“Please don’t sell uranium to India” – Goanese priest writes to JUlia Gillard
India has enough of trouble on this front. The 1983 disaster at Union Carbide in Bhopal is still to be sorted out and people affected are still awaiting compensation, including the several thousand left affected, blinded and maimed.
Dear Ms Gillard, please do not sell uranium to India. It will leave India the poorer if you lift that ban on uranium sales.
OPEN LETTER on World Fisheries Day 21st. Nov 2011 From: Fr. Xavier Pinto,C.Ss.R. Apostleship of the Sea India, 876,Alto Porvorim. GOA. India 403521.
To: Ms. Julia Gillard, The Hon. Prime Minister of Australia. ACT, Australia.
Re: Impending disaster & plight of fishing communities on the Southern coast in India.
Dear Ms Gillard,
I read with great distress news that you are urging your Government to overturn a ban on supplying Australian uranium to India.
If this news is true, please, please do not do this. The world at large is still struggling to understand the effects and aftermath of several nuclear disasters which have occurred in plants and establishments certified as “very safe”. The one in Fukushima, Japan, a nation of advanced technologies, is still in the news. Recently the Catholic Bishops of Japan (CBCJ) have warned how dangerous and ill-conceived plans for nuclear plants are.
The Japan Catholic bishops said on Thursday Nov 10th 2011, that they advocated an immediate end to nuclear power generation. At a press conference at Motoderakoji Cathedral in Sendai City, they launched a document, End Nuclear Energy Now: Coming to terms with the tragic disaster of the Fukushima Daiichi accident.
In 2001, the CBCJ warned of the risks from nuclear power plants: “In order to avoid tragedy, we must develop safe alternative means of producing energy.” Such an incident was precisely the type of tragedy as occurred at Fukushima. There are 54 nuclear power stations in Japan. According to the new document, every one of those “holds within itself the danger of another enormous accident like [Fukushima Daiichi].”
The bishops acknowledged that, if nuclear energy were to be abolished, Japan would be left with an energy deficit, and that the problem of CO2 would still need to be addressed. But they insisted that humans have a responsibility to protect “nature and all life, which are God’s creatures,” and to pass a safe environment on to future generations.
Japan has “a culture, national wisdom, and tradition of living in harmony with nature.” Its Shinto and Buddhist religions are infused with a similar mentality, and “in Christianity, we also have the mentality of noble poverty.”
The bishops urge their countrymen to change their lives fundamentally: “The essential thing is to adapt our lifestyle, which is excessively dependent on nuclear energy; to turn that lifestyle around in its whole way of being.”
India has enough of trouble on this front. The 1983 disaster at Union Carbide in Bhopal is still to be sorted out and people affected are still awaiting compensation, including the several thousand left affected, blinded and maimed.
Currently others in India are protesting against building new nuclear plants. The people of a small fishing village – KOODANKULLAM – in south India are in distress and anxiety, fearing they will be displaced and lose their ancestral rights. 20,000 people collected there recently to protest against the nuclear plant.
Dear Ms Gillard, please do not sell uranium to India. It will leave India the poorer if you lift that ban on uranium sales. India and the world know that Australia does a lot for India. Please do this one more good thing. Don’t lift the ban on selling uranium to India.
It is time that all concerned, especially governments, search for safer means of generating energy. These are available for those with the will to develop alternative energy sources, and so avoid excessive risks to later generations.
Fr. Xavier Pinto, C.Ss.R
Apostleship of the Sea ,
National Chaplain and Director &
AOS South Asia Coordinator.
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