Robert Jason Alvarez Lifetime Achievement Award by ANA/NIRS

I attended today -- albeit with flawed video conferencing technology -- the  lifetime achievement award for Robert Jason Alvarez today. I look forward to seeing the video.

As a top U.S. Department of Energy official under President William Jefferson Clinton and Secretary of Energy Hazel O'Leary, as a staffer for U.S. Senator John Glenn, and as a lifelong investigator of radiation and its effects, Bob Alvarez has helped expose and sought to remedy the effects of this frail planet's mismanaged and dangerous nuclear weapons manufacturing industrial technostructure. 

Three cheers! 

Today's young people are environmentally conscious, and inspired by Bob's leadership. 

I look forward to our Nation continuing g to make progress against the insanity of nuclear weapons plant manufacturing, further exposing the "dark Satanic mills," as poet William Blake would have called them.  

Here's my written tribute to Bob from his kudos page:

Dear Bob: I am so proud of all that you have accomplished and was inspired by it. Bob Alvarez, you have helped make the world a better place, and I salute you! Your work for Senator Glenn, President Clinton and Secretary O'Leary gave those of us in the whistleblower protection community New Hope (name of an actual "pond" at Y-12 nuclear bomb factory). Your work helped change the coverup culture in those nuclear weapons plants, or "dark Satanic mills," to borrow the words of the poet William Blake.. Thank you for all that you have done to free our frail planet from what I call "the Oak Ridge Oligarchy of Atomic Blunderers" -- U.S. nuclear weapons plant poisons, secrecy, perjury, contract fraud, retaliation, flummery, dupery and nincompoopery!. I read about the Karen. Silkwood case while I was in law school in Memphis. You, Kitty Tucker, Gerry Spence, et al. were heroic in what you accomplished, putting "fear on trial" The Silkwood case touched my heart and soul, and I was inspired to help whistleblowers, first clerking for United States Department of Labor Chief Judge Nahum Litt, then working as Legal Counsel for Constitutional Rights at the Government Accountability Project, then in solo practice (until I was suspended and disbarred by the Tennessee Supreme Court after criticizing Department of Labor desuetude of whistleblower law enforcement). Like you, Bob, I was persecuted unfairly for criticizing the Department of Energy (DoE), a/k/a "Denier of Everything." As Editor of the Appalachian Observer, in 1981-1983, I reported on radioactive waste and our planet's largest mercury pollution event at Y-12 Nuclear Weapons Plant, commencing with my 1981 article entitled "12 Million Pounds of Radioactive Waste, Some Leaking." I called for criminal prosecution in July 11, 1983 testimony before then-Rep. Al Gore, Jr. The late Anderson County, Tennessee Circuit Court Judge James B. Scott, a former Y-12 Nuclear Weapons Plant (Union Carbide) employee told local lawyers that what DoE did in Oak Ridge was "worse than what the Soviets did at Chelyabinsk." So much work remains to discover, uncover and remedy nuclear weapons plant horrors. What's next?