Rocky25
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I will NOT reply to your rants! Don't bring my name or reply to my post! If you think TimeTravel and Rocky are same people, Report it and let Mods find it!
India strikes back at nuclear protesters
- Thread starter BoB's
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I will NOT reply to your rants! Don't bring my name or reply to my post! If you think TimeTravel and Rocky are same people, Report it and let Mods find it!
Sashan
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You see my highlighted word for major - there were minor protests since 1980s - but it became significant since 2011 - but I do not believe it is due to free internet - free internet would mean you would have had the support of people in other parts of the country - you have significant opposition in the Tamilnadu state itself - Especially with the 8 hour powercuts in TN.
Are you talking about Tirunelveli district where KK is located or Kanyakumari district? The Tirunelveli district's literacy rate is on par with the literacy rate of TN.
Kalpakkam is where the research plants including the fast breeder research plant and indigenous plants are - which would mean greater risk than Koodankulam - the difference is in IT terms, code development happens in Kalpakkam while you have an advanced bug fixed code. In nuclear plant terms, you can understand the risk with Kalpakkam - compared to that, Koodankulam is an advanced nuclear plant with additional safety features like solar panel based eletricity backup provided after learning from Fukushima disaster.
While I do not want to comment about the people of Bombay taking chances, Again there are no statistics supporting the cancer argument - it is straight out of Udayakumar's one of the argument points. He has not provided any supporting evidence for that.
And for your information, Fukushima had disaster built-in due to the greedy corporate nature of the Tokyo power company which ignored and falsified reports - Koodankulam safety assessment was done by several neutral agencies including experts from various IITs - about 7000 man hours were spent by these agencies.
Do not have time now to go through the details but will provide it over the weekend or some other day.
Oh, I'm not getting involved in your "pig" fights nor do i care about your particular grouse. I highlighted a specific sentence on purpose to indicate my bone of contention with you. As for being stupid, I beg to differ & would offer you a mirror if it helps. Homework? don't make me laugh, you were the one comparing Japan & India as similar seismic zones. Don't have to get uppity with everyone, you are not the sole repository of all wisdom nor are we going to countenance your usurping that idea.
You posted stuff & so the plant should stop ?I never claimed to be neutral on the plant (only on your religious scrap). I believe that you & your likes have no case & will jump from one hypothesis to other whether any of them are relevant or not. Such people, in my opinion are not deserving of a endless hearing & at some point will have to be dealt with. I believe the nuclear plant to be safe & that it needs to be made operational as soon as possible.
As for shutting my mouth & not wasting your time, anyone can decide for themselves based on the number & quality of posts sent in on this subject by each as to who is wasting time & who needs that advice more.
EXACTLY. You and any other poster can go thru the entire thread and see every post. They will see my links, facts, and the actual statements I made. And then they will see the one sided attack on me and a few other folks who actually defend the stance of the protestors. If you took the time to read, instead of being an ignorant troll you would realize the valid points we all made. The fundmental flaw in your arguement is that you think it wont happen, or the chances are slim to none, or that safety in India is great. Get real. I blew out every arguement you made. I showed you proof on how the Indian gov;t is suppressing info my RTI activists. Some democracy right? Instead of hearing such issues out, you guys become even more narrow minded losers. So, do us all a favor and f=k off. None of you guys contribute anything meaningful to this debate. No suggestions, no ideas how to make this nuclear reactor plant run on time without needlessly attacking the opposition without proof. You talk about Kalam, a missile engineer giving his input on a nuclear reactor. I guess you dont read enough mate, coz that arguement was made by the lead nuclear scientist who pointed out to kalam himself that he was no expert on such matters. So, stop with your blantatn lies and distortion of the facts. YOu can be President and advisor and such, but at the end of the day you depend on others to come to a conclusion. Where is Kalam now, when Post no,. 205 article pointed the active govt suppression of evidence? All I hear is crikets and Im not a fool to believe everything the govt states when we have idiots and corrupt politicans involved.
YOu can believe whatever you want. Im not forcing you to believe anything. I am just giving an unbiased view that India is not in a position as France and Japan who have unlimited resources and tech to assist in case of an emergency.
If you took the time to read coherently, you would know where I stand on this issue. Again, accusing me of wanting to stop the plants completely is total lie. I don;t mind as long as certain measures are in place.I dont care liar. YOu can say whatever you want but I have documented proof of you stating lies to make your false point. So, leave the tread, if you are so threatened by the truth. Same guy who thinks a dam will last 1000 yrs.
Why do you expect ppl to listen to these BS reports by agencies that are not neutral? Tata and AED are agenices that have a lot to gain with nuclear energy. How come the govt was hiding and suppressing the release of info on radiation causing cancer to employees? You know what that proves? The the standards and practices being used are not safe. Funny you talk about greedy corporate nature of Tokoyo yet fail to see the greedy nature of our babus and bureaucrats. You talk about no stats, well in order to argue with stats then proper unbiased research has to be completed. Just because there is no link, it does not mean there is no defintive link of causative agents. it simply means nothing has been established. YOu have to remember, there is still so much to learn about cancer. We are simply nibbling on crumb of information. Do you have any idea how controlled the media was in the 1980's compared to now? News is freely available thru a variety of sources. Ever wonder about the crackdown on the internet in India. We used to call out and complain about China...and look what the rest of the world is doing...
Oh, I'm not getting involved in your "pig" fights nor do i care about your particular grouse. I highlighted a specific sentence on purpose to indicate my bone of contention with you. As for being stupid, I beg to differ & would offer you a mirror if it helps. Homework? don't make me laugh, you were the one comparing Japan & India as similar seismic zones. Don't have to get uppity with everyone, you are not the sole repository of all wisdom nor are we going to countenance your usurping that idea.
You posted stuff & so the plant should stop ?
As for shutting my mouth & not wasting your time, anyone can decide for themselves based on the number & quality of posts sent in on this subject by each as to who is wasting time & who needs that advice more.
Again I have l=provided links to back up my claims....what have you backed up? Any evidence any links? just a wate of space it seems....It seems like you and friends think you are the only keepers of knowledge of nuclear reactors in India. Probably mad that fishermen know about this subject than you
What you fail to see, when push comes to shove, this whole process involves govt only. There are no real checks and balances. just a bunch or smoke and mirrors.
This is what I am talking about. You claim its not as white and black as I make it out. Well, buddy I suggest you read a lot more. YOu are the type of fools who talk and dismiss the poor and uneducated but with all the knowledge you have gained, you have lost vital human attirubute that all our ancestors had, COMMON SENSE. Do you know what the difference is between heavy and hazardous chemicals/metals are? There are many known carincogens involving such that are conclusively proven to cause cancer in lab animals. You talk about enormous security precautions but forget one incident in which a radioactive element was found in a water cooler of nuclear plant. Sabotage, insecurity, lax standards and practices,etc? It was mentioned in the media ad barely made a beep. Afterwards, there was no mention of it ever again.
Read up: So hard to find.....let me know if you need help googling...
Accidents at nuclear power plants in India
India currently has twenty nuclear reactors in operation, and their safety record is far from clean.
Below is a list of leaks, fires and structural damages that have occurred in India’s civilian nuclear power sector. Numerous other examples of oil leaks, hydrogen leaks, fires and high bearing vibrations have often shut plants, and sometimes not (1).
As the Department of Atomic Energy is not obliged to reveal details of ongoings at these plants to the public, there may be many other accidents that we do not know about.
April 2011 Fire alarms blare in the control room of the Kaiga Generating Station in Karnataka. Comments by officials alternately say there was no fire, that there was only smoke and no fire, and that the fire was not in a sensitive area (2). Details from the AERB are awaited.
November 2009 Fifty-five employees consume radioactive material after tritiated water finds its way into the drinking water cooler in Kaiga Generating Station. The NPCIL attributes the incident to “an insider’s mischief” (3).
April 2003 Six tonnes leak of heavy water at reactor II of the Narora Atomic Power Station (NAPS) in Uttar Pradesh (4), indicating safety measures have not been improved from the leak at the same reactor three years previously.
January 2003 Failure of a valve in the Kalpakkam Atomic Reprocessing Plant in Tamil Nadu results in the release of high-level waste, exposing six workers to high doses of radiation (5). The leaking area of the plant had no radiation monitors or mechanisms to detect valve failure, which may have prevented the employees’ exposure. A safety committee had previously recommended that the plant be shut down. The management blames the “over enthusiasm” of the workers (6).
May 2002 Tritiated water leaks from a downgraded heavy water storage tank at the tank farm of Rajasthan Atomic Power Station (RAPS) 1&2 into a common dyke area. An estimated 22.2 Curies of radioactivity is released into the environment (7).
November 2001 A leak of 1.4 tonnes of heavy water at the NAPS I reactor, resulting in one worker receiving an internal radiation dose of 18.49 mSv (8).
April 2000 Leak of about seven tonnes of heavy water from the moderator system at NAPS Unit II. Various workers involved in the clean-up received ‘significant uptakes of tritium’, although only one had a radiation dose over the recommended annual limit (9).
March 1999 Somewhere between four and fourteen tonnes (10) of heavy water leaks from the pipes at Madras Atomic Power Station (MAPS) at Kalpakkam, Tamil Nadu, during a test process. The pipes have a history of cracks and vibration problems (11) . Forty-two people are reportedly involved in mopping up the radioactive liquid (12).
May 1994 The inner surface of the containment dome of Unit I of Kaiga Generating Station collapses (delaminates) while the plant is under construction. Approximately 130 tonnes of concrete fall from a height of nearly thirty metres (13), injuring fourteen workers. The dome had already been completed (14), forming the part of the reactor designed to prevent escape of radioactive material into the environment in the case of an accident. Fortunately, the core had not then been loaded.
February 1994 Helium gas and heavy water leak in Unit 1 of RAPS. The plant is shut down until March 1997 (15).
March 1993 Two blades of the turbine in NAPS Unit I break off, slicing through other blades and indirectly causing a raging fire, which catches onto leaked oil and spreads through the turbine building. The smoke sensors fail to detect the fire, which is only noticed once workers see the flames. It causes a blackout in the plant, including the shutdown of the secondary cooling systems, and power is not restored for seventeen hours. In the meantime, operators have to manually activate the primary shutdown system. They also climb onto the roof to open valves to slow the reactions in the core by hand (16). The incident was rated as a Level 3 on the International Nuclear Event Scale, INES.
May 1992 Tube leak causes a radioactive release of 12 Curies of radioactivity from Tarapur Atomic Power Station (17).
January 1992 Four tons of heavy water spilt at RAPS (17).
December 1991 A leak from pipelines in the vicinity of CIRUS and Dhruva research reactors at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) in Trombay, Maharashtra, results in severe Cs-137 soil contamination of thousands of times the acceptable limit. Local vegetation was also found to be contaminated, though contract workers digging to the leaking pipeline were reportedly not tested for radiation exposure, despite the evidence of their high dose (18).
July 1991 A contracted labourer mistakenly paints the walls of RAPS with heavy water before applying a coat of whitewash. He also washed his paintbrush, face and hands in the deuterated and tritiated water, and has not been traced since (19).
March 1991 Heavy water leak at MAPS takes four days to clean up (20).
Accidents at nuclear power plants | Greenpeace India
The safety inadequacies of India's fast breeder reactor | Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
The safety inadequacies of India's fast breeder reactor
BY ASHWIN KUMAR AND M. V. RAMANA | 21 JULY 2009
Article Highlights
India's Department of Atomic Energy plans to build a large fleet of fast breeder nuclear reactors in the coming years.
However, many other countries that have experimented with fast reactors have shut down their programs due to technical and safety difficulties.
The Indian prototype is similarly flawed, inadequately protected against the possibility of a severe accident.
India's Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) is planning a large expansion of nuclear power, in which fast breeder reactors play an important role. Fast breeder reactors are attractive to the DAE because they produce (or "breed") more fissile material than they use. The breeder reactor is especially attractive in India, which hopes to develop a large domestic nuclear energy program even though it has primarily poor quality uranium ore that is expensive to mine.
Currently, only one fast reactor operates in the country--a small test reactor in Kalpakkam, a small township about 80 kilometers (almost 50 miles) south of Chennai. The construction of a larger prototype fast breeder reactor (PFBR) is underway at the same location. This reactor is expected to be completed in 2010 and will use mixed plutonium-uranium oxide as fuel in its core, with a blanket of depleted uranium oxide that will absorb neutrons and transmute into plutonium 239. Liquid sodium will be used to cool the core, which will produce 1,200 megawatts of thermal power and 500 megawatts of electricity. The reactor is to be the first of hundreds that the DAE envisions constructing throughout India by mid-century.
However, such an expansion of fast reactors, even if more modest than DAE projections, could adversely affect public health and safety. While all nuclear reactors are susceptible to catastrophic accidents, fast reactors pose a unique risk. In fast reactors, the core isn't in its most reactive--or energy producing-- configuration when operating normally. Therefore, an accident that rearranges the fuel in the core could lead to an increase in reaction rate and an increase in energy production. If this were to occur quickly, it could lead to a large, explosive energy release that might rupture the reactor vessel and disperse radioactive material into the environment.
Many of these reactors also have what is called a "positive coolant void coefficient," which means that if the coolant in the central part of the core were to heat up and form bubbles of sodium vapor, the reactivity--a measure of the neutron balance within the core, which determines the reactor's tendency to change its power level (if it is positive, the power level rises)--would increase; therefore core melting could accelerate during an accident. (A positive coolant void coefficient, though not involving sodium, contributed to the runaway reaction increase during the April 1986 Chernobyl reactor accident.) In contrast, conventional light water reactors typically have a "negative coolant void coefficient" so that a loss of coolant reduces the core's reactivity. The existing Indian fast breeder test reactor, with its much smaller core, doesn't have a positive coolant void coefficient. Thus, the DAE doesn't have real-world experience in handling the safety challenges that a large prototype reactor will pose.
More largely, international experience shows that fast breeder reactors aren't ready for commercial use. Superphénix, the flagship of the French breeder program, remained inoperative for the majority of its 11-year lifetime until it was finally shuttered in 1996. Concerns about the adequacy of the design of the German fast breeder reactor led to it being contested by environmental groups and the local state government in the 1980s and ultimately to its cancellation in 1991. And the Japanese fast reactor Monju shut down in 1995 after a sodium coolant leak caused a fire and has yet to restart. Only China and Russia are still developing fast breeders. China, however, has yet to operate one, and the Russian BN-600 fast reactor has suffered repeated sodium leaks and fires.
When it comes to India's prototype fast breeder reactor, two distinct questions must be asked: (1) Is there confidence about how an accident would propagate inside the core and how much energy it might release?; and (2) have PFBR design efforts been as strict as necessary, given the possibility that an accident would be difficult to contain and potentially harmful to the surrounding population?
The simple answer to both is no.
The DAE, like other fast-reactor developers, has tried to study how severe a core-disruptive accident would be and how much energy it would release. In the case of the PFBR, the DAE has argued that the worst-case core disruptive accident would release an explosive energy of 100 megajoules. This is questionable.
The DAE's estimate is much smaller when compared with other fast reactors, especially when the much larger power capacity of the PFBR--and thus, the larger amount of fissile material used in the reactor--is taken into account. For example, it was estimated that the smaller German reactor (designed to produce 760 megawatts of thermal energy) would produce 370 megajoules in the event of a core-disruptive accident--much higher than the PFBR estimate. Other fast reactors around the world have similarly higher estimates for how much energy would be produced in such accidents.
