Mood was quite upbeat when the anti-nuclear activist delegation addressed a press conference last Friday (7th September) after meeting the Prime Minister. The PM, acting upon a Resolution adopted by Tamil Nadu State Cabinet last month after a 12-day long mass hunger-strike, promised the delegation in the afternoon that the work will be immediately stopped at Koodankulam nuclear power plant site and an expert committee with the movement’s representation would be set up to look into the issue.
Speaking to the press conference facilitated by the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP), leading activists Dr. S P Udayakumar, Bishop Yuvon Ambroise of Tuticorin Latin Catholic Diocese and M. Pushparayan described the resilience of the two decade old movement and the way it has been able to mobilize support across parties and communities in the region. Dr. S P Udayakumar also gave a detailed description of problems with the projects – its environmental impacts, safety concerns, its adverse effects on people’s livelihood and questioned the very rationale of the project.
However, even before the delegation reached back to Chennai, it came to know of two documents posted on the Prime Minister Office’s website – a press release and a personal letter from the PM to the Tamilnadu Chief Minister Ms. Jayalalita. In the press release, there is no clear assurance of stopping the work and even the expert committee has been given a very limited mandate to ‘interact’ with people and allay their fears regarding safety of KNPP. In his letter to the Chief Minister, the PM has sought her continued support for completion of the Koodankulam nuclear project.
The letter also talks about assurance given by NPCIL for the safety of Koodankulam reactors, while completely evading any reference to Russian agencies own safety audit done after Fukushima in which they have outlined 31 serious safety concerns, including with the VVER design that is being constructed in Koodankulam, in the eventuality of a major accident.
The PM talked about ‘welfare work’ done in the area by the NPCIL, but it is a standard practice of nuclear corporates worldwide to bribe government officials on one hand and to spent money on local infrastructure on the other to get support while imperilling people’s future and livelihood in the long run.
Manmohan Singh’s letter to Tamilnadu CM tries to reduce the entire range of issues raised by the movement to some misplaced over-reaction to Fukushima and essentially looks at it as a PR problem.
After Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s backtracking act on his promise, the people protesting against the Koodankulam Nuclear power Plant have decided to resume their struggle. The Struggle Committee has given an ultimatum to the central Government to stop the construction work in Koodankulam by October 11th. More than 7,000 people observed a token fast at Idinthakarai on Monday and vowed to intensify the struggle.
Dr. S P Udayakumar of People’s Movement Against nuclear Energy (PMANE) has expressed his dismay over the PM’s volte-face. Noting that the work at KNPP had not been suspended so far, he said “So, we staged the token hunger protest today. During the fast, representatives of people from various areas met and decided to continue the fast till Tuesday. We have urged the State government to again press the Centre to suspend the work at KNPP based on the (State) Cabinet’s resolution, and the Centre should respect the resolution.” Leading Koodankulam activist M.Pushparayan said that the movement would now put pressure on the State Government to suspend the construction work immediately and have an open dialogue with people. On the Prime Minister’s letter to CM Ms. Jayalalitha, he has been quoted saying “Centre is not concerned about the safety and security of the Tamils.”
The PMANE convenors said “We urge the Tamil Nadu government to ensure that its resolution is enacted upon and the works on this nuclear power plant are stopped immediately.”
Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP) in its statement has called this attitude of Central government unfortunate and undemocratic. Greenpeace India has also criticized the government for reducing the issue to PR (public relations). The movement in Koodankulam has also got support from Kerela.
Dividing people for nuclear power
In another very unfortunate development, the intelligence agencies have been reported to be doing religious profiling of the agitators and probing the role of Church in “instigating the fishermen and local populace to scuttle future deals with Russia”. Incidentally, majority of the fishing communities in the region is Christian and it results in active participation of their community and religious organisations. But using this fact for a divisive tactics in already delicate communal fabric of Indian politics would be mischievous on part of the authorities and their supportive media. Speaking to the press conference in Delhi on Friday, both Dr. S P Udayakumar and Bishop of Tuticorin had underscored the broad-based and multi-religious nature of the protests.
