S4E36: The Fallout You Never Knew About: California's Hidden Nuclear Legacy

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

0:00:00 - (Chris Clarke): 90 miles from the desert Protection Podcast is made possible by listeners just like you. If you want to help us out, you can go to 90 miles from needles.com donate or text needles to 53555.

0:00:25 - (Joe Geoffrey): Think the deserts are Barren Wastelands. Think again.

0:00:34 - (Joe Geoffrey): It'S time for 90 miles from Needles the Desert Protection Podcast.

0:00:45 - (Announcer): America where on Yucca Flats, Nevada, US Marines take cover while on atom bomb maneuvers.  And just over three miles away, the now familiar blinding flash. Chief purpose of these explosions have been to ensure that the atom bomb can be used in full scale offensives on land without leaving its deadly radiation in the target area. So the U.S. marines, like the whole world, watch the effects of the blast and wonder.

0:01:22 - (Peter Coyote): An atomic cloud rose over the Nevada Desert on May 19, 1953. Soldiers and civilians watched as the plume was blown by prevailing winds. The blast was a nuclear test conducted at the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles from Las Vegas. Its name was Upshot Knothole Harry. The wind direction changed from what was predicted. Nuclear fallout was distributed across the much of the United States and beyond.

0:01:58 - (Announcer): A major moment in Washington today. President Trump signing the one big beautiful bill into law surrounded by Republican members of Congress and members of his cabinet. The nearly 900 page bill includes the expansion of the Radiation Exposure Compensation act, now federal law again. The Radiation Exposure Compensation act pays families across certain states if they were exposed to radiation and other contaminants happening as a result of the federal government's goals to create and test nuclear weapons. Many people near these sites, including in New Mexico, developing cancers and other serious diseases. As a result, the New Rica expands who is eligible now, including downwinders in New Mexico who lived here from 1944 to 1962 with compensation up to $100,000.

0:02:47 - (Chris Clarke): On July 16, 1945, the U.S. war Department detonated the first ever atomic bomb at the Trinity site in southern New Mexico. That bomb had a yield that was approximately the equivalent of 20,000 tons of TNT. And that was merely the first of about 2,000 nuclear test explosions conducted by countries around the world, the most recent documented one being in North Korea in 2017. In the United States, the Nevada Test Site, now referred to as the Nevada National Security Site, was the scene of most American nuclear weapons testing, with 904 explosions and a little bit more than 100 others that were in different places like the Pacific testing grounds in the South Atlantic, Amchitka island and Alaska, etc.

0:03:36 - (Chris Clarke): The US's last nuclear test took place in September 1992 and between 1945 and 1992 the US exploded 1,054 nuclear weapons. Their testing program since then, the US has maintained a unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing, but with the other roughly thousand tests by other countries. A 2003 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Cancer Institute estimated that nuclear fallout might have killed 11,000 people, most of them due to thyroid cancer, which would have been linked to exposure to radioactive iodine.

0:04:13 - (Chris Clarke): The Radiation Exposure Compensation act of 1990, also known as RECA, which was, as that little sound clip indicates, reauthorized in the Trump omnibus spending bill, has been responsible for more than $1.38 billion in compensation going to people who took part in the tests and to people who lived downwind, mainly in Nevada, Utah and New Mexico. And the name downwinders is telling it illuminates a bias that the people organizing the nuclear testing had in that they decided testing needed to wait until the wind would blow the fallout over what people considered an expendable part of the United States, the relatively less populated southwestern deserts and in fact, many people in southeastern Nevada and southwestern Utah, St. George, et cetera, did suffer serious health impacts, occasionally fatal, from these tests.

0:05:13 - (Chris Clarke): But it's not all downwind in the official sense. Wind is a tricky thing. Sometimes it takes things in directions that you don't expect. And in today's episode, we're going to be talking with my old friend Dr. Michael E. Ketterer, professor emeritus of chemistry at Northern Arizona University, about his findings that some of the fallout ended up in eastern California, in the Owens Valley, in nearby areas, the base of the Sierra Nevada, and in some places the fallout fell on amounts comparable to those in downwind hotspots like St. George. We're going to be talking with Mike at some length for this episode, but I wanted to encourage you if you're hearing this before the 27th of September 2025, and if you're within striking distance of El Paso, I'm going to be sitting near the prairie dogs at the El Paso Zoo.

