3CR
 Community Radio 855am

THE RADIO-ACTIVE SHOW

With Eric Miller and Linda Marks

Saturday at 10.00am

10th April 1999

Hello and welcome to the Radioactive Show brought to you by the Sustainable Energy and Anti-Uranium Service. I’m Linda Marks and with me in the studio is Eric Miller. (Good Morning) The Radioactive Show is a weekly program bringing you news and information on Nuclear, Peace and Energy issues.

On today’s show we take a look at the Government’s proposal to build a new research nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights in the south of Sydney. We hear from Maria Psaltis, the Deputy Convenor of ‘People Against the Nuclear Reactor’, Genevieve Rankin who is a councillor with the Sutherland Shire Council, Dr Jim Green from the Institute for Sustainable Futures at UTS, and from Dr Helen Caldicott.

A new nuclear reactor was one of the main agenda items at the recent Radioactive Alert Symposium held on the 19th and 20th March at Old Parliament House in Canberra. Maria Psaltis is Deputy Convenor of ‘People Against the Nuclear Reactor’ and she and her family live near the old research reactor in the suburb of Lucas Heights in the south of Sydney. She spoke of her fears of living near the reactor. The reactor is the oldest operating of its type and due to close in 2003.

Maris Psaltis: Thankyou for the opportunity to talk to you about what are real fears and concerns of the residents in my community. Those of us who have chosen to become informed are extremely concerned about the health and safety issues associated with living near this nuclear facility.

So what is it like living near Australia’s only nuclear reactor? Well, we don’t eat the fruit from our trees any longer or the herbs from our gardens because we found out that our council has a zoning restriction of a 4.8 kilometre radius around the reactor for any food production industry.

I also worry about an accident occurring that would require my children to be sheltered in the school. Do the teachers know how to do this properly so as to minimise the exposure to our children? And how will the community act? Will they be calm? Will they not rush up to the school demanding to take out their children out and exposing the other children every time the door opens? ANSTO in their emergency brochure tell us to remain indoors and to wait for information from the police or media. I want to know how the whole community will be alerted, quickly, without any warning sirens. The ’97 bushfires proved, I believe, that people panic and of course, the first thing they will do is rush up to the school to look after their own children.

We also would have food restrictions that we would need to follow and I’m not convinced that anyone in our community knows what to do in the event of an accident. Brochures have only ever been distributed twice in the passed 17 years that I’ve lived in the community. I believe that it is important that a warning system is installed that is clearly recognised by residents as the warning for a nuclear accident. I also want this emergency brochure handed out to every new homebuyer and every new enrolment in schools. The brochure also needs to give us much more information than it does. And the regulatory body APANSA should be conducting public meetings after accidents to answer any queries from residents.

Every day we plan to get out of the area. To escape and take our kids and run. And some have already done that. Others have decided to stay and fight. And our children want to stay near their friends and school. We agonise over how far is safe? Where would we be safe? Daniel Hirsh in his submission to Sutherland Shire Council said that 80 kilometres would be affected in an accident. Well that’s all of Sydney.

I’ve had many teary conversations with mothers after sleepless nights worrying about the future. We wonder how we feel if our children ever have to pay the price for the nuclear industry’s accidents, mistakes and ‘she’ll be right’ attitude. We wonder if we will ever be able to mother our children without this fear.

We also live amongst a community that has glossy brochures, ads in local papers telling us it’s safe. Many people believe it is safe. Why wouldn’t you when ANSTO sponsor your local club or school newsletter? They are also at our community fairs telling us that all’s well. We want to believe them. We also want to believe that governments make informed decisions about our health and safety. I believed them too for many years. Even when something in my gut told me to be suspicious, I kept on believing because I was living in a lovely community and my children were very happy. I wanted to find out if it was safe. That’s why I decided to become informed. Instead I learnt all the half-truths that we have been subjected to. Things like, and I have four examples. Research reactors are so safe that that they are in university campuses. But I found out they don’t produce radioisotopes. We were never told about the alternative technologies that are safer and cheaper. And secondly, the reactor at ANSTO is as small as a washing machine and holds as much radiation as a teacup. Well I don’t know what that means. Thirdly, you get the same amount of radiation flying from Sydney to Melbourne, but you don’t get noble gases and iodine 131. And that the accidental release was within permissible doses. It can still give you cancer and how many hits of accidental radiation do we get? I can’t trust them with the answers to any of that.

