Nuking peaceful protests - Praful Bidwai

Even zealous supporters of nuclear power should logically concede three things to their opponents. First, after Fukushima, it’s natural for people everywhere to be deeply sceptical of the claimed safety of nuclear power, and for governments to phase out atomic programmes, as is happening in countries like Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and now Japan.

Second, nuclear power, like all technologies, should be promoted democratically, with the consent of the people living in the vicinity, and with scrupulous regard for civil liberties. And third, safety must be paramount in reactor construction and operation, with strict adherence to norms and full compliance with the rules laid down by an independent safety authority.

The way the Indian government has dealt with the opponents of the Koodankulam nuclear reactors being built in Tamil Nadu violates all three red lines. Rather than treat such opposition as natural, logical and an indication of citizens’ engagement with the world, the Department of Atomic Energy and its subsidiary Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd see it as a pathological condition to be cured by psychiatrists from the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore.

The government has all along demonised Koodankulam’s opponents. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, no less, vilified them as inspired by “foreign-funded” NGOs without citing an iota of evidence. The government even deported a German tourist living in a Rs200-a-day room, alleging he was “masterminding” and financing the agitation. This week, it summarily deported three Japanese activists who were planning to visit Koodankulam. All this shows official disconnect with reality. Globally, nuclear power was in retreat even before Fukushima. The number of operating reactors peaked 10 years ago, and their installed capacity has been falling since 2010. Nuclear’s share of global power generation has declined from its peak (17 percent) to about 11 percent.

Post-Fukushima, the global nuclear industry faces its worst-ever credibility crisis. With increasingly adverse public opinion, and rising reactor costs (which have tripled over a decade), it’ll probably go into terminal decline. Jeff Immelt of General Electric, one of the world’s largest suppliers of atomic equipment says, nuclear power is “really hard to justify”. However, India continues its Nuclear March of Folly and has unleashed savage repression against anti-nuclear protesters. Hundreds of FIRs have been lodged against several thousands of people in Koodankulam (according to one estimate, an incredible 55,000 people), and many are charged with sedition and waging war against the state – for organising protests without a single violent incident.

It’s hard to think of another occasion, including the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, or the 1992 Babri demolition, where the state has charged so many people with such grave offences. On September 10, the police launched a vicious lathi and tear-gas attack on peaceful protesters although they were obstructing nobody’s movement. The police literally drove many agitators into the sea, molested women, arrested scores and looted their houses. Police firing killed a fisherman.

A fact-finding team led by Justice BG Kolse-Patil and senior journalist Kalpana Sharma describes the Koodankulam situation as a “reign of terror”, marked by “extreme and totally unjustified” use of force, physical abuse, vindictive detention of 56 people, including juveniles, and targeting of women. Such thug-like police behaviour, it says, “has no place in a country that calls itself democratic”. Yet, repression of movements against destructive projects is becoming part of a deplorable pattern in India. No socially desirable project can be built on the ashes of citizens. This in and of itself is a strong reason to oppose the Koodankulam reactors.

Manmohan Singh last year suspended work at Koodankulam and promised to allay people’s apprehensions regarding safety. But he had no intention of doing so. The sarkari experts he appointed didn’t even bother to meet the people’s representatives or answer their queries about the site’s vulnerability to tsunamis, volcanic activity and earthquakes. People’s fears grew as NPCIL refused to share relevant information with them, including the Site Evaluation and the Safety Analysis Reports. Despite a Right to Information request, a legal petition and a parliament question, NPCIL failed to disclose the text of an Indo-Russian intergovernmental agreement, which reportedly absolves the reactors’ supplier of any liability for an accident.

This puts a disturbing question-mark over the official claim that the reactors are safe, and accidents are all but impossible. If so, why is the supplier evading liability? That brings us to the third factor mentioned above: NPCIL’s non-compliance with safety protocols, and the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board’s approval for fuel-loading in breach of the own norms. This is a grim story. Last year, following Fukushima, the AERB set up under state orders a task force to suggest improvements in reactor safety. This made 17 recommendations, pertaining to freshwater and power backup, improved sensors and instrumentation, etc.

