THE DR HELEN CALDICOTT INTERVIEW
Interviewed by Claudette Vaughan
Dr Helen Caldicott is hailed as the worlds leading spokesperson for the antinuclear movement. She 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. It should be noted her willingness and availability to speak to diverse grassroots groups of people should be as legendary as Noam Chomsky’s availability to grassroots activists is, but in Australia Dr Caldicott’s vast contribution to the Peace Movement is hardly even acknowledged. Being a best selling author she divides her time between the south coast of New South Wales and Washington D.C. where she is President of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute. Here is the Abolitionist’s Interview with her.
 In your book “Nuclear Power is not the Answer” you say that nuclear power contributes to global warming. How does it Helen?
It’s because the nuclear industry is not telling people the truth. A nuclear power plant does not run itself. It has to be fueled and that fuel is uranium. It comes from the earth and you have to dig up millions of tonnes using huge amounts of diesel fuel which creates lots of global warming. The uranium ore is then crushed, a process which creates more global warming, then at this stage the uranium is converted to a gas called uranium hexachloride which is forced through tiny little filters to be enriched, and that’s a very, very energy consuming process. Australian uranium is enriched in America where they use two huge coal-fired plants to enrich the uranium, a process which itself contributes to global warming. Not only that but a large amount of CFC gas is used to cool hundreds of miles of pipes containing the uranium hexafluoride gas. The pipes containing the CFC gas themselves leak. CFC, as well as damaging the Ozone layer and is banned under the Montreal protocol, is a potent global warmer- 10 to 20 thousand times more potent than CO2.
Then you have to build a huge reactor and the manufacture of concrete and cement makes large amounts of CO2 –just the chemical process – then the reactor operates for approximately 24 years when it can’t operate any more because it’s radioactive and has to be shut down and allowed to cool. Then it needs to be decommissioned– cut apart by remote control using robots. This has never been done on a large reactor before. This process of course requires more fossil fuel.
The very radioactive high level waste must be safely stored and cooled in cooling pools adjacent to the reactor for decades after which time it must be transported, again using large quantities of fossil fuel, and stored safely somewhere in the earth for 500,000 years which is a physical impossibility.
 So if you add up all the fossil fuel used in the nuclear chain, a nuclear power plant at the moment produces one third the amount of CO2 as a similar sized gas fueled planet, but as the uranium ore declines in concentration, within 1 or 2 decades a nuclear power plant will produce the same amount of C02 as a gas fired plant so you might as well burn the fossil fuels – at least you don’t get the radioactive waste.
John Howard’s dismissed out of hand recently on the ABC two large concerns on uranium mining. First, the health risks. He says the data pertaining to health risks from 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl is a decade old now, virtually implying it’s out-of-date. The second claim he laughed off was the assertion that he was interested in buying up radioactive waste from the US because he saw money to be made from out of it. What are your views?
The Liberal Party passed a resolution in June last year to allow the storage of foreign radiowastes in Australia, so he was lying.
As to the health risks, it doesn’t matter if the data is old or new. In the past, 20 to 50% of men who have mined uranium have died from lung cancer. However they are not just subject to getting lung cancer but also to leukemia and other cancers and having their testicles irradiated. If you read, “Nuclear Power is not the Answer” you will find out why.
In other words, John Howard is not a biologist; he’s not a nuclear physicist so he doesn’t know what he is talking about. He lies.
Why is he joining with America in a Global Nuclear Energy Partnership – GNEP, which involves mining uranium, enriching it, (An enrichment plant is illegal in Australia), exporting the uranium fuel rods, then re-importing the extraordinary radioactive fuel after it has been fissioned in an overseas reactor, so other countries can’t build bombs from this fuel, and then storing radioactive waste in Australia. Finally the GNEP calls for chopping up the intensively radioactive fuel rods by remote control, then dissolving them in concentrated nitric acid – that’s called re-processing. From this intensively radioactive solution is removed plutonium. Plutonium has two uses, 1. As fuel for nuclear weapons and 2. to use in fast reactors as fuel instead of uranium. These fast reactors are the most satanically dangerous machines ever invented by Man because they can produce a massive nuclear explosion and scatter deadly carcinogenic plutonium to the four winds – one millionth of a gram is carcinogenic. Why is he doing it? Obviously because he is in the pocket of the Americans and automatically does anything they suggest.
Ziggy Switkowsky, in debate with you recently was remarkably caviler about his pro nuclear stance and it’s acceptance with the Australian community, having the audacity to say that only a few people held similar views to yourself Helen. What did you think about it?
He’s not telling the truth. He’s the smoothest operator I have ever had to deal with and I’ve dealt with a lot of lying people in the nuclear industry.. He’s the person putting out the studies to please the Prime Minister to attain the Prime Minister’s objectives.
