Doctors want nuclear option off the agenda

I WISH to congratulate you for publishing the excellent letter from Derry Chambers on the nuclear power industry (Irish Examiner, January 22).

Hopefully, it will stimulate badly needed national and even international debate. The Irish Doctors Environmental Association, along with the International Society of Doctors for the Environment and the International Physicians against Nuclear War (Nobel Peace Prize winners), representing more than 200,000 doctors and medical students around the world, have comprehensively rejected nuclear energy as an option.

We call on all governments and relevant authorities to cease construction of new nuclear power facilities and to decommission all existing plants for sound health, social and economic reasons.

We also advocate energy efficiency and conservation along with the development of environmentally benign and sustainable technologies for energy production, including solar (thermal and photovoltaic), wind, hydroelectric and biomass.

As Mr Chambers suggests, we have hardly begun to tap the non-nuclear, non-fossil energy potential available to us.

What he did not mention is the little known fact that through an accord signed in 1959, the World Health Organisation (WHO), an official part of the UN, is legally bound to the International Atomic Energy Authority, the official world body promoting and overseeing the development of nuclear energy.

This effectively prohibits the WHO from publicising the adverse health effects of nuclear energy generation, hence the hugely conflicting reports on the effects of the Chernobyl disaster.

However, this disgraceful anomaly is about to be publicised, and hopefully corrected, as an international campaign is being mounted to highlight the issue. It will include a demonstration lasting a month outside the WHO headquarters in Geneva due to begin next April.

Dr Philip Michael

Chair

Irish Doctors Environmental Association

Bandon

Co Cork