learning from jabiluka
Like anti-Adani protesters today, those who stood up at Jabiluka were attacked. It’s good to remember that people can prevail.
3 April 2018
Like anti-Adani protesters today, those who stood up at Jabiluka were attacked. It’s good to remember that people can prevail.
No matter how bad you think the global nuclear weapons complex is, it is worse than you know. Much worse. Ellsberg knows this because he helped design it.
We’re in an age when ambition is called for. And it just may come in the shape of a 32,000 tonne ocean liner.
Peak nuclear has passed. There’s no science to support an Australian nuclear industry.
ON OCTOBER 19 I WAS INVITED TO PARTICIPATE IN ‘MEN OF LETTERS‘ in Sydney – an occasional departure for the wonderful women of letters team. Ten of us were invited to write a letter to a woman who changed our lives. This was mine.
i. cause The rice paddy on the edge of Iitate village is 30km back from the coast, framed by steep forested hills, and we stop here briefly because the scene is so strangely heraldic. At first glance, this looks like any other rural Japanese town in late summer, but it isn’t any more. The precise geometries of the fields are softened with neglect and waist-high weeds. Two empty police cars sit out front of the vacant community hall. Crickets hum in the mid-day humidity, in sleepy counterpoint to the rumble of diesel engines. A work team of several dozen
In introducing a document of this kind, the first thing to note is that the text speaks for itself. This is not a work of analysis or opinion, but a straightforward chronology of accident, incompetence and disaster spanning seven decades. The key unifying theme here is nuclear technology, roaring into modern history out of the blinding singularity that lit the sky over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The twin industries of nuclear weapons and civil nuclear power hold a unique and forbidding place in our lives as the 20th century recedes and the forgotten struggles of the Cold War
Much of the debate around uranium sales to India – inside the ALP and in the broader community – will be viewed through the lens of the self-evident interest in maximising revenues from a commodity that Australia already sells to a dozen other nations. I suspect most people, if they’re interested at all, will wonder what the fuss is about. We sell the stuff to a nuclear-armed communist dictatorship and the organised crime syndicate formerly known as Russia, so why not sell it to the world’s largest democracy?
The concept of ‘environmental protection’ has taken on new meaning with the announcement of Commonwealth environmental approvals for BHP Billiton’s Olympic Dam copper/gold/uranium mine in South Australia.