped back to Los Alamos where the "DEMON CORE" would take it victims !
Two jobs I never want to have. One is working at a nuclear power plant the other is an ice cream man.
This sounds like some type of fictional lore from the Fallout universe. Its sad to hear the disappointment in people's voices who realize that the government they trusted and believed in was responsible for the destruction of their own health through complete negligence and carelessness.
Indeed. As well as the private companies they were working for at the time.
11:45 Chicago Pile 1 ("CP-1") lacked radiation shielding and a cooling system. It needed neither. The reactor operated for 5 minutes at a power level of less than a watt, not even enough heat to warm a single drop of water. In spite of it's bulky size it was only an experiment to verify that a reactor could work. Very extensive precautions were taken in case of a potential runaway reaction.
That's because it didn't melt down. The best case scenario happened. They didn't want to build it there originally themselves. They felt it would be safer way out in the woods. I just found it fascinating that instead of just paying striking workers out there, they decided to take it to the University of Chicago. They had the full purse of the United States of America. You couldn't pay those guys what, an extra nickel an hour?
@@reallifepicturesfilmIt did, indeed, go critical. But without cooling it wasn't safe to go further than bare criticality. They were very concerned about safety and would have preferred the remote location for that reason. But speed and secrecy were as important. Groves was in charge by then and would have paid whatever but wouldn't have had the time and patience to negotiate with Jimmy Hoffa types.
@@beryllium1932 I have no knowledge that they were "Jimmy Hoffa types" whatever that means, or how long it would have taken to settle it. the ended up doing Chicago Pile 2 outside the city a few short months later anyway. They had time. The fact is, they took the less safe route over settling with workers.
1:09:37 hey I’m a radiation protection specialist at a nuclear plant in Canada and just so you know 0.2mrem/yr is not 2 hundred milla rem per year that zero point two milla rem per year, other than that I loved the video
A Specialist should know that it is milli, not milla.
It's such a disgrace that these dedicated workers and their families and communities were put through so much suffering.
I'm a supporter of nuclear energy, but with safety ensured at every step!
These stories show a failure at every level in terms of protecting the people...
Kay, this is so well said. Thank you.
Please help me learn how someone can donate money or other help to any of these organizations that support these horribly mistreated workers. If the government wont do it then perhaps some of us with the means to do so can. I will look for opportunities, but if others can look as well it might help. This is a disgusting chapter in our history. Help those who can help to do so....that is very very American. This is a very important documentary.
Thank you so much for the kind words and support of the workers. The Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act that's in the film is administered through the Department of Labor, so they have our tax dollars to pay the workers, but many workers have never heard of the program. I made the film mainly to get the word out to people who are deserving of this help and also those struggling to get through the hoops they have them jumping through. If you can spread the word to workers that may qualify that would be a big help. Thanks again.
love how the guy gets cancer due to them exposing him to radiation and they fire him, so he can't afford treatment, lose his car, home etc. and have no way to support himself or his family.
I found countless horrible stories like that while making this film. Very sad.
@@reallifepicturesfilm 😢
@@reallifepicturesfilm seems with the compensation they were waiting for everyone to die off and would not pay them
That's basically it. delay delay delay, and deny deny.
Jesus! The least they could do was give them life long health insurance!
If this is the best that the "Greatest Nation" in history can do for patriots?? God will need to help us all....
Sunflower plant absorbs radiation
So does hemp apparently, big time!!
@@stlpkdeathryde didn’t know it did that but knew it does cleanse the soil is planted in
They have to be fully grown first
Yes, as all plants and trees will absorb radioactive materials. HOWEVER,.... the plant will UPTAKE the radionuclides into it's stem and blossom which is NOW ABOVE GROUND ! The plant dies and falls on TOP OF THE GROUND where the decaying flower gets WINDBLOWN or RAIN carries it elsewhere,... AGAIN ABOVE TO SOIL ! And if someone EATS the RADIOACTIVE SUNFLOWER SEEDS,... then what ??? Did you know that TOBACCO is among the HIGHEST Radioactive plants in the world ? Yes,... and people SMOKE TOBACCO,... along with all the other POISONOUS CHEMICALS the Industry puts into their cigarettes !
What blows my mind is how several of these employees, betrayed and lied to by their own country then suffer their own demise (cancer, etc) and suffering and exposure of their loved ones will still comment "best country in the world'! Some of them even burying their children dying cancer from exposure I wonder, have they lived anywhere else? Why is this acceptable?