The DAE's estimate is based on two main assumptions: (1) that only part of the core will melt down and contribute to the accident; and (2) that only about 1 percent of the thermal energy released during the accident would be converted into mechanical energy that can damage the containment building and cause ejection of radioactive materials into the atmosphere.
Neither of these assumptions is justifiable. Britain's Atomic Energy Authority has done experiments that suggest up to 4 percent of the thermal energy could be converted into mechanical energy. And the phenomena that might occur inside the reactor core during a severe accident are very complex, so there's no way to stage a full-scale experiment to compare with the theoretical accident models that the reactor's designers used in their estimates. In addition, important omissions in the DAE's own safety studies make their analysis inadequately conservative. (Our independent estimates of the energy produced in a hypothetical PFBR core disruptive accident are presented in the Science and Global Security article, "Compromising Safety: Design Choices and Severe Accident Possibilities in India's Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor" and these are much higher than the DAE's estimates.)
Turning to the second question: In terms of the stringency of the DAE's design effort, the record reveals inadequate safety precautions. One goal of any "defense-in-depth" design is to engineer barriers to withstand the most severe accident that's considered plausible. Important among these barriers is the reactor's containment building, the most visible structure from the outside of any nuclear plant. Compared to most other breeder reactors, and light water reactors for that matter, the design of the PFBR's containment is relatively weak and won't be able to contain an accident that releases a large amount of energy. The DAE knows how to build stronger containments--its newest heavy water reactor design has a containment building that is meant to withstand six times more pressure than the PFBR's containment--but has chosen not to do so for the PFBR.
The other unsafe design choice is that of the reactor core. As mentioned earlier, the destabilizing positive coolant void coefficient in fast reactors is a problem because it increases the possibility that reactivity will escalate inside the core during an accident. It's possible to decrease this effect by designing the reactor core so that fuel subassemblies are interspersed within the depleted uranium blanket, in what is termed a heterogeneous core. The U.S. Clinch River Breeder Reactor, which was eventually cancelled, was designed with a heterogeneous core, and Russia has considered a heterogeneous core for its planned BN-1600 reactor. The DAE hasn't made such an effort, and the person who directed India's fast breeder program during part of the design phase once argued that the emphasis on the coolant void coefficient was mistaken because a negative void coefficient could lead to dangerous situations in an accident as well. That might be true, but it misses the obvious point that the same potentially dangerous situations would be even more dangerous if the void coefficient within the core is positive.
Both of these design choices--a weak containment building and a reactor core with a large and positive void coefficient--are readily explainable: They lowered costs. Reducing the sodium coolant void coefficient would have increased the fissile material requirement of the reactor by 30-50 percent--an expensive component of the initial costs. Likewise, a stronger containment building would have cost more. All of this is motivated by the DAE's assessment that "the capital cost of [fast breeder reactors] will remain the most important hurdle" to their rapid deployment.
Lowered electricity costs would normally be most welcome, but not with the increased risk of catastrophic accidents caused by poorly designed fast breeder reactors.
Nuclear Power Plant Accidents in India
DateLocationDescriptionCost(inmillions2006US$)
4 May 1987Kalpakkam,IndiaFast Breeder Test Reactor at Kalpakkamrefuelling accident that ruptures the reactor core,resulting in a two-year shutdown30010September 1989Tarapur,Maharashtra,IndiaOperators at theTarapur Atomic Power Station find that the reactor had been leaking radioactiveiodine at more than 700 times normal levels.Repairs to the reactor take more than a year 7813 May1992Tarapur,Maharashtra,IndiaA malfunctioning tube causes the Tarapur Atomic Power Station to release 12 curies of radioactivity231 March1993Bulandshahr,Uttar Pradesh,IndiaThe Narora Atomic Power Stationsuffers a fireat two of its steam turbine blades, damaging theheavy water reactor and almost leading to ameltdown2202 February1995Kota, Rajasthan,IndiaTheRajasthan Atomic Power Stationleaksradioactive helium and heavy water into theRana Pratap Sagar River , necessitating a two-year shutdown for repairs28022 October 2002Kalpakkam,IndiaAlmost 100 kg radioactive sodium at a fast breeder reactor leaks into a purification cabin,ruining a number of valves and operatingsystems30It is estimated that before the accident at Tarapur, lack of proper maintenance exposedmore than 3000 Indian personnel to "very high" and "hazardous" radiation levels.Researchers at the American University calculated at least 124 "hazardous incidents" atnuclear plants in India between 1993 and 1995.
[22]
NEW DELHIKakrapara Atomic Power Station (KAPS), in the western city of Surat, is India's well-groomed nuclear workhorse. Huge concrete domes enclose its two reactors, whichgenerate a surplus of power for the country. And when it comes to controlling radiationleakage, KAPS is "our best station," says S.P. Sukhatme, chairman of India's AtomicEnergy Regulatory Board (AERB).That, it turns out, is bad news. KAPS may be India's prized nuclear plant, but radiationemitted from its reactors is three times as much as the international norm, says Mr.Sukhatme.
It's a shocking admission that puts the rest of the country's nuclear-power plants in grave perspective. "The main implication is that other nuclear-power plants are much worsethan even Kakrapar," says Suren Gadekar, considered to be India's top antinuclear activist.Four months ago, world leaders fretted about the possibility of two nuclear-weaponsrivals, India and Pakistan, approaching the brink of war. That problem apparently onhold, India's nuclear scientists say the country could still face an equally devastatingnuclear catastrophe – without a shot being fired.This time, the threat is not Pakistan or terrorists, but India's power plants themselves.Some scientists say that the plants are so poorly built and maintained, a Chernobyl-styledisaster may be just a matter of time."The fact that India's nuclear regulator acknowledges that reactors in India are notoperated to the standards of reactors in the US and Europe is not much of a surprise,"says Christopher Sherry, research director of the Safe Energy Communication Council inWashington. "But it is very disturbing."India tested its first nuclear device in May 1974. In 1998, the country successfullyconducted five underground nuclear tests, heralding its entry into ga select group of countries capable of waging nuclear war.Today, the country has 14 nuclear power reactors including two at KAPS. Most aremodeled after a design first built in Shippingport, Penn. in 1957, and considered byexperts to be the most cost-effective way to produce electricity through nuclear energy.However only three of those nuclear reactors fall under International Atomic EnergyAgency (IAEA) standards. The rest – which were built with local technology – areaccountable only to national standards set by the AERB.This February, Sukhatme asked the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd – agovernment-owned manufacturer of nuclear plants – to plug leakage of water contaminated with tritium, a highly radioactive substance, from reactors. "There is a clear need for reducing the exposure to workers," he says.Also earlier this year, the AERB ordered the closure of India's first nuclear plant in thestate of Rajasthan. The reactor that put India on the nuclear world map developed a seriesof defects, starting with "turbine-blade failures." Gradually the reactor was wrecked by"cracks in the end-shields, a leak in the calandria overpressure relief device, a leak inmany tubes in the moderator heat exchanger."While the government releases no information about leaks or accidents at its nuclear power plants, Dhirendra Sharma, a scientist who has written extensively on India'satomic-power projects, has compiled figures based on his own reporting. "An estimated
300 incidents of a serious nature have occurred, causing radiation leaks and physicaldamage to workers," he says. "These have so far remained official secrets."According to critics like Mr. Gadekar, India's nuclear-power program has always beensecretive because politicians use it as a cover for the country's weapons program. "Rightfrom Jawaharlal Nehru [India's first prime minister] onward, our leaders have alwaysclaimed that the nuclear-power program is a 'peaceful' program, whereas the weaponsimplications were always there in the background," says Gadekar. "As a result, secrecyhas become a way of life for these people."The chairman of India's Atomic Energy Commission, Anil Kakodkar, has repeatedlyasserted that his group is doing what it can to ensure that the country's power plants aresafe. Still, leaks continues to raise serious questions about safety.Part of the problem, says N.M. Sampathkumar Iyangar, a former manufacturer of nuclear reactor components, is that well-connected manufacturers are able to cut deals with politicians in India's Department of Energy, often selling defective parts, which are thenused to build reactors.But others, like Dr. Kakodkar, say the real problem is that new technology designed toupgrade safety at power plants is too expensive for developing countries like India.According to Kakodkar, India should not be held accountable to international standardsuntil the international community helps make such technology available to developingcountries."Safety and technology cannot be divorced," he says.
Tehelka - India's Independent Weekly News Magazine
Accident Sites - radiation, cancer, blindness, tardiness, cover-ups.
The lessons from the Kalpakkam nuclear facility
BY KUNAL MAJUMDER
Pride of India
Kalpakkam’s indigenous nuclear reactors produce electricity for commercial consumption
In the end, loud voices were all that mattered. After three months of extended discussions, legislators in the Indian Parliament yelled their assent. The Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Bill, 2010 was a legislation.
As India charts its journey towards extended nuclear commerce — the legislation allows India to trade with global private firms in nuclear technology — we highlight key coordinates on the Indian nuclear map as we seek to understand how ready we are to embrace nuclear energy.
Last week’s story, Nuclear energy. Ministries warn they are far from ready, 4 September, laid bare the backroom machinations as the government worked to ensure that the Parliament cleared the draft Nuclear Liability legislation. Amidst the loud public din, voices of government officials warning that they were ill-equipped to deal with nuclear accidents were drowned out. When the legislation was finally passed in the Rajya Sabha, Minister of State for Science and Technology Prithviraj Chavan, attempting to take dissenters on board, declared, “This is not final... We will take care of every single suggestion. If required, the Bill will be changed for the better.”
This week, TEHELKA travels to Kalpakkam and Kudankulam in Tamil Nadu where two nuclear plants are located.
IN AN inconspicuous corner of the Department of Atomic Energy’s (DAE) website is a large map that could easily belong in a student’s science textbook. On the map that captures atomic energy establishments in India, it isn’t difficult to find Kalpakkam. Located around 70 km from Tamil Nadu’s capital, Chennai, Kalpakkam plays host to seven nuclear organisations — from the Madras Atomic Power Station that generates nuclear energy to the Kalpakkam Atomic Reprocessing Plant that reprocesses spent fuel from the reactors for reuse in other nuclear programmes. But there is yet another reason to accord Kalpakkam a special place on the Indian nuclear map. The two pressurised heavy water reactors installed at Kalpakkam were developed indigenously. Commercial operation at the atomic power plant began way back in 1984 and 1986; and currently the plant produces 440MW of electricity from the two reactors. Plans for an additional 500MW capacity are on the anvil.
PLAYING WITH SAFETY
> 1995 Dayanidhi and Khandhasamy record 50 times more than normal gamma radiation levels in Kalpakkam
> 26 MARCH 1999 Heavy water leak in the K5 unit of MAPS II. At least seven people received a full radiation dose
> 30 MAY 2001 S Sivakumar, a worker, suffers internal contamination after a neoprene glove is punctured
> 7 JULY 2002 Selvakumar, a worker, burns his left hand after he picks up a radioactive substance
> 19 DECEMBER 2002 Madhusoodanan and Rajan fail to follow safety procedures; suffer internal contamination
Further south, about 700 km from Kalpakkam, is Kudankulam. The Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited is in the process of constructing two 1,000MW capacity reactors here. Kudankulam reactors, being built with the support of the Russian nuclear vendor company, Atomstroyexport, will be India’s first collaboration with an international player when it begins operations in March 2011. The atomic power plants at Kalpakkam and Kudankulam then present two distinct coordinates within the Indian nuclear energy spectrum — a predominantly indigenous-technology powered Kalpakkam power plant versus a power plant that will bring on board collaboration with a foreign player.
And yet as TEHELKA found when it travelled to both places, the anxieties and the pain in the voices of the people living around these plants did not differ. If at Kalpakkam, whispers of nuclear incidents and accidents at the various nuclear facilities were very audible, at Kudankulam, it was the apprehension of an impending disaster that rang clear.
TEHELKA ACCESSED a confidential letter (BARCFEA/ 03/03/131 dated 24 January 2003) written to the Director of Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), the Mumbai-based organisation that oversees operations at the Kalpakkam Fuel Reprocessing Plant. The letter written by the general secretary of the BARC Facilities Employees’ Association recounted in detail a significant nuclear accident that took place on 21 January 2003 at the Kalpakkam Atomic Reprocessing Plant. According to the letter, a scientist, Srinivasa Raju, was asked to collect a sample of an unknown solution from a low-level radioactive waste tank. The tank had not been fitted with a gamma monitor that would raise an alarm in case of high radiation levels. Around 12 pm, Raju carried the sample to an internal laboratory by hand and left it in a tray for testing. The laboratory’s gamma monitor immediately began emitting visual alarms in response to the high-radiation level of the solution. It took the workers two hours to notice the radiation monitors. By the time, the source of the alarm was located, Raju had been working with the solution for nearly an hour. Besides Raju, five others, including a woman, had also been exposed to high levels of radiation. BARC officials acknowledged the event eight months later, and finally on 6 August 2003, B Bhattacharjee, then director of BARC, termed it “the worst accident in India’s nuclear history”.
A sorry sight A cancerous eye will eventually claim the life of three-year-old Abhi, warn medical experts
When we asked about the six people, including Raju, who were exposed to high levels of radiation, there were no easy answers. “One of them died,” said Dr A Vijaya, medical superintendent of the DAE established hospital in Kalpakkam, only to quickly add, “but not due to radiation. The rest are fine.” Deflecting queries about their whereabouts, Dr Vijaya directed us to the fuel reprocessing plant officials. Repeated attempts to contact the reprocessing plant officials proved futile.
Yet another Confidential letter reveals more cases of radiation exposure (see box). In an off-hand dismissal of accident claims by workers at the plant, Dr Vasudev Rao, Director, Chemical Group, Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research in Kalpakkam said the Indian nuclear industry had a zero-tolerance policy towards radiation exposure. “Because of our clean track record, even small instances are blown out of proportion by the media and common people,” said Dr Rao.
Outside the facility too, there are enough voices that speak of radiation effects. Since plant operations began in the early 1980s, incidents of cancer and auto-immune thyroid diseases in the surrounding villages have increased. Five km south of the Kalpakkam nuclear facility, at Sadraskuppam village, we met with Rajesh (name changed), a contract worker at the nuclear facility. Rajesh’s three-year-old daughter, Abhi has been diagnosed with retinoblastoma, or cancer of eyes, and doctors have just confirmed the eventuality of her death.
“I want to donate her organs. But my wife is far too emotional and won’t hear of it,” he says. Rajesh earns 300 daily — a sum that is hardly enough to pay for an operation that could have possibly saved his daughter’s life.
A second-generation plant worker, Rajesh tells us emphatically that doctors treating his daughter at the Aarvind Eye Hospital in Madurai unequivocally confirm that radiation from the nuclear plant is responsible for her condition. Their advice is clear — move out of the area. Something that Rajesh cannot afford to do. “I have four young children who depend on me. How will I feed them if I don’t work here?” asks Rajesh. Point out the obvious irony and Rajesh turns away.
For the nation Kudankulam will have four more 1,000 MW capacity nuclear reactors, bringing the total number to six
Rajesh’s story is by no means an isolated one. An estimated 30,000 workers live in the five villages that fall within the 5 km radius from the plant, besides a DAE township that accommodates permanent plant workers. Ask for statistics on cancer-related deaths among workers and the local public health centre refuses our requests on grounds classifying the information as sensitive. The DAE medical officer, Dr Vijaya, claims that the number of cancer cases in the township is an insignificant 244 over a 10-year period. Local activists contest the figure and say that the official list excludes many deaths. The cause of death is often changed to keep numbers down. Activists and DAE officials also do not see eye-to-eye on the causes of diseases that are prevalent here. Despite studies by internationally recognised professionals, DAE officials maintain that the radiation levels emitted are too low to cause problems.
