Robert Del Tredici is an artist, photographer, and teacher with a BA in philosophy, an MA in Comparative Literature (University of California, Berkeley), and an interest in the dynamic between image and text.His first sustained artwork was a series of 100 pen-and-ink illustrations to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, done in the early 1960s. He studied under Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa in the early 1970s, who gave him the name “Good Eye of Enlightenment.”
Del Tredici began documenting the nuclear age in 1979. His first book of photographs and interviews, The People of Three Mile Island (Sierra Club Books, 1980), was part sociology and part critique of nuclear power. His second book, At Work in the Fields of the Bomb (Harper & Row, 1987), documented the US nuclear weapons industry and won the 1987 Olive Branch Book Award for its contribution to world peace.
In 1987 Robert founded The Atomic Photographers Guild. In 1991 he began documenting the nuclear weapons industry in the former Soviet Union.
During the Clinton administration, under Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary, Del Tredici became principal photographer and designer for three government reports on the present, past, and future of the radioactive cleanup of the US nuclear weapons complex.
In 2000 he published an expanded series of his Moby-Dick illustrations under the title Floodgates of the Wonderworld:(Kent State University Press). Since September 11, 2001, he has been working in collage in an effort to put the post-9/11 world into perspective. He teaches photography, drawing, and the history of animated film in Montreal.
The People of Three-Mile Island
TMI steamMiddletown Pa. closest-town to the damaged reactorYellow-Brick-Road, TMILynne-Ann Beisceker. 4th Grade, Middletown Christian Day SchoolBill Whittock, witness to the 4-a.m. March 28, 1979 accident, TMIDairy Famer, Animal-Activist, and Barefoot Epidemiologist Jane-Lee EttersJoyce Carradi - 3 Mile IslandJudith Johnsrud, TMI-activistClaire Hoover, dairy farmer, whose cattle died after the accident TMIGeorge Stuaffer and Tammy Pfeiffer. MiddletownMeeting about releasing Krypton-85 radioactive gas into Middletown airNuclear-Family, TMIWoman ponders at a Public Meeting in Middletown'How many watts is this kid worth?' TMI public meeting
Port Hope, Ontario
Cameco Corporation’s Port Hope Uranium Conversion Facility, in operation since 1935, is a nuclear substance processing facility licensed to process uranium trioxide (UO3) into both uranium dioxide (UO2) and uranium hexafluoride (UF6). UO2 is used to manufacture fuel for power reactors in Canada, while UF6 is exported to companies in other countries for enrichment and fabrication into fuel for nuclear power reactors around the world. The facility is located in the Municipality of Port Hope, situated on the north shore of Lake Ontario approximately 100 kilometres east of Toronto, Ontario.
http://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/uranium/processing/nuclear-facilities/port-hope-uranium-conversion/index.cfm
International Atomic Miscellany
Spent Fuel in Dry Storage, Gentilly, QuebecHiroshima BuddhaYoshito MatsushigeMaids of Muslyumovo, Chelyabinsk, RussiaDrums of Uranium Greensalt Crystals, Fernald Feed Materials Production Center, OhioPlutonium Dust Storm Rocky FlatsReplica of the Hiroshima Bomb at the SmithsonianThe N Tunnel
This underground 875-foot steel pipe is used to test the impact of radiation from an exploding nuclear warhead on vitally important electronic equipment. At the far end of the tunnel is the “Zero Room” containing a nuclear warhead. When it is detonated, radiation travels down the pipe at the speed of light, followed by a slower shock wave. Within 16 thousandths of a second, two huge blast doors slam shut, trapping the shock wave in the Zero Room so that only the radiation impinges on the test equipment. This pipe is being readied for an underground nuclear test code-named “Misty Rain”. Area 12, Nevada Test Site, Nye County, Nevada. 29 October 1984.
UraniumIn Cloud ChamberTest Stop Karaoul, KazakhstanParticle of Plutonium in lung tissue of an ape. Alpha radiation.The sealed door to an "infinity room" at Rocky Flats. More than 20 such rooms have been contaminated by releases during plutonium operations at the site. The rooms are called "infinite rooms" because the rates of alpha radiation are too high for standard monitoring equipment to measure. The radioactivity in these rooms is 25,000 times background radiation. Rocky Flats Plant, Colorado, March 18th, 1994Howard Morland's Model of a Modern H-bomb WarheadReplicas of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki BombsBerlyn BrixnerModel of the Uranium atom, Museum of Science and Energy, Oak RidgeMona Lisa of the Glove Box, Plutonium Finishing Plant, HanfordL Plutonium Production Reactor, Savannah River SiteYoshito MatsushigePort Radium, the World's First Uranium Mine, NWTTerminal GuidanceThis glass ball, 3.2 inches across, is the exact size of the plutonium core in the Nagasaki bomb. It is held by author Richard Rhodes.The "Becquerel Reindeer" contaminated by ChernobylEdward TellerPlutoniun ButtonDr. Karl Z. Morgan, Father of Health Physics, Oak RidgeThe Face of the CANDU Reactor, Darlington, Ont.Berlyn Brixner