India puts energy before lives

[Dr. John Dayal]

People’s life and livelihood versus nuclear power for industry

JOHN DAYAL

It is the life and the livelihood of the poorest of the poor versus a
nation’s ambitions in nuclear energy for industry and super-powerdom
in Koodankulam in south India.

A lakh of men, women and children demonstrated earlier this month at
the, several of them launching a ten daylong hunger-strike, demanding
a stop to the Russia-assisted construction of a 1,000 megawatt nuclear
power plant which has triggered a nagging controversy both on its
physical safety, following the Fukushima disaster in Japan, and its
impact on the environment affecting the livelihood of several
million boatmen and fisher-folks along the Coromandel coast.
It made international news was the presence of a large number of
Catholic Priests and Nuns, many of them born in the area and
umblically connected with the people whose cause they so openly
espoused. Catholics and other Christian denominations form a
significant part of the coastal population of Puducherry, Tamil Nadu,
and of neighbouring maritime states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and
Kerala, most of them subsisting on fishing and prawn farming, both
sensitive to a warming of sea currents because of unchecked waste
water discharge.

According to a UCAN report , the people came from 20 Catholic villages
and a dozen others around Koodankulam from the districts of
Kanyakumari, Thoothukudi and Tirunelveli. The agency interviewed some
of the demonstrators.“Russian nuclear technology has failed in
Chernobyl. Why should we use it here to endanger our lives,” said
Bishop Yuvon Ambroise of Tuticorin and chairperson of the Office for
Justice, Peace and Development (JPD) at the Catholic Bishops’
Conference of India. Bishop Ambroise said the country should look to
Europe and Japan as an example.“India should follow Germany and Japan,
who recently announced that they are giving up their nuclear
facilities after the Fukushima disaster.” “Our lives are in danger
because of the nuclear plant,” said Bishop Peter Remigius of Kottar.
“We want the facilities to be used for useful purposes.” Medha Patkar,
who mothered the Narbada Bachao movement against big damns said
questions remained over why the government had approved the facility
in an inhabited area despite environmental concerns.

After more than a week, the agitation was called off when the Union
government and the administrations of Puducherry and Tamil Nadu, the
two affected States, called a temporary halt to work on the nuclear
plant and promised talks with the local people. The Tamil Nadu Cabinet
of chief minister J Jayalalitha is to pass a formal resolution and
send it over to the Union Government. Prime minister Manmohan Singh
will have to take a call on the issue after he returns from New York
where is attending the General Assembly of the United nations. It
remains a moot question if the government will indeed halt further
work and eventually shut down the existing units of the plant. Fears
are it will not.

Nuclear energy, for war and for peace, remains locked in a fierce
stranglehold of hyper nationalism and the needs of the growing economy
in a country whose people aspire to be a global superpower in the not
too distant future. This nationalism has made real debate on safety
and security issues all but taboo in the country, with just a handful
of activists and academics involved in any genuine debate. Years of
nuclear isolation, when its only technological support was from the
then Soviet Union, accentuated India’s paranoia that the world wanted
to keep it away from cheap power for its growth. A clandestine
nuclear military experiment exploded India into the Big Power club
when the regime of the late prime minister Indira Gandhi carried out
an underground blast in the early 1980s in the desert sands of
Rajasthan. Two decades later, the government of Prime Minister Atal
Behari Vajpayee, leading a National Democratic alliance collation
headed by his own Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party, carried
out a series of explosions in the same testing grounds. Pakistan,
neighbour and traditional enemy, followed suit with its own nuclear
experiments. Both countries today have an estimated more than two
hundred strategic nuclear warheads mounted on ground and air-borne
missiles, and possibly also on warships. This show of might, and an
end of the soft military alliance with Russia, has helped India reach
pacts in nuclear material with the US and Europe who look on the
expanding Indian market with deep interest.

Electricity for industry and homes remains a critical need for India,
which does not have great reserves of oil, and only limited reserves
of high grade coal for hydrocarbon-fuelled thermal power plants. With
most of its northern rivers flowing through unstable seismic regions
prone to earthquakes, the safety of existing hydel power plants has
been called into question. The collapse of the tunnels in the Teesta
river project in the north eastern state of Sikkim in the recent
earthquake had revived the paranoia first evoked when a quake hit the
Koyna dam in Maharashtra some years ago.