Though it hasn’t been officially announced, 30,000 villagers have been asked to leave once the Kudankulam plant gets ready
NONE OF these debates were taken on board by the parliamentary committee that visited the facility on 7 July this year while the nuclear liability legislation was under consideration. Over a few hours, committee members led by T Subbarami Reddy met officials from different facilities and local politicians and concluded that the facility was equipped to handle accidents and that people faced no problems in the area. “We are shocked. They didn’t even enter the villages. They accepted the version of the DAE officials and the politicians,” says Dr V Pugazhenthi, a physician who has been practising in the area for the past 20 years. Understandably, the doctor is a strong critic of the plant’s unsafe practices.
In Kudankulam, months away from the start of the operations, there is no sign of debate. Villagers allege that the mandated public hearings, one possible space for debate, were held 87 km from the plant site. Says AS Ravi, a local leader, “We went in huge numbers despite the obvious problem of distance. Nothing mattered though. In the end, our villages didn’t even figure on their map.” Adds Dr SP Udayakumar, another activist, “People here are bracing for the radiation effects once the plant operations begin in March 2011. Though officially, there has been no intimation, 30,000 villagers have been asked to leave once the plant is functional.”
In the end, for the villagers of Kudankulam, there is only one relevant question left to ask. In broken Hindi, an old banana vendor yells, “If Manmohan Singh thinks nuclear energy is good, why doesn’t he build a plant at 10 Janpath?” One suggestion that Prithviraj Chavan is not going to take on board.
PHOTO: LAKSHMAN M , IGCAR
kunal@tehelka.com
Nuclear power plant accidents: listed, visualised and ranked since 1952 | World news | guardian.co.uk
Why Indian nuclear plants are accident-prone and some may explode in the long run?
Why Indian nuclear plants are accident-prone and some may explode in the long run?
LATEST
Prof.T.Shivaji Rao, Director, Center for Environmental Studies, GITAM University, Visakhapatnam.
The International Atomic Energy Agency expert committee enquiry report on Fukushima disaster clearly established that nuclear safety is bound to be impossible for sevral reasons as indicated in the report. For instance the experts warned that complicated structures and organisations during a nuclear accident can result in delays in urgent decision making.
(Note: British expert, Farmer, chose a source term of 5 million curies of Iodine-131 for a 10% core release and predicted high contamination upto 160km. from the reactor. Beattie and Bell used a release of one million curies of Iodine-131 and predicted high contamination upto 144km. from the reactor. Gomberg, an American expert considered the maximum core release under atmospheric inversion conditions and predicted very high levels of radio-active contamination upto 128km from the reactor. All these studies indicate that an accident scenario for the 1100 MW Size-well reactor can be used to predict the socio-economic consequences of a nuclear accident for the different sites like Kovvada in Srikakulam and Jaitapur in Maharashtra to determine their suitability for establishing the proposed nuclear plants.)
According to the experts at least one nuclear incident and $332 millions damages every year are reported for the last 3 decades and most of these accidents are not due to natural disasters like the one at Fukushima. Disasters can occur due to mechanical failures, human errors, terrorist attacks and several radiation spills occurred during operation, transportation and other factors. Some of these events with lesser media coverage have potential to cause considerable damage. About 57 accidents occurred since Chernobyl disaster in 1986 and in addition to about 124 hazardous accidents at Nuclear plants in India between 1993 and 1995. Iodine leak in Tarapur with radiation levels 700 times more than the normal effected 3000 Indians in 1989.
Although contaminated soils due to Bhopal accident can be restored by spending money the long half lives of radioactive pollutants militate against the possibility of restoring lands subject to high levels of contamination by air and water sources and the nuclear waste storage treatment and disposal still is an unsolved problem and thereby nuclear energy has become the fourth most expensive of the alternative sources of energy in spite of the fact that the cost estimates of nuclear energy exclude the costs of safety, storage and decommissioning. Consequently even the advanced passive safety nuclear plants have not coming to operation even in countries like USA.
REACTOR SAFETY: The Nuclear Energy Lobby is very powerful all over the world. In USA they are spending 7 to 8 million dollars on advertising for a return to nuclear power under the threat of Ozone depletion and green-house effect due to pollution from thermal power plants. But a number of Nobel Laureates like Linus pauling, George wald, Hannes Alfven and James watt and eminent scientists like Rosalie Bertel and Willian Caldicott have been strongly opposing nuclear power due to radiation hazards. It is well known that the bombardment of Uranium fuel produces neutrons, heat energy, radio-active fission products and activation products. Hence utmost care is taken to prevent this radiation from escaping into environment and harm the workers and the general public. A 1000 MW Reactor contains several thousand million curies of radio-activity in its core and the radiation delivered nearby could be 100 million rems per hour against 5 rems per year allowed for occupational exposure by the authorities.
Although nuclear radiation cannot be detected by man’s physical senses it gets into the air, water and soil and the food chains and food-webs in nature and gets biologically magnified to contaminate the environment and poison the life systems. It cannot be considered to be clean just because it cannot be seen, smelled, tasted or touched by man. In fact many studies suggested increased cancer rates among workers exposed to radiation at the American nuclear weapon facilities. In a 1984 study report on excess cancer deaths, 9 out of 12 studies established the link between cancer and radiation. One study reported very high death rates from Lymphatic cancer and cancer of cervix and uterus among 19000 women who worked at the Oak-ridge nuclear reservation in Tennessee. Another study reported abnormal death rates from Leukemia and brain cancer among male workers at the Oak-ridge.
Infact the recent reassessment of the Japanese bomb victims has proved that cancer risk is 15 times greater than the radiation risk factors accepted by the International Committee on Radiation Protection (ICRP) in 1977. A reduction in radiation dose is bound to be opposed by the nuclear industry as it will make nuclear power very expensive. However the national and international organizations that specify the standards cannot remain unconcerned about these crucial problems of life and death. In Britain, the annual radiation dose limits have been revised in 1987 to 50 milli-rems to the general public. In USA the dose limits were set at 25 milli-rems to the general public by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Energy Research and Development Agency has recommended for a drastic reduction to 5 milli-rems.
MODES OF REACTOR FAILURE: Serious concern about the dangers of operating nuclear power plants created panic among the public due to an accident in 1979 at the Nuclear power plant k own as three Mile Island accident in Harrisburg of Pennsylvania, USA. A series of equipment failures, misleading readings from the instruments and human errors caused the abnormal heating of the reactor core and these grave errors prevented emergency systems from operating properly.
Small amounts of radioactive gases from the plant escaped into the atmosphere and caused health risks to the public including a few excess cancer deaths among 20 lakhs of people living within 50 miles of the plant. Sabotage, an earthquake, a human error or equipment failure can cause a reactor accident in which a main pipe in the primary cooling circuit can get fractured. In such a case the control rods would switch off the reactor so that nuclear fission process is stopped immediately. Even then the disintegration of the fission products cannot be stopped and there will be decay heat. In a 650 MW power plant, the heat formation by such disintegration will be 200MW for 3 seconds after the reactor is switched-off and it will be 30 MW after one hour and 12 MW after 24 hours and the decay heat due to disintegration continues for several months.
Under normal working conditions in the reactor the fuel casing surface has a temperature of 350oC (660oF) while the interior of the fuel rods will be at 2,200oC (4000oF), approaching the melting point of the fuel. If the cooling liquid is lost the surface of the fuel rods heats up rapidly and within 10 to 15 seconds fuel casing would breakdown and within a minute the casing would melt and the fuel rods also began to melt. Unless the emergency core cooling system comes into operation within the first few minutes, the reactor core and the fuel of about 100 tonnes and the supporting structure would melt and collapse on the floor of the inner-most fuel tank. To meet such an accident due to loss of cooling agent, the reactor is provided with several emergency cooling independent systems based on theoretical calculations. During an experimental test the systems failed; the emergency coolant failed to cool the reactor core as it escaped through the leak in the cooling circuit and also owing to a layer of steam forming between the hot surface of the fuel rods and the emergency coolant, and the remaining emergency coolant fluid could not carry away the heat generated by the fuel rods. If the core cooling system fails to work in time, almost in a minute, the reactor core melts and if the coolant water is added at this belated time, it would make the situation worse. The melted metals in the fuel reactor react violently with this coolant water and produces great volume of heat and the steam and hydrogen thus produced would be released in such a great quantities and at such a high pressure that the pressure tank would burst and there will be no other technical control measure that can stop the melting process and the molten core would sink into the ground causing what is known as China syndrome. Practically all the gaseous fission products and some of the volatile and non-volatile products would be thrown into the atmosphere. In a 1000 MW reactor the fission products accumulated after one year would approximate the amount that will be released by about 1000 atom bombs of the Hiroshima variety.
RESIDUAL HEAT FROM A 650MW REACTOR & LOSS OF COOLANT LEADING TO EXPLOSION (Diminishing heat and sequence of failures due to loss of coolant after the reactor is stopped.)
(Diminishing heat and sequence of failures due to loss of coolant after the reactor is stopped.)
Time
Heat formation
Remarks
0
650 MW
Reactor stopped by control rods
3 Seconds
200 MW
Heat formation
15 Seconds
–
Fuel casing begans to fail
30 Seconds
–
Boiling layer of emergency coolant
45 Seconds
–
Reactor core melts
60 Seconds
–
Reactor core collapses
1 hour
30 MW
–
24 hours
12 MW
–
Months
Diminishing heat
–
RISK DUE TO ACCIDENTS:For making a probabilistic safety assessment of a nuclear plant for a specified location, an estimate of the socio-economic consequences due to an unlikely severe accident must be made in 2 steps. Firstly, the magnitude and nature of release of toxic radio-isotopes into the environment, known as, the “source term” must be determined. Secondly, the source term must be used in modeling the atmospheric dispersion of radio-activity under different stability conditions and the consequent impact in terms of health effects on people and damage to agriculture and animal husbandry, houses and properties must be assessed. Even for reactor designs with strong containment structures, some kinds of accidents which can by-pass the containment occur. In case of Chernobyl with the sudden failure of the first 3 barriers, namely the fuel-matrix, cladding and cooling system and the absence of a strong containment, the radio-isotopes immediately flashed out, escaped into the environment, and the emission continued for 10 days. In case of Three Mile Island, the 3 barriers failed on a longer time scale of 3 hours while the containment retained all but a trace of radio-activity that escaped from the core for a short duration.
For calculating the consequences of an accident for a 1100 MW pressurized water reactor at size-well in England, the Westing house corporation and the British authorities considered the source terms for containment by-pass for the maximum release of radio-isotopes from the core of the reactor. They used the National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB) “MARC” suite of programmes for the atmospheric dispersion modeling. Under the worst conditions, this model predicts that people have to be evacuated down-wind upto 140 to 170km from the reactor. The damage due to an accident has been estimated at 2400 million pounds inclusive of health and housing costs, losses in agriculture and non-agriculture fields, cleaning and decommissioning expenses and supplementary costs of alternate power supply etc. Similar studies on socio-economic consequences of postulated accidents at nuclear plant sites were made by different experts to determine the suitable location. For instance a British expert, Farmer, chose a source term of 5 million curies of Iodine-131 for a 10% core release and predicted high contamination upto 160km. from the reactor. Beattie and Bell used a release of one million curies of Iodine-131 and predicted high contamination upto 144km. from the reactor. Gomberg, an American expert considered the maximum core release under atmospheric inversion conditions and predicted very high levels of radio-active contamination upto 128km from the reactor. (See here)
If the American Nuclear Power plant managers are taking interest inprotecting public health and the environment by taking up emergency planning zones upto 50 miles or 80km from the nuclear plant site for estimating the peak levels of radiation exposure for evacuating people for and settling them in safer places the Indian Government and the nuclear plant managers are violating this standard in India and thereby are positively considering that the life of an Indian is far inferior than that of an American citizen and thereby are aoviding the public health norms in planning for nuclear power plants to ensure safety of the public and the environment and thereby the Indian people are not taken as co-partners as in other countries.
All these studies indicate that an accident scenario for the 1100 MW Size-well reactor can be used to predict the socio-economic consequences of a nuclear accident for the different sites like Kovvada in Srikakulam and Jaitapur in Maharashtra to determine their suitability for establishing the proposed nuclear plants.
Indian Work Culture Provides Mileage for Promotion of Disastershttp://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/article2229713.eceThe Indian National Capital,New Delhi, has been struck time and again by terrorists because of the mileage they are able to derive, but the disaster management mechanism in this highly sensitive city still remains mired in red-tape with bureaucratic ego, multiplicity of authority and a lackadaisical approach towards carrying out even basic tasks, like mock drills, making a mockery of the entire process.
Sources in the Delhi Government said despite Delhi having been targeted on numerous occasions, the disaster management mechanism here remains far from satisfactory. The problems plaguing it are many.While the Disaster Management Act 2005 had led to the setting up of the Delhi Disaster Management Authority under the Lieutenant-Governor and the constitution of District Disaster Management Authority in each of the nine districts, these bodies continue to suffer on account of multiplicity of authority.“The Delhi Police, which is the first responder in any disaster, be it manmade or natural, Delhi Traffic Police, Municipal Corporation of Delhi, New Delhi Municipal Council and Delhi Development Authority all come under the Union Government and so the Delhi Government has little say in case their officials do not adhere to any rules or directions. Only a report can be made out to the Centre against them and the matter rests there,” said a senior official.
MULTIPLE CAUSES FOR REACTOR FAILURES
A reactor may be designed to be safe for a given magnitude of earthquake and a Tsunami wave to withstand or to withstand both. But if a third risky event like a terrorist attack that devastated the world trade center in NewYork , Bomb attacks that destroyed Dams in Germany during the second world War or a missile attack is experienced by a nuclear plant, nobody can guarantee the safety of the reactors. Hence Nuclear Safety is a myth particularly under Indian nuclear industrial work culture and hence India must follow the Japanese Prime Minister in abandoning nuclear reactors and promote alternate sources of energy. Nuclear reactor proliferation is the greatest threat to human life amounting to an undeclared nuclear waragainst mankind posing a threat to our civilization.
Advanced passive safety Reactors
Questioning the safety of nuclear reactors Dr.Hannes Alfven, a noble laureate said “although the nuclear experts devote more effort to safety problems than others, the real question is whether their blue-prints will work as expected by them in the real world and not only in their technological paradise.”
The growing number of nuclear incidents show that it is impossible to ensure complete safety even the most modern passive safe reactors. Decay heat needs pumped cooling water for an year to prevent over heating nuclear plants are some of the most sophisticated and complex energy systems and no matter how will they are designed and engineered, they cannot be deemed fail-proof.
Reactors are highly complex machines with an incalculable things including inter connected linkages that could go wrong. In the Three Mile Island Reactor accident one malfunction led to another malfunction and then to a series of others until the core itself began to melt and even the best experts did not know how to respond . A combination of electrical, mechanical and human failures can disable the reactor itself. Indian work culture is not as reliable as the work culture of the nuclear plant operators of a highly technically advanced country like Japan where the Fukushima reactor accidents proved that nuclear accidents cannot be forecast and prevented in time and hence under Indian work culture of unreliable dimensions and unfavourable circumstances like the growing social unrest due to political corruption that promotes terrorist activities including bombing, accidents as are occurring in major cities like New Delhi, Mumbai and Hyderabad the nuclear plants are bound to fail in the long run.
