Several hundred people marched and rallied in Brisbane on Palm Sunday, calling for an end to the nuclear industry and nuclear weapons. Another theme of the rally was opposition to land mines and support of a campaign to clear land mines from countries where they are killing and maiming thousands. The keynote speaker was former Victorian Labor MLC and long-time activist Joan Coxsedge. On the eighth anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, we print the text of her talk.
I find it outrageous and disgusting that in 1994 we still have to fight against mainstream propaganda that tells us nuclear power is clean, cheap and safe. This slogan, which was invented by the industry itself in the 1950s, has survived the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe, when the reactor building's roof was blown off, releasing a radioactive cloud around the world that will last for thousands of years, and all the other near disasters occurring since that time, which tell us again and again that nuclear power is the opposite, being deadly dangerous, very expensive and filthy dirty.
We should remember that radioactive contamination of our earth did not begin or end with Chernobyl. The development of atomic weapons, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nuclear weapons tests that are still taking place and more than 100 accidents in nuclear facilities in more than 14 countries are part of the catalogue of horrors of military and civilian use of atomic energy, which go back to World War II.
According to the Congress of Radioactively Injured in Berlin, 15 to 40 million human beings around the world have already been contaminated by radiation. Windscale in Britain has such a disgusting safety record that authorities were forced to change its name to Sellafield. Radioactive pollution in the Irish Sea is so bad that if you were silly enough to swim in it you would probably come out with a permanent glow.
Unfortunately for us humans and our ailing environment, the worst is yet to come. Dotted throughout Britain, Europe and the United States are rapidly ageing reactors, some of which should have been decommissioned many years ago, but nobody knows how to do it. In any case, the cost is prohibitive. For the past three decades, governments and private operators have known this decommissioning problem was looming, but they sat on their hands doing absolutely nothing. The best they can come up with after all this time is to entomb the offending reactor in concrete and earth, which is rather symbolic when you think about it.
This attitude is symptomatic of the way the nuclear industry got going in the first place. It was initially developed towards the end of the second world war to create the ultimate weapon and was cruelly and cynically used against Japan despite Japan's readiness to surrender. This mass experiment was at least highly visible, whereas Washington's other deadly radioactive experiments against thousands of its own citizens and God knows who else have only just started coming out. Since day one, incredible secrecy, corruption and gross irresponsibility have been the hallmark of the nuclear state.
Forty years ago almost to the day, the lives of Marshall Islanders in the Pacific were permanently shattered when the United States exploded its first fully developed hydrogen bomb, code-named Castle Bravo. It vaporised a substantial part of Bikini Atoll at the north-western tip of the islands' main chain.
The islanders, wearing their traditional scanty clothing and covered in fine debris, spent two days paddling about barefoot in radioactive ash before being rescued. As a result, they suffered extensive burns and permanent exile from their homeland because of serious land and marine contamination. In the longer term, their traditional, natural and gentle lifestyle was gone forever.
Like the British at Maralinga, the US military made no measurements of general fallout from that first or 65 subsequent weapons tests in what was then a US protectorate, transforming it into the most contaminated land on this earth.
The Marshall Islanders themselves, four decades later, have completed the first phase of an independent health study of their community. This has revealed an incidence of thyroid cancers and tumours about a thousand times higher than would normally be expected, especially among women who were children during the 1950s, when testing was at its peak.
Washington's anti-human crypto-fascist philosophy was evident in Hiroshima immediately post-bomb, where the US military ran a so-called hospital for victims, but which was no more than a data-collection base, doing nothing to alleviate their horrible suffering. This callous attitude governs the way the entire nuclear industry operates. It certainly showed up after Chernobyl, which was treated as if it was merely a Cold War political football.
Western interests initially played down the seriousness of the accident, an attitude that still prevails. Later, they blamed the particular type of reactor and Soviet technology in general. We heard about the lack of a containment structure, despite the fact that many Western reactors are in exactly the same state. The nuclear-powered ships that pop in and out of our ports and which New Zealand had the good sense to ban, certainly have no containment structures; otherwise they would sink to the bottom of the ocean.
It is interesting sometimes going back and looking at old correspondence. I used to be the president of the Victorian ALP Anti-Uranium Policy Committee — which we disbanded a few years ago in disgust at the party's ongoing betrayal on this issue — and in that capacity I wrote to Hans Blix, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the supposed nuclear monitoring body, about the need to support programs to help the victims of Chernobyl and to act to improve the safety of nuclear reactors in that region.
