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by Helen Caldicott
Posted: 01/01/01
THE ETHICAL
IMPLICATIONS OF THE NUCLEAR AGE WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO AUSTRALIA
“WE DIDN’T INHERIT THE
EARTH FROM OUR ANCESTORS, WE BORROWED IT FROM OUR DESCENDENTS”
The nuclear age began
when Madam Curie discovered radiation in the late part of the 19th
century. Although contributing vastly to scientific knowledge, she, her
daughter, and numerous lab assistants died of malignancies and diseases
related to radiation. She had handled only tiny amounts of radium which
she extracted painstakingly from uranium ore. Her discoveries along with
those of Albert Einstein and others made possible the use of nuclear
fission in weapon production. It wasn’t until the Manhattan Project was
instigated in the early 1940s that the nuclear age began in earnest with
the large scale manufacture of radioactive materials for the production of
three atomic bombs. 1. The first was code-named Trinity, after the Father,
Son and Holy Ghost, and was tested in the desert of New Mexico at
Alamogordo early in 1945. As Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the
Manhattan Project watched this first nuclear explosion which harnessed the
forces of the stars, he murmured to himself “I am become death, the
shatterer of worlds”, a quote from the Bhagavad Gita. The second bomb
called Little Boy, a uranium bomb, was exploded on August 6th over
Hiroshima. This bomb killed approximately 200,000 people. Some survivors
from Hiroshima fled to the only Christian city in Japan thinking that
America would never bomb Nagasaki, but they arrived three days later, just
in time for the third weapon, Fat Man. This was a plutonium bomb which
killed about 120,000 people. The Japanese people often say “we understand
the first bomb, but why the second?”
MEDICAL HISTORY
Apart from some
classical human tragedies associated with the early use of radioactive
materials and X rays, scientific understanding of the medical effects of
radiation has been derived largely from the study of the survivors of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These people in Japan are called “hibakisha”. They
tend to be shunned by society, people are scared to marry them because
their offspring may be born deformed, they find it almost impossible to
obtain insurance, and the US Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission has examined
them and collated the data but offered them no treatment. They are in fact
“the guinea pigs” of the nuclear age. Their diseases began soon after the
explosions, with many dying from pneumonia and common infections because
their immune systems had been damaged by the radiation. Others died of
acute radiation sickness, experiencing massive haemorrhage, infections,
hair loss, diarrhea and vomiting because the intensity of the radiation
they received destroyed the actively dividing blood, gut and skin and hair
cells. There was of course a high incidence of spontaneous abortions
amongst those pregnant at the time of the bombs.
Five years after the
explosions leukemia increased thirty times amongst the survivors; this
epidemic continued for five years. Starting fifteen years later solid
cancers of stomach, ovary, bowel, breast, lung, and thyroid doubled
amongst the survivors. Interestingly, although it is now fifty years
later, new cancers are appearing in other organs such as bone marrow and
urinary tract. In other words the medical profession is still in the
initial process of understanding the latent periods of carcinogenesis for
specific radiation induced cancers. What is more worrying is that it can
take up to twenty generations before the true genetic effects reveal
themselves amongst the progeny of the victims. Radiation induces genetic
mutations in both the somatic or ordinary body cells and in the germ calls
- eggs and sperm. Somatic mutations tend to cause cancer, and mutations in
the germ cells can induce a variety of genetic and chromosomal diseases -
more than 3000. But the damage to the unborn does not stop there. If a
genetically normal embryo is irradiated, important developmental cells may
be killed, so that the baby is born deformed - like the thalidomide babies
who were born without limbs, and other severe developmental abnormalities.
This form of embryonic damage is called teratogenesis.
NUCLEAR DEVELOPMENTS
Unfortunately after
the end of the second world war, several attempts were made to prevent the
ongoing development of nuclear weapons, but these proved singularly
unsuccessful. America continued apace to produce more atomic bombs, Russia
got the secret and the nuclear arms race began in earnest. Edward Teller,
Oppenheimer’s colleague then designed the “super bomb”, or hydrogen bomb
which could be made large enough to incinerate millions of people in one
shot. Oppenheimer was appalled at this invention, Teller nevertheless
prevailed, he accused Oppenheimer of being a communist, Teller won the
battle, and hydrogen bombs became the new weapons of the arms race that
were produced in their thousands.
