Karl Grossman (left) sharing Space Command Vision for 2020 with a journalist during Global Network protest at the Treasury Department in Washington DC. Grossman has been the leading journalist on the nukes in space story since the late 1980's. He just had a flurry of stories about the Mars rover Curiosity being powered by nuclear devices. Karl was recently honored by Networking Magazine with the following story about his long time efforts against nuclear power.
Deep Digging Journalist for the Sake of Public Safety
By Christine D. Giordano
It was a perfectly sublime Saturday evening in the Hamptons — with flowers
blooming and restaurants hopping, yet it was a bookstore in Sag Harbor that saw
the most action — with a standing-room only crowd gathered inside, pressing
their way toward the podium to hear what a journalist had to say. It was no
ordinary journalist, of course. It was one of the last surviving, vigilant
watchdog journalists Karl Grossman, speaking about his 50 year career as an
investigative reporter, at the very popular Canio’s bookstore in Sag Harbor.
For years, Grossman has developed a following through his interviews, his
columns in Long Island newspapers, his “enviro-exposes,” his documentaries that
spotlight environmental toxins, and his books such as Cover Up: What You Are Not
Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power (1980); The Poison Conspiracy (1982);
Nicaragua: America’s New Vietnam? (1984); Power Crazy:Is LILCO Turning Shoreham
Into America’s Chernobyl? (1986); The Wrong Stuff: The Space Program’s Nuclear
Threat to Our Planet (1997) and Weapons in Space (2001). His television program
Enviro Close-Up is in 200 countries, and he’s written and narrated TV
documentaries for EnviroVideo.
Few have taken their Journalism responsibilities as seriously as Grossman. At
one point, seven to 11 nuclear power plants were planned for Long Island, and,
after researching the dire health effects linked to radiation, Grossman wrote
articles and the book that opened a dialogue regarding the dangers of having a
nuclear backyard. “The very exposure was enough to solve the problem,” said
Grossman.
Former Governor Mario Cuomo eventually stood against creating such an
environment.
Horror Stories
Now the journalist is concerned with the
radiation leakage from the Japanese nuclear meltdown and what he calls the
“coverup of Fukushima:” His physician sources tell him 1 million people will die
of radiation poisoning resulting from the malfunction of the Fukushima Daiichi
Nuclear Power Station, yet pro-nuclear groups claim there will be no public
ill-effects. The situation mimics the information gathered in his first book,
Cover Up: What You are Not Supposed to Know about Nuclear Power (available for a
free download
here)
“I did a new preface right after Fukushima,” said Grossman, reading from the
book.“I started off (the preface) we’ve not been informed about nuclear power.
We’ve not been told and that is done on purpose. Keeping the public in the dark
was deemed necessary by the promoters of nuclear power.”
During the
interview with Networking®, Grossman sat in his home in Sag
Harbor, surrounded by stacks of meticulous overstuffed paper files. He has a
mine of information that often predates the Internet — spanning decades, from
deep research he has done and special reports he has obtained from years of
cultivating sources on the inside. Public advocates and warriors for the
environment often get a bad rap for going off half cocked, but as Grossman cited
information and discussed topics, he repeatedly fished out news clippings and
government documents to back up his words until, what amassed, was a credible
unstated creed: it is a journalist’s job to expose corruption in order to keep
the public safe… and if corruption runs wild, the public needs to be warned.
“What you do, when you do this kind of work, is you look for the horror
story,” said Grossman. His horror stories have investigated toxic pesticides,
the
hazards of fueling space probes with nuclear energy, and cancer clusters
created by nuclear power.
From CopyBoy to International Resource
He began his
journalist days as a copyboy, answering phones, and passing on the horror
stories to the investigative journalist at his newspaper. Now he receives
hundreds of emails each day from insiders within his networks, alerting him to
environmental and nuclear news. The hardest part of the job is backing up what
they’re saying with documentation. Yet he does. Even if it takes thousands of
phone calls and hundreds of Freedom of Information requests.
“The power of the press is enormous and you only want to use it when you are
absolutely certain you’ve got a case together,” he said.
In fact, he may be one of the few people in the world who has documents about
things such as the potential consequences of accidents with plutonium fueled
space probes, that he says could potentially shower deadly radiation over the
earth. He has put this inside knowledge and documentation onto slides, and
lectured internationally through the Macrae Speakers and Entertainment agency
(www.macraespeakers.com).