His reply was revealing, as you would expect from a man who heads a rotten, corrupt agency which is no more than a front for the international nuclear establishment, whose bully boy "inspectors" run around the world selectively inventing nuclear threats in places like Iraq and North Korea, while other places like Israel amass a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons and get away with it. Blix repeated the scandalous official pro-nuclear line that Chernobyl had caused few health problems. The greatest problem, he said, was mass hysteria. I dare say you'd be pretty hysterical too if you lived near Chernobyl. Here are a few facts.
At least 600,000 people who helped in the clean-up were exposed to lethal radiation. A few days elapsed before the zone of death was recognised and the inhabitants were evacuated. In the years following the disaster, more and more villages at a greater distance from the reactor are being moved out. Up to now, about 118,000 people have been resettled with a further 110,000 expected to follow. But that is a drop in the bucket.
Almost 4 million people, 500,000 of them children, are still living in areas that are moderately to severely contaminated. The higher the radiation level, the greater the chance that cellular genetic damage will occur. The cell dies, becomes cancerous or is horribly deformed. We are talking not only about human cells but animal and plant cells as well.
The lives of those affected are blighted. They suffer from chronic breathing difficulties, anaemia, thyroid dysfunction, damage to all hormone-producing organs and various forms of cancer. According to medical opinion, the diseases which have occurred so far are only the tip of the iceberg.
Long-term effects from Hiroshima took seven to eight years to appear, whereas the effects from Chernobyl have become visible within three years. The population, especially children, have been further endangered by contaminated food still being grown around the area. In Russia it is correctly called "dirty food" and could affect some 2 million children.
The concrete sarcophagus built over the destroyed block has been leaking right from the beginning, and another disaster threatens from the one ton of uranium still inside the reactor. The immense weight of the sarcophagus — 600,000 tons — is causing tension that will create even more fissures.
As an aside, Cuba has treated free of charge some 11,000 of the most seriously affected children from Chernobyl.
The Orwellian language trotted out speaks for itself. Nuclear industry jargon for the Chernobyl catastrophe is, believe it or not, "maximum credible accident", the implication being that if the accident had been any bigger it would have been "incredible". Three Mile Island in the US very nearly was.
It seems as if nothing has been learned. Nothing. The US "gift" to the future will be a very deep, very filthy rubbish dump containing millions of tonnes of radioactive waste. The waste will be stored in 200-litre plastic-lined steel barrels deposited 700 metres underground in chambers in the south-east desert of New Mexico.
The United States government has decreed that the dump remain sealed and intact for 10,000 years, a completely arbitrary figure. Some waste, such as plutonium-239, will be just as dangerous in 24,000 years time. So why the figure 10,000? Listen to this one: the US Environmental Protection Agency decided that this was the longest time for which scientists could still make "meaningful calculations".
These underground chambers in New Mexico, called WIPP or Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, will be the first permanent home for 50 years of accumulated lethal residue from atomic and nuclear weapons production in the US, the nation that discovered how to release the atom's awesome energy. Uncle Sam has already spent more than $1.4 billion over 15 years and will no doubt spend a lot more before 1998, the year they hope to begin storing the 300,000 steel drums full of this sinister garbage.
The government tried to start stocking the waste plant in 1991, but a lawsuit from New Mexico blocked the attempt and is still under review. It is generally acknowledged that the drums will corrode and leak within decades, but by then it is hoped the surrounding salt will seal in the active gaseous garbage for eternity.
I wonder how these pro-nuclear lunatics will go about warning a million unborn generations to keep out of this hell-hole? To grapple with this impossible task, the US Energy Department, responsible for nuclear waste, assembled a panel of experts representing architecture, anthropology, semiotics, linguistics and geomorphology to face this science fiction challenge of putting up a marker. Don't laugh, but science fiction writers were actually invited to attend — though apparently the fees weren't tempting enough.
Here is another terrifying example of the sick minds of the criminal lunatics who run the nuclear industry. Fifty years ago, hot on the heels of the world's first sustained nuclear fission reaction, US Army engineers with the Manhattan Project descended on the small town of Hanford, situated in a corner of Washington state. They chose the site because of its sparse population, the Columbia River with its plentiful clear cold water and the abundance of electricity.