Jawaharlal Nehru and his scientific advisers thought succour lay in
clean nuclear energy. In 1962 Homi Bhabha, the father of atomic energy
in India, projected 20,000 mw in nuclear generation capacity by 1987
based on imported reactors. The target, and future targets, could
never rally be achieved. The Department of Atomic Energy which owns
the largely indigenous nuclear power program now has a target of
20,000 MWe for 2020 and expects to have 63,000 MWe nuclear capacity on
line by 2032. It aims to supply 25 per cent of electricity from
nuclear power by 2050. Because India is outside the Nuclear Non-
Proliferation Treaty due to its weapons program, it was for 34 years
largely excluded from trade in nuclear plant or materials, which has
hampered its development of civil nuclear energy until 2009. Due to
these trade bans and lack of indigenous uranium, India has uniquely
been developing a nuclear fuel cycle to exploit its reserves of
thorium. Its current energy derived from nuclear plans is 5,000 mw.

According to the government’s own assessments, quoted in the media,
electricity demand in the country is increasing rapidly, and the 830
billion kilowatt hours produced in 2008 was triple the 1990 output,
though still represented only some 700 kWh per capita for the year.
Because of the massive transmission line losses, this resulted in
only 591 billion kWh consumption. Coal provides 68 per cent of the
electricity at present, natural gas 8 per cent, hydro-electric units
giving 14 percent more The per capita electricity consumption figure
is expected to double by 2020, with 6.3% annual growth, and reach
5000-6000 kWh by 2050. By the way, there are many who blame coal based
units for pollution and question the security and safety, even the
displacement potential, of dams meant for irrigation and power.

The crippling of the Fukusima plant in Japan in the earthquake and
tsunami in March 2011 has for once brought the safety debate into the
public domain. The International Atomic Energy Agency’s global expert
fact-finding group has in its June report said “there were
insufficient defence for tsunami hazards” the likes of which
devastated the Coromandel coast of India, as also Indonesia, Thailand
and Sri Lanka, some years ago. The Nuclear Power Corp. of India has
undertaken safety evaluation of 20 operating power plants and nuclear
power plants under construction, suggesting a series of safety
procedures, specially for plants along the coastline.

The nuclear power lobby says the Russian VVER reactors of 1000 MWe are
considered to be quite safe, unlike the Chernobyl graphite RBMK
reactors. They have many safety features built in to them, and have an
operating life of 40 years. The reactors at Koodankulam have an added
“passive cooling” system for additional safety. The more advanced VVER
1200 reactors, with more safety features, are being built in Russia,
and would be available for the future expansion of Koodankulam. While
30 VVER-1000 reactors have been built, 19 more are planned or are
under construction. China has built two such reactors at the Tainwan
nuclear power plant and is constructing six more. The VVER 1000 built
in China has 94 per cent of its systems automated, i.e. the plant can
control itself under most situations. The IDEA has referred to the
Tainwan station as the “safest nuclear power plant in the world”.

The lobby says the Koodankulam reactors can be considered to be
adequate from the safety standpoint. “There would be no rational
reason for stopping the project at this stage, when it is over 95 per
cent completed.” The plant is far from major seismic activity, it is
said, and therefore the risks are manageable.

This is challenged by anti Nuclear activists such as the pioneering
journalist Praful Bidwai who has carried out a safety campaign for
more than twenty years.

The environment impact on the ocean is a more urgent issue. The
Koodankulam thermal power plant will require large amounts of cooling
water, an estimated 70 cubic metres per second, which will be heated
up while going through the coils of the nuclear power plant and will
be discharged into the sea. The impact of this warm water on the
marine environment is said to be difficult to assess, and would depend
on the sea depth, flow rates, and ecology. There have also been some
allegations of the health effects of radiation on people living in the
vicinity of nuclear power plants elsewhere in India.

But India has clearly indicated it will not abandon the quest for
nuclear energy. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is emphatic about the
future of India’s nuclear energy programme, saying “there would be no
looking back on nuclear energy,: and in fact proposing expanding
India’s civil nuclear energy with adequate safety measures. Indian
civil society is not convinced if the measures will really be adequate
to prevent a future disaster. Koodankulam and the fishermen in its
neighbourhood remain apprehensive.