Aug 4, 2009
Dr. Margaret Flowers of Physicians for a National Health Plan (www.pnhp.org) is the featured guest on this edition of Tell Somebody.
Dr. Flowers was one of 13 single-payer healthcare advocates arrested in May for demanding that a single-payer healthcare reform advocate be included "at the table" with all the for-profit healthcare campaign donors at U.S. Senate Finance Committee hearings.
Dr. Flowers was able to testify before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee in June, and on August 4th was heard on Tell Somebody. Right-click on the mp3 file at the bottom of this posting and "save as", or subscribe to Tell Somebody, for free, at the iTunes store to hear what she had to say.
Links to Dr. Flowers' testimony and more information, including contacts for local advocacy, here http://tellsomebodyradio.blogspot.com/2009/08/dr-margaret-flowers-next-up-on-tell.html
Also this week, the Department of Energy is looking for a national dump site for mercury. In an inter-governmental agency memo, Mark Holecek, Acting Manager for the National Nuclear Security Administration Kansas City Site Office (ie., the 'old' Kansas City WMD plant at Bannister Rd. and Troost) said, in effect, "pick me, pick me!"
At public meetings helping to grease the skids for a complicated leasing arrangement involving city tax breaks and private developers to build a new nuclear weapons components plant, , Kansas City plant officials usually push how well they claim to have cleaned up the old place. But in his pitch to have the old KC WMD plant considered as a waste dump, Holocek writes:
"The Kansas City Plant presently stores a quantity of a liquid alloy of mercury that is commercially used for its reduced melting point. For both environmental protection and practical reasons, it might be advantageous to consider including other liquid alloys of mercury within the mission of the proposed elemental mercury storage facility..."
rather than just the 99.5% pure mercury that the DOE folks stressed at the public meeting.
I had a couple of questions for the mercury managers - in the second half of the show you can judge for yourself the quality of their answers.
Lots more on the Kansas City WMD plant here:
http://kcnukeswatch.wordpress.com/
http://kcnukeswatch.wordpress.com/2009/06/19/piea-passes-kc-nuke-plant-resolutions-61909/
http://www.nukewatch.org/KCNukePlant/index.html