The poor sods who lived there — about 1200 families — were swamped by 50,000 construction workers who built a metallurgical factory to make, extract and refine plutonium for nuclear weapons. Hanford delivered its first plutonium to the bomb-makers at Los Alamos early in 1945 and remained America's primary source of the element until 1986. Plutonium is the most toxic substance known to humankind. One microgram is enough to kill a human being.
Although the US nuclear industry is spread over 14 main locations, the Hanford Reservation of 1456 sq km — almost as big as Greater London — is estimated to hold two-thirds of its highly radioactive wastes. Beneath the wilderness where elk, deer and rabbits abound, is an environmental nightmare where cauldrons of highly radioactive soup bump and burp, belching flammable gases. Deadly poisons inch their way through the soil to the beautiful Columbia River. A full tonne of plutonium may be lying under the sand buried among thousands of tonnes of solid wastes — more than enough to exterminate the world many times over — but no-one really knows because the records are so poor, no doubt to hide their crimes.
The burping tanks boiled for years with the heat of their own radioactivity and destroyed any rubber, plastics and oils indiscriminately dumped into them. They are still highly radioactive. Hanford has 177 such tanks; 18 of them belch and burp. Exactly what chemical complexities have been created in these simmering cauldrons is anybody's guess.
Approximately 190,000 cubic metres of lethal solid waste and 760 billion litres of slightly less radioactive liquid waste and other toxic materials were stored, dumped or poured into the ground. Three gigantic concrete canyons where plutonium was separated from spent nuclear fuel are spaced 16 km apart.
When Hanford ceased plutonium production, the process of declassifying details of 40 years of intense activity began. In 1989, it was given the new task of pioneering techniques for cleaning up all the nuclear production sites across the US, probably because Hanford was the most seriously contaminated of the lot.
The US government wants the site cleaned up by the year 2020. And this will make you puke. The prime contractor is Westinghouse Hanford Company, a subsidiary of Westinghouse Electric Corporation, which created the deadly mess in the first place and fiddled the records.
Westinghouse is laughing all the way to the bank, because its main clean-up will be billions of dollars of taxpayers' money, $50-$200 billion worth. No-one seems too sure of the cost because they haven't yet worked out how to define "clean"! You can bet your bottom dollar it will be the "lowest common denominator" and will cost heaps and heaps.
Where does Australia fit into the nuclear equation? We have about a quarter of the world's uranium, which — despite what are laughingly called "safeguards" — can end up anywhere, including in bombs and nuclear weapons, in fast breeder reactors to make weapons-grade plutonium and, no doubt, inside the Chernobyl reactor.
Since 1982, when the leadership of the Labor Party lied and connived to change our previous anti-uranium position, Australian mining companies would be allowed to flog our uranium to the devil himself, if there was a market in hell. But there isn't. The world market has collapsed, especially with the demise of the Soviet bloc and the release of huge uranium stockpiles, with the price being pushed down to rock bottom.
Mining company screams for the ending of the so-called restrictions of the ALP's three-mine policy therefore ring hollow. As a result of the uranium glut, it is very much a buyers' market, creating even more lethal dangers. Overseas purchasers can now demand that sellers take back their uranium waste. This increases the clout of those irresponsible bastards within Australia who want to turn this country — or at least the Aboriginal part — into a nuclear waste dump, despite the fact that there is no known safe method for storing such wastes.
People who believe our government when they say they're not going down that path should take a look at the amount of money Australia has already spent, and is still spending, on high-level nuclear waste storage research — at least six times the amount spent on all other energy research put together.
We can't just sit on our hands doing nothing about this appalling state of affairs. We must fight and fight and go on fighting to wipe out our disgraceful part in the nuclear fuel cycle, as a step towards world peace. Nuclear energy and the drive towards war go hand in glove. We should remember the women's peace camps as far apart as Pine Gap in Australia and Seneca Falls in New York state, fighting against nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. They were inspired by the gutsy women of Greenham Common to take direct non-violent action against the nuclear state.
I was privileged to go to all of those peace camps, so what better way for me to end up than with a women's peace encampment poem affirming life:
We say no to the threat of global holocaust,
no to the arms race, no to death.
We say yes to a world where people,
animals, plants and the earth itself
are respected and valued.