Antinuclear

Dr Helen Caldicott – international campaigner for the truth about nuclear power

Profile – Helen Caldicott
Sydney Morning Herald By Lucinda Schmidt July 29, 2009

This anti-nuclear campaigner has spent a lifetime striving to create a better world.

The day after the Federal Government approved a new uranium mine in South Australia, veteran anti-nuclear campaigner Helen Caldicott was appalled. In her view, exporting uranium, to any country, is morally indefensible.

“I think it’s devastating,” she says, describing Prime Minister Kevin Rudd as “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” and accusing Environment Minister Peter Garrett of moral turpitude.

“I’m so ashamed to be an Australian at the moment,” says Caldicott, 71, a Melbourne-born medical doctor.

“As we export uranium, we’re in fact exporting nuclear weapons, cancer, leukaemia and genetic disease. It’s a public health issue.”

In the 1970s and 1980s, Caldicott was one of the world’s leading anti-nuclear voices, as the Cold War generated fear of a nuclear holocaust.

In Australia, she played a big role in forcing the French atmospheric nuclear tests underground, after writing a letter to a newspaper in 1971 about the increase in radiation levels in Adelaide’s water supply following tests over the Pacific Ocean.

Profile – Helen Caldicott – Money – Business – Home – smh.com.au

July 29, 2009 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, politics, uranium | antinuclear, Australia, nuclear, radioactive, uranium