The rationale of the meeting was to respond to the grassroots demand for scrapping the project. Its sheer moral force, expressed in a 12-day hunger strike by more than 100 people last month, impelled the Tamil Nadu cabinet to take the unprecedented step of demanding that project construction be halted until people’s “apprehensions” about its hazards are “allayed”. These apprehensions are genuine, strong and well-grounded. They have since led to another mass hunger-strike and a siege of the plant site by 10,000 people.

The meeting’s rationale was certainly not to hear Mr Banerjee, who recently brought disgrace to India’s scientific community. Just as the world’s worst civilian nuclear disaster, at Fukushima in Japan, took a nasty turn with the March 12-14 hydrogen explosions, he dismissed its gravity. He said the explosions—which both indicated severe core damage and aggravated it, leading to three meltdowns—were “a purely chemical reaction, not a nuclear emergency”! Nothing could have been more delusional. Yet, such men are in charge of ultra-hazardous technologies with life-and-death consequences for millions.

Dr Singh promised the delegates that he would halt work at Koodankulam, where two Russian-made reactors are being built. But in less than an hour, he went back on his word, and wrote to Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa, saying India needs nuclear power for “energy security”; “I count on your support” in ensuring the project’s “timely implementation”.

Dr Singh has damaged his own image by treating the protestors like infants, or at best, ignorant, superstitious and misguided adults who need to be coached, taught and disciplined by a nanny state. But People’s Movement Against Nuclear Energy (PMANE) leaders are well-educated, well-informed and sensible professionals, including SP Udayakumar, who has for long years taught at a good US university, M. Pushparayan, a lawyer, and Tuticorin’s Catholic Bishop Yvon Ambroise.

PMANE activists’ case against the Koodankulam project is compelling. The two 1,000 MW reactors under construction were never subjected to the Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) process, itself weak, inadequate and now greatly diluted, under which a comprehensive EIA report is prepared, given to the local people, and a public hearing held. The reactors were cleared by the Ministry of Environment and Forests in 1989, five years before the EIA process started. It approved them without considering the intrinsic hazards of nuclear power, radiation releases, or long-term waste storage—as if they were gas-fired power stations.

The activists know also know that the reactors will draw in millions of litres of freshwater a day to cool their cores, and release it at a high temperature into the sea, affecting marine life and the fish catch on which lakhs of livelihoods depend. They are being built within a one-kilometre radius of major population centres in violation of DAE norms that stipulate a 1.6-km “nil-population” zone.

PMANE activists know the reactors will routinely release, even without accidents, effluents and emissions containing radioactivity, a poison you can’t see, touch or smell, but which enters the food chain and eventually affects people. Scientific studies covering 136 nuclear sites in the UK, Canada, France, the US, Germany, Japan, and Spain show abnormally high leukemia rates among children, and higher incidence of cancers of the bone, thyroid and lungs, congenital deformities, organ damage and reduced immunity. Human beings in India aren’t and cannot be an exception to this.

The activists are aware that all nuclear activities produce a variety of wastes, which remain hazardous for thousands of years. Science hasn’t yet found a safe way of storing, leave alone neutralising, nuclear wastes. Nobody knows how Koodankulam’s wastes will be handled.

Worst of all, catastrophic accidents are possible in every kind of nuclear reactor used in the world, including a core meltdown like Chernobyl or Fukushima. The death-toll from Chernobyl is conservatively estimated at 34,000 and is still climbing. (Some studies put it even beyond one lakh.) So bad and persistent is the radioactive contamination around Chernobyl that 25 years on, 300,000 people cannot go back to their homes. The Fukushima disaster still hasn’t ended in seven months, but the station operator is paying out $50 billion (Rs 250,000 crores) in damages already caused.

PMANE activists can tell DAE’s closed-minded bureaucrats a thing or two about the inherent hazards of ALL nuclear reactors, arising from their complexity and their operation at relatively high pressures and temperatures.