My first encounter with ANSTO over a specific incident was two years ago when they decided to take a school source of strontium 90 beta level to our May Fair to demonstrate background radiation. It was stolen and has still not been recovered. I felt the community should have had clear information available to them about what they should do if they find this thing in a child’s schoolbag, lunchbox, pocket, or if it had been tampered with or digested. Instead we were told to ring ANSTO it we found it. And not to worry, it was one-fifth the radiation of a smoke detector. So now I don’t touch smoke detectors either.

This is really the point. I don’t want my family exposed to any levels of radiation above background radiation. We all know that no level of exposure to radiation can be described as safe. Just recently we have had three accidents reported to the media by a concerned worker at ANSTO. Again I’ve been told that the emissions were trivial. What I would have wanted was someone to have alerted my community so that I could decide how I could look after my children at those times. I still don’t know when the iodine 131 was released. At what time, on what day, and which way the wind was blowing. And they don’t know either. You can’t imagine how devastating it is to not know what impact these accidents have had, and no doubt other accidents, are having on your children.

So how do we fight? We run cake stalls to raise money to print newsletters that we letterbox drop to try and inform people. We make signs to have them pulled down by our local council within two days of going up while the other ‘do you want to lose 5 kilos’ signs are left up. Our mayor at one time did not allow pamphlets in libraries.

We have had a $6 million EIS but they still can’t show us the siting study, as it is a cabinet in confidence document. The decision to build the reactor will be a decision made in cabinet. Why don’t I have a say? Why doesn’t anyone in Australia have a say in the direction our government is going on things nuclear. I believe that the decision has been made to build the new reactor already and I can only hope that the outcry from the people will happen and stop it.

Local people are calling for a proper retrospective cohort health study. I believe that there should be a study of thyroid disease as so many women in my community are suffering from this, myself included. These studies should be costed into the budget of a new reactor. Perhaps ANSTO could pay for them with the profits they plan to make with the fourfold increase in isotope production. How can anyone really believe that a nuclear reactor, anywhere, especially near young communities is reasonable? Any industry that may require children to be locked inside their classrooms for hours and hours to be protected from what might be in the air should not be built. We are in desperate need for any help that the media, personalities, individuals, anybody can offer.

Linda Marks: That was Maria Psaltis, Deputy Convenor of ‘People Against the Nuclear Reactor’ speaking at the recent Radioactive Alert Symposium. Genevieve Rankin is a councillor in the Sutherland Shire Council where the Lucas Heights reactor is situated. She has worked to close the reactor for many years. Although Australia in the 1950s had plans to build nuclear power plants, Genevieve believes that the research reactor was built for military purposes and that the Lucas Heights site emits as much radiation as other bigger nuclear sites in the Western World. And she says that there are other better ways to produce nuclear medicine. Here is Genevieve Rankin:

Genevieve Rankin: It (the Lucas Heights reactor) was built under the defence act and it was very, very clear that it was built for defence purposes. The Maralinga inquiry has shown that Australian scientists and military people were desperate to get in on the act, the nuclear club, worldwide. It was built under the defence act. There was 20 years gaol right up until 1987 legislation for anyone working in the industry who spoke out against accidents and other problems at Lucas Heights. They could be up for penal provisions of 20 years. Residents who got information from staff at that time and spoke about it could be up for 7 years gaol at that time.

There was no doubt in any one’s mind that this was a secret defence establishment built, said to be, remote from Sydney’s population, built in order to allow for weapons research and for the production of isotopes.

A 10 megawatt reactor is a production or test reactor, not a research reactor in the sense of American ones that you might find on university campuses that run on .000005 megawatts of power. This is a 10 megawatt reactor.

Research reactors are more prone as we’ve discovered in research, to accidents, and this is why there are so many accidents at Lucas Heights. They are more prone to accidents than power reactors because they start up and shut down quite frequently. It is in that starting up and shutting down period that you have a lot of potential for these, what they call ‘incidents’, at Lucas Heights.

In the 50s when the reactor was built, Professor Baxter who was chair of the Atomic Energy Commission, addressed the Sutherland Council of the time. He said that there would be no emissions from the site. He said that we have a perfectly modern reactor here and we can operate it without any emissions. If you say that to anybody who works at Lucas Heights these days they say, Baxter was a lunatic, anybody knows that you can’t operate a factory without having emissions. But this is on the record and it was the first lie, if you like, that’s recorded, there on the council minutes, how this industry was introduced to the area. As we know, as Helen said yesterday, emissions from that site are dirtier than big reactors overseas, places like Brookhaven. The iodine 131 coming off that site with the isotope production is more than comes out of Sellafield. It is a disgrace. It has been sloppily run for many years. Now they want us to trust them running one twice the size, although we are not allowed to know what size the new reactor will be.