Terrorist Attacks on Nuclear Plants-Report to U.K. Government
Kovvada Nuclear Plant claimed to be safe due to improvements
Finally demographic and Meteorological analysis are made to evaluate the reactor sites to restrict the exposed population in the unlikely event of a large scale release of radio-activity and thus safety standards must be made known to the people who ultimately have to make a choice between the economic benefits of the nuclear power and its long term risks to the health and welfare of the present and future generations and the decision to opt for the nuclear power in preference tos the more economical and renewable energy resources must be left in the hands of the public who are the ultimate decision makers in a social welfare state.
812. 1987, June – U.S.A.
More than 23,000 mishaps have occurred at US commercial reactor power plants since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, according to Public Citizen.
1979 – 2,310 accidents 1980 – 3,804 accidents 1981 – 4,060 accidents
1982 – 4,500 accidents 1983 – 5,000 accidents 1984 – 2,417 accidents
1985 – 2,974 accidents 1986 – 3,000 accidents.
(Public Citizen Critical Mass Energy Project WISE NC 275 June 87)857. 1987 – U.S.A.
The Government and its officials are the public servants who have to work to promote peoples welfare and national progress by promoting the right methods of development in preference to the wrong methods of development which are ecologically unsound, economically ruinous and socially unacceptable and the Gandhian principles of sustainable development must be upheld because Indian ethos not only preaches but practices in letter and spirit the slogan of SARVEJANA SUKHINOBHAVANTU.
Why nuclear reactor safety is considered as a myth by German chancellor Angela Merkel and Japanese ex- prime minister, Naoto Kan
When the Swiss Government wanted to buy the US Reactors in 1973 , they demanded experimental proof that the dome containment would retain the radioactive pollutants released during a Loss of Coolant Accident (LOCA). Actual Test is very expensive,Moreover, since an actual test would be more dangerous than nuclear bomb testing, assurances on reactor safety are entirely based on tests on paper using simulated mathematical models.
As such test results can not take into account the different permutations and combinations of malfunctions from defective materials, mechanical or human errors, sabotage, bombing, terrorism, missile hits, aero-plane crashes etc. they become invalid.
In other words, nobody can do all the necessary testing nor even anticipate what kind of tests are needed. At best, the experts may be able to simulate and estimate the answers to some of the questions asked by the people but do the people know all the questions that are yet to be asked for making the reactors absolutely safe for all time for different Natural and Man-made errors? Hence the proof of reactor safety could not be given and still has not been demonstrated.
But when the tests on the Emergency core cooling system designed to flood the core during a loss of coolant Accident[LOCA] were run at the National Reactor Testing Station in Idaho, mechanical failures occurred. When the tests were run during 1970-71 all the six tests conducted by the Aero-jet Nuclear Company failed. Subsequent experiments at Oak-ridge National Laboratoreis indicated that the Zircaloy-clad fuel rods of the Light water reactors may swell, rupture and block the cooling channels, and thereby obstruct the emergency cooling water from reaching the core and such obstruction which holds back the emergency core cooling water leads to a catastrophe sometime or the other. Thus reactor safety is most often a myth!
Questioning the safety of nuclear reactors Dr.Hannes Alfven, a noble laureate said “although the nuclear experts devote more effort to safety problems than others, the real question is whether their blue-prints will work as expected by them in the real world and not only in their technological paradise”
According to Brahma Chellany: ”The chain of incidents engulfing all six Fukushima reactors was triggered by their close proximity to each other.
With a flare-up at one reactor affecting systems at another, Japan has ended up with serial blasts, fires, spent-fuel exposures and other radiation leaks at the Fukushima complex.
The lesson: A string of events can quickly overwhelm emergency preparedness and safety redundancies built into reactor systems.This seriously calls into question India’s decision to approve construction of six to 12 large reactors at each new nuclear park.”
Why Indian nuclear plants are accident-prone and some may explode in the long run?
Why Indian nuclear plants are accident-prone and some may explode in the long run?
LATEST
Prof.T.Shivaji Rao, Director, Center for Environmental Studies, GITAM University, Visakhapatnam.
The International Atomic Energy Agency expert committee enquiry report on Fukushima disaster clearly established that nuclear safety is bound to be impossible for sevral reasons as indicated in the report. For instance the experts warned that complicated structures and organisations during a nuclear accident can result in delays in urgent decision making.
(Note: British expert, Farmer, chose a source term of 5 million curies of Iodine-131 for a 10% core release and predicted high contamination upto 160km. from the reactor. Beattie and Bell used a release of one million curies of Iodine-131 and predicted high contamination upto 144km. from the reactor. Gomberg, an American expert considered the maximum core release under atmospheric inversion conditions and predicted very high levels of radio-active contamination upto 128km from the reactor. All these studies indicate that an accident scenario for the 1100 MW Size-well reactor can be used to predict the socio-economic consequences of a nuclear accident for the different sites like Kovvada in Srikakulam and Jaitapur in Maharashtra to determine their suitability for establishing the proposed nuclear plants.)
According to the experts at least one nuclear incident and $332 millions damages every year are reported for the last 3 decades and most of these accidents are not due to natural disasters like the one at Fukushima. Disasters can occur due to mechanical failures, human errors, terrorist attacks and several radiation spills occurred during operation, transportation and other factors. Some of these events with lesser media coverage have potential to cause considerable damage. About 57 accidents occurred since Chernobyl disaster in 1986 and in addition to about 124 hazardous accidents at Nuclear plants in India between 1993 and 1995. Iodine leak in Tarapur with radiation levels 700 times more than the normal effected 3000 Indians in 1989.
Although contaminated soils due to Bhopal accident can be restored by spending money the long half lives of radioactive pollutants militate against the possibility of restoring lands subject to high levels of contamination by air and water sources and the nuclear waste storage treatment and disposal still is an unsolved problem and thereby nuclear energy has become the fourth most expensive of the alternative sources of energy in spite of the fact that the cost estimates of nuclear energy exclude the costs of safety, storage and decommissioning. Consequently even the advanced passive safety nuclear plants have not coming to operation even in countries like USA.
REACTOR SAFETY: The Nuclear Energy Lobby is very powerful all over the world. In USA they are spending 7 to 8 million dollars on advertising for a return to nuclear power under the threat of Ozone depletion and green-house effect due to pollution from thermal power plants. But a number of Nobel Laureates like Linus pauling, George wald, Hannes Alfven and James watt and eminent scientists like Rosalie Bertel and Willian Caldicott have been strongly opposing nuclear power due to radiation hazards. It is well known that the bombardment of Uranium fuel produces neutrons, heat energy, radio-active fission products and activation products. Hence utmost care is taken to prevent this radiation from escaping into environment and harm the workers and the general public. A 1000 MW Reactor contains several thousand million curies of radio-activity in its core and the radiation delivered nearby could be 100 million rems per hour against 5 rems per year allowed for occupational exposure by the authorities.
Although nuclear radiation cannot be detected by man’s physical senses it gets into the air, water and soil and the food chains and food-webs in nature and gets biologically magnified to contaminate the environment and poison the life systems. It cannot be considered to be clean just because it cannot be seen, smelled, tasted or touched by man. In fact many studies suggested increased cancer rates among workers exposed to radiation at the American nuclear weapon facilities. In a 1984 study report on excess cancer deaths, 9 out of 12 studies established the link between cancer and radiation. One study reported very high death rates from Lymphatic cancer and cancer of cervix and uterus among 19000 women who worked at the Oak-ridge nuclear reservation in Tennessee. Another study reported abnormal death rates from Leukemia and brain cancer among male workers at the Oak-ridge.
Infact the recent reassessment of the Japanese bomb victims has proved that cancer risk is 15 times greater than the radiation risk factors accepted by the International Committee on Radiation Protection (ICRP) in 1977. A reduction in radiation dose is bound to be opposed by the nuclear industry as it will make nuclear power very expensive. However the national and international organizations that specify the standards cannot remain unconcerned about these crucial problems of life and death. In Britain, the annual radiation dose limits have been revised in 1987 to 50 milli-rems to the general public. In USA the dose limits were set at 25 milli-rems to the general public by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Energy Research and Development Agency has recommended for a drastic reduction to 5 milli-rems.
MODES OF REACTOR FAILURE: Serious concern about the dangers of operating nuclear power plants created panic among the public due to an accident in 1979 at the Nuclear power plant k own as three Mile Island accident in Harrisburg of Pennsylvania, USA. A series of equipment failures, misleading readings from the instruments and human errors caused the abnormal heating of the reactor core and these grave errors prevented emergency systems from operating properly.
Small amounts of radioactive gases from the plant escaped into the atmosphere and caused health risks to the public including a few excess cancer deaths among 20 lakhs of people living within 50 miles of the plant. Sabotage, an earthquake, a human error or equipment failure can cause a reactor accident in which a main pipe in the primary cooling circuit can get fractured. In such a case the control rods would switch off the reactor so that nuclear fission process is stopped immediately. Even then the disintegration of the fission products cannot be stopped and there will be decay heat. In a 650 MW power plant, the heat formation by such disintegration will be 200MW for 3 seconds after the reactor is switched-off and it will be 30 MW after one hour and 12 MW after 24 hours and the decay heat due to disintegration continues for several months.
Under normal working conditions in the reactor the fuel casing surface has a temperature of 350oC (660oF) while the interior of the fuel rods will be at 2,200oC (4000oF), approaching the melting point of the fuel. If the cooling liquid is lost the surface of the fuel rods heats up rapidly and within 10 to 15 seconds fuel casing would breakdown and within a minute the casing would melt and the fuel rods also began to melt. Unless the emergency core cooling system comes into operation within the first few minutes, the reactor core and the fuel of about 100 tonnes and the supporting structure would melt and collapse on the floor of the inner-most fuel tank. To meet such an accident due to loss of cooling agent, the reactor is provided with several emergency cooling independent systems based on theoretical calculations. During an experimental test the systems failed; the emergency coolant failed to cool the reactor core as it escaped through the leak in the cooling circuit and also owing to a layer of steam forming between the hot surface of the fuel rods and the emergency coolant, and the remaining emergency coolant fluid could not carry away the heat generated by the fuel rods. If the core cooling system fails to work in time, almost in a minute, the reactor core melts and if the coolant water is added at this belated time, it would make the situation worse. The melted metals in the fuel reactor react violently with this coolant water and produces great volume of heat and the steam and hydrogen thus produced would be released in such a great quantities and at such a high pressure that the pressure tank would burst and there will be no other technical control measure that can stop the melting process and the molten core would sink into the ground causing what is known as China syndrome. Practically all the gaseous fission products and some of the volatile and non-volatile products would be thrown into the atmosphere. In a 1000 MW reactor the fission products accumulated after one year would approximate the amount that will be released by about 1000 atom bombs of the Hiroshima variety.
RESIDUAL HEAT FROM A 650MW REACTOR & LOSS OF COOLANT LEADING TO EXPLOSION (Diminishing heat and sequence of failures due to loss of coolant after the reactor is stopped.)
(Diminishing heat and sequence of failures due to loss of coolant after the reactor is stopped.)
Time
Heat formation
Remarks
0
650 MW
Reactor stopped by control rods
3 Seconds
200 MW
Heat formation
15 Seconds
–
Fuel casing begans to fail
30 Seconds
–
Boiling layer of emergency coolant
45 Seconds
–
Reactor core melts
60 Seconds
–
Reactor core collapses
1 hour
30 MW
–
24 hours
12 MW
–
Months
Diminishing heat
–
RISK DUE TO ACCIDENTS:For making a probabilistic safety assessment of a nuclear plant for a specified location, an estimate of the socio-economic consequences due to an unlikely severe accident must be made in 2 steps. Firstly, the magnitude and nature of release of toxic radio-isotopes into the environment, known as, the “source term” must be determined. Secondly, the source term must be used in modeling the atmospheric dispersion of radio-activity under different stability conditions and the consequent impact in terms of health effects on people and damage to agriculture and animal husbandry, houses and properties must be assessed. Even for reactor designs with strong containment structures, some kinds of accidents which can by-pass the containment occur. In case of Chernobyl with the sudden failure of the first 3 barriers, namely the fuel-matrix, cladding and cooling system and the absence of a strong containment, the radio-isotopes immediately flashed out, escaped into the environment, and the emission continued for 10 days. In case of Three Mile Island, the 3 barriers failed on a longer time scale of 3 hours while the containment retained all but a trace of radio-activity that escaped from the core for a short duration.
For calculating the consequences of an accident for a 1100 MW pressurized water reactor at size-well in England, the Westing house corporation and the British authorities considered the source terms for containment by-pass for the maximum release of radio-isotopes from the core of the reactor. They used the National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB) “MARC” suite of programmes for the atmospheric dispersion modeling. Under the worst conditions, this model predicts that people have to be evacuated down-wind upto 140 to 170km from the reactor. The damage due to an accident has been estimated at 2400 million pounds inclusive of health and housing costs, losses in agriculture and non-agriculture fields, cleaning and decommissioning expenses and supplementary costs of alternate power supply etc. Similar studies on socio-economic consequences of postulated accidents at nuclear plant sites were made by different experts to determine the suitable location. For instance a British expert, Farmer, chose a source term of 5 million curies of Iodine-131 for a 10% core release and predicted high contamination upto 160km. from the reactor. Beattie and Bell used a release of one million curies of Iodine-131 and predicted high contamination upto 144km. from the reactor. Gomberg, an American expert considered the maximum core release under atmospheric inversion conditions and predicted very high levels of radio-active contamination upto 128km from the reactor. (See here)
If the American Nuclear Power plant managers are taking interest inprotecting public health and the environment by taking up emergency planning zones upto 50 miles or 80km from the nuclear plant site for estimating the peak levels of radiation exposure for evacuating people for and settling them in safer places the Indian Government and the nuclear plant managers are violating this standard in India and thereby are positively considering that the life of an Indian is far inferior than that of an American citizen and thereby are aoviding the public health norms in planning for nuclear power plants to ensure safety of the public and the environment and thereby the Indian people are not taken as co-partners as in other countries.
All these studies indicate that an accident scenario for the 1100 MW Size-well reactor can be used to predict the socio-economic consequences of a nuclear accident for the different sites like Kovvada in Srikakulam and Jaitapur in Maharashtra to determine their suitability for establishing the proposed nuclear plants.
Indian Work Culture Provides Mileage for Promotion of Disastershttp://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/article2229713.eceThe Indian National Capital,New Delhi, has been struck time and again by terrorists because of the mileage they are able to derive, but the disaster management mechanism in this highly sensitive city still remains mired in red-tape with bureaucratic ego, multiplicity of authority and a lackadaisical approach towards carrying out even basic tasks, like mock drills, making a mockery of the entire process.
Sources in the Delhi Government said despite Delhi having been targeted on numerous occasions, the disaster management mechanism here remains far from satisfactory. The problems plaguing it are many.While the Disaster Management Act 2005 had led to the setting up of the Delhi Disaster Management Authority under the Lieutenant-Governor and the constitution of District Disaster Management Authority in each of the nine districts, these bodies continue to suffer on account of multiplicity of authority.“The Delhi Police, which is the first responder in any disaster, be it manmade or natural, Delhi Traffic Police, Municipal Corporation of Delhi, New Delhi Municipal Council and Delhi Development Authority all come under the Union Government and so the Delhi Government has little say in case their officials do not adhere to any rules or directions. Only a report can be made out to the Centre against them and the matter rests there,” said a senior official.
