Australians once feared the health impacts of nuclear. Now nobody’s talking about it

In 1982, Helen Caldicott, one of Australia’s most prominent anti-nuclear campaigners, spent an hour with Ronald Reagan at the White House, warning the then-president about the dangers of nuclear.

“I came out of that saying I thought, because I’m a physician, that he had impending Alzheimer’s,” Caldicott, now 86, says. “Which he did.”

Caldicott fears Australia’s memory is also faltering.

From her home in regional NSW, Caldicott says people have forgotten that period where anti-nuclear activism was a key cause of the left and nuclear safety fears ran high.

Helen Caldicott was one of Australia’s most prominent anti-nuclear campaigners. Credit: Sylvia Liber

As Australians prepare to cast a vote in an election which could have huge implications for the country’s energy future, nuclear proponents dismiss Caldicott’s fears as outdated.

But they are still lurking in the debate as an unspoken question over the Coalition’s policy to build seven nuclear plants nationally to offset the decline of coal power and help Australia reach net zero emissions by 2050.

When asked if nuclear energy production was a safety risk to Australians in April, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese dodged the question and said the main reason for the concern was “about the economy”.

His government, in lockstep with the Coalition, is investing billions in a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines under the AUKUS pact.

At the final leaders’ debate on April 27, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton said the government’s endorsement of AUKUS proved nuclear power was not dangerous.

“Who in his or her right mind would sign up to a nuclear submarine and put our sailors onto the submarine thinking that there was a concern about safety?” he said on Channel Seven.

But in recent weeks, Dutton has avoided drawing attention to his nuclear policy, and Labor has attacked him over not visiting the sites of the Coalition’s proposed reactors.

The issue was dragged onto centre stage this week as anti-nuclear protesters disrupted a Dutton campaign event and press conference – and their theatrics largely played on the fears people have around nuclear safety.

Anti-nuclear protesters also turned up.Credit: James Brickwood

If Dutton were to form government, safety could come to the fore again because it would need to overturn the federal ban on nuclear energy, implemented in 1999 by John Howard in a deal with the Greens.

Despite the dangers being dismissed by Labor and the Coalition, Caldicott remains concerned about nuclear waste being improperly stored in Australia and contaminating water supplies – or even a Chernobyl-like reactor meltdown.

“It’s not being discussed at all, which is amazing to me”, Caldicott says. “People are very ignorant.”

Kirsty Braybon, a nuclear law expert and adjunct professor at the University of Adelaide, says those in Caldicott’s camp have misconceptions of the dangers.

Kirsty Braybon at a nuclear laboratory in Belgium.Credit: Kirsty Braybon

“All energy sources ... have some sort of risks,” says Braybon, arguing these dangers can be mitigated. Nuclear waste can be stored underground, and Australia’s low frequency of earthquakes means an accident like that seen at Fukushima in 2011 couldn’t happen.

“So the one thing the nuclear industry does really, really, really well, is it learns from all of its mistakes,” Braybon says.

Fears regarding nuclear radiation are also overblown, she says. Last year, Braybon travelled to a nuclear waste facility, a nuclear lab, a power plant and an armed nuclear submarine while pregnant.

“I’d build a nuclear waste facility on my property if I could. It would make me a lot of money,” says Braybon, who lives on 25 acres in the Adelaide Hills.

The World Nuclear Association reports that the US navy’s nuclear fleet has never experienced an accident in its 50-year history. The Lucas Heights nuclear medical facility in Sydney’s south has operated effectively for decades and has recorded only minor safety breaches.

Inside Lucas Heights nuclear medical facility.Credit: James Brickwood

Emeritus professor of the Australian National University Ken Baldwin says nuclear energy is safe, with stringent regulations preventing accidents and underground depositories able to safely store high-level nuclear waste (though the world’s first such facility in Finland is not yet operational).

The Coalition has previously said it plans to temporarily store spent fuel on site before moving it to the same location as waste from the AUKUS nuclear submarines will be kept.

“We [Australia] would make sure that we manage both the safety of nuclear power generation and the waste storage in a very responsible manner because we are a well-governed country,” says Baldwin.

Director of Nuclear Innovation Centre at UNSW Edward Obbard says “nuclear energy is one of the safest ways to generate electricity” and has a death rate far lower than coal, oil, gas and hydropower, based on accidents and pollution.

Obbard says the reactor meltdown at Chernobyl in 1986 “is not relevant to Australia because it occurred in a previous reactor design”. People disproportionately remember the impacts of the three reactor meltdowns at Fukushima, he says, when the more significant destruction, and 20,000 deaths, were caused by a 14-metre tsunami and a 9.0-magnitude earthquake.

Some people fear nuclear because it can “capture our imagination so terribly”, he says.

But UNSW associate professor Mark Disendorf says the fears are valid. He says earthquakes are common in the Hunter Valley – the site of one proposed reactor – and is concerned by a German government study that has shown proximity to a nuclear power plant increased the likelihood of leukemia for children under five.

He says that the argument that Australia’s stringent safety regulations and access to modern technology would make it immune to the dangers was “invalid because Australia has so little experience”.

In a statement, the Australian government’s primary authority for radiation protection and nuclear safety says nuclear power plants are designed to be safe and have significantly improved their operations in recent decades, “but cannot be considered entirely risk-free”.

The regulator also says radiation can be harmful at high exposure levels, so safety limits and protocols are important. Although radiation is prevalent in our everyday environment, “Australia does not have a large nuclear sector and there is low familiarity with nuclear science in the wider community,” it says.

A generational divide and ideological opposition to renewables are two explanations as to why anti-nuclear sentiment has faded, says social trends researcher and director of research at 89 Degrees East, Rebecca Huntley.

Director of research at 89 Degrees East Rebecca Huntley.

Huntley says younger voters, who are less aware of the damage caused by Chernobyl and Fukushima, tend to be more supportive of nuclear.

Many people now show “a grudging recognition we need to move away, particularly from coal,” Huntley says. “And their antipathy to renewable energy, particularly wind, is so intense they think ‘well, why aren’t we considering this option [nuclear]’.”

But Huntley says her polling indicates some do remain concerned about safety, and “most of those concerns are framed in terms of catastrophic events like Fukushima or Chernobyl” rather than the safe disposal of nuclear waste.

January 2025 polling conducted exclusively for this masthead by the Resolve Political Monitor shows opinion is broadly split on support for nuclear power. Thirty-one per cent of respondents support nuclear power, 29 per cent opposed, 29 per cent are open to the government investigating it, and 11 per cent are undecided.

Anti-nuclear protestors show their anger at the French Consulate in Sydney. 6 September 1995. Photo by Glenn ShipleyCredit: Glenn Shipley

When Caldicott casts her vote on Saturday, it will be in protest against the Coalition’s nuclear plans. But her motivation will be different than most.

Since her White House conversation decades ago, countries worldwide have made at least a start on building just over 300 nuclear power reactors, according to the World Nuclear Industry Stats Report.

Most people, says Huntley, are thinking about the cost of living rather than nuclear.

“I will also question about whether this next election is going to be about energy policy,” she says. “But it will have a profound effect on energy policy.”

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