Medical research, particularly in the medical field has been held back by the fact that we have a nuclear reactor. There are researchers that have worked for ANSTO for many, many years in the field of nuclear medicine who feel that this is an incredibly backward step. They are not anti-nuclear. They want nuclear medicine and they want isotope in various forms. From cyclotrons, from accelerators, and the ones that can be produced from nuclear waste, but they think those produced in the nuclear reactor are out-dated, they are locking us into high radiation medical procedures and leaving an enormous trail of waste in their path.

Linda Marks: That was Genevieve Rankin, Councillor for the Sutherland Shire Council in south Sydney. Jim Green did his thesis on nuclear matters dealing with Lucas Heights. He is now at the Institute for Sustainable Futures at UTS in NSW. He believes that stopping the new reactor is crucial to stopping Australia going down the nuclear road. Dr Jim Green:

Jim Green: … so we don’t need a reactor for medicine or science and the government knows this. It begs the question, why are they building this reactor? These are the so-called ‘national interest’ arguments. In a nutshell, ANSTO was a prop for every aspect of Australia’s involvement in the nuclear industry. It is because of ANSTO’s broader involvement in nuclear matters that the government wants to maintain the organisation and to give it a shiny new reactor.

The Hifar reactor at ANSTO was created primarily to introduce nuclear power into Australia in the 50s and 60s. ANSTO was involved in the British weapons tests in the late 50s and 60s. ANSTO was involved in the push for nuclear weapons in 50s and 60s. In fact Philip Baxter, the chair of ANSTO was one of the most influential proponents of nuclear weapons.

As it became increasingly unlikely that nuclear weapons would be built in Australia, ANSTO set up a ploughshares committee. The idea was to use nuclear weapons for civil engineering projects such as building an artificial harbour off the coast of WA. These were called peaceful nuclear explosives but, of course, it is not entirely clear how you tell the difference between a peaceful and a military nuclear weapon. At various stages in its history ANSTO has been involved in every facet the uranium industry, from prospecting uranium mining, enrichment and marketing. So you can see that historically, ANSTO and its research reactor has been involved in all the big-ticket nuclear programs.

And that’s the pattern. ANSTO is a prop for the nuclear industry and ANSTO is pushing Australia into new areas of the nuclear fuel cycle. And this is the pattern that persists today. ANSTO is still a prop for the uranium industry. This includes a modest degree of practical technical support for the industry. It includes monitoring Australian uranium as it moves through the nuclear fuel cycle overseas. It includes providing advice on the technical and in particular the military capabilities of recipient countries for Australian uranium. And they are quite open in saying that ANSTO is directly and indirectly drumming up business for Australian uranium. Of course, the main problem with this set of arguments is that we shouldn’t be mining uranium in the first place. Even allowing that we have a uranium industry, ANSTO provides useful support for that industry but not crucial, essential support for the industry.

More important than that is ANSTO’s role in monitoring overseas nuclear programmes and to a lesser extent influencing them. At the moment we are told that Australia place on the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency depends on the replacement of the reactor. It is doubtful that the position on the Board of Governors does depend on operating a reactor in Australia, and in any case, that position is not put to good use. As Jean McSorely writes, it would not be a bad thing if Australia was in there pushing for stricter safeguards, a separation of promotion and watchdog activities and stringent safety laws. If Australia did that, it would, more than likely, lose its Board of Governors seat. So Australia has to be part of the promotional stakes to keep within the upper echelons of the IAEA.

Liberal and Labor Governments oppose some nuclear weapons programmes, Iraq, North Korea, for example, and they actively support other nuclear weapons programmes, not least, that of the US. And to be involved in international bodies such as the IAEA, you have to play the game. Playing the game means promoting peaceful nuclear technologies. It means promoting nuclear power even though nuclear power is banned in Australia. It means sending ANSTO’s spent fuel overseas for reprocessing even though reprocessing is prohibited in Australia. It means promoting all kinds of peaceful nuclear technologies even though all kinds of peaceful technologies can be used for weapons production. Enrichment facilities can be used for weapons production. Israel and India used so-called research reactors to produce plutonium for weapons. Over a dozen other countries have used research reactors in support of weapons programs. Reprocessing plants or smaller facilities known as hotcells can be used for peaceful purposes such as separating medical isotopes or they can be used to separate plutonium for bombs. Or highly enriched uranium for bombs.

