By Matin C. Barry Fri, 03/25/2011 Lavalnews.ca

Nuke opponents seek closing of Quebec’s Gentilly reactor

Anti-nuke activist Dr. Helen Caldicott is predicting that the nuclear crisis overwhelming Japan following that country’s devastating earthquake is the beginning of the end for global nuclear power.

She claims the Japanese situation is many times worse than Chernobyl — the world’s previously most serious nuclear disaster.

The unimaginable
“I never imagined six reactors melting down — nobody did,” Caldicott said during a press conference held in Montreal on March 18. She was in the city to deliver a lecture that evening on the dangers of nuclear energy. While her visit here was planned months ago, it was all the more poignant because of the unfolding situation in Japan.

Describing some of the acute radiation sickness symptoms that overcame the firefighters and soldiers who were sent in to deal with the explosion and fire at the Chernobyl meltdown, Caldicott said, “That’s what’s going to happen to the Japanese.”

Citing Albert Einstein, who noted that nuclear energy is a risky way to generate electrical power, Caldicott said the fallout that drifted from Chernobyl all over Europe contaminating the continent’s food supplies is “nothing compared to what’s happening now” in Japan. She said efforts to control the Japanese reactors could still be ongoing six months from now. “We haven’t seen anything yet — the accident is really just starting.”

Soaring cancer
According to Caldicott, the reactors damaged as a result of the earthquake generate plutonium, which is one of the most radioactive byproducts of nuclear reactors. “Plutonium is going to get out and spread all over the northern hemisphere and it’s already heading towards North America now,” she said, naming off a list of other highly radioactive substances. She predicted that cancer rates in Japan will be soaring dramatically.
Caldicott, a pediatrician from Australia, put her medical career aside to become an anti-nuclear activist in 1980, following the Three Mile Island nuclear power station accident, which happened in the U.S. the year before. Caldicott rose to international fame in 1982, after Canada’s National Film Board released the documentary If You Love This Planet. The half-hour film recorded a lecture Caldicott gave to some American students about the dangers of nuclear technology.

NFB controversy
Released at the height of the neo-Conservative era when Ronald Reagan was president, the film prompted the American Department of Justice to designate it foreign political propaganda and its distribution was suppressed in the U.S. However, the move backfired by drawing a lot of attention to the film. It went on to win the 1982 Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject. (If You Love This Planet can be seen in its entirety on the Web at: http://www.nfb.ca/film/if_you_love_this_planet
Japan’s unfolding nuclear crisis is galvanizing Quebec’s anti-nuclear activists to renew their opposition to the Liberal government’s plan to bring the province’s sole nuclear power plant, Gentilly Two, back online. “The opinion of Québec Solidaire is that we must close it,” Françoise David, co-leader of the left-wing provincial party, said during the March 18 press conference. “We do not want to develop nuclear energy in Quebec.” She said the $2 billion that would be spent on the refurbishment of Gentilly Two could be used instead to develop more environmentally-sound energy sources.

Gentilly opposition
“Quebec has had the fortunate chance to be able to rely on hydro electricity for many decades and we have the know-how to develop new kinds of green energy,” David added. “We have absolutely no need for nuclear energy. Secondly, we know that at the present time there is no sustainable solution to the problem of storing nuclear material, be it in Quebec or Canada.” David and others maintain that nuclear reactors are no longer necessary for the manufacture of medical isotopes, since they can also be produced with particle accelerators.

“People have suggested here for a long time that Gentilly One, our shutdown reactor, should be used as a laboratory for developing technology,” said Judith Berlyn, a long-time Montreal anti-nuclear activist. (Berlyn is especially concerned about the link between nuclear power production and the development of atomic weapons.) She called for full public hearings to be held on the dangers of nuclear reactors in Canada, as well as recognition of the complicit role Canada plays internationally as a leading exporter of uranium and nuclear reactors.