Helen Caldicott



Helen Caldicott (born 1938) is an Australian physician and anti-nuclear advocate who has founded several associations dedicated to opposing nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons proliferation, war and military action in general, particularly the use of depleted uranium munitions.

Life
Born in Melbourne, Australia, Caldicott received her medical degree in 1961 from the University of Adelaide Medical School. In 1977 she joined the staff of the Children's Hospital Medical Center in Boston and was a teacher at the Harvard Medical School in pediatrics from 1977 to 1978. In 1980 she left her medical career in order to concentrate on calling the world's attention to what she perceived as the "insanity" of the world's increasing use of nuclear energy, including nuclear weapons and national stockpiles.

Her media presence sparked in 1982, when she was featured in the Canadian Oscar-winning documentary If You Love This Planet. Caldicott claimed that the Hershey Foods Corporation produced chocolate carrying strontium 90 because of the proximity of the Three Mile Island disaster to Hershey's Pennsylvania factory. According to Caldicott, strontium 90 that fell on the Pennsylvania grass found its way into the milk of the local dairy cows. However, the EPA reports found that Strontium 90 was not among the gaseous radionuclides emitted by Three Mile Island. Caldicott disputes the EPA report in her book, Nuclear Power is Not the Answer.

Also in 1982, she founded the Women’s Action for Nuclear Disarmament (WAND) in the United States, which was later renamed Women’s Action for New Directions. It is a group dedicated to reducing or redirecting government spending away from nuclear energy use towards what the group perceives as unmet social issues.

During her time in the United States from 1977 to 1986, Caldicott was involved with Physicians for Social Responsibility (founded originally in 1961), an organization of 23,000 doctors committed to educating others on what they claimed were the dangers of nuclear energy. She also worked abroad to establish similar groups that focused on education about what she said were risks of nuclear energy, nuclear weapons and nuclear war. One such international group (International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. She herself received the Humanist of the Year award from the American Humanist Association in 1982.

In 1990, Caldicott decided to contest the seat of Division of Richmond (a traditional National Party of Australia seat in northern New South Wales) in the federal election. Due to the operation of preferential voting, Caldicott's entry in the race ultimately allowed the Labor candidate, Neville Newell, to win the seat despite polling only 27% of the primary vote. After her failed bid for the House of Representatives, she made an attempt in 1991 to enter the Australian Senate by winning Australian Democrats' support to replace New South Wales Senator Paul McLean, who had recently resigned. However, party rules dictated that the appointment go to the highest unelected person on their New South Wales Senate ticket from the previous election, which saw Karin Sowada take the position automatically instead of Caldicott.

Caldicott’s investigative writings had the distinction of being nominated and subsequently chosen as Project Censored’s #2 story in 1990. Citing the research of Soviet scientists Valery Burdakov and Vyacheslav Fiin, Caldicott argued that NASA’s Space Shuttle program was destroying the Earth’s ozone and that 300 total shuttle flights would be enough to "completely destroy the Earth's protective ozone shield," although there is no scientific evidence to back up this claim.

In 1995 Caldicott returned to the US where she lectured for the New School of Social Research on the Media, Global Politics, and the Environment. She also hosted a weekly radio show on WBAI (Pacifica) and became the Founding President of the STAR (Standing for Truth About Radiation) Foundation.

Her sixth book, The New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bush’s Military Industrial Complex, was published in 2001. While touring with that book, she founded the Nuclear Policy Research Institute, headquartered in Washington, DC. NPRI seeks to facilitate an ongoing public education campaign in the mainstream media about what it perceives as the dangers of nuclear energy, including weapons and power programs and policies. It is led by both Caldicott and Executive Director Julie R. Enszer. NPRI has attempted to create a consensus to end all uses of nuclear energy and destroy the nuclear age by means of public education campaigns, establishing a presence in the mainstream media, and sponsoring high-profile symposia.

In May 2003, Caldicott gave a lecture entitled "The New Nuclear Threat" at the University of San Diego's Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice Distinguished Lecture Series.

A 2004 documentary film, 'Helen's War: portrait of a dissident' provides a look into Dr. Caldicott's life through the eyes of her niece, filmmaker Anna Broinowski.