In a nutshell, research reactors are part of the problem not part of the solution. If the government was serious about nuclear disarmament then one small but positive step would be to close the Lucas Heights reactor without replacement. That in itself would have a powerful and symbolic effect, an advanced industrial country deciding that life was indeed possible without a nuclear reactor.

And the closure of the reactor should be tied to the development and export of non-reactor technologies for medicine and science. There are numerous alternative technologies, cyclotrons, linear accelerators, and so on. Without exception these alternatives are safer and cleaner than reactors. Without exception they pose no risk in relation to weapons proliferation. Without exception they are withering on the vine because of preferential funding for reactor technology.

So this strategy is not a panacea. Those countries that do have ambitions are the last ones that are going to replace their nuclear programmes with non-reactor alternatives. But this strategy would at least help to stem the gradual and often unintentional drift of many counties to nuclear weapons. It would also expose those countries that do have a military agenda behind their civil programmes.

To sum up. This is a crucial fight, it is a crucial fight for the nuclear cowboys up the hill and it is a crucial fight for us. If you gave the government the choice between a new reactor at Lucas Heights or the Jabiluka mine, or any other uranium mine for that matter, they would take the reactor without a doubt because of its strategic significance. It is up to us to stop them for the sake of the local residents, for the sake of the medical and scientific research fields that are being starved, and last but not least, so we can pull out this prop for the nuclear industry.

Linda Marks: That was Dr Jim Green from the Institute for Sustainable Futures at UTS. Helen Caldicott organised the symposium and summed up the session on the new reactor with this anecdote:

Helen Caldicott: I’ll just end this session on Lucas Heights with one anecdote. There is a man called George Milosh who is an American who ran Lucas Heights or was heavily involved with Lucas Heights for about 7 years. Last year he went back to help run Brookhaven National Lab on Long Island with which I have had a very close association.

Brookhaven National Lab had a filthy old graphite reactor with aluminium cladded fuel rods just like the Hifar reactor at Lucas Heights. Aluminium is a terribly dangerous thing to clad the rods with because it cracks and it has little pin holes and it lets out the isotopes. Eventually it was closed down in 1968 only after huge amounts of caesium 137 and strontium 90 and plutonium escaped. So it created a dreadful radioactive legacy on Long Island.

They have another reactor that is operating and its spent fuel pool was leaking for 12 years tritium into the only aquifer on Long Island and they knew about it for 12 years. The plume of tritium has crossed the Long Island express way entering suburbs like Shirley, Brookhaven, Mannerville and there is a school nearby and for two years those children were drinking tritiated water out of their fountain. Many of the houses have had their water replaced with quote ‘public water’, I don’t know where they get it from, and the residents have to pay for the water themselves.

When George Milosh arrived there he said at the press conference and three people have reported this to me, ‘This place is nothing compared to Lucas Heights.’

Lucas Heights is a high level radioactive waste repository with spent fuel rods put straight in the ground. That doesn’t happen anywhere in the United States or Canada. It has plutonium buried at Little Forest burial ground just across the road. It releases huge amounts of radioactive iodine that is a very potent carcinogen for children particularly for their thyroid glands. That women are having thyroid problems around Lucas Heights probably means that it has affected the function of their thyroid glands. This is a very, very serious medical problem. Now, we have laws in America. I say we because I have a green card, where we can go to Brookhaven and they are on the back foot, really defensive. So we have a lot of work to do.

This place is nothing compared to Lucas Heights.

Linda Marks: And that was Helen Caldicott who organised the Radioactive Alert Symposium recently in Canberra and the music played throughout the programme was Tiddas with "Happy Earth."

Eric Miller: And that’s all the time we have for the Radioactive Show this week Linda, so it’s goodbye from Eric.

Linda Marks: And it’s goodbye from Linda.

Eric Miller: Please listen in next week.

Transcript produced by Linda Marks - with much thanks!!!
Page last updated April 28, 1999.
Back to the Radio-Active Show Archivesor Back to the SEA-US Front Page

Copyright © SEA-US 1999