HELEN CALDICOTT is on the peace path.
Dr Caldicott, near 70, is determined to stop nuclear power in Australia and she has chosen the federal election to make her fight as public as possible. She was in Sydney last week promoting her latest book, Nuclear Power Is Not The Answer but also to get her anti-nuclear message across.
"This is the most dangerous election we have ever had and it is the most serious election Australia has ever faced," she says.
Australia has signed up to the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, and has also agreed to take radioactive waste from overseas. She says that as a member of the partnership, Australia will eventually export enriched uranium for other countries to use in their reactors to generate electricity, then in line with the core principle of the partnership, Australia will take back and store the resultant waste.
Dr Caldicott is Australia's leading anti-nuclear campaigner and is a member of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the group which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. She won the first Australian Peace Prize last year and was named one of the 20th century's most influential women by the Smithsonian Institution.
But despite all those plaudits, she has had trouble getting an audience with politicians from either side. She sent a copy of Carbon Free and Nuclear Free: A Roadmap for US Energy Policy, a document produced by the Nuclear Policy Research Institute in the United States, to both the shadow minister for the environment, Peter Garrett; and the Leader of the Opposition, Kevin Rudd; but neither has responded. And she has certainly never had any success in persuading either the Prime Minister or the Minister for the Environment.
And Dr Caldicott says that it is not only politicians who are reluctant to hear the anti-nuclear message; she says that getting her message out to the public is becoming increasingly difficult.
"Australians are not well-educated in this area," she says.
For her the most important thing is for Australians to understand what the nuclear issues are all about and she says that we have lessons to learn from the European experience.
In 1986, one of the reactors at a nuclear plant just outside Chernobyl exploded and the radioactive plume drifted over Europe and even to some parts of North America.
Dr Caldicott says that when people live near reactors they are at risk from nuclear contamination; and the Federal Government's plan to have 25 nuclear reactors along the east coast is highly dangerous.
"If Howard's plan goes ahead, we will be one of the most nuclearised countries in the world," she says.
"The whole of Europe is contaminated and I don't eat European food.
"We don't want to take that risk."