Caldicott currently splits her time between the United States and Australia and continues to lecture widely to promote her views on nuclear energy use, including weapons and power. She has been awarded 19 honorary doctoral degrees and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling. She was awarded the Lannan Foundation Prize for Cultural Freedom in 2003, and in 2006, the Peace Organisation of Australia presented her with the inaugural Australian Peace Prize "for her longstanding commitment to raising awareness about the medical and environmental hazards of the nuclear age". The Smithsonian Institution has named Caldicott as one of the most influential women of the 20th century.

Criticisms of her work
As a vocal and uncompromising opponent of the nuclear industry in all its forms, Caldicott has faced a degree of criticism. In both her books and in interviews she has repeatedly stated that the nuclear industry lies. As an example, in an appearance on the E&E TV talk show hosted by Monica Trauzzi, this exchange took place:

"Monica Trauzzi: 'Can you explain how there can be such a disparity between your contention that nuclear power plants will produce the same amount of emissions as standard power plants, and what the industry is seeing which is, hey, it's absolutely clean and safe and secure?'"

"Helen Caldicott: 'The industry lies. You know, when I used to debate with generals from the Pentagon about the medical effects of nuclear war, they don't lie. They know a bomb dropping on Washington would vaporize hundreds of thousands of people and burn millions. But the nuclear industry I've been debating for 35 years, and they lie. And it's hard to deal with people who lie. In medicine, if I lied about my patients or my treatment I would be deregistered. It's inappropriate to lie about science. Now there's only one decent study to look at the whole nuclear fuel chain from beginning to end, and that's the one I've quoted in my book. The nuclear industry pick and choose what suits them for their propaganda. It's very important to have the facts, Monica.'"

The factual and scientific integrity of Caldicott's claims and books on nuclear issues has been repeatedly challenged. David Bradish, a blogger at NEI Nuclear Notes, the Nuclear Energy Institute's blog, has reviewed Caldicott's book Nuclear Power is Not the Answer in a chapter-by-chapter post. He contends that Caldicott's sources are scanty and inaccurate, that her construction and operating costs are too high, that her concerns with health risks are unfounded, and that her book is generally misleading and not factual.

In her latest book, for example, Caldicott cites the work of Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith as the sole basis for her argument that when whole-of-life-cycle analysis is employed, world uranium reserves are much more limited than widely believed, and that the greenhouse gas emissions profile of nuclear energy is far more significant than is scientifically accepted. However, the work of Storm and Smith has been criticised extensively by independent scientists and found to be heavily flawed.

Stewart Peterson, a pro-nuclear activist who blogs at the weblog Nuclear is Our Future, disagrees with Caldicott's contention that "Nuclear power is exorbitantly expensive, and notoriously unreliable." Instead Peterson contends that:

1. Nuclear power plants that were built during the 1980s were exorbitantly expensive because anti-nuclear activists sued to induce delays, which combined with 20%+ interest rates and the capital-intensive nature of nuclear power to greatly inflate capital costs that are about the same as a coal plant.

2. Nuclear power plants are the most reliable electrical generators in the world. Nuclear power plants are online about 90% of the time; other steam-cycle plants about 75%, geothermal plants and gas turbines about 60%, and windmills about 30%. This 90% reliability isn't really necessary; 70%-75% is plenty, and any extra effort spent to increase reliability past this point is a waste of money.

Caldicott and many environmentalists, however, claim that much of the cost of nuclear power is not included in the figures provided by those that state nuclear energy is comparitively inexpensive. They insist that the costs of mining and enriching uranium, reactor construction and then finally decommissioing and dismantling the reactor, transportation of high-level and intermediate waste and long-term storage for 240,000 years, and the  worst case scenario of all, the accidental or terrorist-induced nuclear meltdown must be included in the true cost of nuclear energy. The Union of Concerned Scientists states in an analysis of nuclear energy:

"An accident at a US nuclear power plant could kill more people than were killed by the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. The financial repercussions could also be catastrophic. The 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant cost the former Soviet Union more than three times the economical benefits accrued from the operation of every other Soviet nuclear power plant operated between 1954 and 1990."

Books

 * Nuclear Madness (1979)
 * Missile Envy (1984)
 * If You Love This Planet: A Plan to Heal the Earth (1992)
 * A Desperate Passion: An Autobiography (1996)
 * ''Metal of Dishonor: How Depleted Uranium Penetrates Steel, Radiates People and Contaminates the Environment (1997) Publisher: International Action Center ISBN 0-9656916-0-8
 * The New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bush’s Military Industrial Complex (2001).
 * Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer to Global Warming or Anything Else (2006)