Dr Caldicott will be giving public lectures followed by book signings in Regina at 7:00 pm on March 6th at the Education Auditorium University of Regina and in Saskatoon at 7:30 pm on March 7th at Third Ave United Church. She will also be doing Grand Rounds at Royal University Hospital from 12:00 to 1:30 on March 8th
Dr. Helen Caldicott is the author of Nuclear Power is Not the Answer, published in September 2006 by The New Press.
She is the Founder and President of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute, www.nuclearpolicy.org.
Dr Helen Caldicott is widely regarded as one of the most articulate and passionate advocates of citizen action to remedy nuclear and environmental crises. She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and was the 2003 winner of the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize. Dr Caldicott has devoted the last 35 years to an international campaign to educate the public about the medical hazards of the nuclear age, and the necessary changes in human behavior to stop environmental destruction.
A renowned physician and activist, she is the co-founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), an organization of 23,000 doctors committed to educating their colleagues about the dangers of nuclear power, nuclear weapons and nuclear war. International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the umbrella group for PSR, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985.
In 2001 Dr. Caldicott founded the Nuclear Policy Research Institute in Washington DC, to help educate Americans about the profound medical, environmental, political and moral consequences of perpetuating nuclear weapons, power and waste. She also founded Women’s Action for Nuclear Disarmament (WAND) in the U.S. in 1980.
Dr Caldicott has been the subject of three films: Helen’s War, Eight Minutes to Midnight, and the Academy Award winning If You Love this Planet.
She has authored many books including: Nuclear Madness: What You Can Do, Missile Envy, The New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bush’s Military-Industrial Complex, and most recently Nuclear Power is Not the Answer.
Her forthcoming book War in Heaven: The Militarization of Outer Space is due out in early 2007.
===================================
Nuclear Power is Not the Answer
An op-ed by Dr. Helen Caldicott
November 2006
George Bush, when visiting the Pennsylvania (US) Limerick nuclear power plant on May 24, 2006 categorically stated “Nuclear power helps us protect the environment.” While it is unclear where the President obtained his scientific and medical expertise, his actual knowledge leaves much to be desired.
Contrary to industry propaganda the energy intensive process used to enrich uranium for nuclear fuel, to construct the reactor and to transport and store the intensely radioactive waste for eons of time, emits global warming gases to the atmosphere. A gas fired plant emits three times more CO2 than a similar sized atomic reactor, but as the supply of usable uranium declines over several decades, a nuclear plant will generate as much CO2 as the gas fired generator. Nuclear power therefore contributes substantially to global warming. If all electricity today was generated with nuclear power only nine years supply usable uranium is available. It is therefore a finite commodity like oil.
Wall Street and Standard & Poors are extremely reluctant to invest in nuclear power having been severely burnt in the 1970s and 80s when Three Mile Island and Chernobyl caused the cost of nuclear reactors to soar.
The 2005 energy bill allocated a massive $13 billion to this inefficient dangerous industry. A meltdown induced by terrorism, mechanical or human failure would signal the end of nuclear power and billions of invested dollars will be lost.
David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer from the Union of Concerned Scientists is not sanguine stating “It is not if but when there is a meltdown” because of lax and inefficient safety procedures overseen by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission at the 103 operating US reactors.
In fact, security has virtually not been tightened at these reactors since 9/11 even though one of the intended targets of the 9/11 terrorists was the Indian Point reactors 35 miles from Manhattan. Up to 43,700 people within 50 miles would succumb to acute radiation sickness over 2 weeks and as many as 518,000 people would die of radiation induced cancer years later according to a study by the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The financial capital of the world would be rendered uninhabitable.
Operating nuclear reactors routinely emit dangerous radioactive materials into the air and water every minute of every day. The noble gases, xenon, krypton and argon are continuously released into the air, where they hover at ground level during meteorological inversion systems, to be inhaled by the surrounding populations. Fat soluble noble gases are readily absorbed through the lung and migrate in the blood to fatty tissues of the abdominal fat pad and upper thighs where they irradiate the reproductive organs with high doses of mutagenic gamma radiation.
Similarly, radioactive hydrogen, or tritium is routinely released into air and water and it also has accidentally leaked into underground water at Indian Point, at the Braidwood, Byron and Dresden reactors near Chicago and the Palo Verde reactor in Arizona. Tritium is a potent carcinogen in animal studies and causes congenital defects. Absorbed readily through the skin, it also enters the body through the gut and lung. With a half life of 12.1 years it is radioactive for over 100 years. People living near nuclear power plants are therefore continually at risk.
But more is at stake. 30 tons of highly carcinogenic nuclear waste is manufactured yearly in each reactor. Nuclear waste is extremely radioactive and so hot that it must be continually cooled for decades, in what euphemistically are called “swimming pools” adjacent to the reactors. A terrorist attack on a swimming pool containing 10 to 30 times more radiation than the reactor could release massive quantities of radiation which would devastate surrounding communities and agricultural areas for ever.
Nuclear waste must be isolated from the environment for at least 250,000 years, a physical and scientific impossibility. In many areas in the US including Hanford WA, Savannah River NC, West Valley NY, radioactive isotopes seep and leak into the environment, where they concentrate at each step of the food chain. Odorless, tasteless and invisible they enter the human body, and migrate to specific organs where they irradiate and mutate surrounding cells for many years. The incubation time for cancer is long – 5 to 60 years, hence the delay in exposing the medical dangers of nuclear power.
Over time however nuclear waste will induce epidemics of cancer, leukemia and genetic disease in all future generations.
The medical dictum states if a disease is incurable the only recourse is prevention.
While nuclear power is a transient generator of electricity its actual legacy is and will be medically catastrophic.
=============================================
Nuclear Power is the Problem, Not a Solution
by Helen Caldicott
Published on Friday, April 15, 2005 by the Australian
There is a huge propaganda push by the nuclear industry to justify nuclear power as a panacea for the reduction of global-warming gases.
In fact Leslie Kemeny on these pages two weeks ago (HES, March 30) suggested that courses on nuclear science and engineering be included in tertiary level institutions in Australia. I agree. But I would suggest that all the relevant facts be taught to students. Mandatory courses in medical schools should embrace the short and long-term biological, genetic and medical dangers associated with the nuclear fuel cycle. Business students should examine the true costs associated with the production of nuclear power. Engineering students should become familiar with the profound problems associated with the storage of long-lived radioactive waste, the human fallibilities that have created the most serious nuclear accidents in history and the ongoing history of near-misses and near-meltdowns in the industry. At present there are 442 nuclear reactors in operation around the world. If, as the nuclear industry suggests, nuclear power were to replace fossil fuels on a large scale, it would be necessary to build 2000 large, 1000-megawatt reactors. Considering that no new nuclear plant has been ordered in the US since 1978, this proposal is less than practical. Furthermore, even if we decided today to replace all fossil-fuel-generated electricity with nuclear power, there would only be enough economically viable uranium to fuel the reactors for three to four years. The true economies of the nuclear industry are never fully accounted for.
