Renowned Australian physician and anti-nuclear activist Dr. Helen Caldicott has for four decades lectured around the world about the medical dangers inherent in the use of radioactive materials for nuclear energy and weapons. Her work was captured in the 1982 National Film Board of Canada short documentary, If You Love This Planet, which won an Oscar.
Last November, Dr. Caldicott was due to speak in Port Hope, Ont., when she found herself persona non grata there. Cameco, a producer of uranium fuel for nuclear power plants around the world, is a major employer in this town of 16,000 on Lake Ontario.
Dr. Caldicott explains what happened to rabble's news editor Cathryn Atkinson.
Q - I got a one-sentence note that says you were banned from Port Hope in November. Why did you want to go there?
I went to Peterborough two years ago and some people from Port Hope had lunch with me and told me about the situation there, and I was horrified. I told them that if they wanted me to come back and talk about it, I would.
I came back again in November, specifically to speak in Port Hope, and I was interviewed by the Toronto Star and said the town should be evacuated; it just came out. And all hell broke loose.
The mayor [Linda Thompson ] said I was not to speak in Port Hope. The inn where I was staying prevented me from staying there, and we couldn't have a fancy dinner that the people had set up. The church that was going to sponsor me would not host me.
So I was moved to Oshawa, half an hour away, to speak. It was teeming with rain and I thought no one would come, but 360 people turned up, plus 12 TV cameras, so we got a lot of publicity.
And I just walked them through the medical implications of radioactive waste and how that can cause cancer, and damage their genes and the eggs and sperm and the whole thing, and how children are so sensitive to it. I told them you can't remediate this; you can dig it up thereby exposing many more people to radioactive elements. And they're going to bury it within the town boundaries right next to the lake [Lake Ontario], where radiation will leach into the lake for the rest of time, including radium which concentrates in fish. I got roundly attacked by letters to the editor, by the mayor, by the PR man at Cameco...
I first sat back and smiled at all of this because I am used to being attacked. I try and tell the stark truth. That was until the Toronto Star wrote an editorial which said I was just doing a book tour, that I was out to make money, not answering any of the allegations or medical problems that I'd described. I wasn't doing a book tour, my book was published two years ago. I rang the editor and he said I could not have equal space to answer this, but you can write a letter that may or may not be published.
I thought I'd better doing something about this, so using the publicity I'd gained, negative or positive, I decided to come to Ottawa this week and do a national press conference in the Parliament house. And I funded this myself because I felt it was really right to do it.
Q - Is this your first visit to Canada since last fall?
Yes. I came to address this and the whole Canadian uranium situation. It's not being addressed at all.
Q - It sounds like the situation was new to you.
Look, I know that Australia is deeply implicated in uranium, in fact I stopped it for five years by educating their unions. And I know Canada has the most highly enriched natural uranium in the world, and I know it was being exported, but I didn't know the depth of the complicity in the fact that Canadians uranium was used in those three bombs in the Manhattan project, and until '57. I had no idea about that, and that the Canadian government has been complicit with the U.S. government in the nuclear arms race right from the start, and that it is still going on.
People say to me that you've got to stop that because it is one of our two major exports -- wheat and uranium. And I say 'one is for life and one is for death.' You should not export material that will cause malignancy and genetic disease for the rest of time. That's not what you do! You don't make money by inducing disease and death.
Q - What do you think of the nuclear industry in Canada?
As I read voraciously about Canada, I learned about its dark nuclear underbelly. I had no idea that it had provided the uranium for the bombs in America until 1957, including the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, that Cameco is the biggest producer of uranium in the world... [uranium] that can go into the making of bombs now and in the future, in a very fragile world, as we can see with Egypt. Also, that the disease that will accrue from the radioactive waste leaking and contamination of food for the rest of time, will, over time, produce random compulsory genetic engineering, and epidemics of malignancies, particularly in children.
This is absolutely, purely, a medical issue. Port Hope epitomizes the whole nuclear fuel cycle from A to Z -- The refining of uranium all the way through to nuclear power to the production of radioactive waste to the production of nuclear weapons.
I thought it imperative that Canadians be taught about this because they seem to be fairly oblivious to what is going on. They're good people but they need to learn.
Q - And if the information isn't going in the media they are not going to learn...
Dr. Dale Dewar and I co-wrote an article about the whole situation for the Globe and Mail and they won't print it. It's gone to the Ottawa Citizen, and if they turn it down... maybe we will send it to the Toronto Star. It's a really good article, outlining all the medical things that you can't do in a press conference.
This isn't left wing or right wing, this is medicine. It's conservative in that we are trying to conserve life.
Q - What is your message to people in Port Hope?
