In Our Backyard Podcast

Charles Utley is Associate Director of BREDL. The Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant , also known as Plant Vogtle is a two-unit nuclear power plant located in Burke County , near Waynesboro , Georgia . Southern Nuclear Company of Georgia, who owns Plant Vogtle wants to build additional nuclear power plants near Waynesboro, GA. This would increase the negative health impacts on nearby reside...

Emily Strasser is a writer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her work has appeared in Catapult, Ploughshares , Guernica , Colorado Review, The New York Times, The Bitter Southerner, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists , and Tricycle, among others, and she was the presenter of the BBC podcast “The Bomb.” She is also working on a book about the intersection of family and national secrets in the nuclear...

Claire Miller is the Movement Building Director at UU Mass Action in Boston, Massachusetts. Since 2006 UU Mass Action has been organizing and mobilizing the 20,000 Unitarian Universalists and 142 congregations in Massachusetts to confront oppression. Their pathways to justice are selected by identifying the priorities in which their congregations are engaged, engaging in our coalition partners sha...

Tom Clements is Director at Savannah River Site Watch or SRS Watch for short. They are working for the public interest by monitoring activities at the U.S. Department of Energy's Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina and other DOE and commercial nuclear projects in the southeastern U.S. region and beyond & striving to halt proliferation of weapons-usable materials. The Savannah River Sit...

Joni Arends is Executive Director of Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety in Santa Fe, NM whose mission is to protect all living beings and the environment from the effects of radioactive and other hazardous materials now and in the future. New Mexico is a hotspot for nuclear activities including: Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory which is the birthplace of atomic age of nuclear weapons design and pr...

Ralph Hutchinson who is the coordinator of The Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance whose main focus is stopping nuclear weapons production at the Y12 Nuclear Weapons Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and protecting the environment threatened by legacy and ongoing activities at the Oak Ridge Nuclear Reservation. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), or the Nuclear Weapon Ban Tr...

Haakon ("Hoken") Williams is the Deputy Director of Committee to Bridge the Gap, a nuclear policy organization that works to improve protections from nuclear risks and assists communities near nuclear facilities and contaminated sites. Haakon has worked with Committee to Bridge the Gap since 2018, including helping produce a series of technical reports on the cleanup of the Hunters Point Naval Shi...

Lesie, Scott, and Phil, are all members of Protect Caswell, a chapter of the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League that is dedicated to help protect and preserve rights in Caswell County, NC. They are fighting Carolina Sunrock, LLC, a company that plans to run three large hot mix asphalt plants producing over two and a half million tons of asphalt per year, plus three truck mix cement plants, tw...

Wanda Bodnar, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering at UNC Chapel Hill and serving as the Scientist Program Analyst for the NC PFAS Testing Network. Dr. Bodnar’s specialty is the development and application of qualitative and quantitative mass spectrometry-based methods to improve our understanding of the health effects that result from exposure...

Dale Feik is the Chair of Washington County Citizen Action Network and Project Director of Hillsboro Air & Water. Located in Washington County in OR. So far this year, fires in Oregon, Washington, and California have burned some 5 million acres, marking the West Coast’s worst fire season in at least 70 years. The blazes have killed at least 35 people, destroyed hundreds of structures, and caus...

Oleg Bodrov is the Chairperson for NGO Green World. Oleg is an engineer-physicist and environmentalist. After finishing his studies at the Leningrad Polytechnic University (1976) as an engineer-physicist he has been engaged in testing of nuclear submarines. From 1980 till 1993 he was head of a group of the Regional Ecological Laboratory of the Khlopin Radium Institute, St. Petersburg. After a visi...

Sara El-Amine is a progressive senior strategist who was one of the architects of the Obama grassroots movement, playing key roles outside the US White House to pass and implement health care reform, minimum wage, marriage equality, gun violence prevention, climate protections, and more. She is currently Head of Community Engagement at Lyft, where she oversees driver, passenger, and local non-prof...

Brady Watson is the Civic Engagement Coordinator with Southern Alliance for Clean Energy or SACE for short. Brady is based out of Knoxville and is responsible for organizing around ballot initiatives and utility issues that may impact climate and energy policy. He is in charge of a Tennessee state-wide campaign where they want to see lower utility bills for Tennesseans most in need; increase acces...