The cost of uranium enrichment is subsidised by the US government. The true cost of the industry's liability in the case of an accident in the US is estimated to be $US 560 billion ($726 billion), but the industry pays only $US 9.1 billion - 98 per cent of the insurance liability is covered by the US federal government. The cost of decommissioning all the existing US nuclear reactors is estimated to be $US 33 billion. These costs - plus the enormous expense involved in the storage of radioactive waste for a quarter of a million years - are not now included in the economic assessments of nuclear electricity. It is said that nuclear power is emission-free. The truth is very different. In the US, where much of the world's uranium is enriched, including Australia's, the enrichment facility at Paducah, Kentucky, requires the electrical output of two 1000-megawatt coal-fired plants, which emit large quantities of carbon dioxide, the gas responsible for 50per cent of global warming. Also, this enrichment facility and another at Portsmouth, Ohio, release from leaky pipes 93 per cent of the chlorofluorocarbon gas emitted yearly in the US.
The production and release of CFC gas is now banned internationally by the Montreal Protocol because it is the main culprit responsible for stratospheric ozone depletion. But CFC is also a global warmer, 10,000 to 20,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide. In fact, the nuclear fuel cycle utilises large quantities of fossil fuel at all of its stages - the mining and milling of uranium, the construction of the nuclear reactor and cooling towers, robotic decommissioning of the intensely radioactive reactor at the end of its 20 to 40-year operating lifetime, and transportation and long-term storage of massive quantities of radioactive waste.
In summary, nuclear power produces, according to a 2004 study by Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith, only three times fewer greenhouse gases than modern natural-gas power stations. Contrary to the nuclear industry's propaganda, nuclear power is therefore not green and it is certainly not clean. Nuclear reactors consistently release millions of curies of radioactive isotopes into the air and water each year. These releases are unregulated because the nuclear industry considers these particular radioactive elements to be biologically inconsequential. This is not so. These unregulated isotopes include the noble gases krypton, xenon and argon, which are fat-soluble and if inhaled by persons living near a nuclear reactor, are absorbed through the lungs, migrating to the fatty tissues of the body, including the abdominal fat pad and upper thighs, near the reproductive organs. These radioactive elements, which emit high-energy gamma radiation, can mutate the genes in the eggs and sperm and cause genetic disease.
Tritium, another biologically significant gas, is also routinely emitted from nuclear reactors. Tritium is composed of three atoms of hydrogen, which combine with oxygen, forming radioactive water, which is absorbed through the skin, lungs and digestive system. It is incorporated into the DNA molecule, where it is mutagenic.
The dire subject of massive quantities of radioactive waste accruing at the 442 nuclear reactors across the world is also rarely, if ever, addressed by the nuclear industry. Each typical 1000-megawatt nuclear reactor manufactures 33tonnes of thermally hot, intensely radioactive waste per year.
Already more than 80,000 tonnes of highly radioactive waste sits in cooling pools next to the 103 US nuclear power plants, awaiting transportation to a storage facility yet to be found. This dangerous material will be an attractive target for terrorist sabotage as it travels through 39 states on roads and railway lines for the next 25 years.
But the long-term storage of radioactive waste continues to pose a problem. The US Congress in 1987 chose Yucca Mountain in Nevada, 150 km northwest of Las Vegas, as a repository for America's high-level waste. But Yucca Mountain has subsequently been found to be unsuitable for the long-term storage of high-level waste because it is a volcanic mountain made of permeable pumice stone and it is transected by 32 earthquake faults. Last week a congressional committee discovered fabricated data about water infiltration and cask corrosion in Yucca Mountain that had been produced by personnel in the US Geological Survey. These startling revelations, according to most experts, have almost disqualified Yucca Mountain as a waste repository, meaning that the US now has nowhere to deposit its expanding nuclear waste inventory.
To make matters worse, a study released last week by the National Academy of Sciences shows that the cooling pools at nuclear reactors, which store 10 to 30 times more radioactive material than that contained in the reactor core, are subject to catastrophic attacks by terrorists, which could unleash an inferno and release massive quantities of deadly radiation -- significantly worse than the radiation released by Chernobyl, according to some scientists.
This vulnerable high-level nuclear waste contained in the cooling pools at 103 nuclear power plants in the US includes hundreds of radioactive elements that have different biological impacts in the human body, the most important being cancer and genetic diseases.
The incubation time for cancer is five to 50 years following exposure to radiation. It is important to note that children, old people and immuno-compromised individuals are many times more sensitive to the malignant effects of radiation than other people.
I will describe four of the most dangerous elements made in nuclear power plants.
Iodine 131, which was released at the nuclear accidents at Sellafield in Britain, Chernobyl in Ukraine and Three Mile Island in the US, is radioactive for only six weeks and it bio-concentrates in leafy vegetables and milk. When it enters the human body via the gut and the lung, it migrates to the thyroid gland in the neck, where it can later induce thyroid cancer. In Belarus more than 2000 children have had their thyroids removed for thyroid cancer, a situation never before recorded in pediatric literature.
Strontium 90 lasts for 600 years. As a calcium analogue, it concentrates in cow and goat milk. It accumulates in the human breast during lactation, and in bone, where it can later induce breast cancer, bone cancer and leukemia.
Cesium 137, which also lasts for 600 years, concentrates in the food chain, particularly meat. On entering the human body, it locates in muscle, where it can induce a malignant muscle cancer called a sarcoma.
Plutonium 239, one of the most dangerous elements known to humans, is so toxic that one-millionth of a gram is carcinogenic. More than 200kg is made annually in each 1000-megawatt nuclear power plant. Plutonium is handled like iron in the body, and is therefore stored in the liver, where it causes liver cancer, and in the bone, where it can induce bone cancer and blood malignancies. On inhalation it causes lung cancer. It also crosses the placenta, where, like the drug thalidomide, it can cause severe congenital deformities. Plutonium has a predisposition for the testicle, where it can cause testicular cancer and induce genetic diseases in future generations. Plutonium lasts for 500,000 years, living on to induce cancer and genetic diseases in future generations of plants, animals and humans.
Plutonium is also the fuel for nuclear weapons -- only 5 kg is necessary to make a bomb and each reactor makes more than 200kg per year.
Therefore any country with a nuclear power plant can theoretically manufacture 40 bombs a year.
Because nuclear power leaves a toxic legacy to all future generations, because it produces global warming gases, because it is far more expensive than any other form of electricity generation, and because it can trigger proliferation of nuclear weapons, these topics need urgently to be introduced into the tertiary educational system of Australia, which is host to 30 per cent to 40 per cent of the world's richest uranium.
Helen Caldicott is an anti-nuclear campaigner and founder and president of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute, which warns of the danger of nuclear energy.
© 2005 The Australian
Dr. Helen Caldicott - Coming to Saskatchewan
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Dr. Helen Caldicott - Coming to Saskatchewan
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BOOK: Nuclear Power is Not the Answer
by Oscar » Fri Dec 15, 2006 5:28 pm
Nuclear Power is Not the Answer to Global Warming or Anything Else
http://www.safecom.org.au/caldicott.htm
by Helen Caldicott
"In a world where dark and dangerous forces are threatening our planet, Helen Caldicott shines a powerful light. This much-needed book reveals truths that confirm we must take positive action now if we are to make a difference." -MARTIN SHEEN
Dr. Helen Caldicott has the rare ability to combine science with passion, logic with love, and urgency with humor -NAOMI KLEIN
Helen Caldicott has been my inspiration to speak out -MERYL STREEP
Dr. Caldicott is one of the most articulate and passionate advocates of citizen action to remedy the nuclear and environmental crises -FROM THE CITATION FOR THE 2003 LANNAN CULTURAL FREEDOM PRIZE
The time to take Caldicott's measured and wise words to heart is now -BOOKLIST
Acclaimed author and activist Naomi Klein states about the latest book by Helen Caldicott: "Dr. Helen Caldicott has the rare ability to combine science with passion, logic with love, and urgency with humor", and Ms Klein just summarises a minute particle of Dr Caldicott's acclaim.