A reactor is a barely controlled nuclear bomb, where a runaway chain reaction is only just prevented by circulating water and using multiple safety devices. But each of these can fail. Lack of cooling can easily produce a catastrophe as the fuel gets relentlessly heated up.

That’s what happened at Fukushima. The reactors couldn’t withstand the Magnitude 9 earthquake, belying the designers’/operators’ claim. The tsunami knocked out the backup generators, precipitating a station blackout, the proximate cause of the loss-of-coolant accident, which led to the meltdown. In addition, highly radioactive spent fuel, stored in water pools on top of the reactors, got exposed as the water evaporated, adding to the radioactivity release.

A station blackout need not be caused by an earthquake or tsunami; it can occur because of any number of factors. It can happen in any reactor, with unpredictable but uncontrollable consequences, including a core meltdown.

PMANE activists understand that this hazard is inherent to nuclear power. In fact, they probably know a lot more about the safety problems with Russian reactors that DAE’s poorly performing bureaucrats who have failed to master nuclear technology and never completed a project on time.

A Norwegian group has revealed (http://www.bellona.org/articles/articles_2011/rosatom_report), a special report presented by nuclear safety experts from Russian state agencies to President Dmitry Medevdev this past June on the country’s nuclear rectors. This reveals that they are grievously under-prepared for both natural and man-made disasters, and negligence.

The report comes from multiple sources including the Ministry of Natural Resources, Federal Service for Environmental, Technological and Nuclear Oversight, as well as Rosatom, the nuclear reactor operator. It says Russian reactors are marked by 31 “serious flaws”.

Among the more critical are: absence of regulations for personnel to know how to deal with large-scale natural disasters or other major contingencies; inadequate protective shelters for workers; lack of records of previous accidents, which would help learn from past mistakes; and poor attention to electrical and safety-significant systems.

This holds true not just of the RBMK design implicated in Chernobyl, but also of the VVER-type reactors being installed at Koodankulam. The report questions the reactors’ ability to remain safe for extended periods if cooling systems fail. Also, key equipment involved in the cooling process suffers from metal fatigue and welding flaws. Russian reactors are vulnerable to the kinds of hydrogen explosions that ripped up reactor buildings at Fukushima.

Most important, the report says that the risk of earthquakes hasn’t been considered as a safety factor in designing Russian reactors. Not all of them have automatic shutdown mechanisms to be activated if an earthquake occurs. Nor are there currently clear guidelines or sufficient infrastructure for spent nuclear fuel management, leading to fears of its leaks during a disaster.

These disclosures are damning. Rosatom chief Sergei Kiriyenko hasn’t denied their veracity or accuracy, bur merely claimed that more money would fix the flaws. At any rate, the report totally contradicts the official Russian statement, made soon after March 11, that a Fukushima-type meltdown could never happen in Russia.

The DAE makes identical claims about India—and as baselessly. Confronted with an informed opposition, it has stooped to maligning PMANE, accusing it of being dominated by the Church, when it’s a broad-based multi-religious movement. The DAE also sees behind the movement. This is a bit rich coming from a department whose very survival now depends on “the foreign hand”: importing reactors from Russia, France and the US—without adequate scrutiny.

Similarly, in Jaitapur, the DAE is slinging mud at the opposition, while telling people that “radiation is your friend”. The French-designed European Pressurised Reactors to be installed there are as problem-ridden as and even more expensive than Koodankulam’s VVERs.

EPRs haven’t passed safety tests anywhere, including France. Indeed, 3,000 safety issues have been raised about them. Their construction, in Finland and France, is behind schedule by four years. They have become the world’s costliest reactors—about four times costlier than India’s nuclear or coal-fired plants and even wind turbines.

It would be suicidal for India to build such nuclear projects. They will bankrupt the electricity sector and impose unaffordable health risks upon people. There are perfectly sound, cost-competitive renewable energy alternatives to nuclear power. That’s where the future lies. (IPA Service)