Media Offensive by the Nuclear Establishment
After the people’s movement forced the State Government to change its stance, the nuclear establishment in India seems to have gone on a media offensive. Senior DAE scientists like M R Srinivasan and Srikumar Bannerjee have labelled the protests misplaced and claimed that not only the Koodankulam project, but the all the nuclear facilities in India are fail-proof when it comes to safety. The AEC Chairman has denied any rethink on the project despite protests.
However, the nuclear establishment is completely avoiding the crucial questions regarding nuclear safety in India:
- On the VVER design being installed in Koodankulam, the Russian agencies themselves have raised serious safety issues, while our nuclear theocrats are giving it a clean chit.
- In case of Jaitapur, more than 3000 serious safety issues with Areva’s EPR reactor design have been highlighted by safety regulatory bodies of Finland (STUK), UK (HSE), France (ASN) and EU. Engineers working on the EPR have serious apprehensions of a “Chernobyl style” meltdown in the design because both the materials and workmanship were substandard, as per leaked EDF documents. In 2009, safety authorities had issued a joint request for EPR design improvement. The American Nuclear Regulatory Council (NRC) has also delayed the safety certification for the EPR for a year. Independent experts have raised serious questions on safety and viability of EPR projects.
- Contrary to the government’s claims, India has a poor record when it comes to nuclear safety. A list of serious nuclear accidents in the recent past can be seen here.
- Far from being open about safety issues, the DAE is known to be utterly secretive and undemocratic. The nuclear establishment has a history of avoiding public scrutiny by labelling its own safety audits ‘top secret’. The nuclear establishment has also badly victimized the whistle blowers and critics in the past.
- The post-Fukushima safety review in India has been hastily done by NPCIL, the nuclear operator itself, in one month whereas in other countries have gone for detailed process. The report does a rather selective reading of events in Fukushima in the first place and, not surprisingly, has come out with reassurances about nuclear installations in India being totally safe. In the wake of Fukushima, people and independent experts had raised serious issues but for the government it remains just a public relations exercise.
- In case of a Fukushima-like accident, people of India are left helpless as the government’s Nuclear Liability Bill caps the maximum liability arbitrarily. Even the watered-down provision for suppliers liability is not acceptable to the American and other international nuclear corporate and these countries are pushing India to do away with the suppliers liability and ratify the CSC.
- The proposed Nuclear Safety Authority and Regulatory Bill 2011 which the PM has lauded in his letter to Ms. Jayalalitha, has been widely criticized for being toothless. Not only the new NSRA’s jurisdiction and role be even more limited than the existing AERB, the govt has overarching powers to supersede it and take any installation out of its purview citing ‘national security’ imperatives. The NSRA bill provides no security to the whistle-blowers.
Besides safety, the people’s movement in Koodankulam has raised wider issues of environmental impact, displacement and livelihood, economic rational of the project and undermining of basic democratic principles by the authorities in pushing for it. In the light of protests in places like Koodankulam, Jaitapur, Mithivirdi, Fatehabad and Chutka, the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP) and other civil society organisations have asked for a open national consultation on nuclear energy. The government would do well to heed to these voices rather than undemocratically imposing a dangerous nuclear expansion on people of this country and using divisive tactics and dubious propaganda for this purpose.
This was expected from the current establishment, who are nothing but a bunch of kickback kings. You name any project they will help you to bring it into India for a price. So what if it is anti people, they just want their commission to be stored in some bank in Switzerland. This is going to be a long struggle, people who are educated enough about the ills of the project should use their network and make sure the correct message goes to a vast majority of the people. The common man in the other part of the state feels that if the KNPP is commissioned he will get uninterrupted power and so what if it is from a nuclear plant. The time has come for a forceful sustained campaign to throw these junk messiahs out of the county. All the best.
You have given comment authentically like as you have seen or you only transfered fund to kick back kings. This is the affected people's movement against the Nuke plant. The benefit goes to the one part of the state or country, why these particular part of people must suffer? If u think people who are fighting aginst this for money only, then you are fool. For money such crowd will not gather. And it is not politically or religiusly motivated. This kind of arguments are put forward to divide the people like you jokers. For u get uninterrupted power supply, these poor people to suffer?