Regrettably, in Howard's Australia, and with a Labor opposition given to a "me-too" pandering and a half-hearted understanding of the potential of its true role as an opposition party, Caldicott is these days more acclaimed in other countries than at home. Sydney Morning Herald reporter Erin O'Dwyer recently observed that Caldicott, someone who addressed in 1982 one million people in Central Park, New York on nuclear disarmament, was shouted down and heckled in 1998 when she addressed a protest against Sydney's Lucas Heights reactor.
It is absolutely essential, that her voice forms part of the equasion now that we have the nuclear debate "we have to have" according to John Howard, and her latest book resulted in the nomination of the Inaugural Australian Peace Prize.
About the Author
The world's leading spokesperson for the antinuclear movement, Dr Helen Caldicott is a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, the recipient of the 2003 Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom and the inaugural Australian Peace Prize awarded by the Peace Organisation of Australia, 2006.
A medical doctor, she has devoted the past thirty-five years to an international campaign to educate the public about the medical hazards of the nuclear age. Dr Caldicott is a bestselling author and divides her time between the central coast of New South Wales and Washington, DC, where she is President of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute.
From http://www.mup.unimelb.edu.au/catalogue ... 251-3.html
About the book
In this revealing examination of the costs and consequences of nuclear energy, world-renowned antinuclear spokesperson Helen Caldicott uncovers the facts that belie the nuclear industry propaganda: nuclear power contributes to global warming; the true cost of nuclear power is prohibitive, with taxpayers picking up most of the tab; there's simply not enough uranium in the world to sustain nuclear power over the long term; and the potential for a catastrophic accident or a terrorist attack far outweighs any benefits.
In a world torn apart by wars over oil, many politicians are increasingly looking for alternative sources of energy-and their leading choice is often nuclear. Among the myths that have been spread over the years about nuclear-powered electricity are that it does not cause global warming or pollution (i.e., that it is "clean and green"), that it is inexpensive, and that it is safe. But the facts belie the barrage of nuclear industry propaganda:
Nuclear power contributes to global warming
The real costs of nuclear power are prohibitive (and taxpayers pick up most of them)
There's not enough uranium in the world to sustain long-term nuclear power
Potential for a catastrophic accident or terrorist attack far outweighs any benefits.
Trained as a physician, and - after four decades of antinuclear activism - thoroughly versed in the science of nuclear energy, the bestselling author of Nuclear Madness and Missile Envy here turns her attention from nuclear bombs to nuclear lightbulbs. As she makes meticulously clear in this damning book, the world cannot withstand either.
The world's leading spokesperson for the antinuclear movement, Dr. Helen Caldicott is the co-founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize, and the 2003 winner of the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize. She divides her time between Australia and Washington, D.C., where she recently established the Nuclear Policy Research Institute.
-------------------------
We should not be exporting uranium because you are exporting cancer
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/we- ... 40560.html
Not recognised among Australia's 100 most influential people, anti-nuclear campaigner Dr Helen Caldicott still stands tall on the world stage, Erin O'Dwyer writes. 'We've gone backwards decades under Bush and Howard'
Sydney Morning Herald
July 2, 2006
LIKE all our best intellectuals, Helen Caldicott is better known in the United States than at home.
In 1982, she silenced a crowd of 1 million people who gathered in New York's Central Park to hear her speak on nuclear disarmament.
But in 1998, when she addressed 1000 people in Engadine protesting against Sydney's Lucas Heights reactor, Caldicott was shouted down by hecklers.
It was a similar story last week when The Bulletin magazine listed 100 of the most influential Australians. Cookery writer Margaret Fulton and pop star Kylie Minogue made the cut. Helen Caldicott, the world's leading anti-nuclear voice, did not.
Yet she has been named as one of the 100 most influential women of the 20th century by the Smithsonian Institution, and she was nominated in 1985 for the Nobel peace prize.
Perhaps it's tall poppy syndrome. Perhaps it is sexism. Or perhaps Caldicott is unsung here simply because we have stopped listening to her message.
"In the '70s and '80s, Australia was very anti-nuclear," she says. "And I used to be very well listened to in Australia in the '70s and '80s. But we've gone backwards decades under the Bush Administration and under the Howard administration and it's been quite devastating."
This month Caldicott publishes her sixth book - Nuclear Power Is Not The Answer To Global Warming Or Anything Else (Melbourne University Press). It comes as the nuclear energy debate heats up amid increased awareness that Australia has about 40 per cent of the world's recoverable uranium resources.
Caldicott hopes the book will penetrate the political untruth that nuclear energy is a safe, green alternative.
"[People] think that it is the answer to global warming," she says, "but in truth it adds to global warming. It does not fix it."
Caldicott's message has always been simple. Nuclear energy leaves a toxic legacy to future generations because it produces not only global warming gases but also massive amounts of toxic carcinogenic radioactive waste. It is also far more expensive than other forms of electricity generation and can trigger proliferation of nuclear weapons.
Even worse, radioactive elements in nuclear-powered countries are already leaking - into the ground, into rivers and oceans, and into the food chain. Already 40 per cent of Europe's landmass is radioactive after Chernobyl, and increasingly so are its food supplies. Alarmingly that includes human breast milk.
Caldicott warns that as more people are exposed, cancers such as leukemia will become more common. So will genetic diseases such as cystic fibrosis. "We should not be exporting uranium because by exporting uranium, you are exporting cancer," she says.
A pediatrician who specialised in cystic fibrosis, Caldicott first grabbed headlines protesting against French nuclear testing in the 1970s. She used her profile to mobilise trade unions and elicited an ACTU resolution to ban uranium mining.
After migrating to the US in the late '70s with her then husband Bill Caldicott, she became a faculty member of the Harvard Medical School. There she mobilised doctors and established Physicians for Social Responsibility with 23,000 influential members. It became one of the US's most powerful anti-nuclear lobby groups and won the Nobel peace prize in 1985.
Caldicott had resigned from the leadership group amid political power play and did not attend the ceremony. Yet she refused to let that devastating experience stop her. She went on to teach at leading universities and was honoured with countless awards and honorary degrees.
Three years ago, she established the Nuclear Policy Research Institute in Washington, known for its high-powered scientific symposiums. She has just been named as the inaugural winner of the Australian Peace Prize.
The journey hasn't always been easy. On the eve of her 50th birthday, Caldicott's marriage ended. All her anti-nuclear work was "ashes in my mouth".
She includes the break-up when asked about her personal milestones. She also includes the births of her six grandchildren. This is because, as a pediatrician, Caldicott's motivation has always been her children, her children's children and children everywhere. "It's one of the reasons I do the work I do," she says. "I practise global preventative medicine."
This year Caldicott will turn 68. She is slowing down, spending less time on the world stage and more time with family at her Central Coast hideaway. But she refuses to go quietly, and has mastered the art of working smarter not harder.
Now, instead of rallying unionists and doctors, she maintains a contact book of the world's top opinion leaders and journalists. Three times during our interview she quotes Thomas Jefferson about a functioning democracy requiring an informed citizenry.
"In the old days it was grass roots and this time it's tree tops," she says. "I'm getting older and it's more efficient to educate the media because through them you get to millions of people."
Caldicott's motivation might always have been her family, but these days she is careful to spend more time with them.
