Beyond Nuclear International Weekly Digest, MONDAY, JULY 17, 2023

Posted: 17th July 2023

The film Oppenheimer opens July 21, just days after the July 16 commemoration of the first atomic test, Trinity in 1945. That moment unleashed the greatest horror and the greatest regrets, including by Oppenheimer, writes Lawrence Wittner. And on the same day as Trinity, and in the same year as the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster (1979) the country’s most forgotten and largest accidental release of radioactive waste occurred, at Church Rock, NM. We republish this little known story in remembrance.

Oppenheimer’s downfall was also ours

Although considered “the father of the atomic bomb”, J. Robert Oppenheimer soon had regrets, leading to his ouster and a witch hunt. For the millions who have suffered since—at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, from atomic testing and from the daily fear of a nuclear war, what was unleashed by the Manhattan Project was humanity’s greatest collective tragedy. READ MORE

The other July 16 tragedy

On July 16, 1979, a dam wall at the Church Rock uranium mill in New Mexico broke, releasing 90 million gallons of liquid radioactive waste and eleven hundred tons of solid mill wastes into the Puerco River. The event was largely eclipsed by the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster earlier that year, perhaps because the people affected were Navajo. They still live with the effects today, while their suffering has been ignored and forgotten. READ MORE

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