The message is that there has never been a scientifically validated, peer reviewed, epidemiological study of the people. Never. And the CNSC [ Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission] claims they've got some studies that say the people in Port Hope are healthy. The studies they've done, which I feel are very partial and not very scientific, do indicate a high incidence of brain cancer in women and children, lung cancer in women, leukemia in children, very high incidence of arteriovascular disease, which can be caused by radiation, and the like.
The indication is that such a study should and must be done, number one, by an independent university with independent funding.
The second thing, the urine of all the people in Port Hope must be tested for excretion of uranium and its daughters -- radium and the like. Those people are simply being ignored and it really is a medical... not catastrophe, but [they need to be] researched and treated properly. Those who want to relocate, because many of them are still living on radioactive land, they need to be compensated by the government and the government needs to build a new village.
Q - That would be quite a reversal for this government.
They've done that up in the north when they've wanted to mine areas. In Australia, they wanted to build a dam and they moved a whole village. It's not unheard of, there are precedents to this. Particularly, people living in such a dangerous place as this.
They're going to do a big cleanup they say, they're going to dig up at least 1.2 million cubic metres of radioactive waste, thereby exposing workers and the people in general, and bury it within the confines of Port Hope because no one else will take it, right next to Lake Ontario and it will leach radium for ever more. It concentrates in fish, and you can't take it. The harbour is extremely radioactive and people are still fishing there!
Q - You're just about to leave the country -- what are you going to do now?
I'm coming back in March. The NDP Party met with me [last week], including Jack Layton... it was a very productive meeting. They are thinking of things to do in Parliament pertaining to this issue. And I also met with someone high up in the Liberal Party, and I hope next time I come to meet with senior members of the Liberal Party.
I did tell this [Liberal] person that if the Liberal Party takes this challenge and rises up and becomes a truly inspirational leader, they could possible win the next election. I am sure of that.
I'm not making money out of this, I paid for this trip myself. I practice medicine, but I've never made much doing this [lecturing], it's just my vocation and I must do it.
More information on Dr. Caldicott's work can be found by clicking here. Her weekly radio show can be heard by clicking here.
Cathryn Atkinson is the news and features editor of rabble.ca.
Sorry, but this article has many things wrong, to my personal knowledge.
The mayor did not bar her from speaking in Port Hope. The church whose hall had been booked cancelled the booking after discovering that the event was not to be what they had understood. Nothing to do with the mayor. In fact, the mayor has gotten a lot of local criticism for having been slow to deal with the Helen Caldicott problem.
It speaks of Caldicott's remarks on "radioactive waste" as though nuclear fission products from bombs and reactors are the same as the low-level wastes from refining, and the even lower-level wastes from the Port Hope radium plant in the 1930s and early 1940s which are, finally, about to be cleaned up here.
She says she educated the unions in Australia. The Steelworkers' Union in Canada knows all about the nuclear industry, having represented the workers at the two Port Hope plants for many decades, with active Health and Safety committees in each plant. Helen Caldicott should stop in and listen to them; she might learn something. Before she spoke in Oshawa she spent a few hours in Port Hope, but apparently heard nothing she was told.
She says there has never been a scientifically validated, peer reviewed, epidemiological study of the people of Port Hope. There has. It's referenced on the municipality's website. Also, the municipality has its own independent experts monitoring the whole clean-up process. Helen Caldicott doesn't want to know about it.
She says those who are living on radioactive land and want to relocate need to be compensated by the government. They were, if their homes had above normal radon levels. In the 1980s. And then the lots were cleaned up. The waste now about to be moved is mostly from vacant land, temporary storage sites, and very low-level back yards. It sounds like a large volume of material because it's a few "hot spots" mixed with a very large volume of ordinary dirt; after you dig it up it's very hard to even find the hot spots, but they must still be in there somewhere, so it has to all go into the permanent storage site.
She says she's not on a book tour. But in Oshawa she answered most questions by holding up her book and saying "it's all in here."
The article is right about one thing: Helen Caldicott's real beef with Port Hope is because we process uranium for export. Fine. But don't take it out on the whole town and try to scare everyone away. Don't imply we produce radioactive waste here; we don't.
Thanks, Wilf, I am grateful for your input.
Just had a look around and I've found the following comments by Mayor Thompson. She could not, of course, ban Dr. Caldicott. I felt it important to get her comments down, Q&A, and unfiltered. The closest to this I could find this morning is that the mayor refused to meet Dr. Caldicott. Happy to make this more clear.
http://www.northumberlandview.ca/index.php?module=news&func=display&sid=5175
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/11/17/port-hope-radioactive-soil-helen-caldicott.html
http://www.ph-fare.com/index.php?article=166
You should not give credibility to anything on the FARE site. Almost no one in Port Hope will admit to being a member of FARE any more; it's down to maybe six people.