The best example is the night Madonna called to chat about the medical dangers of nuclear power.
Caldicott was preparing a lamb roast for her family and said: "Madonna, I can't take your call right now. I'll have to talk to you later."
"My family has never forgiven me," she says with a laugh.
"But my children were resentful that I wasn't around much and I do think about that. I wish I had been.
"On the other hand, I was wanting to make sure that they had a future. Nothing you do comes without consequences."
See http://www.nuclearpolicy.org and http://www.helencaldicott.com
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/we-should......html
=============================
A dangerous liaison
The Age
by Andra Jackson July 5, 2006
Australia's alignment with America is "dangerous" because the US now has a policy to use nuclear weapons on non-nuclear states with impunity, an anti-nuclear campaigner said last night.
Dr Helen Caldicott, founder of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute, said this was the first time the United States had adopted such a policy.
America expected Australia "to fight alongside them in Iraq and probably against China if Taiwan becomes independent", she said. "America has 34 US bases in Australia. If there was an outbreak of nuclear war between Russia and America, we are targeted."
Australian-born Dr Caldicott was speaking in Melbourne where she was awarded the inaugural Australian Peace Prize by the Australian Peace Organisation.
ANDRA JACKSON
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/ ... on....html
Caldicott collects
The Australian Strewth Column July 04, 2006 by Jane Fraser
DEMOCRATS leader Senator Lyn Allison will present the inaugural Australian Peace Prize to Helen Caldicott at a cocktail party in Melbourne tonight, coinciding with the launch of her new book Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer. The Peace Organisation of Australia chose Caldicott because of her "commitment to raising awareness about the medical and environmental hazards of the nuclear age". Caldicott has been named one of the most influential women of the 20th century by the Smithsonian Institute, although she didn't make the cut in the 100 most influential Australians named last week by The Bulletin magazine. Other nominations for the prize included High Court judge Michael Kirby and former foreign minister Gareth Evans.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/st ... 90,00.html
Campaigner attacks nuclear inquiry's credibility
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
7.30 Report
TV PROGRAM TRANSCRIPT
Broadcast: 03/07/2006
Reporter: Kerry O'Brien
KERRY O'BRIEN, PRESENTER: Twenty-five years ago, Australian doctor Helen Caldicott was one of the most powerful and compelling figures on America's public stage. She founded a movement of more than 20,000 physicians and scientists against the nuclear arms race, and even her enemies had to acknowledge the potency of her appeal.
DR HELEN CALDICOTT: Don't believe what they're saying, watch what they do.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
KERRY O'BRIEN: In one disarmament rally in New York's Central Park in 1982, something like a million people turned out to hear her speak. But the end of the Cold War was pretty much the end of the movement, and the one-time Nobel Prize nominee eventually retired to the NSW Central Coast. Yet in recent years, she's sought to rekindle the spark of protest. And now, as the Australian Government launches its inquiry into the feasibility of nuclear power here, she's already moved to attack its credibility, with her own launch in Melbourne this week - a book called Nuclear Power is Not the Answer. I spoke with Helen Caldicott at her home near Gosford.
Helen Caldicott, can I begin with, I suppose, the most obvious question. You had an enormous following in the early 80s. The impetus of your campaign tended to peter out as the threat of nuclear holocaust dissipated. You retired to your coastal garden and to spend more time with family. Why the comeback?
DR HELEN CALDICOTT, ANTI-NUCLEAR ACTIVIST: Well, I, too, thought that the risk of nuclear war would just dissipate and go away and the main movers and shakers would get rid of the nuclear weapons and for a while there in the 90s, no-one really knew which direction it was going to take. And then Clinton was elected and Clinton didn't have the courage to take on the Pentagon. He was scared of them. He just let the matter lie. And now America and Russia still target each other on hair-trigger alert with thousands of nuclear weapons. And I'm trying to set up a conference with the Pentagon at the moment and the White House and the Russians to talk about the fact that we could be blown off the face of the earth tonight. And it's more serious now than it was at the height of the Cold War.
KERRY O'BRIEN: And yet, you found it very hard to reignite the spark this time round, haven't you? Why?
DR HELEN CALDICOTT: Because people think the risk's gone away. They're practising psychic numbing. Thank God it's all finished, we're friendly with the Russians. But the fact is the Russian early warning system doesn't work and by accident or by terrorist intrusion they could blow up the world tonight.
KERRY O'BRIEN: On nuclear power, on which your book is about to be launched, you say the arguments against nuclear power are overwhelming. You're not shaken by the fact that some highly-respected global warming campaigners say that the threat of greenhouse is so great that the risks of nuclear power are outweighed by the benefits that nuclear power on a large scale would deliver on greenhouse.
DR HELEN CALDICOTT: What are the benefits it would deliver? The fact is that the nuclear fuel cycle from A to Z, mining, milling, enriching, building the reactor, storing the waste for half a million years, produce a lot of greenhouse gases. So nuclear power, in fact, adds to greenhouse warming, does not detract, does not negate it, adds to it substantially.
KERRY O'BRIEN: But once a nuclear power station is built, it is then not adding to greenhouse, correct?
DR HELEN CALDICOTT: No, but you've got to make the fuel, Kerry. You've got to enrich the uranium, you've got to dig it up and the quality of uranium will be declining rapidly over time and it's going to produce, use a huge amount of fossil fuel to enrich it. So soon, in a decade or two, a nuclear power plant will produce as much CO2 as a similar sized gas-fired plant. So the argument is fallacious, but the nuclear industry is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to convince people that nuclear power is the answer to global warming, which it's not.
KERRY O'BRIEN: But some highly credible scientists, eminent scientists, are swayed by the argument.
DR HELEN CALDICOTT: Name them. Which ones?
KERRY O'BRIEN: Well, I'll tell you. James Lovelock is a powerful environmentalist and scientific voice, isn't he? When he calls for a massive expansion in the world's nuclear energy programs because he believes it's the only option left to stem the rapid advance of the greenhouse threat, I mean, is he dumb on this?
DR HELEN CALDICOTT: He's off the tracks. I've spoken to James Lovelock several times. He thinks that oxygen causes cancer, although he's a medical scientist. And he said, "Look, the way to heat my house is to put nuclear waste in my basement". So he wasn't open to reason or understanding. He's right on greenhouse warming, absolutely. He's totally wrong on nuclear power. And nuclear power from a medical perspective will, over time, induce epidemics of cancer and leukaemia and genetic disease forever more. And if he's a medical scientist he should indeed be concerned about that.
KERRY O'BRIEN: No-one can doubt Tim Flannery's scientific and environmental credentials. He says James Lovelock has a point on nuclear power. Flannery, too, is coming to see nuclear power as possibly a lesser of evils with regard to greenhouse in Australia.
DR HELEN CALDICOTT: You don't replace one evil with another, Kerry.
KERRY O'BRIEN: If it's the lesser of evils?
DR HELEN CALDICOTT: It's not the lesser of evils. The generation of nuclear power is the only electricity generation that can destroy a city. There are two huge nuclear reactors 35 miles from Manhattan. They were targets for the 9/11 terrorists. If one of those goes and the wind blows towards Manhattan, that's the end of the financial capital of the world.
KERRY O'BRIEN: If all the arguments against nuclear power are as overwhelming as you assert, particularly the economic arguments like the need for massive government subsidies, surely those arguments have to win the day? In which case, what have you got to worry about?