0:06:01 - (Chris Clarke): With the Desert Advocacy Media Network and this podcast's table taking part in the Chihuahuan Desert Fiesta, I encourage you to come by if you're in the general vicinity of anywhere between Marfa and, say, Deming, New Mexico. Come on by. We'll grab some coffee. Before we get to my interview with Mike Ketterer, we also have a couple of donors to thank. Scott B. Davis came by our donation page with a generous donation and left a note saying, Chris, I'm a longtime desert rat and photographer.

0:06:31 - (Chris Clarke): Your words, your wisdom and the show are a gift. It's a pleasure to finally support you in this important work. Thank you. Well, thank you Scott. That's a wonderful note and we are very grateful for your support. I'm going to have to google your photography and take a look at it. We also had someone prefers to remain anonymous who wrote after giving a nice donation, just discovered you. Thank you for the important work you're doing.

0:06:57 - (Chris Clarke): It is really nice to get messages like these, especially after last episode in which I will admit the woes of the world were kind of getting to me. Having some new donors pop up and give us messages of support is a lovely thing. So thank you both and if you want to join our anonymous donor and Scott B. Davis, you can go to 90 miles from needles.com donate and pick out an amount and a frequency of donation that suits you and we will be very grateful.

0:07:23 - (Chris Clarke): And with that, let's get to our interview.

0:07:55 - (Mike Ketterer): I’m Michael Ketterer, a retired chemistry professor from Northern Arizona University, I continue to do lab work part time chasing the trail of where substances come from, and recently in the last couple decades my work has focused mainly on uranium and plutonium. Using mass spectrometry as a fingerprinting technique. I emphasize where is it from if people are concerned about substances in their environment, fallout contamination from the nuclear fuel cycle or uranium mining and milling? The two questions go together how much and who is it from? Who is very important because the thing that environmental contamination should make people think about is somebody is always responsible for it. That could be all of us if we're talking about CO2 molecules in the air. But if we're talking about a trail of contaminated sediment, there's most definitely a who to that and people deserve to hear and know the who. We expect to find naturally occurring uranium and small amounts of plutonium from ubiquitous stratospheric fallout.

0:09:15 - (Mike Ketterer): If I am detecting something that is out of bounds with what's expected in the background, then I will probably tell somebody that becomes important. Using isotopic testing of the elements uranium and plutonium and their isotopes is the answer to how do you tell people where is it from?

0:09:36 - (Chris Clarke): I think a pretty high percentage of our listeners are familiar with what an isotope is, but a quick definition would be really helpful.

0:09:45 - (Mike Ketterer): Well, the element plutonium as well as uranium each consist of several different nuclear forms. Those are called isotopes. They all have the same number of protons in their nucleus and that defines which element they are. They have different numbers of neutrons, which gives them different masses and different nuclear properties. Different isotopes have different half-lives they decay with different rates and energies and so on.

0:10:16 - (Mike Ketterer): In the case of plutonium, it's a mostly synthetic isotope. The anthropogenic processes fabricate several different forms. Plutonium 238, for instance, 239, 240, 241, 242. Those are all chemically essentially the same, but because of their masses, they can be distinguished. Nature has certain well defined isotope composition. For uranium. Nature puts hardly any plutonium at all into the Earth's crust. Basically, a certain amount of uranium is expected to be there.

0:10:53 - (Mike Ketterer): It's about 3 micrograms per gram in the Earth's crust, somewhere around 30 to 40 becquerels per kilogram in radioactivity units of Uranium 238, somewhere around 1 picocurie per gram of Uranium 238, somewhere around one picocurie per gram of Thorium 230, which is a daughter, and Thorium 232, which is another isotope altogether, and maybe somewhere around one becquerel per kilogram of plutonium 239 and 240.