Dr Doug Rokke has said America has now ordered the uranium armory to nuke both Iran and Pakistan. You have been to Iran and found it very beautiful.
It’s a very beautiful country with a very ancient Persian culture. Many of the roads in Tehran are named after poets. They are very fascinating people. If they bomb the three uranium enrichment facilities in Iran with nuclear weapons which both Israel and the Pentagon are planning to do, over 2.8 million people could be killed from radioactive fallout according to a paper written by Physicians for Social Responsibility.
Australia is in no position morally to point the finger at Iran, North Korea or Israel when Australia is selling uranium to India outside of the Non Proliferation Treaty and is so morally interchangeable when it suits Australia’s interests so-called.
Australia is not selling it yet to India and there is some doubt now whether or not the US-Indian Treaty will go ahead because of such fervent opposition within the Indian Parliament. We are not sure whether that arrangement will proceed but certainly if it does proceed, we have violated the Non Proliferation Treaty, and we have not a moral leg to stand on. More than that, you don’t sell a carcinogenic industry to other countries to make money.
Australia is very well placed to initiate Renewables and energy efficient alternatives. Why aren’t they?
Prime Ministers including Kevin Rudd are in the pockets of the Coal and the Uranium Industry. Period. We could become the Energy Superpower of the world bathed as we are in sun, blown by wind and we have an enormous amount of hot rocks amenable to be used to generate electricity near the surface of the earth in Queensland and South Australia. We are perfectly placed to run our whole country on Renewables.
Indeed, a colleague and I have produced a Road Map for the US for a carbon – free nuclear free future by 2050. It’s all absolutely doable technology economically and technologically speaking. It’s not happening because of the politicians don’t want it to happen.
 There is a link also between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Australian Conservation Foundation’s Dave Sweeney has said that Russia and all the other countries, in order to obtain Australian uranium, states that the uranium will only be for domestic purposes, and this is how they free up their domestic uranium for military purposes.
This is true for Russia, and also India which made their first atomic bombs from Canadian civilian power plant. Pakistan did the same thing – made bombs from a civilian power plant as did Israel, as did Britain, and probably China as well. So, you know, what’s the deal?
First, there is an artificial distinction between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. In the US they used “military” reactors specifically allocated to make plutonium for bombs, and the reactors to generate electricity were completely separate but now that separation has ceased to exist and the US is actually manufacturing tritium in the Watts Barr nuclear power reactor in Tennessee. Tritium is used as a booster in hydrogen bombs. They have therefore blurred the distinction, once and for all, between military and civilian reactors in America.
The Pro-Nuclear lobby is framing the debate in such a way that nuclear energy is the only choice available to Australia and they are framing everything else, such as all Renewables, as a cheap hippy joke. Has that been your experience in America?
It’s not a cheap hippy joke at all. In Congress, many members have their morals compromised by receiving funds from the nuclear industy, the car industry, and the coal and gas industry etc, so now the Energy Policy of the Congress is in total disarray with lobbying groups swarming all over the Congress pressuring members to vote for their own special interests. It’s just the most horrific situation because the world has passed the point of no return in global warming and to replace the fossil fuel industry with nuclear power is crazy. It’s like going from tobacco to crack.
Is this world heading for a global nuclear incineration?
Quite possibly. In fact when I wrote “The New Nuclear Danger: George Bush’s Military Industrial Complex” I really could not comprehend how we are still here. Nothing has changed since the Cold War, of the 30,000 H Bombs in the world, Russia and America own 97%, America has official policies and plans to “win” a pre-emptive nuclear war against Russia which will itself destroy the planet. There are enough nuclear weapons to “overkill” each person on the planet 12 times. A simple mistake made by the early waring system of either Russia or the US could induce the end of life of earth. Indeed errors such as this have occurred not infrequently. In fact, recently the Chinese hacked into the Pentagon’s computer system the other day so we live on the edge of a nuclear abyss every second of every day.
If Nuclear goes ahead, what’s the possibility of nuclear power plant sabotage?
High. I don’t know why we haven’t had a terrorist attack yet. They are just sitting there waiting to be attacked. Having nuclear power in an age of terrorism is really insane. In fact, America has not beefed up its security at any of its nuclear power stations since 9/11 – it’s mad.
I know you have been a major part of Randy Atkin’s anti-nuclear documentary. What he has done is give us another part of the puzzle over nuclear and he has convincingly shown that the US Government wants nuclear in the ballpark to win the war in space. Do you accept the isotope Helium-3 theory that on the moon there’s a non-nuclear mineral that can fuel the Earth, if only it could be mined or do you think this is a smoke screen for taxpayers to pay for mining the moon?
The moon is a global commons and there is an UN international law, signed by all Nations to state just that. Nobody and no nation is allowed to mine the moon. Read my latest book “War In Heaven”.
www.nuclearfree.com
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