From: http://www.helencaldicott.com/2011/03/caldicott-japan-may-spell-end-of-nuclear-industry-worldwide/
Dr Helen Caldicott: ‘The situation is very grim and not just for the Japanese people’ One person who is in no doubt about the seriousness of the incident is prominent anti-nuclear campaigner, Dr Helen Caldicott. Independent Australia spoke exclusively to Dr Caldicott yesterday as she was in transit to Canada to speak at a hearing into a proposal to build four new power plants in Darlington, Ontario. Dr. Helen Caldicott is perhaps most influential environmental activist in the past 35 years. She called the situation in Japan was an “absolute disaster” that could be many, many times worse than Chernobyl. Dr Helen Caldicott raised the possibility of cataclysmic loss of life and suggested the emergency could be far more severe than Chernobyl. “The situation is very grim and not just for the Japanese people,” said Dr Caldicott. “If both reactors blow then the whole of the Northern Hemisphere may be affected,” she said. “Only one reactor blew at Chernobyl and it was only 3 months old, with new cores holding relatively little radiation; these ones have been operating for 40 years and would hold about 30 times more radiation than Chernobyl’s.” Dr Caldicott cited a report from the New York Academy of Sciences, which said that over 1 million people have died as a direct result of the 1986 melt-down at Chernobyl, mostly from cancer. She said authorities had attempted to “hush up” the full scale of the Chernobyl disaster. The official 2005 figure from the International Atomic Energy Agency was just 4,000 fatalities.