MULTIPLE CAUSES FOR REACTOR FAILURES
A reactor may be designed to be safe for a given magnitude of earthquake and a Tsunami wave to withstand or to withstand both. But if a third risky event like a terrorist attack that devastated the world trade center in NewYork , Bomb attacks that destroyed Dams in Germany during the second world War or a missile attack is experienced by a nuclear plant, nobody can guarantee the safety of the reactors. Hence Nuclear Safety is a myth particularly under Indian nuclear industrial work culture and hence India must follow the Japanese Prime Minister in abandoning nuclear reactors and promote alternate sources of energy. Nuclear reactor proliferation is the greatest threat to human life amounting to an undeclared nuclear waragainst mankind posing a threat to our civilization.
Advanced passive safety Reactors
Questioning the safety of nuclear reactors Dr.Hannes Alfven, a noble laureate said “although the nuclear experts devote more effort to safety problems than others, the real question is whether their blue-prints will work as expected by them in the real world and not only in their technological paradise.”
The growing number of nuclear incidents show that it is impossible to ensure complete safety even the most modern passive safe reactors. Decay heat needs pumped cooling water for an year to prevent over heating nuclear plants are some of the most sophisticated and complex energy systems and no matter how will they are designed and engineered, they cannot be deemed fail-proof.
Reactors are highly complex machines with an incalculable things including inter connected linkages that could go wrong. In the Three Mile Island Reactor accident one malfunction led to another malfunction and then to a series of others until the core itself began to melt and even the best experts did not know how to respond . A combination of electrical, mechanical and human failures can disable the reactor itself. Indian work culture is not as reliable as the work culture of the nuclear plant operators of a highly technically advanced country like Japan where the Fukushima reactor accidents proved that nuclear accidents cannot be forecast and prevented in time and hence under Indian work culture of unreliable dimensions and unfavourable circumstances like the growing social unrest due to political corruption that promotes terrorist activities including bombing, accidents as are occurring in major cities like New Delhi, Mumbai and Hyderabad the nuclear plants are bound to fail in the long run.
Terrorist Attacks on Nuclear Plants-Report to U.K. Government
Kovvada Nuclear Plant claimed to be safe due to improvements
Finally demographic and Meteorological analysis are made to evaluate the reactor sites to restrict the exposed population in the unlikely event of a large scale release of radio-activity and thus safety standards must be made known to the people who ultimately have to make a choice between the economic benefits of the nuclear power and its long term risks to the health and welfare of the present and future generations and the decision to opt for the nuclear power in preference tos the more economical and renewable energy resources must be left in the hands of the public who are the ultimate decision makers in a social welfare state.
812. 1987, June – U.S.A.
More than 23,000 mishaps have occurred at US commercial reactor power plants since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, according to Public Citizen.
1979 – 2,310 accidents 1980 – 3,804 accidents 1981 – 4,060 accidents
1982 – 4,500 accidents 1983 – 5,000 accidents 1984 – 2,417 accidents
1985 – 2,974 accidents 1986 – 3,000 accidents.
(Public Citizen Critical Mass Energy Project WISE NC 275 June 87)857. 1987 – U.S.A.
The Government and its officials are the public servants who have to work to promote peoples welfare and national progress by promoting the right methods of development in preference to the wrong methods of development which are ecologically unsound, economically ruinous and socially unacceptable and the Gandhian principles of sustainable development must be upheld because Indian ethos not only preaches but practices in letter and spirit the slogan of SARVEJANA SUKHINOBHAVANTU.
Why nuclear reactor safety is considered as a myth by German chancellor Angela Merkel and Japanese ex- prime minister, Naoto Kan
When the Swiss Government wanted to buy the US Reactors in 1973 , they demanded experimental proof that the dome containment would retain the radioactive pollutants released during a Loss of Coolant Accident (LOCA). Actual Test is very expensive,Moreover, since an actual test would be more dangerous than nuclear bomb testing, assurances on reactor safety are entirely based on tests on paper using simulated mathematical models.
As such test results can not take into account the different permutations and combinations of malfunctions from defective materials, mechanical or human errors, sabotage, bombing, terrorism, missile hits, aero-plane crashes etc. they become invalid.
In other words, nobody can do all the necessary testing nor even anticipate what kind of tests are needed. At best, the experts may be able to simulate and estimate the answers to some of the questions asked by the people but do the people know all the questions that are yet to be asked for making the reactors absolutely safe for all time for different Natural and Man-made errors? Hence the proof of reactor safety could not be given and still has not been demonstrated.
But when the tests on the Emergency core cooling system designed to flood the core during a loss of coolant Accident[LOCA] were run at the National Reactor Testing Station in Idaho, mechanical failures occurred. When the tests were run during 1970-71 all the six tests conducted by the Aero-jet Nuclear Company failed. Subsequent experiments at Oak-ridge National Laboratoreis indicated that the Zircaloy-clad fuel rods of the Light water reactors may swell, rupture and block the cooling channels, and thereby obstruct the emergency cooling water from reaching the core and such obstruction which holds back the emergency core cooling water leads to a catastrophe sometime or the other. Thus reactor safety is most often a myth!
Questioning the safety of nuclear reactors Dr.Hannes Alfven, a noble laureate said “although the nuclear experts devote more effort to safety problems than others, the real question is whether their blue-prints will work as expected by them in the real world and not only in their technological paradise”
According to Brahma Chellany: ”The chain of incidents engulfing all six Fukushima reactors was triggered by their close proximity to each other.
With a flare-up at one reactor affecting systems at another, Japan has ended up with serial blasts, fires, spent-fuel exposures and other radiation leaks at the Fukushima complex.
The lesson: A string of events can quickly overwhelm emergency preparedness and safety redundancies built into reactor systems.This seriously calls into question India’s decision to approve construction of six to 12 large reactors at each new nuclear park.”
http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/te_1624_web.pdf
Read up dummies.....
Indian activists fear nuclear plant accident - Environment - NZ Herald News
Indian activists fear nuclear plant accident
By Rahul Bedi
5:30 AM Friday Oct 28, 2011
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Residents of the Tamil Nadu province, where the Koodankulam nuclear plant is located. Photo / Greg Bowker
Thousands of protesters living near a nuclear power plant about to be commissioned are blocking highways and staging hunger strikes demanding its closure as they distrust federal government assurances regarding safety.
Agitated villagers living around the Russian-built Koodankulam nuclear plant in the southern Tamil Nadu province, 700km south of the state capital of Chennai, fear there will be an accident similar to the radiation leak in March at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant following the earthquake and tsunami.
They have blocked all entry points to the plant, preventing further construction work.
"The nuclear plant is unsafe," said SP Udayakumar, of the voluntary People's Movement Against Nuclear Energy. "The safety analysis report and the site evaluation study have not been made public. No public hearing was held. It's an authoritarian project that has been imposed on the people."
He said there had been serious lapses in the environmental impact assessment and that a report commissioned by the Russian Government had found 25 defects in the reactor design.
The report concluded that the Russian technology was unsafe and that the reactors were not equipped to withstand natural or man-made disasters.
India, which has 20 civilian atomic plants, plans on quadrupling its 5000 megawatts of power - barely 2.3 per cent of its current energy output - by 2020 to fuel its booming economy.
Following the Fukushima catastrophe, the debate in India over harnessing nuclear power has become intense, with politicians, atomic scientists, analysts and writers ranged on either side.
This applies not only to the Koodankulam plant, under construction for more than a decade and expected to begin operations soon, but to a series of similar plants planned for India, with possible United States, French and Russian collaboration.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told Tamil Naud Chief Minister J Jayalalitha that all precautions would be taken at the Koodankulam nuclear plant to maintain the highest safety standards.
"The Government fully shares the concerns of the people of the area and will take all steps to allay their fears" Singh said, emphasising that Indian nuclear reactors had an impeccable safety record.
But that has failed to mollify Jayalalitha or People's Movement members, who remain opposed to the plant.
Udayakumar said: "We feel that India should not go for nuclear energy when developed countries such as Germany and Italy are phasing out their reactors.
"Even if they open nuclear plants like shops across the country, we are not going to produce more than 10 per cent of power.
"It will take 24,000 years to dispose of half the nuclear waste these would generate."
The People's Movement recommends using alternative means of generating power, harnessing sun, wind and tide.
"We should think beyond fossil and nuclear power," Udayakumar said.
"We are a country with 365 days of sunshine, besides which the white man's technology has badly hurt the Earth."
By Rahul Bedi
Indian activists fear nuclear plant accident - Environment - NZ Herald News
Indian activists fear nuclear plant accident
By Rahul Bedi
5:30 AM Friday Oct 28, 2011
EXPAND
Residents of the Tamil Nadu province, where the Koodankulam nuclear plant is located. Photo / Greg Bowker
Thousands of protesters living near a nuclear power plant about to be commissioned are blocking highways and staging hunger strikes demanding its closure as they distrust federal government assurances regarding safety.
Agitated villagers living around the Russian-built Koodankulam nuclear plant in the southern Tamil Nadu province, 700km south of the state capital of Chennai, fear there will be an accident similar to the radiation leak in March at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant following the earthquake and tsunami.
They have blocked all entry points to the plant, preventing further construction work.
"The nuclear plant is unsafe," said SP Udayakumar, of the voluntary People's Movement Against Nuclear Energy. "The safety analysis report and the site evaluation study have not been made public. No public hearing was held. It's an authoritarian project that has been imposed on the people."
He said there had been serious lapses in the environmental impact assessment and that a report commissioned by the Russian Government had found 25 defects in the reactor design.
The report concluded that the Russian technology was unsafe and that the reactors were not equipped to withstand natural or man-made disasters.
India, which has 20 civilian atomic plants, plans on quadrupling its 5000 megawatts of power - barely 2.3 per cent of its current energy output - by 2020 to fuel its booming economy.
Following the Fukushima catastrophe, the debate in India over harnessing nuclear power has become intense, with politicians, atomic scientists, analysts and writers ranged on either side.
This applies not only to the Koodankulam plant, under construction for more than a decade and expected to begin operations soon, but to a series of similar plants planned for India, with possible United States, French and Russian collaboration.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told Tamil Naud Chief Minister J Jayalalitha that all precautions would be taken at the Koodankulam nuclear plant to maintain the highest safety standards.
"The Government fully shares the concerns of the people of the area and will take all steps to allay their fears" Singh said, emphasising that Indian nuclear reactors had an impeccable safety record.
But that has failed to mollify Jayalalitha or People's Movement members, who remain opposed to the plant.
Udayakumar said: "We feel that India should not go for nuclear energy when developed countries such as Germany and Italy are phasing out their reactors.
"Even if they open nuclear plants like shops across the country, we are not going to produce more than 10 per cent of power.
"It will take 24,000 years to dispose of half the nuclear waste these would generate."
The People's Movement recommends using alternative means of generating power, harnessing sun, wind and tide.
"We should think beyond fossil and nuclear power," Udayakumar said.
"We are a country with 365 days of sunshine, besides which the white man's technology has badly hurt the Earth."
By Rahul Bedi
Can corrupt India handle nuclear safety?
March 18, 2011 19:46 IST
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From the resurrected cash-for-votes scandal to a rigged process favouring four foreign vendors -- and from new safety concerns to the special legislation that caps the foreign suppliers' accident liability by burdening the Indian taxpayer -- the nuclear deal's future looks more troubled than ever, says Brahma Chellaney.
The unfolding nuclear disaster in Japan [ Images ] actually bears a US imprint: All six reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant were designed by General Electric. The prototype of this reactor model -- known as the Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) Mark I -- was supplied to India [ Images ] by GE, which built the twin-reactor Tarapur station in the 1960s on a turnkey basis.
Tarapur, one of the world's oldest operating nuclear plants, has some of the same risk factors that played a role at Fukushima.
Since the Fukushima crisis erupted, several countries have announced steps to scale back or review nuclear power, with Germany [ Images ] temporarily shutting down seven of its pre-1980 plants and Switzerland [ Images ] suspending plans to build and replace nuclear reactors.
Even China, known for its lack of respect for safety issues, has announced that it is suspending new plant approvals until it could strengthen safety standards.
In contrast, New Delhi's [ Images ] response has been to launch a public relations campaign to say Indian nuclear plants are safe and secure. The very persons who blurred the line between fact and fiction in the debate over the controversial Indo-US nuclear deal are again engaging in casuistry.
A smarter, wiser and more-credible course for authorities would be to acknowledge that, given the gravity of the Fukushima crisis, India must review its nuclear power policy and systems to ensure that long-term risks of nuclear accidents are contained.
To be sure, India -- given its low per capita energy consumption -- needs to generate far more electricity to economically advance. So it must tap all sources of power, including safe and cost-competitive nuclear power.
The consequences of a nuclear accident in a large, densely populated country like India are going to be greater than in an island nation like Japan. In part because of its geography and the prevailing wind patterns, Japan has been lucky thus far that the radioactive particles from Fukushima have largely dispersed over the Pacific Ocean.
The economics of reactor imports is also a key issue in India because the taxpayer must not be burdened with more subsidies.
Yet those who pushed the nuclear deal through without building a national consensus are now too invested in that deal to be able to take an objective view of cost competitiveness and long-term safety. One indication of that has been the brazen manner in which a nuclear park has been exclusively reserved, without inviting bids, for each of the four chosen foreign vendors.
The Wikileaks disclosures over the cash-for-votes scandal only confirm what has been well known -- the role of big money in lubricating the nuclear deal. Now big money is influencing the opaque contract making.
Nevertheless India's nuclear safety -- and the wisdom of a massive import-based expansion of the nuclear power programme -- will now come under closer scrutiny. In fact, given the way India handled the Bhopal gas catastrophe that killed at least 22,000, Fukushima holds important implications. Although the exact sequence of events at Fukushima is still not clear, consider some obvious nuclear dangers in India:
The chain of incidents engulfing all six Fukushima reactors was triggered by their close proximity to each other. With a flare-up at one reactor affecting systems at another, Japan has ended up with serial blasts, fires, spent-fuel exposures and other radiation leaks at the Fukushima complex.
The lesson: A string of events can quickly overwhelm emergency preparedness and safety redundancies built into reactor systems.
This seriously calls into question India's decision to approve construction of six to 12 large reactors at each new nuclear park.
The Fukushima spent-fuel fire and other problems shine a spotlight on the spent-fuel challenges at the sister plant in Tarapur, where the discharged fuel has been accumulating for over four decades because the US has refused to either take it or allow India to reprocess it. At the so-called Spent Fuel Storage Facility, the Tarapur spent-fuel bundles are kept under water in specially engineered bays.
This mounting, highly radioactive spent fuel poses major space problems and safety and environmental hazards that are greater than at any other plant in the world. In fact, the spent-fuel rods -- unlike the reactor -- have no containment structure. Yet New Delhi has shied away from exerting pressure on Washington to resolve an issue that threatens environmental and public safety in India's commercial heartland.
The operating license of the aging Tarapur BWRs has been periodically extended by the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board. Despite safety and equipment upgrades at Tarapur, the fact is that first-generation reactors have generally some dangerous weaknesses. In fact, much before the Fukushima incidents, several US experts had warned that this BWR model was susceptible to explosion and containment failure.
The power shortages in the Mumbai [ Images ] area have influenced the decision to keep the two BWRs in operation up to 2030. But in the US, the utility running a BWR plant of the same vintage as in Tarapur -- at Oyster Creek in New Jersey -- recently decided to close it in 2019. And the Vermont state senate last year voted to stop the less-old Vermont Yankee BWR plant from operating past next year.
From the resurrected cash-for-votes scandal to a rigged process favouring four foreign vendors -- and from new safety concerns to the special legislation that caps the foreign suppliers' accident liability by burdening the Indian taxpayer -- the nuclear deal's future looks more troubled than ever.
