Daniel Hirsch

— In Memoriam: Daniel Hirsch of Committee to Bridge the Gap

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From Committee to Bridge the Gap
News Release
July 27, 2025

With deep sadness but also with heartfelt gratitude for a life well lived, the Committee to Bridge the Gap announces the death of its founder, Daniel O. Hirsch, on July 19th 2025 at his home in Ben Lomond, California. CBG board chair Jack Miles had earlier accepted Hirsch’s resignation as president of Bridge the Gap on the grounds of grievously worsening health. Anthony Zepeda, CBG secretary, had agreed to succeed Hirsch as president and had begun transitional meetings with CBG staff.

Committee to Bridge the Gap came formally into being as an organization in a meeting at UCLA after Hirsch had returned home to Los Angeles, and in its early years the organization addressed a variety of ongoing social and political issues, notably including the cause of peace and reconciliation in Israel/Palestine. Gradually, however, and particularly after Hirsch’s appointment as director of the Program on Environmental and Nuclear Policy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, nuclear safety became CBG’s central public-interest mission. Just two days before his death, Hirsch delivered a powerful public comment at a virtual hearing contesting Executive Order 14300 radically reducing radiation safety standards. In that spirit, the work of CBG will continue.

Privately, Hirsch, who never married, lived a life of monastic simplicity and frugality. Though an atheist, he maintained a close spiritual relationship with the sisters of Redwoods Monastery, in rural Humboldt County. By the terms of his will, the wealth he had accumulated through a lifetime of willed poverty will go to the poor. As the crippling effects of chronic Q-fever progressively incapacitated him, Dan Hirsch chose not to prolong a life whose continuation would only squander the wealth he had destined for others. May his memory be a blessing, most especially for all who sacrifice private comfort for the public good and all who when they speak truth to power, do so modestly and with meticulous attention to all the facts.

CBG will announce memorial services for Hirsch when plans are complete. Mourners may make donations in his honor to Doctors Without Borders doctorswithoutborders.org or Give Directly givedirectly.org

https://www.committeetobridgethegap.org/2025/07/27/dan-hirsch-has-passed-away/

From Smart Meter Science Substack
by Patricia Burke
July 31, 2025

Dan was the Founder of CBG, as well as Director, Program on Environmental and Nuclear Policy, at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

See interviews with Dan Hirsch, posted at the UCLA Library’s Center for Oral History Research.

As reflected on CBG’s homepage, if it was about Santa Susana Field Lab, Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, or San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant, Dan was on it.

Dan just testified at educational sessions intended to push back against the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s attempt to do away with the Linear, No Threshold theory of ionizing radiation’s hazards to human health. (See the link to Dan’s slideshow he presented as public comment to NRC on July 16, 2025, posted at NIRS’s website, here.) He had worked at the cutting edge of protecting human health against the nuclear industry’s artificial radioactive pollution, for many decades, including at the National Academy of Science.

As documented in the MSNBC documentary film In the Shadow of the Valley, which also features interviews with Dan, at Santa Susana, his graduate students unearthed the 1959 meltdown, which had been covered up for 20 years.

He testified repeatedly about the seismic, and other risks, at Diablo Canyon, including before U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer’s (Democrat-California) Environment and Public Works Committee, more than a decade ago, as well as at grassroots sessions, such as those of San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace, a few years ago.

Around two decades ago, Dan stopped a nuclear power industry spokesman dead in his tracks — not for the first time. On an NPR interview about energy and environment, focused on nuclear power, the industry spokesman kept bringing up climate protection. At one point, Dan said “I actually care about the climate,” which stopped the industry spokesman from disingenuously bringing it up again.

See articles authored or co-authored by Dan, posted at The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

CBG’s website also posts many of Dan’s Publications, as well as those of its colleagues.

As anti-nuclear attorney Terry Lodge of Toledo, Ohio shared with the Ohio Nuclear-Free Network about the devastating news:

Dan was the ultra serious, savagely sarcastic, brilliant mentor to many a generation of antinuclear activists. A loss of great moment.

