Quick Links : Jabiluka & Related - Indigenous Issues - Radiation & Effects
Nuclear Weapons - Nuclear Power - ANSTO & Lucas HeightsJabiluka & Related Quotes
Bono (from rock band U2) (Herald Sun, Feb. 23, 1998) :
- "The struggle to me isn't even about law or land rights," Bono said. "It seems to me it's about the soul of the country. If you want to have a future, that people all feel a part of it, sometimes you have to deal a little bit with the past".
Peter Garrett, lead singer of Midnight Oil and President of the Australian Conservation Foundation (Sydney Morning Herald, June 12, 1998) :
- "Any fair-minded Australian who has thought through the issue of having 20 million tonnes of radioactive tailings in a World Heritage-listed area, in the middle of the most significant national park that we have, on land that belongs to somebody else, will say that this mine is wrong."
Winding up the UNESCO tour to Kakadu, Prof. Francioni states (ABC News, Oct. 31, 1998) :
- "There are problems that are related to various cumulative effects of both tourism and the proposed mining, the existing mine - the compatability of these activities, which no doubt have a significant impact on the ecosystem and on the living cultural traditions."
Indigenous Issues
Vincent Forrester, Northern Territory Chair of the National Aboriginal Conference (Uranium Mining in Australia, 2ND Edition, MAUM Booklet, July 1991) :
- "It's not correct to say that any Aboriginal community has made a real decision on uranium mining until all the facts are presented to all of our people affected, and they must be presented in Aboriginal languages in a manner that has meaning to our people."
Nuclear Weapons
Ted Taylor, Former Bomb Designer, Los Alamos National Laboratory (Mother Jones Magazine, March/April 1995) :
- "We were fascinated by abstract violence on a huge scale. I became addicted to nuclear weapons work ... success was a high. That sense of 'It's my bomb'. "
John F. Kennedy, Former President of the USA :
- "Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us."
Nuclear Power
Yoshio Matsuki (staff member of the IAEA Divison of Nuclear Installation Safety) and Russell Lee (director of Center for Energy and Environmental Analysis, Oak Ridge USA) in an article comparing different energy risks. IAEA Bulletin 1, 1999 :
- "(...) If a simple and pain-free cure for cancer is found, most impacts and therefore the costs of the nuclear fuel chain can become negligible."
Ian Hore-Lacy, General Manager of the Uranium Information Centre Ltd, at the 1997 Annual Conference of the AusIMM (March, 1997) :
- "Most of us routinely travel by commercial airliners, but every now and then we are reminded that the law of gravity still applies, when an airliner at the geographical or regulatory margins of civil aviation descends with a thud and much loss of life. Chernobyl reminded us of the nuclear equivalent of the law of gravity, but it is no more relevant to the safety of nuclear power in general than some under-resourced third-world airline is to the safety of Qantas."
A young engineer at the Cap De La Hague nuclear reprocessing plant in France, talking to Robert Jungk, author of the Nuclear State, 1979 (Nuclear Power, MAUM Booklet, Oct. 1985) :
- "Inevitably the plants will become so faulty one after another that they will have to be closed and walled-up and turned into radiating monuments to our 'progressive' age. There will not be a catastrophic explosion but this region will be turned into an atomic wilderness. It will be so polluted that in a few decades the whole Cape will have to be hermetically sealed and written off as a dead loss.
:Then the last human being will leave Cape 'Ghoul' Hague. It will have to be guarded like a seat of infection for decades and centuries by people who will not understand why we have permitted this. People will hate us."
Radiation & Effects
Admiral Hyman Rickover, Responsible for the Development of the Light Water reactors and US Nuclear Submarines, speaking in 1982 (Nuclear Power, MAUM Booklet, Oct. 1985) :
- ""I'll be philosophical. Until about 2 billion years ago, it was impossible to have any life on earth. That is, there was so much radiation on Earth that you couldn't have any life. Fish or anything. Gradually, about 2 billions years ago, the amount of radiation on this planet reduced and made it possible for some forms of life to begin. It started in the seas, I understand from what I've read. And the amount of radiation has been gradually decreasing ... which means that ultimately there will be no radiation.
"Now when we go back to using nuclear power, we are creating something that nature tried to destroy to make life possible."
Ex-welder, Indian Nuclear Reactor Complex, New York, from The new York Times, March 24, 1978 (Nuclear Power, MAUM Booklet, Oct. 1985) :
- "I accepted a temporary assignment there three years ago without knowing what it could possibly do to me. But now I hear top scientists saying there are no safe levels of radiation and I don't want to end up someone else's mistake."
John Graham (former president of the American Nuclear Society, and currently vice president in charge of environment, safety and health for British Nuclear Fuels' US subsidiary) is quoted by Nigel Hawkes in Science Briefing, in The Times of London, June 2, 1997, as saying (thanks to the Nuclear Resister) (sourced from WISE NC, Vol. 477, 1997) :
- "People predisposed to cancer should be given radiation throughout their lives ... I believe that one day radiation will become part of our daily exercise regime."
ANSTO & Lucas Heights
The following quotes are compiled and supplied by Dr Jim Green,
independent expert on ANSTO and the HIFAR Reactor.
Senior government official interviewed on ABC Radio's Background Briefing, March 29, 1998 :
- "The government decided to push the whole health line, and that included appealing to the emotion of people - the loss of life, the loss of children's lives. ... So it was reduced to one point, and an emotional one at that. They never tried to argue the science of it, the rationality of it.
Dr. Geoff Bower, Head of the Association of Physicians in Nuclear Medicine, when asked if it would be a life threatening situation if Australia did not produce medical isotopes locally.
- "Probably not life threatening. I think that's over-dramatising it and that's what people have done to win an argument. I resist that."
