Nuclear Power is Not the Answer to Global Warming or Anything Else (2006), by Dr Helen Caldicott

The title of veteran anti-nuclear campaigner Dr Caldicott's latest book will leave no doubt as to where she stands on the issue, if you didn't already know. A physician specialising in the medical effects of radiation, Dr Caldicott's second career as figurehead for the global campaign began with a letter to The Advertiser in 1972, raising awareness of the French nuclear tests. That letter led to interviews and an audience with Gough Whitlam, who "wasn't much interested". But the Unions were, particularly when she started to talk about testicular effects of radiation, and before long she had inspired a 24-hour Railways Workers' Union strike that afforded her front-page publicity.

Nuclear Energy is Not the Answer focusses on the global situation, with a heavy emphasis on the United States. She spends all of two pages discussing Australia, which means that while its contents may be of use to the local debate, you won't find any information about John Howard's Nuclear Taskforce (led by Ziggy Switkowski) or what she believes is really going on at Lucas Heights - suffice to say that the "medical isotopes" claim (they can apparently be constructed without the need for a reactor) is probably bogus.

The book's strongest sections are those utilising Dr Caldicott's personal expertise: radiation medicine. In these chapters, she presents a highly convincing case against the mining, refinement, use and storage of radioactive matter for use in power generation and weaponry, from a medical perspective. Indeed, she has characterised the entire nuclear "issue" as primarily a "medical" one.

Her weakest chapters are those dealing more broadly with nuclear power and weapons proliferation. In these aspects of her argument, she is most certainly an ideologue (which she admits to, without seeming to understand the full implications of such a charge). Worryingly, she appears to have no compunctions about finding references to "fit" her argument: her first two chapters, in which she presents the full costs of the nuclear fuel cycle from extraction and reactor construction to storage and decommissioning, are based solely upon the un-refereed findings of two retired Netherlands scientists. She openly advocates Google as a tool for finding facts "you already know".

This hard, ideological bent to her work comes from years of confrontation with the nuclear industry and its political voices, and from what she sees as the media's acquiescence in the industry's deceptiveness. The result is an unfortunate cheapening of the debate to stark "facts" and figures, upon which there is no agreement by each "side" and from which the lay citizen can learn very little.

Dr Caldicott's major mistake, it seems, lies in thinking that the debate can be won with education of "the facts". But facts can be twisted, and are rarely irrefutable. Like many scientists, she puts enormous faith in her own science and is frustrated at politicians' scientific and medical "illiteracy".

But politicians represent the non-expert citizenry, who must be persuaded according not only to Reason, but also to Common Sense and Ethics. The debate will move forward not upon the final agreement on "facts", but on an application of Values. Dr Caldicott claims that, contrary to the industry's claims, nuclear power is not "clean and green", will hardly decrease CO2 emissions and is certainly not "safe", but she misses probably the easiest argument against nuclear power: that it fails to address the two major problems associated with coal-fired power. Coal is extracted from the Earth's crust (necessarily an unsustainable activity), and its conversion to energy creates a toxic by-product.

If Caldicott's title is correct (and it must be, given a dispassionate examination of the problems), her book fails to convince, though parts of it make useful contributions to the "facts and figures" debate.