0:11:25 - (Mike Ketterer): From the global background.

0:11:28 - (Chris Clarke): I'll just butt in here for a second. Mike throws around a few different ways of measuring radioactivity in this interview, and he's referring here to Becquerels and picocuries, which is a trillionth of a Curie. A Curie is basically an obsolete measurement of radiation. People don't use it much anymore. But we'll define it for you anyway. First, a Becquerel, named after Henri Becquerel, who actually shared a Nobel Prize in 1903 in physics with Pierre and Marie Curie.

0:11:58 - (Chris Clarke): They each got their own unit. A Becquerel is one radioactive decay per second. A single Becquerel is not really that big a deal. A typical banana has about 15 becquerels that it's giving out. Bananas have a lot of potassium and one isotope of potassium. Potassium 40 is somewhat radioactive. You can keep eating bananas because that potassium 40 passes through your system with no trouble. A curie is 37 billion becquerels.

0:12:29 - (Chris Clarke): If you find a banana that is emitting one curie of radiation due to its potassium 40, that's going to be, first off a big banana. And secondly, do not eat it. There are other units that are commonly used in discussing radiation. Rads, rems, roentgens, sieverts. But we will save those definitions until we absolutely need them.

0:12:51 - (Mike Ketterer): So that's kind of the null hypothesis. And I test environments and scenarios to find places where there's some other kind of uranium or some other kind of plutonium that is there, especially in a significant way, maybe near where people live, or in a way that is valid new information that people ought to think about. The story of Acid Canyon in New Mexico we talked about a year ago.

0:13:23 - (Chris Clarke): That would be season three episode 27, which we released on September 18, 2024. So it really was a year ago.

0:13:33 - (Mike Ketterer): And the story of the California Upwinder Zone. These are stories of how I have used isotopic testing to point out that a certain type of source exists. When I get valid data from laboratory measurements of samples collected appropriately, measured appropriately, and so on. My opinions that stem from those data are carved in stone like Mount Rushmore. I am doing a very basic interpretation of the factual information that's conveyed from these results.

0:14:15 - (Mike Ketterer): We could talk about plutonium as a test case here of this hypothesis testing business. The idea here is that if we measure the isotope composition of at least two of those, and it's usually 239 and 240, we can learn something about where do they come from. Because as a synthetic element, plutonium has a telltale blend of isotopes. If it is from the global or stratospheric fallout, for instance, the.

0:14:44 - (Mike Ketterer): The expected 240 divided by 239 atom ratio, the ratio of just the numbers of atoms is about 0.18. And that is known within about 10 relative percent. It's fairly constrained. Now, other plutonium that comes from other sources, whether we're talking about the Trinity test or the material that's in Asset Canyon or even the Nevada test site debris, has a much different atom ratio, usually much lower for all of those things that I mentioned. So from Nevada, that deposition, which was transported more in the troposphere than the stratosphere, the lower atmosphere, has a range of more like 0.03 to 0.07.

0:15:31 - (Mike Ketterer): The Trinity test is somewhere around 0.03 in there. And then some of the material that's in Acid Canyon is actually down in the 01 0.02 range. In other words, with an atom ratio 240 over 239 that is that low. It's like saying on an atom basis, this stuff is mostly plutonium 239. I was making a trip by car from Flagstaff to the bay area in 2008, I believe it was. And I drove through the eastern Sierras up 395.

0:16:09 - (Mike Ketterer): And I started to ask myself the rhetorical question. I know that I'm near the Nevada test site. In terms of miles from it. But I know that I'm also upwind from the Nevada test site because I've always heard the prevailing wisdom, the myth. We conducted the tests when the wind was blowing towards the east, and so the fallout all went towards Nevada and Utah. So St. George got it, but California was not affected. That's the prevailing thought that I had in my mind in 2008 when I was making this trip up there. So I decided I'm going to stop here and there. And I took a series of samples, and when I got back to Flagstaff, I conducted the isotopic testing along the lines that were prevailing. And I found evidence that blows that out of the water.