It's not easy to explain, but I sat with these folks and got to know them and they are all great people. They see the good in this country as well and see people like Denise Brock who the government did ultimately hire to help them. There's more to this country than the people who are selfish and take advantage of others. There are people like him that put their lives on the line for this rest of us. He sees that. I see it too, even though it's hard sometime. Thanks for your comments and taking the time to view the film.
@@reallifepicturesfilm I understand your point and you're right. There are a lot of great people in our country and I don't debate this fact. My point is that the govt and the greedy elitists that control them are pure evil and this is not acceptable. It has become like a dysfunctional family where the parents are addicted to more and the other family members act out more and more until the social structure is all but collapsed.
Trinity’s bomb was plutonium 13:06. Do you mean the uranium was converted to plutonium?
She was referring to the "tamper" in the Trinity bomb. I would have liked that to have been clearer.
I have worked at several of the nation's nuclear weapons facilities in the radiation safety role. The nuclear aspect is only a small part of the hazards. We testing for Mercury which is an essential material in the processing of nuclear materials. Mercury is now one of our biggest concerns. I have worked onsite at Fernald in Ross, Ohio, The Mound in Miamisburg, OH, Been onsite at Portsmouth, in Ohio, Oak Ridge, TN, Paducah Gaseous Diffusion plant, in KY, Los Alamos in Albuquerque, NM, and now work at Savannah River Site in SC. I know that people have suffered because of radiation work, however, many of these people also chain smoked. This muddies the water in determining if the work in the Nuclear Facility caused cancer or tobacco. In Asbestos work, smoking and working with Friable Asbestos increases the chance of Cancer or Mesothelioma FIFTY TIMES over working with asbestos alone.
The reason we changed from street clothes to coveralls and special shoes was because it was difficult to detect low levels of contamination on the skin so we had to shower out.
Many of this plants didn't take a reasonable amount of care in protecting workings. Often they withheld information from them that would have protected them. They didn't do their due-diligence in safety so can't fall back on workers now. Certainly nothing "muddy" about falsifying health records and tossing badges in the trash.
I worked in nuclear plants for 13 years, all over the US. I stopped doing it in 2016. I wont live near one now. They are not safe.
Thank you for your statement as many nuke workers don't want to admit they were LIED TO !
Those nice people eating out of their contaminated garden is so sad.🙏
It is indeed. Some of the nicest people I've met.
idiocracy as its best
37:45
Indeed
so much for clean energy
We would have had relatively clean energy, had people not gone into a hysterical fit in the beginning days and it's more energy. Just like with every technology there is a learning curve it may not be pretty, and I admit that yes we did a lot of stupid things. By the 1970s we had gotten actually very good at generating nuclear power. It was stupidity and lack maintenance by third-party operators Idyllwild accidents at places like Three Mile Island to occur. The Scandal about The Love Triangle / murder suicide at the SL1 plant has been long proven a fantasy. And there were problems with that style reactor. However there are hundreds of reactors operating all around the world, currently one of the biggest power plants in the world is operating beautifully in the middle of a war zone. Son has a spectacular safety record most of the plants that are in Europe spectacular safety records. Unfortunately here in the United States by the time of plant reaches the age where it needs to be recertified, it is no longer cost effective go through the process to recertify it it's easier to shut it down and allow it to be dormant. And then store the fuel. It's sad that some 40 reactors were built across the United States and we're never put into operation because of unfounded Hysteria.
Clean bombs don't you mean ? There's plenty of nuclear reactors in Europe (and elsewhere) yet we have no equivalent sites like these.
@grahamstevenson1740
you seem to forget that half of Europe was contaminated (and partly still is!) from a nuclear power plant in Czernobyl. You seem to forget that there is still no striking solution to the waste problem (and in trying to find the solution we have created problems like in the Asse mine).
@@cymbala6208 The contamination from Chernobyl (NOT a western designed reactor) was fairly low level and now essentially negligible. There ARE solutions to waste disposal. Sweden and Finland in particular are at the forefront.
@@grahamstevenson1740 A blown open, fully out of control nuke reactor is spewing out massive amounts of radioactivity, Hot Fuel Rods, and HIGH LEVEL CONTAMINATES is NOT LOW LEVEL ! It is High enough to cause evacuation of the entire city of Pripyat for eons, destroyed the forest between Pripyat and Chernobyl ( now known as the RED FOREST ) and has been causing countless damage and death to it's former residents and surrounding towns !