Grossman’s first nuclear documentary, created while he was working as a
journalist for Channel 21, was a calm review of nuclear power — through what he
called journalistic “ping pong” — he interviewed sources on both sides of the
argument for and against nuclear power. He said he was calmly told by industry
experts that nuclear accidents only happened once in a few hundred years. But
when Three Mile Harbor nuclear power plant malfunctioned and spewed toxins onto
Pennsylvania and upstate New York in 1979, he realized he was witnessing the
type of catastrophe he was told was nearly impossible. He felt he had been
“bamboozled” by people with pro-nuclear interests.
He dug deeper. This time, he created the award-winning documentary, Three
Mile Island Revisited, (able to be seen
here), containing
interviews with residents near the power plant who suffered a “600-fold
increase” in cancer after the toxins were released into their neighborhood,
according to the documentary. It showed a two-headed calf, soaring infant death
rates and had interviews with experts such as Dr. Jay Gould who measured about a
million excess deaths in relation to the toxic cloud that spread between
Pennsylvania and upstate New York, and others who talked about the radiation
nuclear plants routinely released. The documentary won the Worldfest Silver
Award, Houston International Film Festival; the Director’s Citation, Black Maria
Video and Film Festival and was chosen for screening at the 1993 Earth Peace
International Film Festival.
Yet as Grossman researched, he said he found that nuclear power plants have
the potential to do much more than melt down. If one of the control rods fails,
nuclear plants have the potential to explode within a second, he said. The
explosion, called a “nuclear runaway” or “power excursion” or “reactivity
accident,” creates a toxic cloud and leaves no time for a massive evacuation. It
has already occurred at Chernobyl, and a military reactor SR1 in Idaho, said
Grossman, while pointing to a photograph of the explosion in his book.
“Edward Teller (a respected nuclear physicist) declared that because of the
dangers of the nuclear runaway you should only build nuclear power plants deep
underground. But that would be so expensive it wouldn’t be cost effective.”
Today, Grossman says the horror story of the radiation leaked from Japan’s
nuclear meltdown at Fukushima is beginning to showing up in infant mortality
rates in the U.S. as well as Japan, in places that held the first radioactive
rainfalls, since fetal cells divide more rapidly. He said he wishes the topic
were covered more by the mainstream media.
“This stuff streaming from radiation is getting into the marine (food)
chain,” he said.
Trying to warn the public, he’s written articles in the New York Times,
national magazines and various other newspapers and websites on the topic. His
Op-Eds lambaste the nuclear regulators for approving more power plants to be
built in Georgia, and “extending the operating licenses of most of the 104
existing plants from 40 to 60 years—although they were only designed to run for
40 years. That’s because radioactivity embrittles their metal components and
degrades other parts after 40 years making the plants unsafe to operate. And the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is now considering extending their licenses
for 80 years,” he wrote.
Posterity
Grossman now favors the instantaneous
publishing convenience of the Internet a true advantage over the year -long
process of book writing, and calls this the “golden age of investigative
reporting.” Southampton Press and Shelter Island Reporter have carried his
weekly columns for years.
His work perpetuates through his army of students. A full professor at State
University of New York College at Old Westbury, he’s taught modern day
Investigative Journalism for 30 years, encouraging his students to live up to
their responsibility of becoming truth seekers for public good.
Said a former student, journalist and editor Annette Hinkle, “What I really
remember about Karl as a teacher was that he saw those who took his class, not
as students, but as fellow journalists. He shared his passion for asking hard
questions and did not accept pat answers. From Freedom of Information laws to
finding sources on the inside, he challenged his students to dig deeper when
something piqued their interest or didn’t seem right.“
Grossman’s influence still inspires her. “Sending writers out to uncover
information that the public has the right to know is a big part of what we do at
weekly community newspapers. It’s a basic right for journalists and Karl has
long made it his job to impress that fact upon his students,” said Hinkle.
Grossman’s awards for investigative reporting include the George Polk,
Generoso Pope, James Aronson and John Peter Zenger Awards, the New York Press
Association, Press Club of Long Island, Society of Professional Journalists,
Psychologists for Social Responsibility, Citizens Campaign for the Environment,
New York Civil Liberties Union, Long Island Coalition for Fair Broadcasting,
Citizens Energy Council and Friends of the Earth.
“Across his more than four decades of investigative work, Karl has made his
mark by examining both the heavily cited and, perhaps most importantly,
frequently not cited pros and cons of policy and debate as they relate to the
environment, sustainability, and energy issues. Equally if not more important is
his continuous call for accountability at every level of our society on these
issues. He has paired this pursuit with a level of excellence in the classroom
that prepares young journalists not only to report on the news of today but to
seek out the impacts such news will have on our tomorrows.”
- Calvin O. Butts,
III, president, SUNY College at Old Westbury