0:17:01 - (Mike Ketterer): This is all going to be stratospheric fallout. And this is not affected at all by Nevada fallout. In fact, I found in some of the federal lands near Mount Whitney, kind of right in the foot of Mount Whitney, near the towns of Independence, Lone Pine, Bishop. I drove up and down 395, taking samples at accessible public lands. And largely, the pattern is there is a whole lot of Nevada test site fallout there because the null hypothesis that it all came from stratospheric fallout from the Soviet tests in the US Pacific tests, that's blown out of the water. When you start measuring ratios that are outside the bounds of fallout, it requires a different explanation. It's already known nine ways from Sunday what the Nevada fallout looks like and where it went.

0:17:57 - (Mike Ketterer): In isotope terms, you expect to see a ratio of about 0.05. I was really shocked when I pulled a few samples, and Instead of getting 0.18 for the 240, 239 ratio, I was getting 0.08. What that is saying is that we've got maybe one part by mass of global background mixed with three or four parts by mass of stuff from Nevada. Said another way, there's some places in there, and right in that area around Mount Whitney is where the activities were the highest. In some cases, almost one becquerel per kilogram.

0:18:36 - (Mike Ketterer): But that's not high, that's not contaminated at all. But it's elevated versus what there would be otherwise in the absence of all of this stuff from Nevada. But then you're seeing atom ratios in some of these locations. And this is just in the surface soil in publicly accessible place. People go hiking. It's right by the trailhead for the Mount Whitney death march, which I have not done.

0:19:02 - (Chris Clarke): Me either. Need to.

0:19:04 - (Mike Ketterer): No, no. There's all of these locations. I sampled a large number of areas up and down 395, about maybe 100 road miles, something like that. The prevailing pattern is you always see some effect from Nevada. Maybe it's only 20 or 30% of the plutonium came from Nevada, but in other places it's like 90% of it. Some of these areas look like they're as bad as St. George.

0:19:30 - (Chris Clarke): Wow.

0:19:32 - (Mike Ketterer): And you know, I've never heard anything out of our federal government about considering these areas, for instance, for membership in RECA Radiation Exposure and Compensation Act. But it seems to me that you can't say St. George bad. Mono  and Inyo counties, California good.

0:19:56 - (Chris Clarke): That's pretty distressing. I know that RECA was just reauthorized pretty recently and it seems like that was maybe a missed opportunity to have a discussion about California contamination on a larger level.

0:20:10 - (Mike Ketterer): I am actually much more optimistic than that Chris, because RECA was passed in a very narrow and constrained way, although they like to say it was extended and expanded. So some new areas like Coldwater Creek in Missouri, St. Louis area, as well as the entire state of New Mexico, both of those are really, really justified. But this Rica is only got about two years and then it's going to turn into a pumpkin again.

0:20:40 - (Mike Ketterer): And so the people that are hard at work trying to pass the next version of RECA are already thinking about these and I think there's every opportunity in the context of the next rich to include these counties because I think from an evidence based standpoint that's where RECA should cover. I am actually, I'll commit myself to saying publicly I'm going to write a book. The plan in short order being the next few months, I want to write a book and it's about RECA.

0:21:15 - (Mike Ketterer): And what it is going to be is basically an evidence based case for RECA. It starts with the evidence and how you evaluate it. Like the NTS abandoned uranium mines and the Trinity test site starts out with that. But then it broadens the question to well, you see this kind of evidence of these types of contaminations in all of these places and that is covered by RECA. I'll pick two examples that should be covered in California. If you follow an evidence based hypothesis testing contamination is present based model rather than a political model for RECA.

0:21:56 - (Mike Ketterer): Mono and Inyo counties of California definitely should be included and so should Pike and Scioto counties in Ohio. The current RECA made some provisions for some zip codes near the former Paducah and Oak Ridge gaseous diffusion plants, but not Piketon. I guess the problem was the government needs that place too much for its nuclear renaissance and so it's bad eyewash to say, oh, we're going to compensate you for RECA because we killed everybody. But by the way, we're going to go on killing.

