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.
