Japan's nuclear disaster spooks
India By Sudha Ramachandran
BANGALORE - The nuclear disaster looming
at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan in the
wake of Friday's devastating earthquake and
tsunami has sparked debate over the safety of
India's nuclear drive. While the government has
gone into overdrive to allay public apprehensions
over the safety of Indian reactors, several
experts and activists remain unconvinced.
India has seven nuclear plants with 20
nuclear reactors. These are located at Kaiga in
Karnatakal; Kalpakkam and Kudankulam in Tamil
Nadu; Tarapur in Maharashtra; Kakrapur in Gujarat;
Narora in Uttar Pradesh; and Rawatbhatta in
Rajasthan. Like the Fukushima plant, several
Indian plants sit on the coast.
Several of
the top brass of India's nuclear establishment
have come out in defense of the nuclear reactors.
"All our plants have been tested to withstand
earthquakes and tsunamis. Our plants
are safe," declared Srikumar
Banerjee, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission
(AEC).
Seeking to reassure the country,
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told parliament on
Monday that an "immediate technical review of all
safety systems in nuclear power plants" would be
carried out to ensure that they would be able to
"withstand the impact of large natural disasters
such as tsunamis and earthquakes".
Nuclear
experts are underlining that the type of reactors
in India and Japan and the environment in which
they operate are different; hence similar
scenarios are unlikely.
Unlike Japan's
nuclear plants which are located in highly seismic
areas (Fukushima is located in Zone 5) most of
India's nuclear plants are situated in the
moderately seismic Zone 3. The Narora plant is the
only one located in Zone 4. Officials rule out the
possibility of an 8.9 magnitude earthquake
striking Indian nuclear plants since none of them
are located in the highly seismic Himalayan
region.
Besides, Indian nuclear plant
structures, systems and equipment are designed to
withstand the maximum possible earthquake at their
location, says Shashikant Dharne, joint director
at the Nuclear Power Corporation (NPC).
Indeed quakes and tsunamis have done
little damage to nuclear reactors in India. The
Narora plant has not been damaged in the several
tremors it has experienced in the past 21 years it
has been in operation, including one of 6.3
magnitude.
When an earthquake of 6.7
magnitude hit Gujarat in 2001, operations at the
Kakrapur plant went on uninterrupted. When the
2004 tsunami battered the Tamil Nadu coast, the
Kalpakkam nuclear power plant's grounds were
flooded, and the reactor went through an automatic
shutdown process and did not operate for a few
days. According to P K Iyengar, former chairman of
the AEC, the decision to install its electrical
systems 17 meters above the ground, prevented
damage to the reactor.
"Indian reactors
are inherently safer as they use natural uranium
as fuel as against enriched uranium that the
Japanese reactors use," says Pallava Bagla, a
science journalist with NDTV. They also "use a
double containment as against the single
containment used in Japan". Besides, the reactor
design "allows for cooling using convection
currents even in a state of station blackout -
when all power and backups fail," points out Om
Pal Singh, an expert on nuclear design safety at
the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur.
Officials point out that 18 of India's 20
reactors are indigenously built, pressurized heavy
water reactors (PHWRs) and only two - those at
Tarapur - use boiling water reactors (BWRs) as did
those in Fukushima. They admit that like the
facility at Fukushima, the Tarapur Atomic Power
Station (TAPS) is an old plant. But TAPS was
renovated and additional safety features
consistent with latest safety standards were
added, they argue.
Not everyone is
convinced of the safety of India's nuclear
reactors or of the country's preparedness to
respond to a nuclear disaster.
Many fear
that if Japan - a country known for its quiet
efficiency and discipline as well as its immense
expertise in earthquake and tsunami-resistant
design - has not been able to prevent explosions
in its nuclear facilities, there is little chance
that India, which is notorious for its chaos and
the low priority it accords to public safety, will
be in a position to do so.
