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Dr. Helen Caldicott, the pioneering Australian antinuclear activist and pediatrician who spearheaded the global nuclear freeze movement of the 1980s and co-founded Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), has joined with left-leaning environmental groups here in an uphill fight to halt nuclear power as a "solution" to the global warming crisis. "Global warming is the greatest gift the nuclear industry has ever received," Dr. Caldicott told Truthout. The growing rush to nuclear power was only enhanced, experts say, by the weak climate deal at the Copenhagen 15 climate conference. The prospects for passage of a climate bill in Congress - virtually all versions are pro-nuclear - were enhanced, most analysts say, because it offered the promise that China might voluntarily agree to verify its carbon reductions and it could reassure senators worried about American manufacturers being undermined by polluters overseas. But at the two-week international confab that didn't produce any binding agreements to do anything, Caldicott and environmental activist groups were marginalized or, in the case of the delegates from Friends of the Earth, evicted from the main hall.

Dr. Helen Caldicott, the pioneering Australian antinuclear activist and pediatrician who spearheaded the global nuclear freeze movement of the 1980s and co-founded Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), has joined with left-leaning environmental groups here in an uphill fight to halt nuclear power as a "solution" to the global warming crisis. "Global warming is the greatest gift the nuclear industry has ever received," Dr. Caldicott told Truthout. The growing rush to nuclear power was only enhanced, experts say, by the weak climate deal at the Copenhagen 15 climate conference. The prospects for passage of a climate bill in Congress - virtually all versions are pro-nuclear - were enhanced, most analysts say, because it offered the promise that China might voluntarily agree to verify its carbon reductions and it could reassure senators worried about American manufacturers being undermined by polluters overseas. But at the two-week international confab that didn't produce any binding agreements to do anything, Caldicott and environmental activist groups were marginalized or, in the case of the delegates from Friends of the Earth, evicted from the main hall.

In the first of four lectures around the state starting April 7, physician and author Dr. Helen Caldicott will address the issue of whether phasing out nuclear power should be part of the long-term solution to the world's safe energy problems. Over the last 35 years, Caldicott has led an international campaign to educate the public about medical hazards of the nuclear age, according to Debra Stoleroff, a public relations spokeswoman. In a lecture entitled "If you love this planet: a plan to heal the Earth," Caldicott will focus on the hazards of nuclear power, Stoleroff said. Over the years, Caldicott has also worked to inform people on what steps countries can take to prevent environmental destruction, Stoleroff said.

Helen Caldicott warns about the still-present nuclear danger SCOTT HARRIS / scott@vueweekly.com For more than 35 years, Dr Helen Caldicott has been an outspoken critic of the follies of the nuclear age, dedicating her life to shining a spotlight on the risks posed to human health and the environment by both nuclear weapons and the widespread use of nuclear power.

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.

With nuclear energy, uranium atoms split inside a reactor, and radiation heats water to its boiling point creating steam to spin a giant turbine. It all seems like ingenious, efficient, and clean energy production. So where's the mess? Now consider plutonium, a horribly carcinogenic and highly fissionable substance, radioactive for more than half a million years. If exposed to air, it will ignite. Like little pieces of confetti, very fine plutonium particles will disperse after ignition. A single particle -- like talc, to give you some perspective -- can give you lung cancer. In the words of Helen Caldicott, M.D.: "Hypothetically, if you could take one pound of plutonium and could put a speck of it in the lungs of every human being, you would kill every man, woman, and child on earth" -- not immediately, but over time "from lung cancer," Caldicott explains.

With nuclear energy, uranium atoms split inside a reactor, and radiation heats water to its boiling point creating steam to spin a giant turbine. It all seems like ingenious, efficient, and clean energy production. So where's the mess? Now consider plutonium, a horribly carcinogenic and highly fissionable substance, radioactive for more than half a million years. If exposed to air, it will ignite. Like little pieces of confetti, very fine plutonium particles will disperse after ignition. A single particle -- like talc, to give you some perspective -- can give you lung cancer. In the words of Helen Caldicott, M.D.: "Hypothetically, if you could take one pound of plutonium and could put a speck of it in the lungs of every human being, you would kill every man, woman, and child on earth" -- not immediately, but over time "from lung cancer," Caldicott explains.

"Dr. Helen Caldicott, co-founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, will speak at St. Michael's College at 6 p.m. March 29 on the medical hazards of the nuclear age. The 71-year-old activist, pediatrician, author and grandmother of seven spoke via telephone from Spain a few days ago, where she had traveled to lecture at an international conference. Caldicott grew up in Australia and spends her free time there in a house in a small fishing village on the coast of New South Wales. She enjoys cooking and puttering in her garden, where kangaroos and exotic birds add to the beauty. She lectures and travels widely, and among her other projects is establishing a new nonprofit that will use social media to spread the anti-nuke message. Here's an account of her conversation with Free Press reporter Molly Walsh."

