Now campaigns across the world demand to keep nuclear power plants open. A controversy between Helen Caldicott and Australian opposition leader Peter Dutton. He wants to build seven new nuclear reactors
On June 18, 2024, the Australian opposition leader, with his shadow cabinet, dropped the bombshell of making the upcoming elections in Australia a referendum on returning to nuclear power plant construction.
One day later ABC News Australia broadcast an interview with David Speers. They call this a decision between renewable energy and nuclear.
Only three days later, On June 22, 2024, the Australian antinuclear campaigner Helen Caldicott joined the debate with a line of reasoning that nobody had yet mentioned: Safety.
Helen Caldicott is best known for having founded several associations dedicated to opposing the use of nuclear power, depleted uranium munitions, and nuclear weapons. In the 1970s, she gained prominence in Australia, New Zealand and North America, speaking on the health hazards of radiation. After the Fukushima Daiichi explosions in Japan, that began on March 11, 2011, she began a several year long campaign calling out the dangers of nuclear power plants.
On June 22, 2024, Helen Caldicott sent an e-mail to friends and organizations, quoting from the introduction to her book: Crisis Without End. It’s a collection of talks by leading experts from Japan, the United States, Russia, and other nations on radiation-related health risks in Japan, impacts on the world’s oceans, the question of low-dosage radiation risks, crucial comparisons with Chernobyl, health and environmental impacts, and the unavoidable implications for the nuclear energy industry.
However now it seems as if the safety risks of nuclear power are forgotten or being pushed aside in the global efforts to bring back nuclear power stations.
Come back when TUC radio returns for excerpts from the two-day symposium at the NY Academy of Medicine on March 11 and 12, 2013, titled The Medical and Ecological Consequences of Fukushima. The excerpts are from the Archives of TUC Radio.
DATE: June 2024
CREDIT: Sky News Australia, ABC News Australia; Helen Caldicott: Crisis Without End
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 39.8MB)
