Children living around a nuclear power plant have higher risks of contracting leukemia, an Australian parliamentary committee has been told.
During a recent inquiry hearing on nuclear power generation, a group of doctors who support climate action raised concerns about the health risks of ionizing radiation released from the operation of nuclear power plants.
“This is higher level radiation. That’s radiation that’s got enough energy to actually damage DNA,” said Genevieve Cowie, a specialist physician and the chair of the research education and advocacy committee for Doctors for the Environment Australia (DEA).
“So that results in increased levels of cancers in particular, but it’s also associated with circulatory diseases, cardiovascular disease, [and] stroke.”
Margaret Beavis, a former GP and the vice president of the Medical Association for the Prevention of War (MAPW), cited a study that investigated the impact of low-dose radiation exposure on 300,000 people working in the nuclear industry over a 30-year period.
Health Risks for People Living Near Nuclear Power Plants
A member of the Committee questioned the doctors about whether the risks of ionizing radiation from nuclear power plants applied to those living near the facilities.
While Beavis acknowledged that the cancers caused by radiation were indistinguishable from other cancers, she said one could identify the impacts of nuclear radiation by looking at cases of leukemia in children.
“We know that children, particularly fetuses in utero, are very, very susceptible to radiation, and there’s been studies [that were] initially picked up with lymphoma and leukemia around the Sellafield nuclear power plant [in the UK],” she said.
“There were studies done looking at this issue, a very large U.S. study that looked at all the credible data.
“That’s what we call a meta-analysis that looked at all the credible data in 2007 and demonstrated there was an increased risk of childhood leukemia within five kilometres of a power plant.”
Beavis also cited a German study that examined leukemia among children living near any of Germany’s 16 operating nuclear power plants over 25 years.
Concerns about Risks of Nuclear Waste
At the same time, Cowie raised concerns about the risks of nuclear waste to the community if Australia adopted a nuclear strategy.The physician said Australia currently lacked the ability to deal with the waste produced by a nuclear power plant.
“Australia has not even managed to deal with the lower level nuclear waste that we already produce, and … you can only store things on site for. You can’t do that indefinitely,” she said.
“And it is also handing on a risk. This goes on for many thousands of years. This is not just a risk to this generation. It’s many, many generations.”
Meanwhile, in a previous hearing, Chris Keefer, president of the Ontario-based Canadians for Nuclear Energy, told the Committee that radioactivity from nuclear waste would mostly disappear after 40 years.
“Within 40 years, 99.9 percent of that initial amount of radioactivity is gone … and within 500 years, you could hold a spent fuel bundle in your hands without risk to your health,” he said.
Keefer also shared Canada’s experience of managing nuclear waste via a straightforward process.
“Our fuel is removed from the reactor. It’s stored in a deep pool, kind of like a swimming pool, but seismically very robust,” he said.
“It cools off for about five or six years, and it’s packaged into concrete and steel canisters, which then sit in a large warehouse.
“These casts are robust. They last hundreds of years.”
The president also stated that he had visited those storage facilities and found that there was less radiation exposure there compared to sitting on a plane and flying from Canada to Australia.