The Koodankulam plant is not compliant with as many as 11 of the 17. The AERB first told the Madras High Court that it wouldn’t permit fuel-loading unless full compliance was established. But within four days, it made an about-turn – probably under pressure from the government. As the comptroller and accountant general has established in a recent report, the AERB lacks independence and is totally subservient to the government. On August 10, it permitted NPCIL to start fuel loading. NPCIL has since been loading live nuclear fuel into the first reactor. This is wrong and dangerous, and shows reckless disregard for safety procedures.

The AERB is guilty of yet more safety violations. Its own rules say there must be absolutely no population in the “exclusion zone” covering a 1.6km radius from the plant, and that the population in the 5km area must be under 20,000. Now, as anyone who has been to Koodankulam will testify, a tsunami rehabilitation colony, with 450 tenements, stands less than 1km from the plant. At least 40,000 people live within a 5km radius. The AERB, supposedly the public’s nuclear watchdog, has turned a blind eye to this. Equally disgraceful is its failure to enforce another rule which stipulates that no fuel-loading be permitted until an off-site emergency preparedness drill is completed within a 16km radius under the joint supervision of NPCIL, the district administration, the state government and the National Disaster Management Authority.

This involves full evacuation procedures, with prior warning, identification of routes, commandeering of vehicles, and clear instructions to the public. No such drill was ever conducted. And yet, the AERB cleared initial fuel-loading. This amounts to playing with the public’s life.

India is loath to move away from nuclear power although the world is abandoning it rapidly. The transition is fastest in the OECD countries, which account for 70 percent of the world’s 429 reactors. There are just two reactors under construction in the West. Both are mired in safety problems, long delays and 130 percent-plus cost overruns. Even France, which gets 80 percent of its electricity from atomic reactors – a fact the global nuclear industry repeats as if that were clinching proof of its own safety and reliability – will reduce its nuclear dependence to 50 percent by 2025.

As nuclear declines, global investment in clean, flexible renewable sources like wind and solar has grossed $1 trillion since 2004. Their costs are falling dramatically. Renewables are the future.

-Praful Bidwai 

The writer, a former newspaper editor, is a researcher and peace and human-rights activist based in Delhi. 
Email: prafulbidwai1 @yahoo.co.in

Courtesy: The News International

KOODANKULAM : TIME TO TALK - Praful Bidwai

The Kudankulam protesters must not be maligned as misguided by ‘foreign' interests. Dialogue with them on nuclear hazards remains an imperative. 

AS the popular agitation against the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project (KKNPP) gains in strength and determination, the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) and its subsidiary, Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd (NPCIL), have mounted a multi-pronged attack on the movement and its leaders, while claiming that the Russian-designed reactors being installed are “perfectly” or “100 per cent” safe.

One part of the attack is that the agitators are “imperilling” the safety of the Rs.13,000-crore project by impeding its normal operation and maintenance through their picketing. In particular, Reactor 1, which is at an advanced state of completion, and recently had a “hot run”, is in danger of being “damaged”.

This underscores the protesters' grave irresponsibility. Another part of the attack is the disinformation spread through newspapers to the effect that the movement is backed by “anti-nuclear groups, the Church and foreign activists” ( The Times of India, November 7). NPCIL chairman S.K. Jain said activists from the United States, Finland, France and Australia “are simply sitting there”.

The second attack is reminiscent of past campaigns to malign environmentalists who fought against large dams and destructive mining and industrial projects – and made a valuable contribution to ecological protection and defence of livelihoods. Anti-nuclear groups naturally support the Kudankulam protests on well-reasoned grounds.

It is their legitimate job to do so. But it is pernicious to introduce a denominational/communal element here. The protesters include people from all communities.

My telephone conversations with a number of people around Kudankulam confirm that there are no “foreign” activists there. The only foreigners present recently were the Russian engineers invited by NPCIL itself.

The charge is particularly deplorable because it comes from an organisation that is bent on rewarding foreign nuclear manufacturers with lucrative reactor contracts for their governments' support to the U.S.-India nuclear deal and its endorsement by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG).

Former DAE secretary Anil Kakodkar put it straight to the Marathi daily Sakaal (January 5): “We also have to keep in mind the commercial interests of foreign countries and … companies …America, Russia and France were the countries that we made mediators in these efforts to lift sanctions, and hence, for the nurturing of their business interests, we made deals with them for nuclear projects.”