The plan to build energy 'security' by importing foreign fuel-dependent reactors is nothing but a money-spending boondoggle that is likely to leave India insecure and buffeted by outside pressures.
The big question haunting the country is whether it has become too corrupt and institutionally corroded to be able to effectively uphold nuclear safety in the long run.
Brahma Chellaney
March 18, 2011 19:46 IST
Share
this Ask
Users Write a
Comment Print this
article
From the resurrected cash-for-votes scandal to a rigged process favouring four foreign vendors -- and from new safety concerns to the special legislation that caps the foreign suppliers' accident liability by burdening the Indian taxpayer -- the nuclear deal's future looks more troubled than ever, says Brahma Chellaney.
The unfolding nuclear disaster in Japan [ Images ] actually bears a US imprint: All six reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant were designed by General Electric. The prototype of this reactor model -- known as the Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) Mark I -- was supplied to India [ Images ] by GE, which built the twin-reactor Tarapur station in the 1960s on a turnkey basis.
Tarapur, one of the world's oldest operating nuclear plants, has some of the same risk factors that played a role at Fukushima.
Since the Fukushima crisis erupted, several countries have announced steps to scale back or review nuclear power, with Germany [ Images ] temporarily shutting down seven of its pre-1980 plants and Switzerland [ Images ] suspending plans to build and replace nuclear reactors.
Even China, known for its lack of respect for safety issues, has announced that it is suspending new plant approvals until it could strengthen safety standards.
In contrast, New Delhi's [ Images ] response has been to launch a public relations campaign to say Indian nuclear plants are safe and secure. The very persons who blurred the line between fact and fiction in the debate over the controversial Indo-US nuclear deal are again engaging in casuistry.
A smarter, wiser and more-credible course for authorities would be to acknowledge that, given the gravity of the Fukushima crisis, India must review its nuclear power policy and systems to ensure that long-term risks of nuclear accidents are contained.
To be sure, India -- given its low per capita energy consumption -- needs to generate far more electricity to economically advance. So it must tap all sources of power, including safe and cost-competitive nuclear power.
The consequences of a nuclear accident in a large, densely populated country like India are going to be greater than in an island nation like Japan. In part because of its geography and the prevailing wind patterns, Japan has been lucky thus far that the radioactive particles from Fukushima have largely dispersed over the Pacific Ocean.
The economics of reactor imports is also a key issue in India because the taxpayer must not be burdened with more subsidies.
Yet those who pushed the nuclear deal through without building a national consensus are now too invested in that deal to be able to take an objective view of cost competitiveness and long-term safety. One indication of that has been the brazen manner in which a nuclear park has been exclusively reserved, without inviting bids, for each of the four chosen foreign vendors.
The Wikileaks disclosures over the cash-for-votes scandal only confirm what has been well known -- the role of big money in lubricating the nuclear deal. Now big money is influencing the opaque contract making.
Nevertheless India's nuclear safety -- and the wisdom of a massive import-based expansion of the nuclear power programme -- will now come under closer scrutiny. In fact, given the way India handled the Bhopal gas catastrophe that killed at least 22,000, Fukushima holds important implications. Although the exact sequence of events at Fukushima is still not clear, consider some obvious nuclear dangers in India:
The chain of incidents engulfing all six Fukushima reactors was triggered by their close proximity to each other. With a flare-up at one reactor affecting systems at another, Japan has ended up with serial blasts, fires, spent-fuel exposures and other radiation leaks at the Fukushima complex.
The lesson: A string of events can quickly overwhelm emergency preparedness and safety redundancies built into reactor systems.
This seriously calls into question India's decision to approve construction of six to 12 large reactors at each new nuclear park.
The Fukushima spent-fuel fire and other problems shine a spotlight on the spent-fuel challenges at the sister plant in Tarapur, where the discharged fuel has been accumulating for over four decades because the US has refused to either take it or allow India to reprocess it. At the so-called Spent Fuel Storage Facility, the Tarapur spent-fuel bundles are kept under water in specially engineered bays.
This mounting, highly radioactive spent fuel poses major space problems and safety and environmental hazards that are greater than at any other plant in the world. In fact, the spent-fuel rods -- unlike the reactor -- have no containment structure. Yet New Delhi has shied away from exerting pressure on Washington to resolve an issue that threatens environmental and public safety in India's commercial heartland.
The operating license of the aging Tarapur BWRs has been periodically extended by the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board. Despite safety and equipment upgrades at Tarapur, the fact is that first-generation reactors have generally some dangerous weaknesses. In fact, much before the Fukushima incidents, several US experts had warned that this BWR model was susceptible to explosion and containment failure.
The power shortages in the Mumbai [ Images ] area have influenced the decision to keep the two BWRs in operation up to 2030. But in the US, the utility running a BWR plant of the same vintage as in Tarapur -- at Oyster Creek in New Jersey -- recently decided to close it in 2019. And the Vermont state senate last year voted to stop the less-old Vermont Yankee BWR plant from operating past next year.
From the resurrected cash-for-votes scandal to a rigged process favouring four foreign vendors -- and from new safety concerns to the special legislation that caps the foreign suppliers' accident liability by burdening the Indian taxpayer -- the nuclear deal's future looks more troubled than ever.
The plan to build energy 'security' by importing foreign fuel-dependent reactors is nothing but a money-spending boondoggle that is likely to leave India insecure and buffeted by outside pressures.
The big question haunting the country is whether it has become too corrupt and institutionally corroded to be able to effectively uphold nuclear safety in the long run.
Brahma Chellaney
Problems With Nuclear Energy
Early in 1995 a seminar on 'Nuclear Energy and Public Safety' was held in Delhi, co-sponsored by the India International Centre and some other organisations. A book, titled Nuclear Energy and Public Safety, edited by Dr Vinod Gaur (incidentally one of the earliest members of the Indian Humanist Union) was published after the seminar, with contributions from about twenty eminent scientists, academicians and others. The picture that emerges from this is disturbing, as summed up in the Preface. Talking of "sloppy technology and management practices" it says: "The devastating fire at Narora, the major flooding of Kakrapara, and the collapse of the containment dome at Kaiga are recent examples of failures, details of which remain unavailable to the public, causing deep concern about the hazard potential of our nuclear installations. This situation supports a lax technological culture through immunity from public exposure at the expense of public anxiety , and clearly underlines the wisdom of creating public transparency of plans and designs and of hazards and failure analyses reports of large and crucial public utilities, as practiced by most democratic nations."
When the Report was published, the situation in nuclear-power generation was largely static worldwide. A number of accidents and incidents had led to widespread concerns regarding the hazards of nuclear power generation, and a slowdown – if not stoppage – in the building of new reactors. The Chernobyl disaster, the incidents at Three Mile Island and Windscale raised serious doubts about the viability of fission-based power generation. In the USA , "The accident was a watershed event for the US nuclear industry. Seventy-four plants under construction at the time of the accident have since been cancelled. Thirteen plants that were operating when the accident occurred have been permanently closed by their owners. Only fifty-three plants then under construction were completed and placed into service. No nuclear power plants have been ordered since the accident." The Bush administration has changed all that and is heralding the Renaissance of Nuclear Power.
Efforts are being made to develop safer and more efficient reactor designs. An international task force has agreed on six nuclear reactor technologies for deployment between 2010 and 2030. All six are expected to yield advances in terms of sustainability, economics, reliability and safety. All these
aspects involve highly complex as well as controversial technical considerations, and it would be presumptuous on my part to try to touch on these.
Here I shall try to confine myself to safety and security. In this context I believe it is important to make a distinction between safety and security; although the close relationship between the two must be borne in mind.
Safety
Safety concerns safeguards against breakdowns, accidents arising out of negligence or mismanagement; and minimising the damage caused by natural disasters. In the case of nuclear energy the major areas of safety concerns are: mining, processing, reactor operations, spent fuel, waste management and decommissioning. Whether adequate safety can be ensured (in theory as well as in practice) in each of these areas has always been debated; but the issues are so highly technical that they are best left to the experts. It is probably true that for every expert there is an equal and opposite expert. This, of course, greatly helps in selective quotation.
On the subject of mining: "From the mining of uranium to the manufacturing of weapons and nuclear power, workers are faced with the risk of exposure to radiation. According to reports by the International Commission for Radiological Protection (ICRP), work-related deaths in uranium mines are estimated at between 5,500 deaths (for radiation workers @ 3 mSv) to 37, 500 deaths (for radiation workers @ 20 mSv) per million workers a year. This compared with deaths in the manufacturing industry (estimated at 110 deaths per year per million workers) and the construction industry (estimated at 164 deaths per million workers per year)".
On reactor safety: "Nuclear power plants are and will always be vulnerable to accidents resulting in meltdown or other large radiation releases due to human error and worn out or defective parts. Even without an accident or attack, nuclear power plants threaten public health by routinely releasing radiation into the air, soil and water. Moreover, U.S. nuclear power plants have a concerning record of violating safety regulations while regulators delay, deny, and defer to the financial interests of nuclear plant owners and operators. These failures increase the risk that nuclear reactors pose to the public."
On waste management, "No technically or economically feasible methods have been proven for the ultimate disposal of radioactive waste; a grim legacy from the nuclear power program for future generations. Several proposals for dealing with the wastes exist and one or more of these approaches may eventually be shown to be satisfactory, but important questions remain unanswered today about all of them”.
Security
Security relates to protection from deliberately hostile actions such as sabotage, terrorist attack or attacks by missiles or bombs. Even if it is
conceded that adequate safeguards can be instituted to prevent any catastrophic outcome in case of accident, negligence, mismanagement or natural disaster, vulnerability to enemy action still has to be taken into account - particularly for states like India, which live in a troubled neighbourhood. A successful attack on a nuclear plant can be incalculably catastrophic. In his landmark book on the subject: Nuclear Plants as Weapons for the Enemy: An Unrecognized Military Peril, Bennett Ramberg points out that any country that possesses nuclear energy facilities gives its adversaries a quasi- nuclear capability to use against it. A US Admiral is candid about this. "Once a war starts, the value system changes and anything you can do to hurt the adversary and cause him problems, you find justification for doing." He recalls hearing someone say, "You don't have to take the bang to the enemy; the bang is already there when you take out his nuclear plants." He was talking about the reported attack by the US on the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center reactor in Iraq, just ten kilometers southeast of Baghdad. It was a small Russian-built research reactor. Nuclear plants, static and prominently visible, are ideal military targets. The world has more than 300 research reactors and almost 500 large nuclear power plants – all sitting ducks. Every nuclear plant is, in effect, a potential nuclear bomb embedded in our territory. It would be unrealistic to count on our nuclear facilities not being attacked in a warlike situation, or in terrorist operations. As Matin Zuberi says, "The core of a typical nuclear plant contains about 1,000 times the radioactivity released by the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. A high explosive bomb used against it would acquire the attributes of a nuclear weapon without its blast effect. According to an environmental impact statement of the U.S Nuclear Regulatory Commission a large truck bomb used against a nuclear reactor in a highly populated area could produce 130,000 deaths. An ordinary conventional explosive could thus be turned into a large radiological weapon.
Within a nuclear power plant perhaps the most vulnerable part is the spent fuel pool. Spent fuel pools for boiling water reactors are located above ground. This can make these reactors even more vulnerable. Conventional explosives, by causing a breach in the pool water connections can cause a fire worse than even a reactor meltdown. As one report says, "If a fire were to break out at the Millstone Reactor Unit 3 spent fuel pond in Connecticut, it would result a three-fold increase in background exposures. This level triggers the NRC evacuation requirement and could render 29,000 square miles of land uninhabitable."
The nuclear power industry, with the support of the Bush administration, is pushing for a revival of nuclear energy. The industry is aggressively seeking to license and build the first new nuclear reactors in a generation. Toward this end, nuclear companies have sought public approval by disingenuously presenting the energy source as clean, renewable, and necessary to deal with global warming, environmental degradation, and dwindling petroleum resources. But nuclear energy is neither clean nor green. While nuclear reactors do release a smaller amount of greenhouse gases than their coal and natural gas counterparts, they create a significant amount of dangerous radioactive waste that remains toxic for hundreds of thousands of years. Beyond the health, safety, and security risks posed by nuclear generation of electricity-as well as its extremely high costs-this waste is a shameful legacy of our environmental exploitation that will beset generations to come.”
That the impediments in the way of India exercising the option to develop nuclear power-generation facilities are likely to be removed is certainly a cause for celebration, and represents the triumph of Indian diplomacy. That India is technologically ready to exercise this option does immense credit to India’s scientific establishment. But there seems to be a disquieting complacency, and surprising evasiveness or silence, on the issues of security and safety. Faced with the prospects of an energy famine, even environmentalists have changed sides. The stakes are incredibly high, permitting almost nil margin for error
Early in 1995 a seminar on 'Nuclear Energy and Public Safety' was held in Delhi, co-sponsored by the India International Centre and some other organisations. A book, titled Nuclear Energy and Public Safety, edited by Dr Vinod Gaur (incidentally one of the earliest members of the Indian Humanist Union) was published after the seminar, with contributions from about twenty eminent scientists, academicians and others. The picture that emerges from this is disturbing, as summed up in the Preface. Talking of "sloppy technology and management practices" it says: "The devastating fire at Narora, the major flooding of Kakrapara, and the collapse of the containment dome at Kaiga are recent examples of failures, details of which remain unavailable to the public, causing deep concern about the hazard potential of our nuclear installations. This situation supports a lax technological culture through immunity from public exposure at the expense of public anxiety , and clearly underlines the wisdom of creating public transparency of plans and designs and of hazards and failure analyses reports of large and crucial public utilities, as practiced by most democratic nations."
When the Report was published, the situation in nuclear-power generation was largely static worldwide. A number of accidents and incidents had led to widespread concerns regarding the hazards of nuclear power generation, and a slowdown – if not stoppage – in the building of new reactors. The Chernobyl disaster, the incidents at Three Mile Island and Windscale raised serious doubts about the viability of fission-based power generation. In the USA , "The accident was a watershed event for the US nuclear industry. Seventy-four plants under construction at the time of the accident have since been cancelled. Thirteen plants that were operating when the accident occurred have been permanently closed by their owners. Only fifty-three plants then under construction were completed and placed into service. No nuclear power plants have been ordered since the accident." The Bush administration has changed all that and is heralding the Renaissance of Nuclear Power.
Efforts are being made to develop safer and more efficient reactor designs. An international task force has agreed on six nuclear reactor technologies for deployment between 2010 and 2030. All six are expected to yield advances in terms of sustainability, economics, reliability and safety. All these
aspects involve highly complex as well as controversial technical considerations, and it would be presumptuous on my part to try to touch on these.
Here I shall try to confine myself to safety and security. In this context I believe it is important to make a distinction between safety and security; although the close relationship between the two must be borne in mind.
Safety
Safety concerns safeguards against breakdowns, accidents arising out of negligence or mismanagement; and minimising the damage caused by natural disasters. In the case of nuclear energy the major areas of safety concerns are: mining, processing, reactor operations, spent fuel, waste management and decommissioning. Whether adequate safety can be ensured (in theory as well as in practice) in each of these areas has always been debated; but the issues are so highly technical that they are best left to the experts. It is probably true that for every expert there is an equal and opposite expert. This, of course, greatly helps in selective quotation.
On the subject of mining: "From the mining of uranium to the manufacturing of weapons and nuclear power, workers are faced with the risk of exposure to radiation. According to reports by the International Commission for Radiological Protection (ICRP), work-related deaths in uranium mines are estimated at between 5,500 deaths (for radiation workers @ 3 mSv) to 37, 500 deaths (for radiation workers @ 20 mSv) per million workers a year. This compared with deaths in the manufacturing industry (estimated at 110 deaths per year per million workers) and the construction industry (estimated at 164 deaths per million workers per year)".