“Rest in peace and know that your impact on this world will never be forgotten.”

Condolences to his family, friends, and colleagues…

https://smartmeterscience.substack.com/p/in-memoriam-daniel-hirsch-of-committee

— Los Angeles: DOE breaks agreement to clean up Santa Susana Field Lab contamination; may leave behind 94%

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For action and upcoming meetings, go to http://www.ssflworkgroup.org

From the Ventura County Star

February 11, 2017

Our region has just been hit by two significant events that affect the health of our community.

While we have long awaited some relief for our drought, torrential rainstorms inundated the Santa Susana Field Lab, one of the most polluted places in the state. Runoff from far lesser storms in recent years resulted in more than 200 instances in which highly toxic and radioactive contaminants migrated off site at levels in excess of state pollution limits, and one can only imagine the effect these recent large storms have had.

Around the same time, the Department of Energy broke its solemn cleanup commitments and announced it would leave as much as 94 percent of the soil contaminated at the field lab site not cleaned up. Unless people rise up and our elected officials act strongly to enforce the promises, people in neighboring communities will be at perpetual risk from migrating radioactivity and toxic chemicals.

The field lab housed 10 nuclear reactors, of which at least four suffered accidents, including a partial nuclear meltdown in 1959. There was a factory for fabricating reactor fuel rods out of plutonium, perhaps the most dangerous substance on earth. In a “hot lab” there, highly irradiated nuclear fuel rods shipped in from around the nation were cut apart, with several radioactive fires.

It illegally burned radioactive and chemically hazardous wastes in open air pits, by shooting barrels of the waste with rifles to ignite them, with the toxic plumes blown over surrounding communities. It conducted tens of thousands of rocket tests, many using very dangerous fuels, and then flushed out the engines with a million gallons of toxic solvents that were allowed to simply percolate into the soil and groundwater.

The result of this shameful violation of basic environmental protections is widespread contamination of groundwater, surface water and soil with strontium-90, cesium-137, plutonium-239, perchlorate, PCBs, dioxins, heavy metals, volatile organic compounds and much more. And because the site sits in the hills overlooking more than 500,000 people within 10 miles, the contamination wants to flow off site to the places and people below.

The site has been fined more than $1 million in recent years for allowing pollutants to migrate off the property at levels deemed unsafe for people or the environment. And as long as the site doesn’t get cleaned up, that will continue.

These awful materials cause cancers including leukemia, genetic defects, neurological and developmental disorders and other health problems. A federally funded study by Dr. Hal Morgenstern of the University of Michigan found a greater than 60 percent increase in key cancers in people living near the site compared with people living farther away. Another government-funded study by a team from UCLA led by Dr. Yoram Cohen concluded that numerous pollutants from the site had migrated off site at levels in excess of EPA levels of concern.

For these reasons, the community was joyous in 2010 when the Department of Energy and NASA signed legally binding agreements with the California Department of Toxic Substances Control requiring all contamination that could be detected in the soil to be cleaned up by 2017.

It is now 2017 and the cleanup hasn’t even begun. And the DOE just issued a draft environmental impact statement breaking the 2010 cleanup agreement and saying it will only consider three options, none of which comply with its past commitments.

One would leave 34 percent of the contamination in place. A second would leave 86 percent. And the third would walk away from a staggering 94 percent of the contaminated soil, just leaving it in place. The 2010 agreement barred any consideration of leave-in-place alternatives.

The DOE has essentially thumbed its nose at California. Even if the cleanup agreement didn’t exist, the decision on how much toxic pollution to clean up doesn’t rest with the polluter, but with the state regulator. The DOE can’t decide to just walk away from most of the contamination.

But the state has been remarkably silent so far in response to this assault on its authority. Indeed, it has in its own actions undercut the cleanup agreement it signed. Toxic Substances Control is years late on its own environmental impact report and has been busy undermining the cleanup in other ways as well.

