In the 1980s, I bought my first house, a fibro cottage situated on the Woronora River which flows through Sydney’s Sutherland Shire catchment. The river cuts through Sutherland’s sandstone and eucalypt-covered escarpment and runs into the Georges River, then Botany Bay. It is better known as the site of the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor.
Over a quarter of a century later, my memories of life on the Woronora are still remarkably vivid. Just as vivid is my recollection of a meeting I attended at a hall in the Woronora village in 1980.
Speaking at this meeting was Sister Rosalie Bertell, a visiting American nun of the Sacred Heart congregation. I was surprised to discover that this wiry and gentle nun possessed impeccable academic credentials in several scientific fields. She was in Australia to take on the might of the nuclear power industry. It was a Rosalie and Goliath battle.
Before visiting Australia, Sister Rosalie had just completed comprehensive research irrefutably disclosing excessive cancer deaths in humans, particularly leukaemia, linked to exposure to nuclear radiation. The few staff members of the Lucas Heights Atomic Energy Commission who attended the meeting of local residents, reportedly to “keep on eye” on this troublesome nun declined to make any public contribution when invited.
Sister Bertell later testified before the Government’s Select Committee on Uranium Resources. She opened my eyes at that meeting to the dangers of leaked radiation, the problem of safely storing and transporting nuclear waste, and to the lack of an emergency evacuation plan for the local community. She shone a light on what had been a place of secrecy — the ‘big cracker’, as the locals called it.
The nuclear debate is gathering momentum. Should we dig more uranium out of the ground? Should we export it? And should we construct more nuclear reactors in Australia?
I am not a scientist, but as an environmental lawyer I have my own serious concerns about the morality of building more nuclear reactors in Australia and bequeathing untold quantities of deadly radioactive waste to generations yet to be born.
Recently the Australian of the Year, Professor Tim Flannery said that Prime Minister John Howard was wrong to say that climate change is not the major moral issue facing Australians. Many thousands of Australian men and women, conversant with the contents of the UN’s latest Intergovernmental Panel on climate change, the Stern Report on the