DR HELEN CALDICOTT: Yeah, it's a good point. I mean, Wall Street is very reluctant to invest in nuclear power. Standard & Poor's now - they are very allergic to it. And really, it's a socialised industry. The Energy Bill of 2005 in the US allocated $13 billion to subsidise nuclear power. It can't operate without huge government subsidies. So it's a socialised industry and a capitalistic society. And if the government keeps subsidising it, then I guess they can build a few reactors but certainly not enough to make any difference to global warming, not that they will anyway in the long term.
KERRY O'BRIEN: You attack the nuclear industry for propagandising, but haven't you been guilty of setting out to manipulate your audiences over the years in the way you have sold your case, at times, dare I suggest, to harangue, generate fear, to push your arguments to the limits, to enlist the public to your cause?
DR HELEN CALDICOTT: How?
KERRY O'BRIEN: I've seen you give speeches to audiences.
DR HELEN CALDICOTT: And?
KERRY O'BRIEN: I would say promoting fear by painting very fearful cases of the picture that you paint of a nuclear holocaust, the picture that you paint in this interview of nuclear accident, isn't that pushing at emotions?
DR HELEN CALDICOTT: Kerry, I don't want the only life in the universe to be destroyed and it's possible to do that now and it makes me scared and I'm a paediatrician having taken the Hippocratic oath. All the world's children are potentially my patients. I'm practising global preventative medicine. And so I have to speak the truth. And if it makes people frightened...you know, it's hard to speak this stuff, because it's boring, you know, and if you've got an audience and you're giving them fact after fact, they sort of go to sleep. So you have to be an actress, too, to wake them up and get them to face reality. Like getting a person to stop smoking. I've done that lots of times by scaring them and they hate me. But you know what, they stop smoking. This is practising preventative medicine.
KERRY O'BRIEN: Coming back to your personal motivation. You say in retirement you became depressed, did you honestly ask yourself whether a part of that depression was simply that you missed the fray?
DR HELEN CALDICOTT: Partly and partly because I'm pretty intuitive to my detriment. And I know what's happening, I can see what can happen in the future. I'm not good at denial, I'm not.
KERRY O'BRIEN: You've talked before about the personal cost to your family of your years of campaigning. What's been the worst of that personal cost?
DR HELEN CALDICOTT: I lost my marriage.
KERRY O'BRIEN: Worth it?
DR HELEN CALDICOTT: It's hard to know, really, isn't it? I mean, it was my destiny to do this work and it kind of still is. I knew from a child that I would do something like this.
KERRY O'BRIEN: But isn't that - look, I'm not suggesting that this is so in your case, but when a person talks about their destiny, isn't there a little bit of a danger in that that you kind of can persuade yourself to all sorts of things because you say it's your destiny?
DR HELEN CALDICOTT: I couldn't not have done it, Kerry. I read On The Beach when I was 15. And that was the turning - I lost my innocence. I lived in Melbourne. I could feel the bombs exploding shortly after that. We could destroy life on earth. Then I did medicine at the age of 17, I learned about genetics and radiation. It was so obvious to me and Russia and America were blowing up bombs in the atmosphere and the fallout was falling down and Linus Pauling said children would get leukaemia and cancer, medically it's obvious. Now, I could practise medicine, I could have stayed at Harvard and done really well. I had a great boss. But I could see beyond pouring stuff into test tubes and treating individual patients. What was the use of caring for my patients so carefully if, in fact, they had no future?
KERRY O'BRIEN: And so here you go again?
DR HELEN CALDICOTT: Yeah.
KERRY O'BRIEN: Helen Caldicott, thanks for talking with us.
DR HELEN CALDICOTT: Thanks, Kerry.
http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2006/s1677668.htm
===============================
Title: Nuclear Power is Not the Answer to Global Warming or Anything Else
Author: Dr Helen Caldicott
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing
Publication date: July 2006
Price: $24.95
Status: Available
Format: Paperback 248 pages
Dimensions: 198 x 128 mm
ISBN: 0-522-85251-3
Nuclear Power is Not the Answer
prices including shipping
quantity cost shipping total
1 24.95 4.40 29.35
2 49.90 8.50 58.40
3 74.85 11.90 86.75
For international shipping please add $AUS10.00 to your total payment
http://www.safecom.org.au/caldicott.htm
by Helen Caldicott
"In a world where dark and dangerous forces are threatening our planet, Helen Caldicott shines a powerful light. This much-needed book reveals truths that confirm we must take positive action now if we are to make a difference." -MARTIN SHEEN
Dr. Helen Caldicott has the rare ability to combine science with passion, logic with love, and urgency with humor -NAOMI KLEIN
Helen Caldicott has been my inspiration to speak out -MERYL STREEP
Dr. Caldicott is one of the most articulate and passionate advocates of citizen action to remedy the nuclear and environmental crises -FROM THE CITATION FOR THE 2003 LANNAN CULTURAL FREEDOM PRIZE
The time to take Caldicott's measured and wise words to heart is now -BOOKLIST
Acclaimed author and activist Naomi Klein states about the latest book by Helen Caldicott: "Dr. Helen Caldicott has the rare ability to combine science with passion, logic with love, and urgency with humor", and Ms Klein just summarises a minute particle of Dr Caldicott's acclaim.
Regrettably, in Howard's Australia, and with a Labor opposition given to a "me-too" pandering and a half-hearted understanding of the potential of its true role as an opposition party, Caldicott is these days more acclaimed in other countries than at home. Sydney Morning Herald reporter Erin O'Dwyer recently observed that Caldicott, someone who addressed in 1982 one million people in Central Park, New York on nuclear disarmament, was shouted down and heckled in 1998 when she addressed a protest against Sydney's Lucas Heights reactor.
It is absolutely essential, that her voice forms part of the equasion now that we have the nuclear debate "we have to have" according to John Howard, and her latest book resulted in the nomination of the Inaugural Australian Peace Prize.
About the Author
The world's leading spokesperson for the antinuclear movement, Dr Helen Caldicott is a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, the recipient of the 2003 Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom and the inaugural Australian Peace Prize awarded by the Peace Organisation of Australia, 2006.
A medical doctor, she has devoted the past thirty-five years to an international campaign to educate the public about the medical hazards of the nuclear age. Dr Caldicott is a bestselling author and divides her time between the central coast of New South Wales and Washington, DC, where she is President of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute.
From http://www.mup.unimelb.edu.au/catalogue ... 251-3.html
About the book
In this revealing examination of the costs and consequences of nuclear energy, world-renowned antinuclear spokesperson Helen Caldicott uncovers the facts that belie the nuclear industry propaganda: nuclear power contributes to global warming; the true cost of nuclear power is prohibitive, with taxpayers picking up most of the tab; there's simply not enough uranium in the world to sustain nuclear power over the long term; and the potential for a catastrophic accident or a terrorist attack far outweighs any benefits.
In a world torn apart by wars over oil, many politicians are increasingly looking for alternative sources of energy-and their leading choice is often nuclear. Among the myths that have been spread over the years about nuclear-powered electricity are that it does not cause global warming or pollution (i.e., that it is "clean and green"), that it is inexpensive, and that it is safe. But the facts belie the barrage of nuclear industry propaganda:
Nuclear power contributes to global warming
The real costs of nuclear power are prohibitive (and taxpayers pick up most of them)
There's not enough uranium in the world to sustain long-term nuclear power
Potential for a catastrophic accident or terrorist attack far outweighs any benefits.