Nobel-nominated peace activist Helen Caldicott will speak in Victoria Oct. 9. Caldicott will address the medical implications of nuclear power and the safety of renewable energy as part of Camosun College's 2008 Insight speaker series.

The call to move away from nuclear power is heating up as South Coast based Dr Helen Caldicott launches a radio program exposing the public to the dangerous and costly truths of the nuclear and uranium industry. Dr Caldicott is armed with 37 years of extensive research, including access to thousands of official medical, scientific and economic documents that blow the cover on the dangers and costs of nuclear energy.

An internationally known writer and anti-nuclear activist got a warm reception from Vermont lawmakers Thursday as she heaped criticism on the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant and the atomic power industry. But one thing Dr. Helen Caldicott didn't get during a visit to the Statehouse was the meeting she was hoping for with Gov. Jim Douglas. "He needs to be educated," she said. In a morning talk to the House and Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee, Caldicott, an Australian-born pediatrician, took aim at several aspects of nuclear power, including claims that it helps to minimize greenhouse gas emissions.

Uranium mining could present WA communities with a variety of health problems, from leukemia to congenital defects, according to a health expert at a recent forum. Speaking at the Public Health Association of Australia's "Uranium Mining: What are the health risks for WA?" seminar, Nobel Peace Prize nominee Dr Helen Caldicott said the public health effects on Western Australians could be disastrous if plans to begin uranium mining in the State go ahead. Dr Caldicott said miners and nearby residents could be at risk should they be exposed to harmful materials.

""The stark truth is that one single failure of nuclear deterrence could end human history." These words, from a recent essay by Dr. Helen Caldicott, are, you might say, my devotional text for the day. I sit with them reluctantly, of course. They trouble the soul more than anything else I can imagine. But it occurs to me that, six and a half decades into the nuclear era, our premature "peace" with these weapons -- our cultural forgetting, our denial -- betokens a psychic helplessness that is enormously dark and dangerous in its own right. At some level we know that our shadow is growing. We watch it happen as spectators. Does any force seem more impervious to the collective will than that which drives the nuclear weapons industry? Will it take, as Caldicott asks, a horrific accident, an insane act of aggression, to shatter the conspiracy? And by then, will it be too late?"

I heard Dr. Helen Caldicott speak at the U of C on Tuesday night, and was reminded that the entire nuclear industry is madness built upon insanity, and deliberate misinformation. They haven't been able to attract a penny of private investment or insurance for years; yet they manage to convince governments to prop up their reactors with subsidies and taxpayer-funded insurance in the event of a nuclear accident.

`It looks as though all Africa might be gone in a week or so ... It seems to go quite quickly at the end, so far as we can ascertain. It's a bit difficult, because when more than half the people in a place are dead, the communications usually go out, and then you don't quite know what's happening." So says a character in "On the Beach," Nevil Shute's 1957 novel in which, following a nuclear war, every person on Earth is dead or dying. Preposterous? Dr. Helen Caldicott does not think so. She read the book as a girl growing up in Melbourne, Australia. Unlike many of us, she had the good sense to be frightened by the story, finding it all too plausible.

The idea of building a nuclear power plant has started to take root in Alberta in the last couple of years. However, some issues need to be looked at in great depth before any more steps are taken down this road. If the costs aren't astronomical enough to make Albertans think twice about nuclear power, perhaps the health safety concerns that preoccupy Dr. Helen Caldicott might prove a major source of consternation.

Although those in the industry have recently been pulling out all the stops to convince us otherwise, nuclear power makes little economic or environmental sense, and even less health sense. Can you tell I've been reading nuclear guru Dr Helen Caldicott?

Soon after the Fukushima accident last month, I stated publicly that a nuclear event of this size and catastrophic potential could present a medical problem of very large dimensions. Events have proven this observation to be true despite the nuclear industry's campaign about the "minimal" health effects of so-called low-level radiation. That billions of its dollars are at stake if the Fukushima event causes the "nuclear renaissance" to slow down appears to be evident from the industry's attacks on its critics, even in the face of an unresolved and escalating disaster at the reactor complex at Fukushima. Proponents of nuclear power - including George Monbiot, who has had a mysterious road-to-Damascus conversion to its supposedly benign effects - accuse me and others who call attention to the potential serious medical consequences of the accident of "cherry-picking" data and overstating the health effects of radiation from the radioactive fuel in the destroyed reactors and their cooling pools. Yet by reassuring the public that things aren't too bad, Monbiot and others at best misinform, and at worst misrepresent or distort, the scientific evidence of the harmful effects of radiation exposure - and they play a predictable shoot-the-messenger game in the process.