[ RadSafe ] Helen Caldicott to be in St Louis Feb 20th

[Roger Helbig]

Helen Caldicott is coming to St Louis on Feb 20th.

Helen Caldicott to conduct nuclear symposium in St. Louis: ‘The Atoms Next Door'
The inimitable Dr. Helen Caldicott will be traveling to Saint Louis to
conduct a symposium on the health impacts of radioactivity and nuclear
waste on Saturday, February 20th at St. Louis Community
College-Wildwood. Recently, the radioactive West Lake Landfill...

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Dr Helen Caldicott has no confidence in USA’s Waste Confidence Act (I
have no confidence in Helen Caldicott - this was posted to Examiner,
which lets people profess to be Examiners in various subjects - they
pretend to be journalists, but they are not - this one is would-be
politician who has twice run for Congress and failed - now he is the
Progressive Examiner - and posts this as his bio

Byron DeLear -- Author, media producer, enviro-entrepreneur and twice
former US House candidate. DeLear keeps his finger on the pulse of a
wide range of progressive missions, serves on boards of various NGOs
and non-profits. He can be reached at ByronDeLear at gmail.com.

his webpage that was extracted by Nuclear-News is
http://www.examiner.com/progressive-in-national/byron-delear

by Christina MacPherson

There is a situation in America called the ‘Waste Confidence Act’
which means that the industry has ‘confidence’—confidence that one day
they’ll work out what to do with all this radioactive waste. So, the
situation is insane, or should I say is “there is a gap between
reality and perception of reality.” And it’s extremely serious.

Helen Caldicott to conduct nuclear symposium in St. Louis: ‘The Atoms
Next Door' Examiner, Byron DeLear  14 Feb 16 Byron DeLear:
"..........“Why do you think that these federal agencies seem to tend
to want to obfuscate and cover-up the real health impacts of this
contamination?”

HC: “The federal agencies are not really interested in remediation
unless they absolutely have to do it because they’re interested in
building bombs and building nuclear power plants—but cleaning-up their
mess? That’s not part of their agenda and never has been. The problem
is that we’re now moving into the period of nuclear waste—we’re
leaving the period or the “age” of nuclear power because it’s not
working and cannot be financed; it’s so expensive, and because we’re
moving rapidly into renewable energy.

So, now we’ve got, I think its 350,000 tons of high-level radioactive
waste accumulating around the world; in Japan, in Britain, in France,
in many European countries at their nuclear reactors. Specifically in
America and Russia, the waste is emanating from the production of
nuclear weapons and this is what we’re dealing with at West Lake.
There’s no interest really in the government doing anything about it
because they like to invent things and in particular want to work with
the atom which is an extreme and powerful form of energy. But
cleaning-up the waste doesn’t interest them because many of them are
physicists and engineers—they don’t understand the medical
ramifications.
If they themselves get cancer from having dealt with radiation then
they kind of understand, but its swept under the carpet mostly and so
the money at present—over a trillion dollars—is going to build new
nuclear weapons and delivery systems over the next 30 years—a trillion
dollars, which is absolutely obscene.

There’s a kind of “nuclear fiction” in America that stems from the
Manhattan Project and that brings us back to West Lake again and the
people who are suffering there. The problem is the absolute
persistence of this waste—the half-life of Uranium-238 is 4.5 billion
years, so it will be there forever. And what do they do with it? Pick
it up? And where do they take it? What poor community will have to put
up with this radioactive detritus for the rest of time? Do they bury
in the desert? What if it rains because of global warming and it
contaminates underground rivers and food supplies and all that? So,
the situation is overwhelming.

No one knows what to do with radioactive waste. I’ve been saying for
40 years, what are you going to do with the waste? And they say,
‘Trust us we’re excellent scientists, one day we’ll find the answer.’
Well, that’s like me saying to a patient, ‘Well, you’ve got a
pancreatic carcinoma, your prognosis is about six months, but trust me
in about 20 years time I’ll find a cure.’ There is a situation in
America called the ‘Waste Confidence Act’ which means that the
industry has ‘confidence’—confidence that one day they’ll work out
what to do with all this radioactive waste. So, the situation is
insane, or should I say is “there is a gap between reality and
perception of reality.” And it’s extremely serious. This waste down
the time-track will induce, as I wrote in my book Nuclear Madness in
1978, epidemics of cancer, leukemia, genetic disease, congenital
deformities for the rest of time. But no one really wants to know
about it until there’s a nuclear accident like Three Mile Island,
Chernobyl, or Fukushima, where everyone is desperate to know what’s
happening. So you can talk until you’re blue in the face to educate
people, but until they really understand in an acute situation they
tend not to be so interested. But the people living near West Lake,
they understand, and the power of the people is the ultimate power for
redress. As Jefferson said, ‘An informed democracy will behave in a
responsible fashion.’ So, what I like to do is practice preventive
medicine by teaching people the dangers so that they’ll do something
about it.