Concern raised over safety of nuclear power plants

The Prime Minister's recent assurance in Parliament that nuclear power plants are quite safe and there need be no concern carries no conviction, according to Prof. T. Shivaji Rao, environmentalist, and Dr. E.A.S Sarma, the convener for Forum for Better Visakha.

The Prime Minister dealt with the Union Government's concern and resolve about the safety of India's nuclear facilities in the wake of what had happened in Japan this year and made a categorical statement, but it raised more questions than answers in relation to the safety of India's nuclear facilities, the two said in a joint statement here on Friday.

They said that “nuclear technology is inherently risk-prone as evident from its track record over the past several decades. There is not a single country having nuclear facilities where accidents of one kind or the other have not taken place, either as result of mechanical failures, or on account of human errors, or due to natural calamities. Prior to Fukushima, Japan had a series of accidents leading to dangerous radioactive leakages.”

Chernobyl disaster

Chernobyl, they said, is a standing example of how a nuclear accident could result in large scale loss of life, radiation exposure causing carcinogenic and inter-generational disorders among the people living around the nuclear power plants and widespread damage to bio-resources in the area. The Three Mile Island accident in the USA and the more recent Fukushima disaster in Japan are the other examples of what damage nuclear accidents can result in. However low may be the probability of an accident of this kind, its occurrence cannot be ruled out and the consequences of such an accident can be disastrous. The Japanese Prime Minister openly admitted that safety of nuclear power is a myth as proved by the latest Fukushima disaster.

Civil Nuclear Liability law

The proposed new nuclear power projects at Jaitapur in Maharashtra, Kovvada in Srikakulam district of AP, Bhavnagar in Gujarat and other locations will run on imported reactors yet to be fully tested for their design safety, the two said. “The same western company that supplied the reactors of Fukushima is likely to supply reactors for Kovvada. By enacting the Civil Nuclear Liability law under pressure from the western countries, India has agreed to exempt the reactor suppliers from the bulk of the liability that may arise out of an accident. In a way, this not only implies a huge hidden subsidy to the companies but it also gives them an indirect incentive to relax the safety norms to the detriment of public health and national economy,” they said.

Prof. Shivaji Rao and Dr. Sarma also objected to “the manner in which the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited is trying to push through its projects at Jaitapur, Bhavnagar and Kovvada. It gives us the feeling that the affected families are kept in the dark about the potential dangers of nuclear power. The fact that the local communities living within the exclusion zone (1.5 km), sterilised zone (5 km) and emergency planning zone (16 km) around the project site have not been fully appraised of the risks to which they will be exposed shows that NPCIL is reluctant to take them into confidence. Some studies show that, in the event of an untoward incident at Kovvada plant, people living as far as 150 km away, including the city of Visakhapatnam could get affected depending on the direction and speed of the wind and other factors.”

In view of these dangers, they appealed to the Prime Minister and the Union Government to reconsider the issue and give up the proposal to establish new nuclear power plants.