Thirty Years of Creative Resistance - Friends of the Earth Australia

overall quality of the EIS and the
downright rorting of the EIS process was
a major issue for FoE at the time. I clearly
remember doing commentary on the
first EIS for the Beverley in-situ leaching
project which seemed unable to tell the
difference between feet and metres, had
columns that were supposed to add up
but didn’t and which claimed that ‘clay
confining layers’ would prevent the escape
of the leach solution despite a detailed
diagram conclusively showing that the clay
confining layers didn’t exist. That particular
EIS was unceremoniously rejected. I
believe that it was due to FoE’s efforts that
the majority of those uranium projects
proposed during the 1970s never went
ahead.
A major factor in FoE’s opposition to
nuclear power has been the issue of
reactor safety. The Browns Ferry accident
in the USA in 1975, where two large
reactors were brought close to meltdown
due to a fire caused by technicians
checking for air leaks with a candle,
reinforced our belief that reactors were not
safe. What really convinced the public that
the likes of FoE were right in relation to
nuclear power was the Three Mile Island
accident of 1979.
I clearly remember the day it happened
because I was in the FoE Fitzroy office
when the phone rang. It was John Speight,
the trade-unionist chair of the Movement
Against Uranium Mining. I had not at that
time looked at a newspaper or listened to
the radio and did not know quite what to
make of his urgent directions.“Get yourself
a newspaper immediately and I’m picking
you up and taking you to 3CR”.
I didn’t even need to open the newspaper
as the headline screamed in black letters
‘Death Cloud Spews from Atom
Plant, Women and Children flee’.
I recall that the next week was basically
interview after interview.
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The Three Mile Island accident is largely
forgotten now as it was eclipsed by the
much more serious Chernobyl disaster.
However it is good to remember that it did
more than anything to halt the growth of
the nuclear power industry, especially in
the US. In Australia it cemented a public
consciousness that anything to do with
nuclear power was indeed bad news.
Three Mile Island was the first complete
nuclear core meltdown in a full-scale
power reactor and it happened in the USA
where it received maximum publicity. Its
regulatory and safety impact rippled out
over the nuclear industry worldwide forcing
increased attention to safety and ultimately
crippling the industry.
If Three Mile Island had crippled the
nuclear industry, Chernobyl was perhaps
the Coup de Grace.
When Chernobyl took place in April 1986
it violated everything that we as nuclear
power safety critics had been taught or
thought we knew about nuclear power
plant safety. We would say that ‘A nuclear
power plant can undergo a core meltdown
like Three Mile Island - but a nuclear
power plant can’t blow up like a bomb’.
Seems we were wrong. Nothing prepared
anyone for how bad Chernobyl was
going to be, though a look at some of
Andrei Tarkovsky’s science fiction movies
might have helped, with lots of deserted
industrial wasteland and a spreading
environmental catastrophe.
Chernobyl as a media story seemed to
grow over a period of days, with reports
of vast amounts of radiation coming out
of Ukraine, the pinpointing of the radiation
to a specific reactor, a mad scramble to
find out about the RBMK reactor type
and the discovery of International Atomic
Energy Agency reports that vaunted the
safety of this reactor type over that of the
Pressurised Water reactor that had given
us Three Mile Island.
FoE 30 Years 23