Trained as a physician, and - after four decades of antinuclear activism - thoroughly versed in the science of nuclear energy, the bestselling author of Nuclear Madness and Missile Envy here turns her attention from nuclear bombs to nuclear lightbulbs. As she makes meticulously clear in this damning book, the world cannot withstand either.
The world's leading spokesperson for the antinuclear movement, Dr. Helen Caldicott is the co-founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize, and the 2003 winner of the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize. She divides her time between Australia and Washington, D.C., where she recently established the Nuclear Policy Research Institute.
-------------------------
We should not be exporting uranium because you are exporting cancer
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/we- ... 40560.html
Not recognised among Australia's 100 most influential people, anti-nuclear campaigner Dr Helen Caldicott still stands tall on the world stage, Erin O'Dwyer writes. 'We've gone backwards decades under Bush and Howard'
Sydney Morning Herald
July 2, 2006
LIKE all our best intellectuals, Helen Caldicott is better known in the United States than at home.
In 1982, she silenced a crowd of 1 million people who gathered in New York's Central Park to hear her speak on nuclear disarmament.
But in 1998, when she addressed 1000 people in Engadine protesting against Sydney's Lucas Heights reactor, Caldicott was shouted down by hecklers.
It was a similar story last week when The Bulletin magazine listed 100 of the most influential Australians. Cookery writer Margaret Fulton and pop star Kylie Minogue made the cut. Helen Caldicott, the world's leading anti-nuclear voice, did not.
Yet she has been named as one of the 100 most influential women of the 20th century by the Smithsonian Institution, and she was nominated in 1985 for the Nobel peace prize.
Perhaps it's tall poppy syndrome. Perhaps it is sexism. Or perhaps Caldicott is unsung here simply because we have stopped listening to her message.
"In the '70s and '80s, Australia was very anti-nuclear," she says. "And I used to be very well listened to in Australia in the '70s and '80s. But we've gone backwards decades under the Bush Administration and under the Howard administration and it's been quite devastating."
This month Caldicott publishes her sixth book - Nuclear Power Is Not The Answer To Global Warming Or Anything Else (Melbourne University Press). It comes as the nuclear energy debate heats up amid increased awareness that Australia has about 40 per cent of the world's recoverable uranium resources.
Caldicott hopes the book will penetrate the political untruth that nuclear energy is a safe, green alternative.
"[People] think that it is the answer to global warming," she says, "but in truth it adds to global warming. It does not fix it."
Caldicott's message has always been simple. Nuclear energy leaves a toxic legacy to future generations because it produces not only global warming gases but also massive amounts of toxic carcinogenic radioactive waste. It is also far more expensive than other forms of electricity generation and can trigger proliferation of nuclear weapons.
Even worse, radioactive elements in nuclear-powered countries are already leaking - into the ground, into rivers and oceans, and into the food chain. Already 40 per cent of Europe's landmass is radioactive after Chernobyl, and increasingly so are its food supplies. Alarmingly that includes human breast milk.
Caldicott warns that as more people are exposed, cancers such as leukemia will become more common. So will genetic diseases such as cystic fibrosis. "We should not be exporting uranium because by exporting uranium, you are exporting cancer," she says.
A pediatrician who specialised in cystic fibrosis, Caldicott first grabbed headlines protesting against French nuclear testing in the 1970s. She used her profile to mobilise trade unions and elicited an ACTU resolution to ban uranium mining.
After migrating to the US in the late '70s with her then husband Bill Caldicott, she became a faculty member of the Harvard Medical School. There she mobilised doctors and established Physicians for Social Responsibility with 23,000 influential members. It became one of the US's most powerful anti-nuclear lobby groups and won the Nobel peace prize in 1985.
Caldicott had resigned from the leadership group amid political power play and did not attend the ceremony. Yet she refused to let that devastating experience stop her. She went on to teach at leading universities and was honoured with countless awards and honorary degrees.
Three years ago, she established the Nuclear Policy Research Institute in Washington, known for its high-powered scientific symposiums. She has just been named as the inaugural winner of the Australian Peace Prize.
The journey hasn't always been easy. On the eve of her 50th birthday, Caldicott's marriage ended. All her anti-nuclear work was "ashes in my mouth".
She includes the break-up when asked about her personal milestones. She also includes the births of her six grandchildren. This is because, as a pediatrician, Caldicott's motivation has always been her children, her children's children and children everywhere. "It's one of the reasons I do the work I do," she says. "I practise global preventative medicine."
This year Caldicott will turn 68. She is slowing down, spending less time on the world stage and more time with family at her Central Coast hideaway. But she refuses to go quietly, and has mastered the art of working smarter not harder.
Now, instead of rallying unionists and doctors, she maintains a contact book of the world's top opinion leaders and journalists. Three times during our interview she quotes Thomas Jefferson about a functioning democracy requiring an informed citizenry.
"In the old days it was grass roots and this time it's tree tops," she says. "I'm getting older and it's more efficient to educate the media because through them you get to millions of people."
Caldicott's motivation might always have been her family, but these days she is careful to spend more time with them.
The best example is the night Madonna called to chat about the medical dangers of nuclear power.
Caldicott was preparing a lamb roast for her family and said: "Madonna, I can't take your call right now. I'll have to talk to you later."
"My family has never forgiven me," she says with a laugh.
"But my children were resentful that I wasn't around much and I do think about that. I wish I had been.
"On the other hand, I was wanting to make sure that they had a future. Nothing you do comes without consequences."
See http://www.nuclearpolicy.org and http://www.helencaldicott.com
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/we-should......html
=============================
A dangerous liaison
The Age
by Andra Jackson July 5, 2006
Australia's alignment with America is "dangerous" because the US now has a policy to use nuclear weapons on non-nuclear states with impunity, an anti-nuclear campaigner said last night.
Dr Helen Caldicott, founder of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute, said this was the first time the United States had adopted such a policy.
America expected Australia "to fight alongside them in Iraq and probably against China if Taiwan becomes independent", she said. "America has 34 US bases in Australia. If there was an outbreak of nuclear war between Russia and America, we are targeted."
Australian-born Dr Caldicott was speaking in Melbourne where she was awarded the inaugural Australian Peace Prize by the Australian Peace Organisation.
ANDRA JACKSON
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/ ... on....html
Caldicott collects
The Australian Strewth Column July 04, 2006 by Jane Fraser
DEMOCRATS leader Senator Lyn Allison will present the inaugural Australian Peace Prize to Helen Caldicott at a cocktail party in Melbourne tonight, coinciding with the launch of her new book Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer. The Peace Organisation of Australia chose Caldicott because of her "commitment to raising awareness about the medical and environmental hazards of the nuclear age". Caldicott has been named one of the most influential women of the 20th century by the Smithsonian Institute, although she didn't make the cut in the 100 most influential Australians named last week by The Bulletin magazine. Other nominations for the prize included High Court judge Michael Kirby and former foreign minister Gareth Evans.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/st ... 90,00.html
Campaigner attacks nuclear inquiry's credibility
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
7.30 Report
TV PROGRAM TRANSCRIPT
Broadcast: 03/07/2006
Reporter: Kerry O'Brien
KERRY O'BRIEN, PRESENTER: Twenty-five years ago, Australian doctor Helen Caldicott was one of the most powerful and compelling figures on America's public stage. She founded a movement of more than 20,000 physicians and scientists against the nuclear arms race, and even her enemies had to acknowledge the potency of her appeal.