The Hiroshima bomb was
equivalent to 13,000 tons of TNT, but hydrogen bombs can be equivalent to
20 million tons of TNT. The largest ever exploded was 50 million tons
equivalent. In fact one large bomb, if exploded in space, thus increasing
its diameter of destruction could incinerate 6 western states of the
United States.
In all, the US built a
total of 70,000 nuclear weapons during the cold war and Russia, who always
stupidly copied and followed the US made about 55,000. We were immensely
lucky to escape annihilation during those years, but escape we did. A huge
antinuclear global movement was created during the late seventies and
eighties led largely by physicians, churches, educators, psychologists,
businessmen, architects, computer technologists, scientists and others.
Indeed the American Catholic Bishops led by Cardinal Bernadin wrote a
Pastoral Letter on the moral and theological implications of the arms race
and nuclear war doctrines. The Methodist Bishops then followed suit as did
many other denominations.
This vast global
movement led to a series of unforseen events inaugurated by Mikhail
Gorbechev, Helmut Kohl, and others, and the cold war suddenly ended in
1989. This global movement which arose because of intense nuclear war
anxiety during the height of the Reagan years suddenly was placated and
went quiet. It was assumed that the nuclear arsenals would be dismantled
by the superpowers and we would all be safe. But unfortunately this is not
to be.
CURRENT THREAT
Although the US Joint
Chiefs of Staff and others high up in the American military are not now in
favour of nuclear weapons, a handful of powerful men at the Strategic Air
Command, still strongly support the possible use of these genocidal
devices. Hence, the US has 2500 hydrogen bombs on the highest state of
alert ready to be launched with the turn of a key. Russia, no longer a
global super power except for its nuclear status, has 2000 on hair trigger
alert to match the US. A nuclear exchange or nuclear war would take only
one hour to complete. Nuclear Winter or the end of most life on this
fragile planet could be caused, it is thought, by the explosion of one
thousand bombs over one hundred cities. There are more than enough on
“hair trigger alert” to induce this scenerio. Thus we are still faced with
the possible, nay probable, annihilation of God’s creation and nobody, no
nation, no states- person, no church body is saying a word.
AUTRALIA’S ROLE
URANIUM MINING
Australia, to take one
example is moving rapidly into the latest phase of the nuclear age,
opening up uranium mines in South Australia, Western Australia, Queensland
and the Northern Territory. Foreign multinationals are rapidly taking
control of the uranium industry. In South Australia, two foreign firms,
one American -General Atomics at Beverley, and one Canadian - Southern
Cross Resources at Honeymoon are “mining” uranium by injecting
concentrated sulphuric acid directly into the soil, removing the solution,
and extracting the uranium. All the liquid waste containing sulphuric
acid, radioactive elements and heavy metals is discharged into ground
water directly above the Great Artesian Basin. But more damage is
occurring to this most precious of water supplies in our parched land.
Western mining, an Australian conglomerate, uses 33 million litres per day
from the Great Artesian Basin for its Olympic Dam uranium, copper and gold
mine. It is actually licensed to use 42 million litres per day. This water
is lost to evapouration. All this in a parched country suffering from
salination and pollution of its greatest river systems!
Uranium of course is
the fuel for nuclear reactors, be they for the generation of electrical
power, or for weapons manufacture. When uranium is fissioned, 200 new man
made radioactive elements, all biologically more dangerous than the
original uranium are generated. Because of the intense radioactivity of
this material, uranium becomes one million times more radioactive when
fissioned in a nuclear reactor. These elements or isotopes constitute
nuclear waste.
NUCLEAR WASTE
Man-made isotopes
remain radioactive variously from seconds to millions of years. I will now
describe just several of these elements and their biological properties.
Strontium 90, which concentrates at each step of the food chain from soil
to grass to cows milk to human breast milk, has a radioactive life of 600
years. The body cannot differentiate between radioactive and non
radioactive elements. Hence, because strontium 90 resembles calcium, it is
absorbed from the gut after ingestion and laid down in growing bones and
teeth. It irradiates small volumes of surrounding cells for many years.
Inevitably some regulatory genes are mutated and cancer - bone or leukemia
( cancer of the white blood cells), could later develop in that
individual.
Caesium 137 lasts for
600 years also, it concentrates in meat and bodily muscle where it can
induce very malignant tumors called sarcomas.
Radioactive iodine is
produced in two forms in nuclear reactors - Iodine 131 which lasts for 6
weeks and Iodine 129 which has a half life of 17 million years. Iodine is
concentrated specifically in the thyroid gland, particularly in foetuses
and growing children. Large intrauterine doses of radio-iodine can damage
thyroid function so much that the baby will be born mentally retarded - a
cretin. Smaller doses are extremely carcinogenic, and indeed over 1000
children near Chernobyl have had their thyroids surgically removed because
they developed thyroid cancer - a situation unheard of in medical history.
