Obituary for Judith Johnsrud

[struggle4progress]

... Beginning with her first anti-nuclear involvement in 1967, successfully fighting against Project Ketch (an Atomic Energy Commission proposal to explode 1,000 atomic bombs underground in northern Pennsylvania to create containments for natural gas --- and the first time in U.S. history that a citizens’ coalition successfully halted such a federal project) to her creation of the Environmental Coalition on Nuclear Power in 1970 and that group’s original intervention against the siting and licensing of Three Mile Island, to her active involvement in a multitude of projects over the decades, the breadth of Judy’s contributions is truly astounding.

In what is a very partial list of “citizen nuclear successes” in Pennsylvania alone, Judy was a key player in the defeat of the Project Ketch Plowshare Project; the Meshoppen Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor; the Newbold Island reactor; Fulton 1 & 2 reactors; and the Energy Park proposal (10 candidate sites: 20,000 megawatts, 10 coal plants and 10 nuclear reactors); the decommissioning of the Quehanna, Waltz Mill, and Saxton Experimental reactors; the halt of the Quakertown Hatfield food irradiator and the Park Township plutonium fuel fabrication and radwaste incinerator; and the closure of the Kiski Valley Water Pollution Control Authority incinerator ash lagoon. She was also instrumental in championing legislation, both in Pennsylvania and nationally, concerning the storage and measurement standards for nuclear waste products, testifying regularly before congressional committees. Judy was very modest and humble and so few people knew of her accomplishments ...

Among her many positions, Judy was chairperson and board member for the National Solar Lobby in Washington D.C.; an active member of the New England Coalition against Nuclear Pollution; a member of both the Sierra Club state board and Sierra Club National Nuclear Waste Task Force and their Radiation Committee; as well as former chairperson of the board of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service in Washington, D.C., a national organization for which she wrote the original proposal and grant. In 2007 she helped found another national/international organization, Beyond Nuclear, and served on its board of directors. She was project director and board member of the organization Radiation and Public Health, and aided in the startup and as a board member of Food and Water, an organization fighting food irradiation. Further, Judy was a member of the Pennsylvania’s Low-Level Radioactive Waste Advisory Board from its inception in the 1980s until 2011. Nationally she was on the United States Department of Energy’s Advisory Committee for the Low-Level Radiation Research Program and on the Radiation Advisory Board of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, among other federal level appointments ...

http://www.energyjustice.net/judith-johnsrud
http://www.nirs.org/about/judyjohnsrud.htm

[struggle4progress]

1. Clips from a Lifetime of Activism - Messages from Dr. Judith Johnsrud