0:22:26 - (Mike Ketterer): And when we are detecting differences, they're nearly that obvious that can't be explained by another way. It should be obvious to anybody and everybody else that if these are valid measurements, that's the caveat. If these are valid measurements can't be explained by the global background, and it requires an alternate hypothesis. H1 is what statistics textbooks would call it. The cowboys at the time said, okay, the wind looks good, Captain.

0:22:59 - (Mike Ketterer): Send her up, let her rip. And so the fallout went where it went. A lot of that has been reconstructed and studied. I think that more sophisticated meteorological evidence. There's a guy named Sebastian Philippe. Sebastian is S E B A S T I E N. Philippe I think is P H I L I P P E. He is at Princeton. I've talked to him a little bit. He's done atmospheric modeling using old weather patterns from the day of the Trinity test and all the individual Nevada events, and has tracked actual air movement and come up with some very interesting findings.

0:23:39 - (Mike Ketterer): What I do is kind of the opposite approach. It's more like ground truthing. I will take samples along the road at the rest area by independence. That's ground truthing not only what happened, but it's also ground truthing somebody's model. The atmospheric models are very useful, but they need to be ground truth. Sophisticated atmospheric modeling would show that some fallout containing clouds passed from the nts, circled around at some elevation, and made their way over to Mount Whitney and ran into a snowstorm.

0:24:13 - (Chris Clarke): Right.

0:24:14 - (Mike Ketterer): You know, that stuff happened during the Cold war when Senator McCarthy was taking names and Khrushchev was banging his shoe on the podium. Back in that day, they were not doing sophisticated meteorological evidence. It was letter rip.

0:24:30 - (Chris Clarke): I wonder if people in Inyo county hearing this are likely to start making connections in their head. You know, grandma died of cancer of one kind or another 10 years ago. Is this connected? And I'm just wondering if there are particular kinds of ailments that are strongly associated with exposure to uranium and plutonium.

0:24:54 - (Mike Ketterer): Well, these are all great questions, Chris. And I can tread a little bit into these areas to the extent that my expertise allows me to. I have a little bit of peripheral knowledge in epidemiology. I've read studies and things like that, and a little bit in chemical toxicology, radio toxicology. Are you not pretend to be a health physicist or anything? But when I go and test environmental samples and I'm looking for Say plutonium.

0:25:24 - (Mike Ketterer): The outcomes are basically three different categories. Door 1, 2 or 3. One is I use the best forensic science I have available and I can't detect it. And if I have done a good job in taking samples and that's a big if, then I am pretty confident in being able to tell people there's no hazard from this because I can't detect it. And I am specifically looking to detect the smallest traces that I can and I cannot find it.

0:25:56 - (Mike Ketterer): So that's probably the best possible outcome. The second category is I can find it either a little bit or a lot, but it doesn't really perturb the present day hazard that exists from somebody that's spending time in this place. So I would say that is the situation we're in for Inyo and Mono Calgary. We can definitely detect the forensic evidence. The breadcrumbs are there. In some cases it looks like there's rather a lot of fallout.

0:26:31 - (Mike Ketterer): I drew a comparison of it to St. George and that's based only on the plutonium and not dozens of other radionuclides like iodine 131. I don't know what those plumes look like or anything that could be tested that sought to measure the volatile components of fallout which produced a lot of the short term health effects. Door number three, which we don't have here is I'm detecting a lot of it to the point where the concentrations are high enough, you better be aware of it. I think what these results would say is there was past exposure contemporaneously during the 50s and 60s. That ought to be revisited, as has already been done by the government, the National Cancer Institute and so on. It's already been done in known downwind zones, for example, southwestern Utah.

0:27:25 - (Mike Ketterer): Additional soil testing is important. More expansive soil testing, testing of residential properties. What kind of dusts do people have in old houses? Are there some houses there that predate the NTS where contaminated dust from these explosions can be found? I would bet there are if you can find old enough houses. I don't think that any of this signifies much of a hazard to the people there today, but it retrospectively points to pretty serious past exposure.