Worse, such propaganda about the “foreign hand” behind the protests guts the possibility of a genuine dialogue with the agitators, mandated by the Centre. The whole rationale of the Prime Minister's October 7 meeting with the people's delegation, in response to the Tamil Nadu Cabinet's call for suspending construction at Kudankulam until people's apprehensions about safety are allayed, was to facilitate dialogue and rational debate.

To return to the first line of attack, DAE Secretary Srikumar Banerjee has claimed he had “serious concern” about “damage” to the reactors: “It is not a plant which can be just switched on and off….We have done the hot run. We can't go from hot run to a freeze condition.… We have to have a minimal operational system….” S.K. Jain said: [a reactor] is “not a car factory where you can switch off the systems and close.... You have simulators, ventilators, computer and electronic systems… you have to maintain” them.

There is as yet no nuclear danger at Kudankulam. Reactor 1 has not gone “critical”– that is, had a nuclear fission chain reaction. For all intents and purposes, it is like a car factory, which too has simulators, ventilators and computers.

Contrary to the suggestion of a nuclear activity, a “hot run” involves loading of dummy fuel assemblies (without uranium) into the reactor, and then “taking the temperature of the primary coolant water to the operating temperature of 280⁰ Celsius…,” according to site director M.K. Balaji ( The Hindu, June 5). After the three-week-long hot run, “the reactor would be disassembled”, not just shut down, and the reactor vessel, pipelines, gauges and safety devices inspected. The run's purpose is to see how the coolant circuit operates and whether pipes, pumps, and so on work properly.

Until Reactor 1 attains criticality, its safety will not be affected in the least if operations are suspended even for months. Kudankulam is already delayed by 10 years. Shutting down reactors even after they have gone critical is not rocket science. All reactors are periodically closed for maintenance. Many have been shut down safely or for good – most recently in Japan and Germany, and earlier in the U.S., France, Britain, Italy, and elsewhere.

Former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam has lent a degree of legitimacy to the DAE's campaign by alleging that “geopolitical and market forces” (the layer presumably meaning rival nuclear suppliers to Russia) are behind the Kudankulam protests. He was categorical that the reactors are “100 per cent” safe, because they have multiple “sophisticated” safety features, and because 99 per cent of their spent fuel would be reprocessed.

NUCLEAR WASTES

Now, reprocessing is a known hazardous and expensive activity, which also produces nuclear wastes, with all their intractable problems. Many components of nuclear wastes have long half-lives (period during which they naturally decay to half their original mass) such as 24,000 years (plutonium-239) and even 710 million years (uranium-235).

Science knows no way of storing wastes safely for such long periods, leave alone neutralising them or disposing them of. No geological formations can be trusted to be stable for millennia and ensure that the wastes will not leach into the environment.

As for safety, no technology is “100 per cent” safe. All technologies carry a finite risk. Risk is particularly great in relatively high-pressure high-temperature systems such as nuclear reactors, which concentrate enormous quantities of energy in small volumes. The work of safety and organisation theory analysts such as Charles Perrow (of Normal Accidents fame) and Scott Sagan tells us that reactors are highly complex systems whose subsystems are, internally, tightly coupled, with the danger that a small mishap or abnormal event in one subsystem can get quickly transmitted to other subsystems, malfunctions get rapidly magnified, and the whole system goes into a massive runaway crisis. “Fail-safe” or “fail-soft” mechanisms can easily break down.

That is what happened at Fukushima, where a station blackout initiated by an earthquake and tsunami caused a loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA), leading to three core meltdowns and huge releases of radioactivity, whose effects have not fully unfolded, or been understood and studied. The accident is still continuing and the reactors remain crisis-bound.

A station blackout is not a rare phenomenon. LOCAs are known in virtually every reactor type with long operating experience.

FLAWED METHOD

Engineers try to make reactors safer by designing them to recover from various initiating failures, and installing multiple protections, all of which would have to fail before radioactivity is released (defence-in-depth). To quantify risks, engineers use a mathematical method called probabilistic risk assessment (PRA). The physicist M.V. Ramana says that PRA conceives of accidents as resulting from one of many combinations of a series of failures, and computes the probability of a severe accident resulting from these “event-trees” or “fault-trees” (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, April 19).