In 2010, we were promised that, with a couple of narrow exceptions, all of the soil contamination that could be detected would be cleaned up. Now it appears likely than close to none will be, and the people in the area will continue to be at perpetual risk from migrating radioactive and toxic contamination — unless they speak out now, loud and clear, and their elected representatives do the same.

Robert Dodge, a family physician in Ventura, serves on the boards of Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and Citizens for Peaceful Resolutions. Daniel Hirsch is director of the Program on Environmental and Nuclear Policy at UC Santa Cruz and president of the Committee to Bridge the Gap.

 

http://www.vcstar.com/story/opinion/columnists/2017/02/11/dodge-hirsch-santa-susana-field-lab-broken-promises/97766134/

Posted under Fair Use Rules.

— EPA plans to vastly raise drinking water radioactivity limits; register for July 13 telebriefing “Dangerous Drinking Water”

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From Nuclear Information and Resource Service

July 1, 2016

Dear Friends,

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has quietly proposed to raise the allowable levels of radioactivity in drinking water a nuclear incident to hundreds of times their current limits. If this guidance goes through, EPA’s action will allow people to drink water with concentrations of radioactivity at vastly higher levels.

Look no further than the current water crisis in Flint, Michigan to understand concern that the EPA will not act to protect public health in an emergency. In this case, the EPA is attempting to ensure that it would not have to act decisively to protect public health!

But there is still time to act.

Call in to the July 13 telebriefing to find out more.
http://org2.salsalabs.com/o/5502/p/salsa/event/common/public/?event_KEY=81984

You are invited to join us on WEDNESDAY JULY 13 for a national telebriefing: Dangerous Drinking Water, with presentations by leading experts and activists:
•Diane D’Arrigo, Radioactive Waste Project Director, Nuclear Information and Resource Service
•Daniel Hirsch, Director, Program on Environmental and Nuclear Policy, University of California Santa Cruz
•Emily Wurth, Water Program Director, Food and Water Watch

•Moderated by NIRS Executive Director, Tim Judson

The open and free event will be on the phone, starting at 8 pm eastern, 7 pm central, 6 pm mountain and 5 pm pacific. We will reserve the second half of the program for questions and discussion.

Register to attend the July 13 telebriefing.
http://org2.salsalabs.com/o/5502/p/salsa/event/common/public/?event_KEY=81984

The program will focus on EPA Guidance that massively increases the permitted levels of radioactivity in drinking water for years after any nuclear incident that requires consideration of “protective action,” ranging from a spill, leak or transport accident to a dirty bomb or nuclear meltdown—a nuclear accident of any kind, big or small. Allowable concentrations of radioactive elements allowed to come out of your tap would rise hundreds or even thousands of times above the current Maximum Concentration Levels allowed under the Safe Drinking Water Act regulations. Click here to review EPA’s proposal.
https://www.epa.gov/radiation/protective-action-guides-pags

Nuclear Energy is Dirty in many dimensions, but first, and foremost because of its dangerous ionizing radiation. The EPA guidance, allowing us to drink highly radioactive water is a clever effort to bypass existing limits, which the law prevents from being weakened. It is yet another way to shift liability and cleanup costs to the public from industry and government in case of a “nuclear event.” For instance, for most radionuclides the Safe Drinking Water levels are based on no more than 4 millirems a year exposure from drinking water; the proposed water PAGs would allow 500 millirems a year with no notice, and no action to limit exposure to adults. This difference protects the government and industry from any liability from massively increased health consequences.

Although EPA for the first time ever admits that those under 15 years of age are at greater risk than adults the draft PAG only pays lip-service to considering a lower level which is still enormously higher than current water limits. This is in addition to rest of EPA PAGs, which allow even more exposure from air and food.

Call in to learn more about this federal guidance and how to help stop it.
http://org2.salsalabs.com/o/5502/p/salsa/event/common/public/?event_KEY=81984

Thanks for all you do,

Mary Olson, Southeast Office Director

Stay Informed:

NIRS on the web: http://www.nirs.org

http://org2.salsalabs.com/o/5502/t/0/blastContent.jsp?email_blast_KEY=1367594