Caldicott - Nuclear madness: what you can do

ALSO BY HELEN CALDICOTT

Missile Envy

If You Love This Planet

Copyright 1994, 1978 by Helen Caldicott

All rights reserved

Book design by Chris Welch

ISBN 0-393-03603-0

ISBN 0-393-31011-6 (pbk)

ISBN 978-0-39331-011-5

ISBN 978-0-393-28585-7 (e-book)

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

www.wwnorton.com

To my children and children-in-law, Philip, Fiona, Penelope,
Eric, and William; and to my grandchildren, Mikhael and
Rachel

S ince I first wrote Nuclear Madness in 1978, many things have happened. In March 1979, Three Mile Island (TMI) melted down and became a household word for the horrors of nuclear power. Then in March 1986, Chernobyl blew its top and distributed radioactivity throughout Europe and indeed the Northern Hemisphere. As many as half a million people could be condemned to die of cancer or leukemia, or to be born genetically deformed, as a result of this catastrophe.

Australia elected a Labour Government in 1982, led by Prime Minister Bob Hawke, which overthrew its own anti-uranium policy enacted in the 1970s as a result of enlightened moves by the Australian Council of Trade Unions. But despite the fact that Australia exports uranium to nine countries now, we have no commercial nuclear power plants, and at this stage only a small, aging, very dirty research reactor on the outskirts of Sydney.

I returned to live in Australia in 1987, after fourteen years in the United States. During the intervening years I visited North America on lecture tours at least twice a year and have kept abreast of policies and changes in the nuclear scene. Amazing revelations have surfaced both in the United States and the Confederation of Independent States (CIS) over the last four years, exposing the most horrific radioactive mess contaminating the land of most states of the United States of America and many of the republics of the former Soviet Union.

Together, the nuclear establishments of the cold war warriors have engaged in the biggest cover-up in the history of the world. The legacy of cold war nuclear bomb production translates into a hot war of contaminated food, air, and water, both for us and for all future generations of humans, animals, and plants.

And to make matters worse, despite the horror and sense of repulsion evoked by Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the nuclear power industry of the United States has been diligently working to reassure an uneasy public that nuclear power is clean, cheap, and safe.

One of its arguments is that no greenhouse gases are produced at nuclear reactors. But the truth is that the main global warming gas, carbon dioxide, is emitted at each step of the nuclear fuel chain, from uranium mining, milling, enrichment, fuel fabrication, construction of the reactor, transportation and storage of radioactive waste, and decommissioning of old reactors. So nuclear power adds to greenhouse warming as well as to radioactive pollution.

Nuclear power is now by far the most expensive form of electricity production, if one calculates the cumulative cost of taxpayer subsidies to the industry at each step of the fuel chain, from uranium mining right through to the storage of radioactive waste.

It is also obviously extremely unsafe, as opposed to the fallacious claims made by the nuclear industry in their eye-catching advertisements. This book enumerates the medical dangers at each step of the nuclear fuel chain.

The number of jobs created by an almost defunct industry are minute compared to the number of potential jobs that could be created by constructing massive solar and wind electricity farms, backfitting every building in the United States to solar power, and ensuring that all new buildings are heated, cooled, and powered by the sun and wind.

What a vision for a grand new world, and what a wonderful model for the developing world, which could be so inspired by this example that it might be helped to bypass the fossile fuel and nuclear era, thus reducing greenhouse warming and additional nuclear pollution.

But as nuclear power becomes more and more distasteful to U.S. citizens, General Electric, Westinghouse, and other nuclear companies are bandying their wares to other countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Taiwan, China, and former Eastern Bloc States. No country has a solution to the storage of radioactive waste. Most pretend that it does not exist. They turn a blind eye to the problem, while the thermally hot, used fuel rods pulsate with radiation in their fuel pools, promising an uncertain and dangerous future for our children and all future generations.

Recent revelations sparked by the U.S. Secretary of Energy, Hazel OLeary, have exposed Nazi-like radiation experiments which were performed on more than 1,000 innocent American citizens throughout the Cold War years.

From 1946 to 1956, 49 retarded boys at the Fernald State School in Waltham, Massachusetts, were fed radioactive iron and calcium in their breakfast cereal by scientists from Harvard and MIT without their parents informed consent. A dose equivalent of 50 X-rays was incurred. Many of these boys have since died without any followup. The experiments were sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission and Quaker Oats.

750 poor, pregnant women were given radioactive iron at a free prenatal clinic at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, exposing their fetuses to radiation levels thirty times above normal. At least three of the children died of cancer by the age of eleven.

As recently as 1971 over 100 prisoners in Oregon and Washington state prisons were paid $5 a month so that scientists could irradiate their testicles with extremely high doses of radiation. They all became temporarily sterile. They were later given vasectomies to avoid the possibility of contaminating the general population with radiation-induced mutants, according to Dr. Carl Heller who ran the experiments. Catholics were exempted from the vasectomy.

At the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine in the 60s and 70s, indigent cancer patients were exposed to very high levels of radiation so they developed acute radiation illness. Nine of the first forty irradiated died within 38 days.

The Oak Ridge National Laboratories in Tennessee exposed nearly 500 patients with leukemia and other cancers to exceptionally high levels of radiation from radioactive cesium and cobalt, including a six-year-old boy.

Argonne National Laboratories outside Chicago injected 18 patients with plutonium between 1945 and 1947. All have since died.

Seven newborn babies, six of whom were black, were injected with radioactive iodine to see if it was absorbed by their thyroid glands.

Between 1960 and 1971, the Atomic Energy Commission irradiated 87 destitute cancer patients with hundreds of rads (battlefield doses) to determine what level of radiation would cause a soldier to not follow orders, be dysfunctional or throw up in his face mask in an airplane. Nine died within twenty days of irradiation. These patients had an average IQ of 86.

An army study in the 1950s gave radioactive iodine to Eskimos and Indians in Alaska and to GIs stationed there to study thyroid function in cold weather.

NASA signed an agreement with the AEC in 1964 to perform radiation experiments on people to determine how much radiation from the sun would affect astronauts.

The Department of Energy is still engaged in scores of radiation experiments for its own research.

The CIA is not cooperating in the review ordered by Secretary OLeary but, according to Mr. Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, the CIA tests were more secret and more lethal than other departmental experiments.