LARRY BUTTROSE: There are much safer ways to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.
A FEW weeks ago, a neighbour from our street left a message in our letterbox informing us that his wife A, had died, and that a memorial service would be held.
It was very sad to read. A was a delightful young woman. The couple had come to parties at our home, and she was elegant, charming and witty, even though she had little voice, weakened by the cancer in her throat. The reason she had cancer, and would eventually die, leaving her husband and child, was Chernobyl.
A and her husband had come to Australia from Poland. After one of the reactors at Ukraine’s Chernobyl nuclear power station blew up in 1986, its plume of lethal fall-out was carried on the winds far and wide. Poland was next door; it shares a border with Ukraine, and A had been affected by the radiation.
After they came to Australia and re-settled, she fell ill. Her husband said the doctors had told him that they had never seen such a cancer. Last year he took A to Germany for special treatment, but, after a decade of fighting the cancer with enormous bravery, A died.
We were unable to attend the memorial service because we had a sick newborn. Instead one night I placed a sympathy card in their letterbox. It felt a pathetically small gesture in the face of the tragedy that had occurred inside their home.
Former prime minister John Howard, towards the end of his time in office, began promoting nuclear power for Australia. It was put forward as a solution to global warming — something he never believed people were causing anyway — but in reality it was a scheme business saw a buck in and still does.
The threat of nuclear power, like the threat of nuclear weapons, has not gone away simply because we have other things on our minds now such as the global economic crisis.
