Filmmaker Liz Rogers and director Kevin Flint go to South Dakota following a story on Uranium contamination only to disc | dG1fbjZ0NjNuOW1iOTQ
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Short filmTranscript
00:00We knew the world would not be the same, few people laughed, few people cried, most people
00:21were silent. I remembered the line from the scripture, now I am become death, the destroyer
00:31of worlds. At the height of the Cold War, we were stockpiling nuclear weapons. To build
00:40these bombs, we needed a lot of uranium. They dug up this radioactive material and left
00:46millions of tons of it leaching into our water supply. Nobody tests for radiation and
00:53uranium, no cities, no counties, no states routinely test for that. People are getting
00:58sick from drinking their water. They're cooking in the water, they're bathing in the water.
01:04We found very high uranium concentrations, three times the EPA limit. How could they
01:11measure such a high number? These are the people who are supposed to be cleaning up.
01:15They're operating under conditions which are manifestly not guaranteed to provide for
01:19the public's safety. All of the barriers to keep the radiation from the public had totally
01:28failed. Nuclear can have 40 great years and one bad day. Plutonium has a half-life of
01:3724,000 years. It will take 10 half-lives before this water is safe to drink. And the effects
01:45are passed on from one generation to the next. This is not just what was done to these
01:50people. My family's dying proof that it's here. We just have to stand up. Life, liberty,
01:58and the pursuit of happiness. And we can't have that in a contaminated world. We're poisoning
02:06ourselves and our planet, and it's a shady bet that we're really going to be able to
02:12deal with this stuff in the time that we have. I've never been an activist, but this
02:19issue made me one.