India’s CANDU type nuclear power reactors release massive quantities of radioactive pollution on a daily basis. Tritium gets into air, rivers, seas, in the form of radioactive water. It contaminates food and drinking water, and it is easily absorbed into our body. Tritium is a carcinogen and it causes birth defects. Tritium pollution causes cancer and birth defects. Tritium replaces ordinary non-radioactive hydrogen and travels throughout the body, going wherever water goes. It becomes part of our DNA and that's where it does its damage. Tritium decays within our body, ejecting high velocity beta particles that can break the chemical bonds of our DNA. The result can be cancer or birth defects. A developing foetus is particularly susceptible to damage from exposure to radiation. There are higher rates of childhood leukemia near nuclear plants in India, Canada, Germany and USA, due to chronic exposure to radioactive pollution from reactors. There is no safe level of exposure to radiation. New research has shown that the nuclear industry has systematically, and fraudulently and greatly underestimated the risks of exposure to tritium and other radioactive pollutants from nuclear reactors. There is no safe level of exposure to radiation and even background levels of radiation can cause cancer. Our drinking water standards need to be revised to take into account this new information, and protect people from chronic exposure to radioactive tritium. Manufacturers of radioactive glow-in-the-dark signs use radioactive Tritium and this pollute the environment.
Decades back I saw radioactive water from split fuel elements are being poured in to the Trombay sea from BARC. When asked one of the directors told me that fishing is banned in the sea surrounding sea. But all the same I could sea fishermen fishing in the area. Every sea fish etc are totally contaminated with radiation and the unfortunate thing is that these sea creatures concentrate the radioactivity by a factor of a lakh. I still think that Sharad Pawars sickness has something to do with his eating of sea fish caught off the coast of Mumbai. Every reactor every day contaminate the surrounding with radiation. In addition to it there were many major accidents in Indian nuclear plants that are systematically suppressed by the government. In April 2011 there was a fire alarm in the control room of the Kaiga Generating Station in Karnataka. In November 2009 radioactive tritiated water was consumed by 55 workers at Kaiga Generating Station. In April 2003 Six tonnes radioactive heavy water at reactor II of the Narora Atomic Power Station (NAPS) in Uttar Pradesh leaked and similar leak at the same reactor three years earlier. In January 2003 a valve failure in the Kalpakkam Atomic Reprocessing Plant in Tamil Nadu resulted in high-level radioactive waste leak and it exposed six workers to high doses of radiation. In May 2002 radioactive 22.2 Curies of tritiated water leaked from a heavy water storage tank at Rajasthan Atomic Power Station (RAPS) into the environment. In November 2001 about 1.4 tonnes of heavy water leaked at the Naroara plant NAPS I reactor, resulting in one worker receiving an internal radiation dose of 18.49 mSv. In April 2000 seven tonnes of heavy water leaked from NAPS Unit II and workers received ‘significant uptakes of tritium. In March 1999 about 14 fourteen tonnes of heavy water leaked from the pipes at Madras Atomic Power Station (MAPS) at Kalpakkam, Tamil Nadu, during a test process exposing 42 workers. In May 1994 containment dome of Unit I of Kaiga Generating Station collapsed and 130 tonnes of concrete fall from a height of nearly thirty metres that injured 14 workers. In February 1994 Helium gas and heavy water leaked in Unit 1 of RAPS. The plant was shut down until March 1997. In March 1993 blades of the turbine in NAPS Unit I break off, slicing through other blades and caused a raging fire, with leaked oil and spreads through the turbine building. Power is not restored for 17 hours and automatic systems failed and the accident was a Level 3 on the International Nuclear Event Scale or INES. In May 1992 about 12 curies of radioactive released from a tube leak Tarapur Atomic Power Station. In January 1992 around 4 tons of heavy water spilled at RAPS. In December 1991, leak from pipelines in the vicinity of CIRUS and Dhruva research reactors at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) in Trombay, Mumbai resulted in severe Cs-137 soil contamination of thousands of times the acceptable limit. Local vegetation was found to be contaminated, and all contract workers were exposed to radiation which was not recorded or monitored as usual. In July 1991 a contract worker labourer painted the walls of RAPS with paint mixed with radioactive heavy water, washed his paintbrush, face and hands in the deuterated and tritiated water, and he was not been traced. In March 1991 Heavy water leak at MAPS takes four days to clean up.