0:27:59 - (Mike Ketterer): I don't think for people recreating in the national forest up there, I don't think there's a big hazard associated with that. I differ with a lot of the people in Colorado that I talk to about the relative risks of recreating on the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge and so on. Common sense comes into play here. Sure you do not want to be standing in a dust cloud of blowing soil during an episodic event if it contains this fallout. But you probably don't want to be in that cloud anyway because of other things, you know, of Hanta or whatever it is.

0:28:35 - (Chris Clarke): Yes, et cetera.

0:28:38 - (Mike Ketterer): I don't have a lot of warnings to the present day population or users of those areas, but I think it's already been put into the ecosystem and we ought to go and try and find out what happened in the past. A small scale epidemiological study in those two counties should be done. I think it would be obvious to try to tease out the data what started happening in the early 50s and continued through today.

0:29:06 - (Mike Ketterer): If those effects exist, it's not really something that's going to produce further damage, but I see it as our obligation to understand where the breadcrumbs are showing this harm occurred in the past.

0:29:22 - (Chris Clarke): Don't go away. We'll be right back. We'll get back to our interview with Mike Ketterer in just a moment. He'll tell us about a sort of citizen science project that he's involved with that will allow people to have access to a way to find out whether or not the soil in their area is contaminated, which is pretty difficult to determine these days without a government grant of some kind. But as a palate cleanser, given that I'm going to be a 10-minute drive from this place for a couple of days this week and hopefully we'll find enough time to go for a short hike.

0:29:56 - (Chris Clarke): Let's go to our offering from Fred Bell who brings us great horned owls in Sabino Canyon in the Santa Catalina Mountains in Tucson.

0:31:22 - (Joe Geoffrey): You're listening to 90 miles from Needles, the desert protection podcast. Sunscreen is your friend.

0:31:30 - (Chris Clarke): When we spoke earlier you also mentioned a spectrometer setup that you're trying to.

0:31:35 - (Mike Ketterer): Put in a so this is a new venture that got started May of this year. I am collaborating with loosely organized group of individuals. We are all members or associate members of Veterans for Peace. I'm not a veteran, so I am an associate member. They are based in mostly in New Mexico, but a team of about seven of us is planning a project and it's underway. One of our team members has donated a 17 foot camper trailer with bathroom and air conditioner and the whole bit and it's been refurbished to accommodate a traveling mass spectrometry lab.

0:32:17 - (Mike Ketterer): The idea is it can be brought to the community. It's at my house in Flagstaff. It's parked in the driveway. The trailer has some generators mounted Onto the back of it. And there's platform on the inside that's been constructed to accommodate the mass spec and other utilities. But this is going to be a New Mexico based laboratory capability. The vehicle is owned by Veterans for Peace. I own and operate the laboratory equipment and I furnish it with a chemistry set suited for the reagents and most importantly, the isotopic standards needed conducting these uranium and plutonium measurements.

0:33:03 - (Mike Ketterer): Plutonium is done without a radioactive materials license. We are working towards a goal of early November. November 2nd is Dia de los Muertos and that might be a good target date. I've suggested to Veterans for Peace that we should have a public unveiling probably in the Albuquerque or Santa Fe area and have, you know, some free food and stuff. Invite the public to come. In particular invite stakeholders that we want to work with.

0:33:33 - (Mike Ketterer): So we anticipate working both with individuals, but more so with, you know, existing organized groups. So for instance, the Tularosa Basin Downwinders. Right. Consortium and I know those folks fairly well, as do you know, most of the rest of our team knows them too. They are interested in working with us. And some of the questions they have in mind are understanding what kind of contamination were people exposed to through drinking water and cisterns, which was common practice at the time of the Trinity test.

0:34:07 - (Mike Ketterer): I have already sampled one cistern that has some very interesting results, quite high. It serves as a funnel, a gathering point for all the contamination that falls on the roof and funnels down into your drinking water. There's no doubt that that was an under recognized source of exposure to Trinity and Nevada fallout back in the day with the downwinders. We're anticipating. This is kind of a two-year target.

