Posted on 10/08/2004 12:00:24 PM PDT by Tom Pain
Activist: Fight nuclear power
Disarmament advocate talks at IWU, ISU
By Michele Steinbacher msteinbacher@pantagraph.com
BLOOMINGTON -- Nuclear arsenals still point at the world's cities more than a decade after the Cold War, and atomic power plants like the one in Clinton dot the nation's landscape. That should terrify Americans into action, one of the world's leading advocates for nuclear disarmament told Central Illinois residents Thursday.
"Why do you have all these missiles if Russia is now your best friend?" Dr. Helen Caldicott asked a crowd gathered at an Illinois Wesleyan University lecture hall Thursday. Later that night she spoke at Illinois State University.
Caldicott, founder and president of the Washington, D.C.-based Nuclear Policy Research Institute, also urged her audience to consider the medical hazards associated with so-called clean nuclear energy -- and to fight plans to build a second nuclear reactor in Clinton.
"It would be the 14th reactor in this state, a state that already has the most in the nation," she said.
"You live in a very, very dangerous area," she added.
The pediatrician told the afternoon crowd that as a physician she knows the effects of nuclear energy and radiation.
Born and raised in Australia, she also knows it firsthand as a melanoma survivor.
The Earth's ozone layer, which filters out harmful solar radiation, has developed a hole over the Southern Hemisphere. That has led to a melanoma epidemic there, she said.
Chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons eat away the ozone layer. Aerosol propellants and refrigerants played a role, but so do the gases produced when uranium is enriched for nuclear fuel, she said.
"This planet is in the intensive care unit. It's an acute clinical emergency on our hands -- and its not physics or biology that's caused this, but men's minds."
Citing nuclear disasters from Pennsylvania's Three-Mile Island in the 1970s to Ukraine's Chernobyl in the 1980s, Caldicott told the audience Americans need to work to close the nation's 103 nuclear power plants.
"If one of them blows, the consequences would be devastating," she said. She lamented U.S. reluctance to study the long-term effects of Three-Mile Island. She said she believes nearby dairy cows provided milk to the Hershey chocolate factory just 13 miles away, resulting in carcinogenic chocolates. And the physician called Chernobyl a "catastrophe of unknown proportions."
The U.S. military has built 77,000 nuclear weapons, she added. Russia and the United States house about 97 percent of the nuclear weapons in the world, she said, but those nations take a microscope to countries, such as North Korea, with only a handful of them.
She described a what-if situation involving Russian missiles hitting Bloomington.
The IWU lecture hall and people in a five-mile radius would be disintegrated. The blast would create a crater three-quarters of a mile wide, she said.
A nuclear war would throw so much dust in the atmosphere, sunlight would be blocked out for nearly a year.
Referring to Chechen rebels' massacre of Russian schoolchildren last month, Caldicott said people should consider the horror that would come from such terrorists reaching the Russian nuclear missiles.
She also worries about the safety of radioactive waste at U.S. reactors.
"A terrorist could fly a plane into a cooling pool," she said, referring to the water reservoirs where spent fuel is stored.
Caldicott co-founded Physicians for Social Responsibility. The 23,000-member organization works to educate colleagues about the dangers of nuclear power and nuclear weapons.
Nobel Prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling nominated Caldicott for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985.
The author of five books, Caldicott is best-known for her 1979-published "Nuclear Madness." Her most recent work is "The New Nuclear Danger: George Bush's Military Industrial Complex."
Caldecott's institute is co-sponsoring a public symposium on "Nuclear Power and Children's Health" Oct. 15 and 16 in Chicago. For more information, see the institute's Web site, www.nuclearpolicy.org
Born and raised in Australia, she also knows it firsthand as a melanoma survivor.
Melanoma survivor may make for a sympathetic story, but this is one cancer that is not attributed to radiation. Lung Cancer, Leukemia yes, but Melanoma, no.
You need more candy in your diet. You're taking me WAAAAAYYY to seriesly.
I do that sometimes.
I wasn't aware there was a connection between the ozone and uranium processing. Does she suggest we should not use radiation even for piece time uses. She probably had radiation treatment for her cancer along with a million other patients.
"Most men prefer Milk Chocolate."
You've been deceived by Stealth Chocolate Liberals. REAL men eat the cacao beans unprocessed and unsweetened, right off the harvest truck, dirt and all. MILK is for infants and calves. LOL
"I and a friend of mine managed to push our group to a proposal of Mutally Assured Destruction. And that the best way to ensure the peace was by build up...I'll never forget the look on her face when we presented that..."
DANG! An aberration in the Public Diseducation System! You've skewed the results! DON'T think outside the empty missle silo like that! You want America to stay SOVEREIGN?!?!?
I WISH I could have joined you for that. Especially since you said it was 1984!
Good Work, rattle their cages every chance you get.
I knew that.....LOL.
"...this Lady is just agenda driven and not science driven."
Even so for most all of the rancid Left. Virtually all of the leftwing scare stories have been discredited over the years, or just plain disproven. This hag is reading from a twenty year-old script--amazing she hasn't exhausted her alloted 15 minutes of fame as yet.
It's not a problem, I only eat dark chocolate.
The author of five books, Caldicott is best-known for her 1979-published "Nuclear Madness." Her most recent work is "The New Nuclear Danger: George Bush's Military Industrial Complex."
I must have missed her other book, "The New Nuclear Danger: Bill Clinton's Military Industrial Complex."
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