Plutonium, apart from being the fuel for nuclear weapons is described by
its founder, Glenn Seaborg as one of the most deadly elements known to the
human race. It should never enter the environment It is an anathema to
Gods creation. Plutonium virtually did not exist until man fissioned
uranium. It is so exceedingly toxic that one thousand millionth of a gram
has been known to cause cancer in dogs, and it is assumed that that minute
amount is also a carcinogenic dose for humans. Plutonium has recently been
found to be many times more soluble than originally thought, hence it can
move readily through soils and food chains.
Once in the human
body, it can induce lung, liver, and bone cancer and leukemia. It causes
melanoma and testicular cancer, it crosses the placenta into the
developing embryo there to induce teratogenic changes, and it has a
predilection for testicles where it mutates genes which determine the
characteristics of future generations. And last but not least it has a
half life of 24,400 years, meaning that it is radioactive for half a
million years.
To give a long-term
scenerio - the plutonium lives on to enter testicle after testicle for the
rest of time, while the damaged genes are propagated generation after
generation also for the rest of time. Plutonium contamination of the
environment will inevitable induce random compulsory genetic engineering,
and the man-made destruction of God’s perfection. Plutonium is a byproduct
of nuclear fission, and approximately 250 kilograms are manufactured each
year in a 1000 megawatt nuclear power plant.
AUSTRALIA’S ROLE IN
THE PROLIFERATION OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS
But plutonium, is the
raw fuel for nuclear weapons. Hence any country that buys our uranium can,
if it so chooses, make its own nuclear weapons, despite the process of
international inspection of nuclear power plants by the International
Atomic Energy Agency, which is pitifully understaffed. Hence, Australia,
by selling uranium is inevitably contributing in the future to the
proliferation of nuclear weapons. Any small nuclear nation could trigger a
global holocaust between the superpowers.
NUCLEAR REACTOR IN
SYDNEY
But mining and export
of uranium on the international market is not the only moral problem
confronting Australia at this time. The current Federal Government has
also decided to build a new nuclear reactor twice the size of the present
old reactor at Lucas Heights, in the heart of a Sydney suburb, surrounded
by 13 schools and kindergartens. The tenders are out to France, Germany,
Argentina and Canada, and the contract to build the reactor will be signed
as early as June this year. There has been no public debate on this
alarming turn of events, the environmental impact statement studies only
the site suitability and not the reactor, and the government has been very
secretive about this development.
A senior government
bureaucrat on ABC radio said on March 29, 1998 that ‘the government
decided to starve the opponents of oxygen so that it could dictate the
manner of debate that would follow the announcement. Because the
government couldn’t win on rational grounds ---‘ The deadly radioactive
elements made in reactors like Lucas Heights such as radioactive iodine,
strontium, caesium, tritium, etc, concentrate at each step of the food
chain, including fish. They are tasteless, odourless, and invisible, and
cancer will not develop for 5 to 60 years following ingestion as described
above. .For over forty years the old Lucas Heights reactor has been
polluting the air and water with carcinogenic radioactive materials,
including radio-iodine in large amounts and it is dumping tritium, a
deadly isotope into the ocean outfall at Cronulla.
No epidemiological
study has been done of the surrounding population. This old reactor could
experience a major accident at some point, melting down in a period of
eight minutest, flooding Sydney with as much radioactive iodine as that
released from the disastrous accident at Sellafield in England in 1957.
The site at Lucas Heights is also a high level radioactive dumping ground.
Spent fuel rods from the reactor which are intensely radioactive are
buried in the ground, where they are already discharging radioactive
elements into the ground water, which drains into the Georges and Woronora
Rivers. Nowhere in the US would the nuclear industry be allowed to bury
spent fuel rods in the ground. Plutonium and its more dangerous cousin
americium are also buried in the soil opposite the Lucas Heights reactor
at a place called Little Forest Burial Grounds.
PRIVATISATION
As the various states
of Australia sell off the electrical generating capacity that once
belonged to the people, so foreign multinationals are moving into the
industry. In Victoria, Kennett sold part of the system to General Public
Utilities, an American corporation which owns and operates Three Mile
Island - the reactor which suffered a meltdown in 1978. South Australia is
about to privatise her electrical industry, and several of the interested
parties are also foreign nuclear corporations. As we lose control of our
grid, so these companies can operate at will. Does this mean that we will
be hosting nuclear power plants in the near future and all the dangers
they impart? Quite possibly.
