Here's Why

Nuclear medicine overboard!

On August 9th I broadcasted on 2SER my argument that if a country wishes to reap the benefits of nuclear medicine, then it is unethical for them to push any environmental costs or dangers onto another country. In short, its unethical and NOT green to import nuclear medicines. Any nation using them should make them, if there is any real risk to making them. If there’s not any real risk, as I explore in the report, then there is no argument for closing down the Lucas Height research reactor in southern Sydney. I posted this on the blog on August 10th.

On 30th August 2004, a bunch of press releases hit my inbox about a new report from a professional protest group called ” the Medical Association for the Prevention of War”, which I’ve never heard of before. The first was from the Australian Greens party titled ” no need for nuclear reactor”, and didn’t contain any facts or arguments except for the URL of the MAPW web site http://www.mapw.org.au, where they claimed you could read the shocking new report. I checked the web site, only to find that the report was “to be released on August 31st”. This explained why the Greens failed to present any new arguments or facts - they hadn’t read the report, they’d sent off the press release, without checking the facts.

Three hours later I received a second press release from the Australian Conservation Foundation, titled “Nuclear Plan Fails its Medical”, quoting the same report, this time introducing the idea that we should import nuclear medicines, but not saying where from. It also introduced the lie that nuclear medicines can be made in cyclotrons. Nuclear medicines are made with neutrons, and synchrotrons can only manipulate electrons and protons because it uses magnets to push their electric charge. Neutrons can only be obtained from reactors. The report was referenced again, but it still wasn’t available from the web site to see if it had some new information.

The report has finally been posted to the web site, and instead of posting the text there, they have made available a 20 megabyte PDF file for download, which is enough to put off most people on normal internet connections in Australia. 19 pages could easily be saved as HTML and made available in a fast downloading format.

The only new information in thereport is that the USA imports its nuclear medicines from Canada, pushing any risks, real or imaginary, on to them. Thats it.

The Greens are such consistent liars and peddlars of misinformation on the issue of nuclear research in Australia, that I can’t vote for them anymore.

About the author: Ian Woolf lives in Sydney, has a degree in Applied Physics, worked as a solar astronomer, software engineer, systems programmer, webmaster, Cisco CCNA tutor, Computational Theory lecturer, and subject coordinator; while changing his career to professional writing and broadcasting. Listen to Ian on the Discovery science show on radio 2SER 107.3Fm Mondays at 9am in Sydney or streaming audio on www.2ser.com, or listen to the Discovery sound archives.