As to someone from the municipality meeting with Helen Caldicott, she was offered a complete briefing from the municipality and from the Port Hope Area Initiative (the federally funded clean-up). She accepted a quickie tour from the PHAI. I don't think anyone refused to meet her, except I am sure the mayor and most councillors refused the invitation to go to her meeting in Oshawa to listen to her. See:Caldicott venue moved to Oshawa
Moving is the only answer: Caldicott
The Port Hope Area Initiative
Frequently Asked Questions
Municipal Peer Review Team
A large number of people complained to the Toronto Star about their unbalanced coverage, printing Caldicott's smears with little opportunity for rebuttal. Your article, if it had wide circulation, would receive the same complaint.
I don't doubt it is contentious, not least because it's a one-on-one interview and not a news article per se. Again, thanks for your input. I don't doubt more will be done on this issue and situation, hopefully by rabble, and more input will come from various directions.
Rabble need do nothing further, because there is no issue. Except in Dr. Caldicott's mind. The Port Hope low-level radioactive waste clean-up story is very old. It was big news in the 1980s. It has taken forever to go through all the environmental assessments and approval process, and is finally about to start. Along comes Dr. Caldicott who claims to think she has uncovered something new. Not.
What adds a new twist to the story though is Helen Caldicott's willful dissemination of false news. Obviously the mayor of Port Hope, Linda Thompson, did not bar, block, prevent or in any other way attempt to prevent Helen Caldicott or anyone else connected with the anti-nuclear movement from speaking in Port Hope. The mayor did not read The Riot Act. Helen Caldicott is using her own self-conferred victim status to both libel the mayor of Port Hope and appeal to the extreme fringe of the environmental movement. Rabble.ca has abetted Helen Caldicott in the spreading of false news -the very charge Canada finally invoked to get rid of Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel. It is a shameful thing Rabble.ca has done allowing a platform for a drive-by smear by someone who cares not a whit for facts or science but whose very bread and butter is outrageous sensationalism. Nothing Ms. Atkinson ever again attaches her name to will be taken seriously by me.
Daniel J. Christie
Port Hope
Just to add a little explanatory colour, there was one home in Port Hope which had to be demolished during the initial cleanup between 1975 and 1982. A remarkable story.
During the second world war when radium was refined in Port Hope, war equipment needing radium paint took priority, here, and then in the USA after Pearl Harbour. Alarm clocks with radium-painted numbers were all the craze. (As a child growing up in Peterborough in 1948, I remember we had one.) So a black market in radium developed in the USA.
A person in the Port Hope plant started smuggling radium out.
He kept the smuggled radium in a vat in his basement, until someone would take delivery and smuggle it to the USA.
So, when every home in Port Hope was surveyed for radon levels starting in 1975, that basement was found to be beyond remediation. The AECL bought the house and demolished it.
Other than Marcel Pochon's little private brick workshop from the 1930s, which also had to be demolished, I do not recall any other building having to be demolished. Any "hot spots" in the others (mostly from radium paint, I expect) were able to be removed.
Helen Caldicott has discovered Port Hope a little late.
Even though this is an old issue,it is still current because some radioactive waste has a long half-life and still presents a problem for a long ways into the future.
While I think that nuclear power has a vital role to play in Canada, and the worlds energy economy, it will only survive if people are confident that nuclear powerplants, nuclear fuel processing plants, uranium mines, and nuclear waste processing and storage is being safely operated. So the different levels of government have to be transparent as well as vigilant in regulating this industry.
Workers, their families and their neighbours have the right to a safe living and working environment.
I think the Harper government , besides wanting to make the carbon based energy king, also does not want the political hasssle of dealing with all the potential problems there are in operating a nuclear industry.
Wilf, you sound like a PR person, lots of quick points, but ignoring the larger issue of long term contamination of low levels of radiation cause long term health problems (such as the cancers Caldicott mentions). Nuclear products are bad for our long term health. that is the collective us, everything now living on the planet. i recognize some people dont listen to locals and speak for them, i cant see this as the case here. Caldicott is expressing her expert opinion on the issue of nuclear contamination and the human body.
please tell us what a permanent storage facility will look like, and what its cost will be. let us know how thorough the EIA's were. and im not talking quantitative, im speaking cumulatively, systemically.
Merkin Muffley did you really just give a nazi comparison to Caldicott? if what Caldicott said was libel, lets see the case opened by the mayor. like the doctor said, she has nothing to gain by doing what she is doing.
just as an aside Wilf, what is your position on endgame and proliferation?