But there are even
more serious moral dilemmas facing Australia at the current time. The
United States of America and England have a problem with their radioactive
waste. There are 103 nuclear power plants in the US and several more in
Britain. Each year one third of the intensely radioactive fuel rods are
removed from a nuclear power plant and stored in what is euphemistically
called a “swimming pool” beside the reactor core. This is a big pool of
water and the rods must be stored here for at least 5 years before they
can be moved because they are both so thermally and radioactively hot, and
terribly dangerous. If not continually cooled they could themselves melt
down and release their deadly contents into the air. But cooling pools at
many old reactors are full, re-racking has occurred allowing the rods to
be stored more closely than originally planned. This is dangerous in
itself because an overfull cooling pool can experience a meltdown. The
long and short of it is that unless these spent fuel pools are cleared of
their contents, many nuclear plants will be forced to close because the
utilities will have nowhere to store their deadly waste. Americans are
understandably very nervous about any plans to transport these incredibly
dangerous cargos in casks across their country to a mountain in Nevada,
called Yucca Mountain. 3000 shipments would traverse America through 43
states annually for the next thirty years before some of the backlog could
be cleared. The bill, dubbed the Mobile Chernobyl Bill is currently up
before the US House of Representatives for a vote, heavily sponsored by
the nuclear industry. But President Clinton has repeatedly said he would
veto such a bill. What then is the backstop position? Australia, with a
vast and uninhabitable desert.
AUSTRALIA’S ROLE
At the moment a
multinational company based in Canada called Pangea has decided that
Australia would be a suitable country to store the vast quantity of the
global high level nuclear waste. Indeed its activities have been supported
by Australian of the Year Sir Gustav Nosal, an eminent biologist employed
by Pangea as a consultant for the last two years. Pangea lobbyists have
been very visible in the corridors of Parliament House in Canberra over
the last year, and our vast and ancient continent is under dire threat.
This company plans to import 75,000 metric tonnes, or three quarters of
the world’s radioactive waste and bury it in the desert either in South or
Western Australia. This waste would contain more than 95% of the world’s
radioactivity inventory.
According to Pangea
the repository will measure 7 by 2 kilometres, it will be operational for
40 years, and 70 ships will be required to transport the waste from
foreign ports to a port as yet unnamed in Australia. There it will be
unloaded, and transported by train to the dump site somewhere in the
desert. People (public and workers) will risk being exposed to radiation
at every step of this international nuclear transportation route The
nuclear waste must be isolated from the environment for a million years or
more. But it will be stored in stainless steel containers that will rust
within 20 years. Although the desert has been dry and stable for millions
of years, global warming scientists predict massive rainfalls in the
centre of Australia over the next 100 years. Water will transport the
radioactive elements into the undergound aquifers and depending upon the
location of the dump the Great Artesian Basin may also be at risk. In our
parched land where water is the life line, polluting the aquifers with
radioactive waste is the height of stupidity. These elements will then
contaminate the cattle, food chains and humans for the rest of time, let
alone indiginous plants and animals. Genetic abnormalities and cancer will
become the norm in all these life forms.
ACTION
We, as Australians
have a sacred responsibility to protect this country and its people from
the life- destroying properties of the nuclear fuel cycle. Australia has
unique flora and fauna which are parts of God’s creation. Our children are
our future, sacred gifts from the creator. It is therefore time that we as
a nation took heed and reacted in a proactive fashion to the insidious
threat of the nuclear industry in our country. Particularly the Catholic
Church has a vital role to play in these ignoble activities. With its
laudable intervention during the 1980s in the form of the American
Catholic Bishops Pastoral Letter on the moral iniquities of the nuclear
arms race and nuclear war, it would now seem appropriate that the
Australian Catholic church plays a vital role in this nuclear debate at
all levels - uranium mining, a new reactor in Sydney and the proposed
radioactive waste dump. This is truly the ultimate “right to life issue”.
A right to be born without genetic malformations, a right to eat and drink
non-radioactive food, a right to live a normal life-span without the
threat of early cancer and the right to live without the ever present
threat of nuclear war. Above all, we are the curators of life on earth, we
hold it in the palm of our hand, a sacred trust with God. Let us take heed
and become the true curators for God.
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