On reactor safety: "Nuclear power plants are and will always be vulnerable to accidents resulting in meltdown or other large radiation releases due to human error and worn out or defective parts. Even without an accident or attack, nuclear power plants threaten public health by routinely releasing radiation into the air, soil and water. Moreover, U.S. nuclear power plants have a concerning record of violating safety regulations while regulators delay, deny, and defer to the financial interests of nuclear plant owners and operators. These failures increase the risk that nuclear reactors pose to the public."
On waste management, "No technically or economically feasible methods have been proven for the ultimate disposal of radioactive waste; a grim legacy from the nuclear power program for future generations. Several proposals for dealing with the wastes exist and one or more of these approaches may eventually be shown to be satisfactory, but important questions remain unanswered today about all of them”.
Security
Security relates to protection from deliberately hostile actions such as sabotage, terrorist attack or attacks by missiles or bombs. Even if it is
conceded that adequate safeguards can be instituted to prevent any catastrophic outcome in case of accident, negligence, mismanagement or natural disaster, vulnerability to enemy action still has to be taken into account - particularly for states like India, which live in a troubled neighbourhood. A successful attack on a nuclear plant can be incalculably catastrophic. In his landmark book on the subject: Nuclear Plants as Weapons for the Enemy: An Unrecognized Military Peril, Bennett Ramberg points out that any country that possesses nuclear energy facilities gives its adversaries a quasi- nuclear capability to use against it. A US Admiral is candid about this. "Once a war starts, the value system changes and anything you can do to hurt the adversary and cause him problems, you find justification for doing." He recalls hearing someone say, "You don't have to take the bang to the enemy; the bang is already there when you take out his nuclear plants." He was talking about the reported attack by the US on the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center reactor in Iraq, just ten kilometers southeast of Baghdad. It was a small Russian-built research reactor. Nuclear plants, static and prominently visible, are ideal military targets. The world has more than 300 research reactors and almost 500 large nuclear power plants – all sitting ducks. Every nuclear plant is, in effect, a potential nuclear bomb embedded in our territory. It would be unrealistic to count on our nuclear facilities not being attacked in a warlike situation, or in terrorist operations. As Matin Zuberi says, "The core of a typical nuclear plant contains about 1,000 times the radioactivity released by the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. A high explosive bomb used against it would acquire the attributes of a nuclear weapon without its blast effect. According to an environmental impact statement of the U.S Nuclear Regulatory Commission a large truck bomb used against a nuclear reactor in a highly populated area could produce 130,000 deaths. An ordinary conventional explosive could thus be turned into a large radiological weapon.
Within a nuclear power plant perhaps the most vulnerable part is the spent fuel pool. Spent fuel pools for boiling water reactors are located above ground. This can make these reactors even more vulnerable. Conventional explosives, by causing a breach in the pool water connections can cause a fire worse than even a reactor meltdown. As one report says, "If a fire were to break out at the Millstone Reactor Unit 3 spent fuel pond in Connecticut, it would result a three-fold increase in background exposures. This level triggers the NRC evacuation requirement and could render 29,000 square miles of land uninhabitable."
The nuclear power industry, with the support of the Bush administration, is pushing for a revival of nuclear energy. The industry is aggressively seeking to license and build the first new nuclear reactors in a generation. Toward this end, nuclear companies have sought public approval by disingenuously presenting the energy source as clean, renewable, and necessary to deal with global warming, environmental degradation, and dwindling petroleum resources. But nuclear energy is neither clean nor green. While nuclear reactors do release a smaller amount of greenhouse gases than their coal and natural gas counterparts, they create a significant amount of dangerous radioactive waste that remains toxic for hundreds of thousands of years. Beyond the health, safety, and security risks posed by nuclear generation of electricity-as well as its extremely high costs-this waste is a shameful legacy of our environmental exploitation that will beset generations to come.”
That the impediments in the way of India exercising the option to develop nuclear power-generation facilities are likely to be removed is certainly a cause for celebration, and represents the triumph of Indian diplomacy. That India is technologically ready to exercise this option does immense credit to India’s scientific establishment. But there seems to be a disquieting complacency, and surprising evasiveness or silence, on the issues of security and safety. Faced with the prospects of an energy famine, even environmentalists have changed sides. The stakes are incredibly high, permitting almost nil margin for error
Is India a Nuclear Time Bomb? : Cover Story News - India Today
Not everyone is convinced of the safety of India's nuclear reactors or of the country's preparedness to respond to a nuclear disaster.
Many fear that if Japan - a country known for its quiet efficiency and discipline as well as its immense expertise in earthquake and tsunami-resistant design - has not been able to prevent explosions in its nuclear facilities, there is little chance that India, which is notorious for its chaos and the low priority it accords to public safety, will be in a position to do so.
"We are most disorganized and unprepared to handle emergencies of any kind of even much less severity," A Gopalakrishnan, former chairman of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) told Asia Times Online. "The AERB's disaster preparedness oversight is mostly on paper and the drills they conduct once in a while are half-hearted efforts, which are a sham," he said.
India's nuclear top brass insist that safety audits of nuclear plants are taken seriously in the country. Nuclear plants need clearance from the AERB every five years and safety audits are mandatory for relicensing, Nuclear Power Corporation of India, Ltd (NPCIL) chairperson S K Jain told the media in the wake of the disaster in Japan.
However, a mandatory safety audit alone does not make reactors safe. Who conducts the audit is important. And in India, the body that does the audit is not autonomous. The AERB draws its personnel from the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) and reports to the AEC.
It "merely serves as a lapdog of the DAE and the Prime Minister's Office. With a captive AERB reporting to the DAE, overall nuclear safety management in India has been rendered worthless," Gopalakrishnan pointed out.
"The earthquake-resistant designs and tsunami abatement measures adopted in India's nuclear plants need a high-level, in-depth review by an independent expert group, consisting of experts outside of the DAE and the NPCIL," he said. "But there is practically no independent verification of data or design methodologies."
"This is no way to run a critical safety regulatory function," writes activist Prabir Purkayastha, describing the lack of a separation in the regulatory and operational functions in nuclear energy as the "single-biggest obstacle for a safe nuclear energy program in the country".
A culture of opacity surrounds India's nuclear establishment. It is not just the nuclear weapons program that is shrouded in secrecy. Little is known about the civilian nuclear program and the functioning of bodies like the AEC and the AERB. In the circumstances, the veracity of audits is hard to accept.
"Audits conducted in the past did reveal loopholes in safety measures at nuclear reactors but these findings were never made public," a senior official at the Kaiga nuclear plant told Asia Times. "Worse, there was little follow-up action."
Activists say they are not expecting anything to come of the prime minister's promised audit of nuclear reactors. "We can already predict the report - all we need to do is to listen what the nuclear establishment has been saying for the last few days and we will know what the report is likely to say," observes Purkayastha.
Not everyone is convinced of the safety of India's nuclear reactors or of the country's preparedness to respond to a nuclear disaster.
Many fear that if Japan - a country known for its quiet efficiency and discipline as well as its immense expertise in earthquake and tsunami-resistant design - has not been able to prevent explosions in its nuclear facilities, there is little chance that India, which is notorious for its chaos and the low priority it accords to public safety, will be in a position to do so.
"We are most disorganized and unprepared to handle emergencies of any kind of even much less severity," A Gopalakrishnan, former chairman of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) told Asia Times Online. "The AERB's disaster preparedness oversight is mostly on paper and the drills they conduct once in a while are half-hearted efforts, which are a sham," he said.
India's nuclear top brass insist that safety audits of nuclear plants are taken seriously in the country. Nuclear plants need clearance from the AERB every five years and safety audits are mandatory for relicensing, Nuclear Power Corporation of India, Ltd (NPCIL) chairperson S K Jain told the media in the wake of the disaster in Japan.
However, a mandatory safety audit alone does not make reactors safe. Who conducts the audit is important. And in India, the body that does the audit is not autonomous. The AERB draws its personnel from the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) and reports to the AEC.
It "merely serves as a lapdog of the DAE and the Prime Minister's Office. With a captive AERB reporting to the DAE, overall nuclear safety management in India has been rendered worthless," Gopalakrishnan pointed out.
"The earthquake-resistant designs and tsunami abatement measures adopted in India's nuclear plants need a high-level, in-depth review by an independent expert group, consisting of experts outside of the DAE and the NPCIL," he said. "But there is practically no independent verification of data or design methodologies."
"This is no way to run a critical safety regulatory function," writes activist Prabir Purkayastha, describing the lack of a separation in the regulatory and operational functions in nuclear energy as the "single-biggest obstacle for a safe nuclear energy program in the country".
A culture of opacity surrounds India's nuclear establishment. It is not just the nuclear weapons program that is shrouded in secrecy. Little is known about the civilian nuclear program and the functioning of bodies like the AEC and the AERB. In the circumstances, the veracity of audits is hard to accept.
"Audits conducted in the past did reveal loopholes in safety measures at nuclear reactors but these findings were never made public," a senior official at the Kaiga nuclear plant told Asia Times. "Worse, there was little follow-up action."
Activists say they are not expecting anything to come of the prime minister's promised audit of nuclear reactors. "We can already predict the report - all we need to do is to listen what the nuclear establishment has been saying for the last few days and we will know what the report is likely to say," observes Purkayastha.
French Nuke Accident Leads India To Reexamine Its Nuclear Ambitions - Forbes
French Nuke Accident Leads India To Reexamine Its Nuclear Ambitions
The explosion at a nuclear reprocessing plant in southern France last week has added to a spate of recent bad news regarding nuclear safety. The Fukushima meltdown following the Japanese earthquake and tsunami in March prompted Germany to begin winding down its nuclear power and scale up renewable energy. Now the French accident, which killed one person and injured three, has caused India, where I’m currently traveling, concern over its own nuclear power ambitions.
India has about 5 gigawatts of installed nuclear power capacity but plans to increase that to 20 gigawatts by 2020 and to 63 gigawatts by 2032. Its goal is to supply 25 percent of its electricity needs with nuclear by 2050, according to the World Nuclear Association. The first of the several large nuclear power plants India is planning, the Russian-built Kudankulam-I, will soon be ready for operation. Following the Fukushima disaster, India began safety tests at the plant to ensure that it could withstand natural disasters.
Nuclear power has seemed on the brink of a renaissance in recent years, as even some environmentalists gave it renewed consideration as a low-carbon baseload power supply that could help in the fight against climate change (after working off a sizeable CO2 footprint from construction). But the reason nuclear isn’t going ahead in many countries, including the United States, isn’t fear of accidents or inability to deal with nuclear waste; it’s economics: the upfront cost of building a new power plant is not a sensible business proposition.
That is not so much an issue for up-and-coming powerhouses like China and India, which need – and can afford – many types of new energy development.
And both countries are following in France’s footsteps to build reprocessing facilities as well. France has the most widespread commercial reprocessing program in the world today, thanks to generous government subsidies that help to ameliorate its significant excess cost over using virgin uranium.
Reprocessing nuclear waste – the material leftover after burning uranium in a nuclear reactor – has two goals: to recover and use some of the potential energy remaining in the waste, and to break the waste down into in to different chunks so each can be managed according to its own properties.
Historically, India was interested in reprocessing because it didn’t have large domestic uranium resources. It is also a leader in developing fast breeder reactors that use thorium, a naturally occurring metal that is more abundant than uranium, less radioactive, and creates less waste. But earlier this year the country discovered large uranium deposits in its state of Andhra Pradesh.
Still, reprocessing is no silver bullet; in fact, it has created a bitter divide among nuclear experts – and not just because it can be a gateway to proliferation, as India itself so aptly demonstrated in 1974. “At this point, it’s like creationism versus evolution,” said Edwin Lyman, senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, indicating that in his view, the anti-reprocessing camp has science on its side. Reprocessing via the current commercial-scale process used in France, called PUREX, recovers only a small amount of additional energy and is more expensive than using virgin uranium, he said. And instead of reducing waste, it merely changes its form. “There’s no feasible, practical way to take material from the waste and use it in a nuclear power system so you could get rid of it over any kind of reasonable time frame,” he said.
Many Indians are protesting their country’s rapid nuclear expansion, most recently exemplified by a mass fast in Tamil Nadu state against the Koodankulam Nuclear Power Project. But neither their concerns nor nuclear accidents are likely to alter India’s plans.
On September 14 The Hindu reported:
“… nuclear reactors are a major export industry for French firms like Areva or EDF. Areva hopes to sell six EPR reactors to India, each of which has a 1650MW capacity, each for an estimated 7 billion Euros.”
India is also working on deals outside of the usual nuclear partnership suspects: the United States, France, and Russia. It’s been in talks with South Korea, which may have more competitive pricing and proved its nuclear bona fides when Korea Electrical Power Corporation (Kepco) won a $20-billion contract with United Arab Emirates, according to The Hindu.
Still, in more than 60 years of research, science has not yet delivered a good solution for nuclear waste management, begging the question of whether nuclear energy is really a sustainable energy source for the future.
Mikael Nilsson, a Swedish researcher at University of California at Irvine, has been working with the Idaho National Laboratory on an advanced reprocessing technology. He said he is driven in part by ethical issues. “If we operate an industry by just consuming raw material and dumping waste, I don’t think that’s good practice,” said Nilsson. “We have to be more responsible.”
French Nuke Accident Leads India To Reexamine Its Nuclear Ambitions
The explosion at a nuclear reprocessing plant in southern France last week has added to a spate of recent bad news regarding nuclear safety. The Fukushima meltdown following the Japanese earthquake and tsunami in March prompted Germany to begin winding down its nuclear power and scale up renewable energy. Now the French accident, which killed one person and injured three, has caused India, where I’m currently traveling, concern over its own nuclear power ambitions.
India has about 5 gigawatts of installed nuclear power capacity but plans to increase that to 20 gigawatts by 2020 and to 63 gigawatts by 2032. Its goal is to supply 25 percent of its electricity needs with nuclear by 2050, according to the World Nuclear Association. The first of the several large nuclear power plants India is planning, the Russian-built Kudankulam-I, will soon be ready for operation. Following the Fukushima disaster, India began safety tests at the plant to ensure that it could withstand natural disasters.
Nuclear power has seemed on the brink of a renaissance in recent years, as even some environmentalists gave it renewed consideration as a low-carbon baseload power supply that could help in the fight against climate change (after working off a sizeable CO2 footprint from construction). But the reason nuclear isn’t going ahead in many countries, including the United States, isn’t fear of accidents or inability to deal with nuclear waste; it’s economics: the upfront cost of building a new power plant is not a sensible business proposition.
That is not so much an issue for up-and-coming powerhouses like China and India, which need – and can afford – many types of new energy development.
And both countries are following in France’s footsteps to build reprocessing facilities as well. France has the most widespread commercial reprocessing program in the world today, thanks to generous government subsidies that help to ameliorate its significant excess cost over using virgin uranium.
Reprocessing nuclear waste – the material leftover after burning uranium in a nuclear reactor – has two goals: to recover and use some of the potential energy remaining in the waste, and to break the waste down into in to different chunks so each can be managed according to its own properties.
Historically, India was interested in reprocessing because it didn’t have large domestic uranium resources. It is also a leader in developing fast breeder reactors that use thorium, a naturally occurring metal that is more abundant than uranium, less radioactive, and creates less waste. But earlier this year the country discovered large uranium deposits in its state of Andhra Pradesh.
