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by Helen Caldicott
Posted: 11/30/97
Selling U.S.-made reactors to China
is hugely dangerous for all the world, far into the future.
During and since the recent visit
it to Washington by Chinese Premier Jiang Zemin, two myths have been
promulgated by the Clinton administration: that the U.S. cares about human
rights in China, and that the $60-billion sale of about 50 nuclear
reactors to China would help to alleviate global warming. Let us deal with
the first myth. If President Clinton and his guests at the dinner given
honour Jiang were in any way concerned about human rights, then
Westinghouse, GE and other nuclear reactor companies would be forced to
abstain from their profit-making agenda and address the medical,
biological and genetic ramifications of selling nuclear power to China.
These are the firms that for months lobbied Congress and the White House
for this deal, which was approved and consummated during Jiang's visit.
Nuclear power creates massive
quantities of radioactive isotopes, which are classified as nuclear waste.
Among these materials are strontium 90, which remains radioactive for 600
years and concentrates in the food chain, like other isotopes, it is
tasteless, odourless and invisible. It acts like calcium in the human
body, where it enters bone and lac-tatting breast. It is a potent
carcinogen. causing bone cancer and/or leukemia and probably breast
cancer.
Another byproduct of the nuclear
energy process is cesium 137. It too remains radioactive for 600 ears.
concentrating in the loud chain and in human muscle, where it can induce
rare, extremely malignant muscle cancers called sarcoma's.
Last but not least is the isotope
plutonium. which is so carcinogenic that. hypothetically. one pound evenly
distributed could cause cancer in every person on Earth. Plutonium has a
radioactive life of half a million years. It enters the body through the
lung, where it is Known to cause cancer, it mimics iron in the body. Hence
it migrates to the bonet where it can induce bone cancer or leukemia or to
the liver, causing liver cancer; and it crosses the placenta into the
embryo, where, like the drug thali-domide, it can cause gross birth
deformities. Finally, it has a predilection for the testicles, thus
inducing genetic mutations in humans and other animals that are passed
from generation to generation for the rest of time. Meanwhile, the
plutonium itself lives on to enter testicle after testicle, lung after
lung. liver after liver for the rest of time as well.
Children are 10 to 20 times more
susceptible to the carcinogenic effects of radiation than are adults. It
is estimated that nuclear power by the year 2001 will have generated 1.139
tons of plutonium. whereas weapons will have contributed 250 tons in the
same period.
Repressive regimes come and go. but
nothing matches the extraordinary abuse of the random, compulsory genetic
engineering implicit in American business' nuclear deal with China, which
will condemn untold generations of humans and animals to cancer and
genetic diseases.
As for the second myth that nuclear
power is the answer to global warming: A friends of the Earth study
shelved that a nuclear power plant must operate for I8 years before
realising one net calorie of energy. This is because of the amount of
fossil fuel used in the manufacture and construction of the reactor and in
the mining of the uranium. The milling and enriching of the uranium and
the fabrication of the fuel rods. This calculation does not include
transport and storage of radioactive waste or decommissioning the reactor.
So nuclear power contributes both to global warning and. Massively, to the
global burden of manmade radioactivity.
Nuclear reactor manufacturers must
be forced to desist from their push to export nuclear power. If the
.American people have decisively decided that no new reactors will be
built in this country, the same criteria must be applied to China.
Indonesia and the former Eastern B'"' countries that are being persuaded '
L'.S. nuclear industry-- that nuclear p^. . is the answer to their energy
dreams.
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