Japan's nuclear safety agency used PRA to extend the Fukushima Daiichi station's licence just one month before the accident. PRA is also cited by reactor manufacturers to make tall claims about safety. However, PRA is a deeply flawed method and has been questioned on both theoretical and empirical grounds. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) study in 2003 says that “uncertainties in PRA methods and databases make it prudent to keep actual historical risk experience in mind when making judgments about safety”.

That experience says five core meltdowns have occurred in the global record of 15,000 reactor-years of operation. At this rate, one can expect a meltdown every eight years in the world's 430-odd reactors.

Conceptually, PRA uses chain-of-event modelling which “cannot account for the indirect, non-linear, and feedback relationships that characterise many accidents…. These risk assessments do a poor job of modelling human actions and their impact on known, let alone unknown, failure modes.” Therefore PRA-based conclusions about overall accident probabilities are undependable.

“Perhaps the only robust conclusion one can draw is that no two major accidents are alike.… This means, unfortunately, that while it may be possible to guard against an exact repeat of the Fukushima disaster, the next nuclear accident will probably be caused by a different combination of initiating factors and failures. There are no reliable tools to predict what that combination will be, and therefore one cannot be confident of being protected against such an accident.”

This grim conclusion warrants sobriety, caution and abundant humility on the part of our nuclear establishment. It should thank the Kudankulam protesters for raising the issue of nuclear safety, and highlighting its paramount importance. It should also reconsider its certification of the French-designed Jaitapur reactors in Maharashtra as safe when their design has not even been frozen or shared with it, and about which hundreds of queries have been raised in Finland, Britain, the U.S., and even France.

There must be a moratorium on all further nuclear activity unless an independent, broad-based, credible safety review is conducted.

 - Praful Bidwai

Courtesy: Frontline, Nov 19 - Dec 2, 2011

For Nuclear Sanity - Praful Bidwai

THE Tamil Nadu Cabinet's resolution urging Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to suspend work on the Kudankulam nuclear reactors until “the apprehensions of the people” regarding their safety “are allayed” represents an unprecedented and handsome victory for the popular movement against ultra-hazardous technologies. It is a tribute to the moral strength and courage of the 12-day peaceful fast by more than 100 people, and successful mobilisation of tens of thousands of committed supporters from Tirunelveli, Kanyakumari and Thoothukudi districts, that Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa had to reverse her pro-project stand within days.

Never before has a State government demanded suspension of a project that it had approved, when it is at an advanced stage. Two reactors were cancelled in Kerala in the past, and two uranium mining projects, in Khasi Hills in Meghalaya and Nalgonda in Andhra Pradesh, have been kept in abeyance in deference to public opposition. But the Kudankulam decision is unique and holds the key to the post-Fukushima future of nuclear power in India.

The Kudankulam agitation was not sudden or new. Nor were the local people instigated by “outsiders” raising a false alarm about the safety of the Russian-designed reactors just before a planned evacuation drill. Local people have opposed the project right since its conception in the 1980s. They organised spirited demonstrations against it as early as in 1989. Indeed, misgivings about Kudankulam extend next door to Kerala. Numerous groups led by the People's Movement against Nuclear Energy (PMANE) have criticised the project on several grounds.

The Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL) has all along failed to persuade the local farmers and fisherfolk that the reactors will cause minimal displacement with no damage to the marine ecosystem and that they pose no hazard to people – despite offering the lure of thousands of jobs, and labour and materials supply contracts, and the promise of vigorous “development” of the region. The people, highly literate and well-informed (as this writer found during two visits to the area) were not taken in. By 2007, large numbers of farmers had joined fisherfolk in agitating against the project, a process catalysed by Environment Impact Assessment-related public hearings for Reactors 3 to 6.

The most important factor that explains the recent struggle is without doubt the still-continuing meltdown of three nuclear reactors at Fukushima in Japan, which highlights the unique potential of nuclear power for catastrophic accidents even in a highly advanced industrial economy. Nuclear power generation is the sole mode of energy production with that hazard. Fukushima also highlighted the prevalence of unsafe practices and collusion between reactor operators and nuclear regulators. The recent accident at the Marcoule reprocessing facility in France has further undermined the public's already feeble confidence in the global nuclear industry.