Fukushima and Chernobyl in its day had issued a warning to us Indians. After the 11-3-2011 meltdown of three nuclear reactors at Fukushima in Japan even the countries that are supposed to be best equipped to deal with nuclear disaster are turning away from nuclare power and India should stop our Kudankulam and Jaitapur nuclear power programme. Gullible, corrupt and weak Indians like Manmohan Singh and Sonia are charged with making decisions, that could result in mass mass murder of Indians and the destruction of India. Germany, and USA are abandoning or delaying plans to replace or upgrade their electricity producing nuclear plants as well as stopping the operational life extension of its existing, reactors beyond their original 40 year licensing period. But India and China with little nuclear experience and poor safety records are moving ahead with plans to expand generating capacity and are planning to add 80 new reactors over the next two decades. The United States has 104 of the 436 reactors worldwide but it stopped new reactor power plant construction for the past 32 years, after its 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear reactor disaster. Fukushima is resulting in the radiation poisoning of whole world. Germany has ordered its 17 nuclear reactors to be shut down by 2022. Socialist Party leaders in France that depend for 79% of its power on nuclear reactors, are raising the issue of nuclear power stoppage. In Japan public approval of adding more nuclear plants stood at 82% six years ago, but after Fukushima, only 30% Japanese support nuclear power. Nuclear bureaucracies in India,Tehran, Jerusalem, Islamabad, etc and terror networks are now a threat to the survival of human race on our planet.
Tepco, is the operator of the Fukushima Daiichi plant, Seven months after the triple meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi, The utility, with 37,000 employees and cozy alliances with Japanese government, supplied electricity to the economic heart of Japan. The average employee made 7.57 million yen or nearly $100,000. Tepco is now a funeral company. Its president disappeared from public view, and then resigned.. It disclosed the meltdowns at the three reactors, nearly two months after the fact. Like the Department of Atomic Energy and Prime Minister of India who are spinning stories of safety of Indian reactors, fuel storage, waste disposal etc, Tepco spun false stories about the timeline of events at the facility, trying to pin blame on the government. Since the disaster, Tepco has booked $23 billion in losses. Tepco owes $50 billion in compensation to the tens of thousands who lived close to the nuclear plant. The compensation payments could send the company into bankruptcy. This cost is even less than one in 10000 of the total cost of this nuclear power plant catostrophie at Fukushima. Everything that is produced in Japan or in nearby areas of Japan, are contaminated with radiation. Even Japanese cars are contaminated. . On 8-8 2011 Japanese cars imported from Japan were rejected at Russian port Kyoyo, as it had 17uSv/h radiation which was 340 times higher than normal. Radiation is detected in Japanese electric appliances, agricultural products, and all Japanese goods. Even if they assembled somewhere,else all core parts are always exported from Japan because of the patent issue. So Indians have to boycott all Japanese products including cars.
Dr. McMohan Singh opens his mouth and says Nuclear Plants are Safe . Then why do we need a 5 Km Exclusion zone? Safe for whom ? Who will digest the radiation from NPPs ? People who live within 30 KMs of the plant. They will suffer cancer. Their wives and daughters will bear DEformed kids because Radiations delete cells from the DNA Chain. Society of that area will bear the suffering and cost of deformed Kids. For McMohan Its safe because it(NPP) means more money for his AKKAs. He is selling your lives and lives of your yet to born children and grand Childrens.
Beware of this Dakku.
I know people living in Kalpakkam for generations and no one suffered from cancer like you say?You are all stone age people go and live in dark ages who cares