DR HELEN CALDICOTT: Don't believe what they're saying, watch what they do.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
KERRY O'BRIEN: In one disarmament rally in New York's Central Park in 1982, something like a million people turned out to hear her speak. But the end of the Cold War was pretty much the end of the movement, and the one-time Nobel Prize nominee eventually retired to the NSW Central Coast. Yet in recent years, she's sought to rekindle the spark of protest. And now, as the Australian Government launches its inquiry into the feasibility of nuclear power here, she's already moved to attack its credibility, with her own launch in Melbourne this week - a book called Nuclear Power is Not the Answer. I spoke with Helen Caldicott at her home near Gosford.
Helen Caldicott, can I begin with, I suppose, the most obvious question. You had an enormous following in the early 80s. The impetus of your campaign tended to peter out as the threat of nuclear holocaust dissipated. You retired to your coastal garden and to spend more time with family. Why the comeback?
DR HELEN CALDICOTT, ANTI-NUCLEAR ACTIVIST: Well, I, too, thought that the risk of nuclear war would just dissipate and go away and the main movers and shakers would get rid of the nuclear weapons and for a while there in the 90s, no-one really knew which direction it was going to take. And then Clinton was elected and Clinton didn't have the courage to take on the Pentagon. He was scared of them. He just let the matter lie. And now America and Russia still target each other on hair-trigger alert with thousands of nuclear weapons. And I'm trying to set up a conference with the Pentagon at the moment and the White House and the Russians to talk about the fact that we could be blown off the face of the earth tonight. And it's more serious now than it was at the height of the Cold War.
KERRY O'BRIEN: And yet, you found it very hard to reignite the spark this time round, haven't you? Why?
DR HELEN CALDICOTT: Because people think the risk's gone away. They're practising psychic numbing. Thank God it's all finished, we're friendly with the Russians. But the fact is the Russian early warning system doesn't work and by accident or by terrorist intrusion they could blow up the world tonight.
KERRY O'BRIEN: On nuclear power, on which your book is about to be launched, you say the arguments against nuclear power are overwhelming. You're not shaken by the fact that some highly-respected global warming campaigners say that the threat of greenhouse is so great that the risks of nuclear power are outweighed by the benefits that nuclear power on a large scale would deliver on greenhouse.
DR HELEN CALDICOTT: What are the benefits it would deliver? The fact is that the nuclear fuel cycle from A to Z, mining, milling, enriching, building the reactor, storing the waste for half a million years, produce a lot of greenhouse gases. So nuclear power, in fact, adds to greenhouse warming, does not detract, does not negate it, adds to it substantially.
KERRY O'BRIEN: But once a nuclear power station is built, it is then not adding to greenhouse, correct?
DR HELEN CALDICOTT: No, but you've got to make the fuel, Kerry. You've got to enrich the uranium, you've got to dig it up and the quality of uranium will be declining rapidly over time and it's going to produce, use a huge amount of fossil fuel to enrich it. So soon, in a decade or two, a nuclear power plant will produce as much CO2 as a similar sized gas-fired plant. So the argument is fallacious, but the nuclear industry is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to convince people that nuclear power is the answer to global warming, which it's not.
KERRY O'BRIEN: But some highly credible scientists, eminent scientists, are swayed by the argument.
DR HELEN CALDICOTT: Name them. Which ones?
KERRY O'BRIEN: Well, I'll tell you. James Lovelock is a powerful environmentalist and scientific voice, isn't he? When he calls for a massive expansion in the world's nuclear energy programs because he believes it's the only option left to stem the rapid advance of the greenhouse threat, I mean, is he dumb on this?
DR HELEN CALDICOTT: He's off the tracks. I've spoken to James Lovelock several times. He thinks that oxygen causes cancer, although he's a medical scientist. And he said, "Look, the way to heat my house is to put nuclear waste in my basement". So he wasn't open to reason or understanding. He's right on greenhouse warming, absolutely. He's totally wrong on nuclear power. And nuclear power from a medical perspective will, over time, induce epidemics of cancer and leukaemia and genetic disease forever more. And if he's a medical scientist he should indeed be concerned about that.
KERRY O'BRIEN: No-one can doubt Tim Flannery's scientific and environmental credentials. He says James Lovelock has a point on nuclear power. Flannery, too, is coming to see nuclear power as possibly a lesser of evils with regard to greenhouse in Australia.
DR HELEN CALDICOTT: You don't replace one evil with another, Kerry.
KERRY O'BRIEN: If it's the lesser of evils?
DR HELEN CALDICOTT: It's not the lesser of evils. The generation of nuclear power is the only electricity generation that can destroy a city. There are two huge nuclear reactors 35 miles from Manhattan. They were targets for the 9/11 terrorists. If one of those goes and the wind blows towards Manhattan, that's the end of the financial capital of the world.
KERRY O'BRIEN: If all the arguments against nuclear power are as overwhelming as you assert, particularly the economic arguments like the need for massive government subsidies, surely those arguments have to win the day? In which case, what have you got to worry about?
DR HELEN CALDICOTT: Yeah, it's a good point. I mean, Wall Street is very reluctant to invest in nuclear power. Standard & Poor's now - they are very allergic to it. And really, it's a socialised industry. The Energy Bill of 2005 in the US allocated $13 billion to subsidise nuclear power. It can't operate without huge government subsidies. So it's a socialised industry and a capitalistic society. And if the government keeps subsidising it, then I guess they can build a few reactors but certainly not enough to make any difference to global warming, not that they will anyway in the long term.
KERRY O'BRIEN: You attack the nuclear industry for propagandising, but haven't you been guilty of setting out to manipulate your audiences over the years in the way you have sold your case, at times, dare I suggest, to harangue, generate fear, to push your arguments to the limits, to enlist the public to your cause?
DR HELEN CALDICOTT: How?
KERRY O'BRIEN: I've seen you give speeches to audiences.
DR HELEN CALDICOTT: And?
KERRY O'BRIEN: I would say promoting fear by painting very fearful cases of the picture that you paint of a nuclear holocaust, the picture that you paint in this interview of nuclear accident, isn't that pushing at emotions?
DR HELEN CALDICOTT: Kerry, I don't want the only life in the universe to be destroyed and it's possible to do that now and it makes me scared and I'm a paediatrician having taken the Hippocratic oath. All the world's children are potentially my patients. I'm practising global preventative medicine. And so I have to speak the truth. And if it makes people frightened...you know, it's hard to speak this stuff, because it's boring, you know, and if you've got an audience and you're giving them fact after fact, they sort of go to sleep. So you have to be an actress, too, to wake them up and get them to face reality. Like getting a person to stop smoking. I've done that lots of times by scaring them and they hate me. But you know what, they stop smoking. This is practising preventative medicine.
KERRY O'BRIEN: Coming back to your personal motivation. You say in retirement you became depressed, did you honestly ask yourself whether a part of that depression was simply that you missed the fray?
DR HELEN CALDICOTT: Partly and partly because I'm pretty intuitive to my detriment. And I know what's happening, I can see what can happen in the future. I'm not good at denial, I'm not.
KERRY O'BRIEN: You've talked before about the personal cost to your family of your years of campaigning. What's been the worst of that personal cost?
DR HELEN CALDICOTT: I lost my marriage.
KERRY O'BRIEN: Worth it?
DR HELEN CALDICOTT: It's hard to know, really, isn't it? I mean, it was my destiny to do this work and it kind of still is. I knew from a child that I would do something like this.