0:34:35 - (Mike Ketterer): We're anticipating with community assistance, gathering enough samples and I think it's going to be somewhere around 1,000 samples to construct some fallout maps of New Mexico for posterity's sake, telling people where the stuff is from and where went in just a very straightforward and objective way. Around the time we talked last year, I was entertaining being part of an academic grant team, getting money from the federal government and so on. They were all happy when I was talking about studying Trinity fallout because that's not controversial.

0:35:09 - (Mike Ketterer): As soon as I mentioned Los Alamos, I. That was, that was the kiss of death for my involvement with those people because there's plenty of people that have, you know, conflicts of interest, shall we say? Yeah, the mobile lab project can use generator power or it can use land-based power, 220v. I have 2, 8, 700-watt generators which can power the whole thing, including air conditioning, cooling and all the utilities. But land-based power is preferred.

0:35:41 - (Mike Ketterer): I'm setting it up and testing it at my house. It'll be sent somewhere to perform work with a crew of at least two people and will go to different locations to interface with communities. I'll give you a good example of how this might be beneficial. People are going to ask why do you want to bother doing all that? Why don't they just mail you a package? Well, they do that too, but last month I spent about a week in pike county and Scioto County, Ohio taking samples. Each sample I would collect and talk to people. I realized that there's earth shattering set of hypotheses that are going around in their mind about that sample, and this is why I'm testing it for them.

0:36:28 - (Mike Ketterer): Wouldn't it be so much better if I could say, okay, I will give you a preliminary answer in six hours or I will give you an answer the next morning or I will give you a printed report on some kind of letterhead with my signature on it in 24 hours. The ability to do something like that in real time or close to real time is much better than where we are now. I'm now sitting on about seven or eight different parties.

0:37:05 - (Mike Ketterer): I took samples from them, from their properties or talked with them and obtained samples from them or whatever. Every one of those persons is sitting there a month later wondering if I forgot about them. Right. And you know, for people that are distrustful of science and scientific geeks, and I can tell you that pike county is about as red as they come for counties in that part of the US So is Scioto.

0:37:35 - (Mike Ketterer): You know, it's. They're distrustful of science type people in general terms. But I think if you were to give them the evidence right in their face and say here, let's look at the numbers coming out of the machine, you bring me your own well water sample if you don't believe me. A lot can be done to persuade and to change minds, but particularly at the political level. We are in the wrong climate in the United States right now through anything like that. I hoped to be embarking on this program about a year ago. I wish to have been embarked and embarking on this program with, you know, maybe the end results is Madam Harris would be signing some significant piece of legislation and apologizing to Americans for having raped their country in so many ways by these industries in the Cold War.

0:38:31 - (Mike Ketterer): I see little hope of that happening now. Yeah, but on the Positive side. There are some people in New Mexico, and I've met many of them that really deserve a profound apology from the United States. And of course that can't happen now, but we got the best next thing to it, the Holy Father knows the Archbishop of Santa Fe. And if you've listened to the Archbishop of Santa Fe, John Wester, Father Wester, what he has to say about making plutonium pits.

0:39:03 - (Mike Ketterer): He and the Holy Father know each other pretty well.

0:39:06 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah.

0:39:08 - (Mike Ketterer): So an apology from the Pope would mean quite a bit more than the apology from our sitting President.

0:39:13 - (Chris Clarke): Well, Mike, I think we've got a lot of really good stuff here for an episode. Do you have any public facing stuff you'd like to direct listeners to, your lab website or anything like that?

0:39:24 - (Mike Ketterer): I don't have any kind of a web presence really. My public presence is easy to find in the popular media. If you Google my name and put in something like Los Alamos, Rocky Flats Piped in Ohio, uranium, plutonium, you'll find plenty of trail. But also if you want to validate my credentials scientifically, just go to google scholar, scholar.google.com type in my last name + plutonium as a keyword, + Flagstaff as a location and you will see I have a respectable list of peer reviewed papers and some of them are pretty old. I mean I've got a couple decades under my belt doing this. I'm easy to find.