I’m a U.S. Navy submarine Nuke 4 years on 2 submarines about 3 REM documented. I was out of the nuclear industry for about 4 years and then back into it at Hanford in the 9 months in early ‘82 I saw a LOT OF SPECIAL NEEDS CHILDREN in Hanford. I saw a picture of Trench 1 and we know what’s in Trench 94. I wonder what’s in Trench ¿ 1 ?-93
For years the 4 reactors at Naval Reactors Facility Idaho Falls just sat there with no phuel onboard then I saw a picture of PARTS being drug to a burial pit and they are all gone. First nuclear powered vessel (submarine) first Air Craft carrier first natural circulation in a war ship
Thank you for your service and for sharing your story. I visited the B reactor in 2016 and screened the film out there for workers. Way too many people still getting sick working out there on the cleanup.
Book : IDAHO FALLS , ..... the SL-1 INCIDENT is a great story of the 3 men KILLED in the SL-1 Reactor explosion,.... and mainly due to a BAD DESIGN !
@@SteveWright-oy8ky Indeed. I was brought out to Idaho Falls to screen the film back in 2016 by the environmental group "The Snake River Alliance". They told me about that incident. I had never heard of it before. Thanks for sharing that.
People were still learning back then
Where'd all that Uranium oxide come from in 1945? Those cubes the Germans had that were found at the end of the war in May 1945 were pure uranium metal and they had literal tons of it - I personally believe thats what fed the cyclotrons and thats why the bomb was ready many months earlier than it was projected. All respect to the people who worked on the Manhatten project but this aspect of the story (the uranium metal sourcing) has always sounded strange to me.
I'm not really sure where Germany got their material. My focus in this film was the US and how it made it way to St. Louis.
Not forgetting the sudden need to grab German scientists by both the US & Russia.
@@reallifepicturesfilm The Uranium came from the St. Joachimthal mine in Czechoslovakia as it had a long history of pitchblende mining . Thanks for your fantastic documentary about yet another of the Govt/ Private Industry co-op of the nuclear fuel and it's radioactive legacy ! For more info about this subject and it's deadly results, read the book, " ATOMIC ACCIDENTS " !
@@SteveWright-oy8ky Thanks for the kind words and info.
This plant contaminated half of St Louis County...
Reckless disregard.
Excellent documentary. The mind boggles to think what Hitler would have done if he had acquired nuclear weapons...
Thank you, and it does indeed.
And even now, ppl think the govt cares about them. history matters.
Family First-hand experience, oak ridge
This is so hesrtbreaking. 😢
The guy talking about Gorbachev looks like Gorbachev
Well that was very interesting and very well done, I mean some of the explanations about how uranium was/is used was a little simplistic, and just wrong at times, but I can forgive that as iot wasn't the main thrust of the film. Also showing a man who's nearly 90 who is sharp as a tack and the picture of health, probably doesn't serve the point you are trying to make that well, lol.
Thank you for your thoughts on the the film. I actually think those gentlemen served my point quite well, as they were actual eyewitnesses to the work at the time. That's old school journalism. Going directly to the source instead of an opinion from someone who wasn't even there 😉 They battled illnesses and survived to tell about it. some of the people I interview unfortunately died before the film was completed. The film doesn't claim that everyone who worked at these plants died, clearly many didn't, but that doesn't justify the irresponsible way they were treated. That's the main thrust of the film. Not sure which uranium section you thought were "wrong". Best.
Proud Americans disgust me.. this is nothing to be proud of. I want out. I moved to NH to be part of the solution. There should be at least one place that prioritizes freedom, discourages patriotism and excuses that lead to injustices, and respects peoples individual rights to exist free from government and coercion. No victim no crime. Government is the problem, not the solution. #NHexit
I don't know if you watched this film, but there is plenty of blame to go around. Private companies cut corners, often behind the government's back and put the public at risk. The documents you see in the film are government documents, open to the public.
The trinity test contained no uranium. It was a plutonium based device.
Not true actually, it used uranium as the tamper or trigger. That's what she is referring to .
@@reallifepicturesfilm It was used as a tamper (neutron reflector). I stand corrected.
@@Indrid__Cold It's the one thing I wish I had clarified in the film. I thought it got too far into the weeds, but you have not been the only person asking about it, so I wasn't in the weeds enough. Thanks for your interest in the topic.
so there is not much difference in handling waste comparing to Russia
in the US people got payed and were free to leave if they had alternatives . in the great opponent the USSR people were eighter forced or payed a minimum compensation for their sacrefice and the polluted areas are probably worse than in the west ... The UK polluted half europe to build their bombs... all very worrying
Indeed. This film is about people not know what they were exposed to in the US. they may have left if they had known what they were dealing with.