New book exposes the unsafety of India’s nuclear power industry

In recent years, some of the crucial Russian suppliers of components to the plant have been detained in Russia and indicted for shoddy business practices.

A new book, The Power of Promise: Examining Nuclear Energy in India by Princeton University physicist M.V. Ramana, takes a sober—and sobering—look at the fantasies and perils attached to this mirage, and finds the promise of nuclear energy empty in every way: environmental, economic and technological.

The more disturbing parts of Ramana’s book deal with the neglect of safety by the nuclear establishment. Recounting various alarming “incidents” in recent decades, he inspires little confidence in India’s ability to avoid a major disaster such as Chernobyl or Fukushima.

India shouldn’t buy what Japan is selling, Live Mint, 4 Nov 13, Materials of substandard quality have already been installed in Kudankulam plant, says former chairman of AERB Pankaj Mishra An obsession with nuclear power makes many political elites secretive, ruthless and delusional, even as their cherished projects threaten millions of people with disaster. But the egregious examples I have in mind here aren’t Iran, Pakistan and North Korea. They are Japan and India, two countries with democratic institutions.

Last week in the south Indian city of Pondicherry, I met a friend who had managed to penetrate the security lockdown around Kudankulam, the Russian-built nuclear power station in Tamil Nadu that began partial operations late last month despite strong protests from local villagers.

Kudankulum lies only a few miles away from a coastline that was ravaged by a tsunami in 2004. Opposition to the plant intensified after another intense earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 caused meltdowns at three nuclear reactors at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan.

Since then, Indian police have deported the few journalists who have tried to report on the protests, sequestered entire villages and levied criminal charges against tens of thousands of locals, some of whom have been accused of sedition and “waging war on the state.”

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who invested much political capital in a nuclear deal with the US in 2008, resorted to an Indian political ploy from the 1970s: blaming an unspecified “foreign hand” for the protests. (Never mind that the much-despised foreign hand helped build the Kudankulum plant, along with much of India’s nuclear infrastructure.)

Nuclear mirage

Certainly, the protesters at Kudankulum have much to be worried about. In recent years, some of the crucial Russian suppliers of components to the plant have been detained in Russia and indicted for shoddy business practices. According to A. Gopalakrishnan, former chairman of India’s Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB), “equipment, components and materials of substandard quality” have already been installed in the plant. Their “deficiencies and defects are dormant today, but these very same shortcomings may cause such parts to catastrophically fail when the reactor is operated for some time.”……

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has also been busy vending Japan’s nuclear industry around the world, including to seismically active Turkey and India, countries that have even less institutional oversight than Japan.

In India, Abe’s path is smoothed not only by the customarily powerful stakeholders in a multibillion-dollar industry but also by the superstitious faith invested in nuclear energy in a country where a large part of the population suffers from long power outages almost every day. Pro-nuclear advocates propose nuclear energy as an answer to India’s power shortages and crippling reliance on imported oil. A new book, The Power of Promise: Examining Nuclear Energy in India by Princeton University physicist M.V. Ramana, takes a sober—and sobering—look at the fantasies and perils attached to this mirage, and finds the promise of nuclear energy empty in every way: environmental, economic and technological……

Great hallucination

…….. Ramana explains how India’s Department of Atomic Energy first acquired its present political clout, and how the Atomic Energy Commission, which reports directly to the prime minister, achieved its immunity to public scrutiny despite repeated failure to meet India’s nuclear-energy needs. In recent years, problematic reports from government bodies such as the comptroller and auditor general have had no impact on the functioning of the nuclear establishment. On occasion, even elected members of the Parliament have been frustrated by its nontransparency.

Chronicling the march of folly, Ramana notes each one of the nuclear establishment’s many dismal milestones, the outlandish targets that were set in continuous defiance of actual results. For instance, the target for the year 2000 (set in 1984) was 10,000 megawatts; the result was a mere 1,840 megawatts. Undeterred by such poor performance, Prime Minister Singh now expects India to have 470,000 megawatts of nuclear capacity in 2050—a figure from science fiction that assumes India will annually increase its nuclear capacity by 11,500 megawatts until 2050 (which is on average 2.5 times the entire nuclear capacity added by the country over the last four decades).

November 5, 2013 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized

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