Shelby Ward a public interest environmental lawyer as well as Director of Sustainable Tennessee and Staff Attorney at the Tennessee Environmental Council (TEC). She is dedicated to serving communities in Tennessee through environmental education and advocacy. She collaborates with stakeholders who share a vision for a sustainable Tennessee and directs the Council’s law and policy program. She is a...

Anne is an Environmental Justice Research Assistant intern with us at BREDL and a grad student at Duke University. She is working to help community members learn how to use Zoom and organize digitally and investigate COVID incidence across EJ communities in NC. Nanda Gupal is a Research Assistant intern with us at BREDL and a graduate student getting his Master of Engineering Management at Duke Un...

Addyson Rowe is a Research Assistant intern with us at BREDL and graduate student in Environmental Science Policy at Duke University. She has been identifying heired properties that Dominion energy has bought or tried to buy in order to construct the pipeline there. A lot of these properties end up not getting signed off on by the owners because heir properties have so many owners that often don’t...

Brian Terrell is the co-coordinator with Voices for Creative Nonviolence (or Voices for short) located in SW Iowa, they are committed to strategic campaigns and experiments, engaging in active nonviolent resistance such as the electoral and legislative process, protest, and to march and demonstrate. Voices has people and campaigns working in Yemen, Iran, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, Germany and more....

John LaForge is the Co-Director with NukeWatch and is currently working and advocating in Hamburg, Germany. Nukewatch has been working for a nuclear-free future since 1979, they bring critical attention to the locations, movements, dangers, and the politics of nuclear weapons and radioactive wastes. The US is the only government that deploys nuclear weapons in other countries. US B61 nuclear gravi...

Francine Stephenson, President of BREDL chapter No Pipeline Johnston County (NPJoCo), Tom Clark, member of BREDL chapter Cumberland County Caring Voices (C3V), Marvin Winstead, President of Nash County Stop the Pipeline (NSTP) and BREDL community organizer, and Lou Zeller, Executive director of Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League (BREDL). Francine, Tom, and Marvin were all along the 600 mile l...

Valerie Williams is President of BREDL Chapter Concerned Stewards of Halifax County. Valerie has a family farm that was on the proposed pathway of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP). Since 2014, us at BREDL began campaigning to counteract the planning and construction of the Atlantic Coast Natural Gas Pipeline that would stretch 600 miles across West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina. After six...

Rachel Coyte is a PhD student at Duke University who is the leading author of the last two papers on the occurrence of hexavalent chromium and other contaminants in groundwater in NC. Rachel and Dr. Avner Vengosh have been researching and working on testing wells in NC for Hexavalent Chromium. Hexavalent chromium is a carcinogen made famous by the movie Erin Brockovich and is far more abundant in...

Petuuche Gilbert is an environmental and human rights activist as well as a member of the Multicultural Alliance for Safe Environment and President of the Indigenous World Association, a United Nations NGO. He lives in the Grants Mining District in New Mexico and has been working on nuclear and mining issues for 30+ years. New Mexico has no nuclear power plants, but it does have the nation's secon...

Ruth Ann Tesanovich is a retired Medical Laboratory Scientist from UGA, and has been a resident of Madison County, GA for 36 years. She is also secretary and treasurer of the Madison County Clean Power Coalition Chapter (MCCPC) a chapter of BREDL whose mission is to protect the environment and advocate for the communities polluted by the processing and burning of railroad ties. Biomass includes wo...

Biologist Mary Olson's life’s mission is to bring to light to the disproportionate impact of radiation on girls and women. Through her work as a staff biologist and policy analyst at  Nuclear Information and Resource Service , Olson has spent decades working for greater health and greater protection for people in communities impacted by nuclear activities. After the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear...

Laura Asherman is the Founder of Forage Films LLC and Director of the film Power Lines . The 30 min documentary follows the construction of an additional two new units at the Plant Vogtle Nuclear Power Plants, which at the time of the documentary was five years behind schedule and more than $13 billion over original cost estimates. These overages directly affect ratepayers across Georgia, who are...