"We are most
disorganized and unprepared to handle emergencies
of any kind of even much less severity," A
Gopalakrishnan, former chairman of the Atomic
Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) told Asia Times
Online. "The AERB's disaster preparedness
oversight is mostly on paper and the drills they
conduct once in a while are half-hearted efforts,
which are a sham," he said.
India's
nuclear top brass insist that safety audits of
nuclear plants are taken seriously in the country.
Nuclear plants need clearance from the AERB every
five years and safety audits are mandatory for
relicensing, Nuclear Power Corporation of India,
Ltd (NPCIL) chairperson S K Jain told the media in
the wake of the disaster in Japan.
However, a mandatory safety audit alone
does not make reactors safe. Who conducts the
audit is important. And in India, the body that
does the audit is not autonomous. The AERB draws
its personnel from the Department of Atomic Energy
(DAE) and reports to the AEC.
It "merely
serves as a lapdog of the DAE and the Prime
Minister's Office. With a captive AERB reporting
to the DAE, overall nuclear safety management in
India has been rendered worthless," Gopalakrishnan
pointed out.
"The earthquake-resistant
designs and tsunami abatement measures adopted in
India's nuclear plants need a high-level, in-depth
review by an independent expert group, consisting
of experts outside of the DAE and the NPCIL," he
said. "But there is practically no independent
verification of data or design methodologies."
"This is no way to run a critical safety
regulatory function," writes activist Prabir
Purkayastha, describing the lack of a separation
in the regulatory and operational functions in
nuclear energy as the "single-biggest obstacle for
a safe nuclear energy program in the country".
A culture of opacity surrounds India's
nuclear establishment. It is not just the nuclear
weapons program that is shrouded in secrecy.
Little is known about the civilian nuclear program
and the functioning of bodies like the AEC and the
AERB. In the circumstances, the veracity of audits
is hard to accept.
"Audits conducted in
the past did reveal loopholes in safety measures
at nuclear reactors but these findings were never
made public," a senior official at the Kaiga
nuclear plant told Asia Times. "Worse, there was
little follow-up action."
Activists say
they are not expecting anything to come of the
prime minister's promised audit of nuclear
reactors. "We can already predict the report - all
we need to do is to listen what the nuclear
establishment has been saying for the last few
days and we will know what the report is likely to
say," observes Purkayastha.
The explosions
at the Fukushima nuclear plant have revived
opposition to the proposed nuclear plant - the
world's largest - at Jaitapur in Maharashtra's
Konkan region. While Jaitapur's proponents say it
is in a seismically safe area - it is in Zone 3 -
activists point out that it is located in a region
that has been hit by three severe earthquakes of a
magnitude exceeding 5 points over the past two
decades, including one in 1993 that left almost
10,000 people dead.
Questions have also
been raised over the safety of Jaitapur's
reactors. India plans to purchase six European
Power Reactors (EPRs) from the French company
Areva for Jaitapur. The EPR is of unproven design
and the first unit has already run into trouble
with British and Finnish nuclear regulators
drawing attention to serious design deficiencies
in its control and safety systems.
Given
that India built on its own 18 PHWRs, three
generations of Indian engineers and scientists are
familiar with PHWR technology. "The safest route
is to consolidate and expand on our PHWR
experience, import natural uranium and build more
PHWRs," Gopalakrishnan said. Instead the
government is purchasing French EPRs in Jaitapur,
of which neither Indians nor the French, know much
about.
"If a major accident occurs in a
PHWR, we have Indian engineers and scientists who
are totally familiar with the technology, who can
jump in and rapidly bring the situation to normal.
For Indian engineering teams to react in a similar
timely and effective manner against an accident in
one of the planned imported reactors will be next
to impossible for at least few decades to come,"
Gopalakrishnan said.
In the next few
years, India plans to spend billions of dollars on
importing reactors. The explosions at Fukushima
may compel the government to believe that this
might not be the safest option.
Sudha Ramachandran is an
independent journalist/researcher based in
Bangalore.
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