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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, 2026 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.

Brief biography
Dr Helen Caldicott FRACP, paediatrician
Founding President of Physicians for Social Responsibility - co-winner of 1985 Nobel Peace Prize
Author of Nuclear Madness; Missile Envy; If You Love This Planet; A Passionate Life.
Subject of two documentaries
1. Eight Minutes to Midnight - nominated for 1982 Academy Award
2. If You Love This Planet - winner of 1983 Academy Award