The second thought that comes to mind is that I’m proud that back in 1972 I was one of the People’s Lobby “fanatic fifty” who got the Clean Environment Act on the ballot, a proposal for the first statewide moratorium on nuclear power plants, the wisdom of which has been demonstrated time and again, most lately with the Fukushima fiasco. My great friend and colleague, Attorney Roger Jon Diamond, wrote the Clean Environment Act and later, the California Political Reform Act. Little did he know when he wrote the Clean Environment Act that his ancestry would have a relationship to nuclear power.
Roger, like me, is partially of Ukrainian Jewish ancestry. See my past commentary on that at http://janbtucker.com/blog/2010/07/15/the-holocaust-made-personal/
Some years ago, before the fall of the Soviet Union, Roger took a trip to the Ukraine. He wanted to see the ancestral town that his family was from. The tour guides kept insisting that the town had been destroyed in World War II and that there was no point in going there. Roger insisted that he wanted to see the town anyway even if it was destroyed. Nobody would budge, they just wouldn’t let him go there.
After he returned to the United States, he found out why. A few years later there was a nuclear disaster there and the nuclear facility was secretive and didn’t want Americans even seeing it. It was located at Chernobyl and from then on, Roger’s ancestral town would be a worldwide household word.