Still, reprocessing is no silver bullet; in fact, it has created a bitter divide among nuclear experts – and not just because it can be a gateway to proliferation, as India itself so aptly demonstrated in 1974. “At this point, it’s like creationism versus evolution,” said Edwin Lyman, senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, indicating that in his view, the anti-reprocessing camp has science on its side. Reprocessing via the current commercial-scale process used in France, called PUREX, recovers only a small amount of additional energy and is more expensive than using virgin uranium, he said. And instead of reducing waste, it merely changes its form. “There’s no feasible, practical way to take material from the waste and use it in a nuclear power system so you could get rid of it over any kind of reasonable time frame,” he said.
Many Indians are protesting their country’s rapid nuclear expansion, most recently exemplified by a mass fast in Tamil Nadu state against the Koodankulam Nuclear Power Project. But neither their concerns nor nuclear accidents are likely to alter India’s plans.
On September 14 The Hindu reported:
“… nuclear reactors are a major export industry for French firms like Areva or EDF. Areva hopes to sell six EPR reactors to India, each of which has a 1650MW capacity, each for an estimated 7 billion Euros.”
India is also working on deals outside of the usual nuclear partnership suspects: the United States, France, and Russia. It’s been in talks with South Korea, which may have more competitive pricing and proved its nuclear bona fides when Korea Electrical Power Corporation (Kepco) won a $20-billion contract with United Arab Emirates, according to The Hindu.
Still, in more than 60 years of research, science has not yet delivered a good solution for nuclear waste management, begging the question of whether nuclear energy is really a sustainable energy source for the future.
Mikael Nilsson, a Swedish researcher at University of California at Irvine, has been working with the Idaho National Laboratory on an advanced reprocessing technology. He said he is driven in part by ethical issues. “If we operate an industry by just consuming raw material and dumping waste, I don’t think that’s good practice,” said Nilsson. “We have to be more responsible.”
Jaitapur Madban Nuclear Power Plant « Yeh Hai Life – India. With Attitude.
On 25th Anniversary Of Chernobyl, India Gives Green Signal To Jaitapur Nuclear Power Plant.
2011-04-26 / Economy, India, Renewable Energy / 0 Comments
One wonders whether our government officials were even aware that today is the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant accident, the world’s worst nuclear plant accident in history. Or maybe they do and consciously chose to announce plans to move ahead with the nuclear power plant in Jaitapur?
But then again, if the Fukushima crisis and violence and killing of its own people over the plant don’t matter, why should we expect this Government to at least have the good sense to not make this announcement today of all days.
Ground Report: Jaitapur protests turn violent - YouTube
Accidents, Negligence, Cover-ups At India’s Nuclear Power Plants.
2011-03-16 / Human Rights, India, People Making A Difference
It takes a disaster to wake us up to the things around us that pose a risk to our health and lives. From Hurricane Katrina to the Japan Catastrophe, Exxon Valdez to the Gulf Oil Spill, and Chernobyl to Bhopal, we are reminded time and time again of one thing – human beings don’t have all the answers.
Yesterday Germany became the first country to shut seven nuclear plants in the wake of the crisis in Japan. India declared they are doing safety reviews, but have no plans to stop building new nuclear plants. They’re even testing food imports from Japan for radiation.
Now head over to Tehelka and read some of their findings of the nuclear power industry in India -
trucks carrying exposed uranium ore leaving trails of dust,
30,000 people living within the supposed ‘exclusion zone’ around nuclear plants
incidents of scientists and workers exposed to radiation.
Utter lack of transparency in medical records and testing for patients suffering from cancer, or dying from radiation exposure.
So India is going to move ahead with its nuclear power plants, and nothing and no one will be able to do a damned thing about it. Land will be forcibly acquired to build the plants, villagers will be displaced, a few thousand of them who don’t move might contract cancer, a few accidents here and there will happen and no one will ever know, radiation will leak into water and again no one will know.
Which leaves us all asking one question – Where Is India’s Erin Brockovich?
6 Things The Nuclear Industry Wants Us To Believe.
2011-03-14 / Environment, India, Industrial disasters, Natural disasters / 0 Comments
Here in the U.S. the Nuclear industry’s experts are out in full force to quell fears about its disaster preparedness in the event of a catastrophe like what we’re seeing in Japan. In India, the Prime Minister announced a safety review. Meanwhile the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd (NPCIL) touted the fact that India’s nuclear reactors withstood the Bhuj earthquake and the 2004 Tsunami.
India plans to build 20 nuclear energy plants and spend $175 billion by 2030 on nuclear generation. One of these plants is the controversial Jaitapur Madban Nuclear Power Plant that reports show is being built in an earthquake prone zone.
From watching and reading all the nuclear power industry experts, here are the 6 things we’ve understood they want us to believe….because they said so:
Every nuclear reactor around the world can withstand an 8.9 or higher earthquake even though most of them are built to specifications of the seismic activity in their particular areas.
All their backup systems are fail-safe, having accounted for EVERY possible disaster that can strike after an earthquake or tsunami.
They have been regularly conducting safety drills to ensure for preparedness.
These drills have been conducted in conjunction with all the federal, state and local authorities responsible, and they have a clear disaster management plan that outlines who does what in such a scenario.
The drills have included warning and evacuation plans for civilians within the 10-20 mile radius that is tagged the emergency zone around a nuclear plant.
Potasium iodide which prevents absorption of radiation and ultimately cancer is currently being provided to people living within the emergency zone. Stocks are easily available and ready for distribution should such an emergency arise.
This is what they’d like us to believe.
The people of Jaitapur never did. Their case for opposing the ‘world’s largest nuclear power plant’ in their backyard just got stronger.
On 25th Anniversary Of Chernobyl, India Gives Green Signal To Jaitapur Nuclear Power Plant.
2011-04-26 / Economy, India, Renewable Energy / 0 Comments
One wonders whether our government officials were even aware that today is the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant accident, the world’s worst nuclear plant accident in history. Or maybe they do and consciously chose to announce plans to move ahead with the nuclear power plant in Jaitapur?
But then again, if the Fukushima crisis and violence and killing of its own people over the plant don’t matter, why should we expect this Government to at least have the good sense to not make this announcement today of all days.
Ground Report: Jaitapur protests turn violent - YouTube
Accidents, Negligence, Cover-ups At India’s Nuclear Power Plants.
2011-03-16 / Human Rights, India, People Making A Difference
It takes a disaster to wake us up to the things around us that pose a risk to our health and lives. From Hurricane Katrina to the Japan Catastrophe, Exxon Valdez to the Gulf Oil Spill, and Chernobyl to Bhopal, we are reminded time and time again of one thing – human beings don’t have all the answers.
Yesterday Germany became the first country to shut seven nuclear plants in the wake of the crisis in Japan. India declared they are doing safety reviews, but have no plans to stop building new nuclear plants. They’re even testing food imports from Japan for radiation.
Now head over to Tehelka and read some of their findings of the nuclear power industry in India -
trucks carrying exposed uranium ore leaving trails of dust,
30,000 people living within the supposed ‘exclusion zone’ around nuclear plants
incidents of scientists and workers exposed to radiation.
Utter lack of transparency in medical records and testing for patients suffering from cancer, or dying from radiation exposure.
So India is going to move ahead with its nuclear power plants, and nothing and no one will be able to do a damned thing about it. Land will be forcibly acquired to build the plants, villagers will be displaced, a few thousand of them who don’t move might contract cancer, a few accidents here and there will happen and no one will ever know, radiation will leak into water and again no one will know.
Which leaves us all asking one question – Where Is India’s Erin Brockovich?
6 Things The Nuclear Industry Wants Us To Believe.
2011-03-14 / Environment, India, Industrial disasters, Natural disasters / 0 Comments
Here in the U.S. the Nuclear industry’s experts are out in full force to quell fears about its disaster preparedness in the event of a catastrophe like what we’re seeing in Japan. In India, the Prime Minister announced a safety review. Meanwhile the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd (NPCIL) touted the fact that India’s nuclear reactors withstood the Bhuj earthquake and the 2004 Tsunami.
India plans to build 20 nuclear energy plants and spend $175 billion by 2030 on nuclear generation. One of these plants is the controversial Jaitapur Madban Nuclear Power Plant that reports show is being built in an earthquake prone zone.
From watching and reading all the nuclear power industry experts, here are the 6 things we’ve understood they want us to believe….because they said so:
Every nuclear reactor around the world can withstand an 8.9 or higher earthquake even though most of them are built to specifications of the seismic activity in their particular areas.
All their backup systems are fail-safe, having accounted for EVERY possible disaster that can strike after an earthquake or tsunami.
They have been regularly conducting safety drills to ensure for preparedness.
These drills have been conducted in conjunction with all the federal, state and local authorities responsible, and they have a clear disaster management plan that outlines who does what in such a scenario.
The drills have included warning and evacuation plans for civilians within the 10-20 mile radius that is tagged the emergency zone around a nuclear plant.
Potasium iodide which prevents absorption of radiation and ultimately cancer is currently being provided to people living within the emergency zone. Stocks are easily available and ready for distribution should such an emergency arise.
This is what they’d like us to believe.
The people of Jaitapur never did. Their case for opposing the ‘world’s largest nuclear power plant’ in their backyard just got stronger.
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Breaking News:The united armies of intergalactic empire of TSEBWONKI galaxy and mars have attacked Delhi again.
Parish land:Our senior reporter Trinity has just confirmed an attack on Delhi by extraterrestrial forces whose existence we have been claiming for past decades but the insidious treacherous Brahminic lowly developed Delhi leaders have dismisses as fear mongering.
These are the exclusive images relayed to us by our psychic reporter.
We have been arguing about the presence of Extra-terrestrial armies for a long time but the government instead of building an intergalactic battle force was wasting resources to build power plants and pulling millions out of poverty.They dismissed our assertions as being of very low probability hence not fit to be wasted resources on.
The Aliens have been attacking delhi for past 50 years.But only we in Parish land could see those invaders.The lowly yindoo northern citizenry is too dumb and is an abomination on our squeaky clean 12% growth rate dragging us down to their Pagan level.The common men in Delhi does not know that he is under attack.The Indian government is an incarnation of Lucifer and lie to its people about hundreds of attack that takes place in delhi and about thousand of people dying in them everyday.Yesterday Aliens killed three students when they using their mind control tricks made a car to crash into a parked truck.
Our Special correspondent trinity reporting about Alien attack.
Source: My parish knows best
Other articles
Nuclear power is pure devilry
We in parish land are also against nuclear power plants.We are proud of our unreasoned opposition to nuclear power.
We do not care whether the whole state of Tamilnadu goes without power .
It does not matter to us that the major sesmic fault from which an strong earthquake or an Tsunami could emerge is more than 2000 nautical miles away.We don't care that the nuclear plant is shielded from Tsunami waves by Island of Sri-Lanka.We can always argue that Tsunami could emerge in Arabian Sea irrespective of the fact that western edge of Indian Ocean is a Divergent plate boundary which does not produce earthquakes but "our parish knows best ".
In our parish land we view the commie newspaper hindu with great deference.To us the op-ed written by our confused communist brothers are equivalent to scientific papers.If that won't cut ice we could always point to some blog written by a reporter carrying geiger counter or by an oped written by a reporter of oilprice in minyaville.
Even though there may not be even a single scientific study to prove that nuclear power plants in vicinity leads to increase in cancer cases but like true blue blooded leftists we can always try to overwhelm people with pointless op-eds which take reference of blue moon events to argue their case.We can always argue what if yeti descends from kanchenjunga and knocks down the nuclear power plant.
we also have a grudge that India does not have an FDA like organisation irrespective of the fact that in India weights and measures under whom quality control department comes is in state list.
If nothing helps we could always rely on our sister organisations like Greenpeace to categorise even civil accidents in nuclear plants as nuclear accidents.Even though not even a single person had died in those accidents due to high level of radiations.After all it is our sole aim to show Nuclear power in bad light.
We have played this game successfully in Three miles Island and again in fushikuma and would play it again in India.
We the United Association of doofuses know best not those stupid scientists who waste their whole life pursuing a useless degree and not devoting it to higher causes.
Parish land:Our senior reporter Trinity has just confirmed an attack on Delhi by extraterrestrial forces whose existence we have been claiming for past decades but the insidious treacherous Brahminic lowly developed Delhi leaders have dismisses as fear mongering.
These are the exclusive images relayed to us by our psychic reporter.
We have been arguing about the presence of Extra-terrestrial armies for a long time but the government instead of building an intergalactic battle force was wasting resources to build power plants and pulling millions out of poverty.They dismissed our assertions as being of very low probability hence not fit to be wasted resources on.
The Aliens have been attacking delhi for past 50 years.But only we in Parish land could see those invaders.The lowly yindoo northern citizenry is too dumb and is an abomination on our squeaky clean 12% growth rate dragging us down to their Pagan level.The common men in Delhi does not know that he is under attack.The Indian government is an incarnation of Lucifer and lie to its people about hundreds of attack that takes place in delhi and about thousand of people dying in them everyday.Yesterday Aliens killed three students when they using their mind control tricks made a car to crash into a parked truck.
Our Special correspondent trinity reporting about Alien attack.
Source: My parish knows best
Other articles
Nuclear power is pure devilry
We in parish land are also against nuclear power plants.We are proud of our unreasoned opposition to nuclear power.
We do not care whether the whole state of Tamilnadu goes without power .
It does not matter to us that the major sesmic fault from which an strong earthquake or an Tsunami could emerge is more than 2000 nautical miles away.We don't care that the nuclear plant is shielded from Tsunami waves by Island of Sri-Lanka.We can always argue that Tsunami could emerge in Arabian Sea irrespective of the fact that western edge of Indian Ocean is a Divergent plate boundary which does not produce earthquakes but "our parish knows best ".
In our parish land we view the commie newspaper hindu with great deference.To us the op-ed written by our confused communist brothers are equivalent to scientific papers.If that won't cut ice we could always point to some blog written by a reporter carrying geiger counter or by an oped written by a reporter of oilprice in minyaville.
Even though there may not be even a single scientific study to prove that nuclear power plants in vicinity leads to increase in cancer cases but like true blue blooded leftists we can always try to overwhelm people with pointless op-eds which take reference of blue moon events to argue their case.We can always argue what if yeti descends from kanchenjunga and knocks down the nuclear power plant.
we also have a grudge that India does not have an FDA like organisation irrespective of the fact that in India weights and measures under whom quality control department comes is in state list.
If nothing helps we could always rely on our sister organisations like Greenpeace to categorise even civil accidents in nuclear plants as nuclear accidents.Even though not even a single person had died in those accidents due to high level of radiations.After all it is our sole aim to show Nuclear power in bad light.
We have played this game successfully in Three miles Island and again in fushikuma and would play it again in India.
We the United Association of doofuses know best not those stupid scientists who waste their whole life pursuing a useless degree and not devoting it to higher causes.
sss112
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Dear trinity,
If you continue like this it would not take time for you to reach 1 millionth post this month itself.
Anyway, just out of curiosity, what is your age and your educational qualification [more importantly from where you got your education]. If you are kind enough to let us know that without some smarta$$ comments and posts longer than the whole of TOI with the usual crap additional newsletters, we would be very thankful of you.
Good day buddy.
If you continue like this it would not take time for you to reach 1 millionth post this month itself.
Anyway, just out of curiosity, what is your age and your educational qualification [more importantly from where you got your education]. If you are kind enough to let us know that without some smarta$$ comments and posts longer than the whole of TOI with the usual crap additional newsletters, we would be very thankful of you.
Good day buddy.
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