Australian Red Cross campaigns to Make Nuclear Weapons the Target

06/09/2011 0 Comments read Nuclear Disarmament

Yami Lester Photo Credit: © Neena Bhandari

By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 06.09.2011 (InDepth News Analysis – IDN): It was 7am on a fateful day in 1953, 10-year-old Yami Lester and a group of Aboriginal children were playing with a toy truck, when they heard a loud bang intercepted with several small bangs as the ground beneath their small feet shook.

“We saw a shiny black cloud coming from the south, moving above and through the trees, which spread across 70 miles. We shut our eyes as they began to burn. In the days that followed, about 50 Yankunytjatjara people in Walatina began to complain of skin rashes, sore eyes, vomiting, diarrhoea and coughing. There was no treatment on the cattle station. The closest health clinic was hundreds of miles away and we had no transport,” says Yami Lester, who was living160 km from Emu Junction in South Australia, the site of the first nuclear test on mainland Australia.

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India, Australia must build thorium based N-reactors: Dr Kalam

20/05/2011 0 Comments read Diaspora, Nuclear Disarmament

By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 20.05.2011 (IANS): India and Australia should work together in building Thorium-based nuclear reactors to meet the growing energy needs, said former Indian President, Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, during his recently concluded four-day (May 17-20) visit to Sydney.

He said, “Thorium-fuelled reactors are supposed to be much safer than uranium-powered ones, use far less material (1 metric ton of thorium gets as much energy as 200 metric tons of uranium, or 3.5 million metric tons of coal), produce waste that is toxic for a shorter period of time (300 years as against uranium’s tens of thousands of years), and is hard to weaponize. In fact, thorium can even feed off of toxic plutonium waste to produce energy. And because the biggest cost in nuclear power is safety, and thorium reactors can’t melt down, they will eventually be much cheaper, too”.

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Moving to a Safer World with a Million Pleas Campaign

01/09/2010 0 Comments read Nuclear Disarmament

By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 01.09.2010 (InDepth News Analysis – IDN): As the threat of nuclear annihilation becomes more real than ever before, the In ternational Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons(ICAN) Australia has launched a `Million Pleas’ campaign, emphasising the urgency to rid the world of these weapons.

“The Million Pleas campaign gives a face and a voice to the issue of Nuclear weapons and the urgency for total disarmament and abolition of these weapons. People do want to see a complete abolition of N-weapons, but they don’t necessarily have a way of getting the message across to world leaders. Through this initiative, they can”, says ICAN Australia’s Campaign Director and Executive Officer, Dimity Hawkins.

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