Nuclear Power Plant A Threat To Life

From 90s onwards the total electricity generated is very high and we are making money. So we are getting to be a rich organization, provided the buyers pay off the loans. We have 14 reactors at 6 sites of our corporation and we don't expect to have more sites and one more site of Kudam Kulam where there is a big reactor of 2000 Mega watts. The continuous increase in added generation more than 100 billion units electricity has been produced so far.

Now these are the reactors under construction with Kudam Kulam in the south, which is short of power. I have always advocated that it is not shortness of power and lack of coal, which decides what kind of electricity we should have from sources. It is important that you must have all types of power in the national grid and even semi national grid. Because if suppose you have a strike in the coal plants the industry must still run. So it is important that you must have many inputs. Therefore in Bengal when they say that we have got a lot of coal, that is not good enough a reason to not have nuclear stations.

Future plants will give out 10,000 Mega Watts electricity which is about 10% of the total power that been generated. At the moment we are about 2 or 3%, which is very low, and some are under construction. Kudam Kulam 1000 Mega Watts power units and in Rab and all. Previously they used to use 200 MW reactors. Now they are bringing up a 500 Mega Watts reactor for using Thorium eventually.

The locals living in villages next to Koodamkulam Nuclear Plant have been asked to vacate their homes and stay away for at least 15 days, by the end of March 2011 to conduct its first trial test. What will these tests yield for Trivandrum and other southern districts of Kerala and Tamil Nadu is yet to be revealed by authorities and nor has our Government taken any responsibility to enquire.

With the recent radioactive explosion at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan (some 150 miles north of Tokyo) there is mounted pressure to check the cost at which development is being sought. Japanese authorities have extended the evacuation zone at Fukushima Daiichi to 30 kms, even as reports seep in that even people beyond the 100 km radius are fleeing, in an effort to escape disaster. Food items from Japan are being discarded due to the fear of contamination by international community.

The Fukushima accident establishes that nobody can assure us total safety with regards to the nuclear power technology. If Fukushima radiation can end up in Sacramento, California which is over 10,000kms away - Kerala will NOT be spared from Koodamkulam! The nearest Kerala district, Trivandrum is a mere 135kms away from Koodamkulam.

As the world is gearing up to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the deadly nuclear power plant accident at Chernobyl on April 26, 2011, another calamity has stuck the humanity. The Chernobyl accident released 1000 times more radiation than the Hiroshima bomb and the effects of radiation reached up to Holland which is almost 2000 kms from Chernobyl. It is understood today that the nuclear disaster in Japan is close to the scale of Chernobyl. Hence, we should be informed about the ways in which radiation can reach our own home lands.

At Koodamkulam two 1000 MW Russian nuclear power plants are being built and plans are in place to add four more. A sham public hearing took place on June 2, 2007 but never reflected people’s outrage against the plant in its final report. With six 1000 MW nuclear power plants, a reprocessing plant, dangerous nuclear waste, and a weapons facility (just be]\cause Koodankulam is far away from Pakistan and China), the sea water is going to be contaminated; fish is going to be contaminated; the air, food, water and everything hundreds of kms away from Koodamkulam will be polluted. Even if these accidents and attacks do not happen, the daily intake of radionuclides and low-level radiation will do severe damage to the health of our people in Trivandrum, Kollam, Pathanamthitta and Alleppey districts.

Not only the Southern Kerala residents are in danger but it being the major tourism sector of Kerala lot of outsiders including foreigners will be affected. Just imagine the number of people who could get affected in the tourist centres of Kanyakumari, Kovalam, Kumarakom and Alleppey. So we urge foreign and domestic tourists to stop from travelling to these centres. The piligrim tourist centre of Sabarimala where crores of people come during a short period will also fall within this sector.

In the light of the above situation, we demand that the Koodankulam nuclear power plant be shut down immediately. Kerala is the only state which has stopped two nuclear power plants with public protests: in Peringome, Kannur and in Kothamangalam, Ernakulam. Common sense would instruct us not to tread this path of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima but generate energy from safe and sustainable sources.

In an unusual move, Tamil Nadu chief minister J Jayalalithaa has ur­ged prime minister Manmohan Singh to halt construction of two nuclear reactors at Koodamkulam in Tir­unelveli district, where more than 100 local residents have been on hunger-strike against the project since September 11, supported by tens of thousands. Only a few days ago, Jayalalithaa had dismissed their apprehensions about lack of reactor safety as unwarranted. E­v­idently, determined popular op­position to the project has i­m­­pelled her to acknowledge t­he “agonising” state of affairs a­nd the people’s “natural” conc­e­rn “for the safety of their families and for themselves” after the “Fukushima disaster”.