Dr. Harry Cohen, M.B.B.S.
- "We now have absurd statements in the media that Australians will die as a result of not having their own reactor, such is the power of the nuclear lobby."
Danna Vale - Member for Hughes, Media Release 5 march 1997 - before she changed her mind!
- "(Expansion of the Lucas Heights nuclear facility) is one option which can be crossed off the list here and now. The reactor itself was built at Lucas Heights 40 years ago when this area was uninhabited bushland. Now, new residential development, over 10,000 new homes, have been built close to the site. ... If we are to continue with a nuclear facility, it is the Government's role to find a suitable site in a safe and responsible location."
Professor Ken McKinnon, Chair of the 1993 Research Reactor Review :
- "There is no way that a research reactor, a new one, built in Australia, would ever make a return on the investment for scientific, commercial and medical uses, which would even get towards a fraction of what it would cost for a cost-benefit analysis on the normal industry basis."
Prof. Max Brennan, former Chair of the ANSTO Board, describing the Access Economics study which purports to demonstrate economic benefits deriving from the operation of a research reactor :
- "Shonky"
Tony Wood, Former Head, Engineering and Reactors, ANSTO. EIS submission, 1998.
- "If it is normal for the proponent (of an EIS) to tell the truth, but not necessarily the whole truth, then ANSTO's presentation is normal. Sometimes the difference between the truth and the whole truth is quite remarkable."
The Sutherland Shire Council. Submission to Senate Inquiry, 1998.
- "Fundamentally, no thorough cost-benefit analysis for the replacement reactor process has occurred."
"Instead of construction of an appropriate repository for highly radioactive waste deriving from spent fuel or residues arising from treatment from overseas, ANSTO and the Federal Government have chosen to manipulate definitions of nuclear waste. Notwithstanding whether high level or intermediate level nuclear waste is derived from the spent fuel rods, both require disposal in a geological repository, according to international best practice. Such a repository is not even under investigation."
Murray Scott, Submission on 1998 draft EIS. Scott's analysis in 1993 indicated that 79% of ANSTO's work does not depend on the reactor. An independent study in 1993 by Professor Geoffrey Wilson found that 69% of ANSTO's work does not depend on the reactor. Two current ANSTO employees estimatethe proportion of non-reactor dependent work at 60-70% :
- "I would be surprised if the fraction of ANSTO's work which actually depended on the output of the reactor facility ... exceeded ~1/3. Overstatement of ANSTO's reactor-dependence persists in the Draft EIS."
A foreign affairs bureaucrat. Public Hearings, 1993 Research Reactor Review. "Getting your hands dirty" means operating a nuclear reactor in suburban Sydney (300 kms from the bureaucrat's home).
- "If you want to have influence, you usually have to get your hands dirty."
Professor Ian Lowe, Griffith University, 1993 RRR Submission.
- "Although the construction of HIFAR and other facilities at Lucas Heights have resulted in about 3% of Australia's public science expenditure going into the ANSTO operation, the returns have been comparatively modest. The output of scientific papers is modest, whether measured per researcher or per unit of expenditure, and it is not possible to show the impact of this work as being unusual. The rate of invention and patenting makes little contribution to the nation as a whole."
Martyn Evans, shadow science minister.
- "The money should have been competitively offered and judged against other needs for science."
Murray Scott, employed at ANSTO for 14-15 years.
- "The most publicly appealing rationale for a replacement reactor is the provision of medical radioisotopes. ... But of all the programs associated with the replacement reactor this operation also carries the greatest risk, the greatest potential for massive contamination release and the most significant future weapons proliferation potential. ... The reality is that there (is) already a substantial irradiated uranium processing operation at Lucas Heights with all the hazards that implies, including the storage of intermediate level liquid radioactive waste in ammonium nitrate solution which carries the risk of chemical explosion. ... It should be understood that a chemical explosion involving this material would release dangerous quantities of airborne fission products."
Nuclear engineer employed at ANSTO for over 25 years.
- "(It is an) unfortunate state of affairs that dear old ANSTO, which lives off taxpayer's money, is feeding us all this propaganda and very little objective information. I thought governmental agencies are there to serve the public - not just to perpetuate themselves."
Professor Barry Allen, former Chief Research Scientist at ANSTO, Fellow in the Department of Pharmacy at the University of Sydney, Head of Biomedical Physics Research at the St. George Cancer Care Centre, and author of over 220 publications.
- "(The new) reactor will be a step into the past .... (It) will comprise mostly imported technology and it may well be the last of its kind ever built. Certainly the $300 million reactor will have little impact on cancer prognosis, the major killer of Australians today. In fact, the cost of replacing the reactor is comparable to the whole wish list that arguably could be written for research facilities by the Australian Science, Technology and Engineering Council (ASTEC)."
"Its reported that if we don't have the reactor people will die because they won't be getting their nuclear medicine radioisotopes. I think that's rather unlikely. Most of the isotopes can be imported into Australia. Some are being generated on the cyclotron. But on the other hand alot of people are dying of cancer and we're trying to develop new cancer therapies which use radioisotopes which emit alpha particles which you cannot get from reactors. And if it comes down to cost-benefit, I think alot more people will be saved if we can proceed with targetted alpha cancer therapy than being stuck with the reactor when we could in fact have imported those isotopes. ... The question is really what the tax-payer of Australia wants. Do they want new therapies or do they want the reactor to be the centre of all research?"
One of the more insightful comments in ANSTO's Environmental Impact Statement :
- "Most people (in the Sutherland Shire) value the friendliness of their neighbours, and the opportunities to be of help and meet with other people afforded by their place of residence."
Know of more ? Email the Webmaster !
Page last updated April 4, 2000.
Back to the SEA-US Front Page