0:40:08 - (Mike Ketterer): My. My public email address is Michael Kettererau. Edu and you can send me a request saying get in contact with me. That is discoverable email under Arizona Open Records act. So excellent.

0:40:23 - (Chris Clarke): If you go to the website of the publication New Mexico Searchlight, you'll see Michael quoted extensively there.

0:40:30 - (Mike Ketterer): I'm really pleased to have the honor of working with Alicia Guzman. She's on a leave of absence with the New York Times right now, but I believe she intends to return to Searchlight. She's not leaving New Mexico and journalism on nuclear oversight by any means. My hat is off to her in what she's figured out. Some of the things that Los Alamos is up to now, such as tritium venting, are quite scary to think about.

0:41:00 - (Chris Clarke): Well, Michael, thank you so much for joining us again and I will definitely take you up on the idea of a little bit of spring hiking.

0:41:07 - (Mike Ketterer): Good to talk with you again, sir. I will keep you posted of any travel plans to California too.

0:41:12 - (Chris Clarke): I can meet you in Lone Pine at a moment's notice if necessary.

0:41:16 - (Mike Ketterer): I think if the effect I'm talking about is real, it ought to be validated, repeated and substantiated by either myself or other people. So we should go up there and take some samples.

0:41:27 - (Chris Clarke): Sounds great.

0:41:29 - (Mike Ketterer): All right, take care, man. Good to see you.

0:42:04 - (Chris Clarke): And that wraps up this episode episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast. Thanks to Mike Ketterer for joining us again. You may recall if you listened to the previous episode in which he joined us last year, that he and I have known each other since approximately 1968, and that is some tenure in the friendship realm. We've let a decade or two go by without talking from time to time, but it's just really good to be in touch and I'm proud that my friend is doing this important work.

0:42:32 - (Chris Clarke): I would also like to thank Joe Jeffrey, our voiceover artist, and Martin Mancha, who put together our beautiful podcast artwork, as well as Fred Bell, the wonderful nature recordist who provides us with these vignettes and what the desert actually sounds like when you're there. Thanks as well to Scott B. Davis and to our anonymous donor this week for kicking in some cash to keep us going. If you want to join them, you can go to 90 miles from needles.com

0:42:58 - (Chris Clarke): donate our theme song Moody Western is by Brightside Studio. Other music in this episode is by Chat Blank. Now I am scrambling to put this episode together several days early because I've got a couple of days of traveling before the episode drops and I'm a little worn out to be honest. But we have the leavings of monsoon rain in my neighborhood. The last rain rain and 29 palms happened a few days back, but the traces are everywhere.

0:43:26 - (Chris Clarke): There's still standing water in the flood control channel near our house. It's a whole new desert. The humidity is making me miserable. I've gotten used to 11% humidity year-round. 16-year-old me living in the Great Lakes would have laughed at how soft I've become with regard to water vapor in the air. And special bonus, there is cinchweed all over the place. Pectis papposa. It's a wonderful plant. If I don't see you in Tucson or in El Paso, I hope you stay. Well, refrain from doom scrolling if you can get outside and touch a bunch grass. I think people always assume when they say touch grass that there's a lawn involved and we don't like lawns here in the desert except for the occasional soccer field.

0:44:13 - (Chris Clarke): So find a bunch grass. Big galleta. It's a favorite food of rabbits and desert tortoises. When you touch Big galleta grass, don't get a paper cut, but feel the beautiful ridges on the flat sides and the long flower heads that turn light tan and almost never have viable seeds. But they're a telltale mark of big galleta grass. We'll be back with more episodes, hopefully including some great stuff from El Paso and the Chihuahuan Desert Fiesta.

0:44:40 - (Chris Clarke): And in the meantime, take care of yourself and take care of each other, and we can all work together to take care of the desert. Bye now. 90 miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.