The Koodamkulam project bristles with problems. Some of them are generic to all nuclear reactors irrespective of origin, design or configuration of fuel and coolant. All existing reactors are vulnerable to a catast­rophic accident such as a Fuk­ushima or Chernobyl-type mel­tdown. Other problems are specific to these reactors of Russian design, and the way they were granted environmental clearance by the Indian government.

A recent study prepa­red for Russian president Dmitry Medvedev by Russian state agencies concerned with nucl­ear safety in the wake of Fuk­ushima reveals that Russian reactors are completely un­der-pr­epared for both natural and man-made disasters ranging fr­om floods to fires to earthqu­akes or plain negligence.

The report comes from an amalgam of sources such as the ministry of natural resources, Federal Service for Environmental, Technological and Nuclear Oversight, as well as Ro­satom, the nuclear operator ag­ency. According to chief engineer Ole Reistad of the Norwegian Institute for Energy Technology: “The report reveals deficiencies which have never before been mentioned publicly, nor reported internationally.”

These include 31 “serious flaws”. Among the more critical failings are: absence of regulations for personnel to know how to deal with large-scale na­tural disasters or other major co­ntingencies; inadequate protective shelters for workers on any given shift in the event of an accident; lack of records of previous accidents, which wo­uld enable workers to learn fr­om past mistakes; and poor attention to electrical and safety-significant systems.

This holds true not just of the RBMK design implicated in the Chernobyl accident, but also of the VVER-type reactors, which India is importing from Russia. The report questions the capability of reactors to remain safe for extended periods if cooling systems fail. There is no guarantee that power backup systems will be effective sh­ould this happen. This is the pr­imary difficulty that beset Fu­kushima Daiichi when the qu­ake and tsunami hit. Also, key equipment involved in the cooling process suffers from me­tal fatigue and welding flaws —yet another problem that was ignored at Fukushima. Russian reactors are vulnerable to the kinds of hydrogen explosions that ripped up three reactor buildings at Fukushima.

Most important, the report says that the risk of earthquakes has not been considered as a safety factor for Russian nuclear facilities. Not all of Russia’s reactors have automa­tic shutdown mechanisms, wh­ich would be activated in the ev­­ent of an earthquake.

This should set the alarm bells ringing in India’s Department of Atomic Energy — mo­re so because the DAE lacks the technical competence to ev­aluate for safety imported de­signs of large sizes such as the 1,000 MW Koodamkulam units. Its experience is essentially limited to 200-230 MW, although it recently installed two 540 MW reactors. But the DAE is, true to type, complacent and blasé about the Ko­odamkulam reactors.

These reactors were cleared by the ministry of environment and forests way back in 1989 — even before the Environmental Impact Assessment process, with a detailed EIA report and public hearings, was inaugurated in 1994. The clearance did not consider the intrinsic hazards of nuclear power generation, radiation releases, or long-term waste storage.

No wonder the DAE’s assertions that the Koodamkulam reactors are perfectly safe and designed to handle all proble­ms, including earthquakes a­nd tsunamis have failed to convince the local population — itself highly literate and well-informed. Its empirical observation that the DAE breaches its own siting norms inspires no confidence whatever. Thus, in place of the norm that there sh­ould be no population in a 1.6-km radius of a nuclear reactor, a sizeable number of people li­ve within a 1-km radius, inclu­ding some recently ho­used in a tsunami relief co­lony.

If the government has any regard for safety and for people’s genuine concerns, the le­ast it can do is halt construction at Koo­da­mk­ulam. There’s an additi­onal re­ason for doing so at Ja­itapur in Maharashtra too. The DAE has just told the Fr­ench government that it will delay buying European Pressurised Reactors for Jaitapur until post-Fuk­ushima nuclear safety tests ha­ve been completed and the EP­R design has been officially certified as safe. Since the design hasn’t even been frozen, it’s only logical th­at all construction at Jaitapur be immediately halted.

India must conduct a credible and independent audit of its nuclear power policy and of the safety of all its reactors, which involves external experts and civil society represe­ntatives as well as DAE personnel. Until this is done, there must be a complete moratorium on all further nuclear projects, including Koodamkulam and Ja­itapur. After the accidents at Fukushima and Marcoule in France, it would be suicidal to assume that nucl­ear power is safe.

Posted in: General News