KERRY O'BRIEN: But isn't that - look, I'm not suggesting that this is so in your case, but when a person talks about their destiny, isn't there a little bit of a danger in that that you kind of can persuade yourself to all sorts of things because you say it's your destiny?
DR HELEN CALDICOTT: I couldn't not have done it, Kerry. I read On The Beach when I was 15. And that was the turning - I lost my innocence. I lived in Melbourne. I could feel the bombs exploding shortly after that. We could destroy life on earth. Then I did medicine at the age of 17, I learned about genetics and radiation. It was so obvious to me and Russia and America were blowing up bombs in the atmosphere and the fallout was falling down and Linus Pauling said children would get leukaemia and cancer, medically it's obvious. Now, I could practise medicine, I could have stayed at Harvard and done really well. I had a great boss. But I could see beyond pouring stuff into test tubes and treating individual patients. What was the use of caring for my patients so carefully if, in fact, they had no future?
KERRY O'BRIEN: And so here you go again?
DR HELEN CALDICOTT: Yeah.
KERRY O'BRIEN: Helen Caldicott, thanks for talking with us.
DR HELEN CALDICOTT: Thanks, Kerry.
http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2006/s1677668.htm
===============================
Title: Nuclear Power is Not the Answer to Global Warming or Anything Else
Author: Dr Helen Caldicott
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing
Publication date: July 2006
Price: $24.95
Status: Available
Format: Paperback 248 pages
Dimensions: 198 x 128 mm
ISBN: 0-522-85251-3
Nuclear Power is Not the Answer
prices including shipping
quantity cost shipping total
1 24.95 4.40 29.35
2 49.90 8.50 58.40
3 74.85 11.90 86.75
For international shipping please add $AUS10.00 to your total payment
Last edited by Oscar on Tue Jun 02, 2009 9:58 am, edited 1 time in total.
- Oscar
- Site Admin
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Nuclear Mutagenesis
by Oscar » Sat Dec 16, 2006 2:49 pm
Nuclear Power Is Contraindicated as a Solution to Global Warming Because of Nuclear Mutagenesis
Posted 12/04/2006
Helen Caldicott, MD
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/548018
The classic dictum in medicine states: If a disease is incurable, prevention is the only recourse.
While the specter of global warming looms large with associated epidemics of arthropod-borne diseases and millions of ecological refuges escaping catastrophic meteorological conditions, nuclear power as an alternative energy has an equally dire prognosis.
Nuclear power is responsible for the emission of substantial quantities of global warming gases from each step of the nuclear fuel chain,[1] and the medical consequences of nuclear power are equally catastrophic.
Each nuclear reactor contains 1000 times more long-lived radiation than released by the Hiroshima bomb, in the form of 200 new biologically dangerous isotopes -- some with minuscule half-lives and others with half-lives of 17 million years.[2] This material -- radioactive waste -- must be isolated from the environment for geological time spans, a scientific and physical impossibility. Already radioactive isotopes are leaking into soil and water from nuclear waste repositories in many countries, and these isotopes bioconcentrate by orders of magnitude at each step of the food chain. Invisible and cryptogenic to the senses, these mutagenic radioactive materials will migrate to and concentrate in specific bodily organs -- iodine 131 in the thyroid, cesium 137 in brain and muscle, strontium 90 in bone, and plutonium 239 (with a half-life of 24,400 years) in lung, liver, bone, fetus, and testicle. Ultimately, these radioisotopes will induce malignancy; however, because of the latent period of carcinogenesis, the cancers will not be diagnosed for many years.[3]
Over generations, radioisotopes in gonads will increase the incidence of genetic and chromosomal diseases. Animals and plants will be similarly affected. Nuclear power is therefore a fundamentally mutagenic industry that results in cancer with a transient byproduct -- electricity generation. As such, nuclear power is medically contraindicated.
That's my opinion. I'm Dr. Helen Caldicott, Pediatrician and President of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute.
References
- Storm van Leeuwen JW, Smith P. Nuclear power, the energy balance. Chapter 1: the CO2-emission of the nuclear life-cycle. July 28, 2005. Available at: http://www.stormsmith.nl/report20050803/Chap_1.pdf Accessed November 28, 2006.
- Nuclear Information and Resource Service. Routine radioactive releases from nuclear reactors - it doesn't take an accident. Takoma Park, Md: Nuclear Information and Resource Service. Available at: http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/routiner ... leases.htm Accessed November 29, 2006.
- Caldicott H. Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer. New York: The New Press; 2006.
Helen Caldicott, MD, Founder; President, Nuclear Policy Research Institute, College Park, Maryland
Author's email address: caldicott@nuclearpolicy.org
Disclosure: Helen Caldicott, MD, has disclosed no relevant financial relationships.
Medscape General Medicine. 2006;8(4):45. ©2006 Medscape
Posted 12/04/2006
Helen Caldicott, MD
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/548018
The classic dictum in medicine states: If a disease is incurable, prevention is the only recourse.
While the specter of global warming looms large with associated epidemics of arthropod-borne diseases and millions of ecological refuges escaping catastrophic meteorological conditions, nuclear power as an alternative energy has an equally dire prognosis.
Nuclear power is responsible for the emission of substantial quantities of global warming gases from each step of the nuclear fuel chain,[1] and the medical consequences of nuclear power are equally catastrophic.
Each nuclear reactor contains 1000 times more long-lived radiation than released by the Hiroshima bomb, in the form of 200 new biologically dangerous isotopes -- some with minuscule half-lives and others with half-lives of 17 million years.[2] This material -- radioactive waste -- must be isolated from the environment for geological time spans, a scientific and physical impossibility. Already radioactive isotopes are leaking into soil and water from nuclear waste repositories in many countries, and these isotopes bioconcentrate by orders of magnitude at each step of the food chain. Invisible and cryptogenic to the senses, these mutagenic radioactive materials will migrate to and concentrate in specific bodily organs -- iodine 131 in the thyroid, cesium 137 in brain and muscle, strontium 90 in bone, and plutonium 239 (with a half-life of 24,400 years) in lung, liver, bone, fetus, and testicle. Ultimately, these radioisotopes will induce malignancy; however, because of the latent period of carcinogenesis, the cancers will not be diagnosed for many years.[3]
Over generations, radioisotopes in gonads will increase the incidence of genetic and chromosomal diseases. Animals and plants will be similarly affected. Nuclear power is therefore a fundamentally mutagenic industry that results in cancer with a transient byproduct -- electricity generation. As such, nuclear power is medically contraindicated.
That's my opinion. I'm Dr. Helen Caldicott, Pediatrician and President of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute.
References
- Storm van Leeuwen JW, Smith P. Nuclear power, the energy balance. Chapter 1: the CO2-emission of the nuclear life-cycle. July 28, 2005. Available at: http://www.stormsmith.nl/report20050803/Chap_1.pdf Accessed November 28, 2006.
- Nuclear Information and Resource Service. Routine radioactive releases from nuclear reactors - it doesn't take an accident. Takoma Park, Md: Nuclear Information and Resource Service. Available at: http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/routiner ... leases.htm Accessed November 29, 2006.
- Caldicott H. Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer. New York: The New Press; 2006.
Helen Caldicott, MD, Founder; President, Nuclear Policy Research Institute, College Park, Maryland
Author's email address: caldicott@nuclearpolicy.org
Disclosure: Helen Caldicott, MD, has disclosed no relevant financial relationships.
Medscape General Medicine. 2006;8(4):45. ©2006 Medscape
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