FLAWED RUSSIAN REACTORS

Not least, three other factors have strengthened the opposition in Kudankulam. The first is the shocking disclosure by a Norwegian group, with a history of integrity and informed activism (http://www.bellona.org/articles/articles_2011/rosatom_report), of a special report presented by nuclear safety experts from Russian state agencies to President Dmitry Medvedev this June on the country's nuclear reactors. This reveals that they are grievously underprepared for both natural and man-made disasters ranging from floods to fires to earthquakes and plain negligence.

The report comes from an amalgam of sources such as the Ministry of Natural Resources, Federal Service for Environmental, Technological and Nuclear Oversight, as well as Rosatom, the nuclear reactor operator. Chief engineer Ole Reistad of the Norwegian Institute for Energy Technology says: “The report reveals deficiencies which have never before been mentioned publicly, nor reported internationally.”

To paraphrase some of its alarming findings, Russian reactors are marked by 31 “serious flaws”. Among the more critical are: absence of regulations for personnel to know how to deal with large-scale natural disasters or other major contingencies; inadequate protective shelters for workers in the event of an accident; lack of records of previous accidents, which would enable learning from past mistakes; and poor attention to electrical and safety-significant systems.

This holds true not just of the RBMK design, which was implicated in the Chernobyl accident, but also of the VVER-type reactors being installed at Kudankulam. The report questions the reactors' ability to remain safe for extended periods if cooling systems fail, with no guarantee that the power backup will be effective. This is the primary difficulty that beset Fukushima Daiichi when the quake and tsunami hit Japan. Also, key equipment involved in the cooling process suffers from metal fatigue and welding flaws – yet another problem ignored at Fukushima. Russian reactors are vulnerable to the kinds of hydrogen explosions that ripped up three reactor buildings at Fukushima.

Most important, the report says that the risk of earthquakes has not been considered as a safety factor in designing Russian reactors. Not all of them have automatic shutdown mechanisms to be activated if an earthquake occurs. Nor are there currently clear guidelines or sufficient infrastructure for spent nuclear fuel management, leading to fears of its leaks during a disaster – as had happened in Japan.

These disclosures, to put it mildly, are damning. Rosatom chief Sergei Kiriyenko has not denied their veracity or accuracy, but merely claimed that more money would fix the flaws. At any rate, the report totally contradicts the official Russian statement, made soon after March 11, that a Fukushima-type meltdown could never happen in Russia. This was supposedly based on a check ordered by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Russian reactors, of which no details have been made public. The global – and the Kudankulam – public has no more reason to trust the Russian government's early statement than to believe the Indian Department of Atomic Energy's (DAE) assessment, following a purely internal and collusive recent review, that all of India's nuclear reactors have adequate safety systems to cope with earthquakes and tsunamis as well as human error.

A second reason underlying the public's sharpened opposition is the fact that the first two units of the Kudankulam project have never been put through the Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) process, under which a comprehensive EIA report is prepared, made available to the local people in advance, and a public hearing is held, at which those affected can record their opposition. The EIA procedure is far from sound, and has been considerably weakened.

Reactors 1 and 2 did not even have to face such cursory or minimal EIA scrutiny – simply because the EIA procedure only came into being in 1994. The Ministry of Environment and Forests had cleared the reactors in 1989. There is no reason to believe that the approval process considered the intrinsic hazards of nuclear power, radiation releases, or long-term waste storage. NPCIL has not shared reports on site evaluation and selection or safety review with the public.

A third reason is the DAE/NPCIL's doublespeak as regards the reactors' siting. The siting norms stipulate that there be no human habitation within 1.6 km from the plant. The next 5-km radius area must be a “sterilised zone”, where population density is small “so that rehabilitation will be easier”. Finally, in the outlying 16-km radius, “the population should not exceed 10,000”. But it is clearly visible that thousands of people live within the 1.6-km zone, including 2,000-plus in a recently built tsunami rehabilitation colony. Two other large settlements lie within the 5-km zone: Kudankulam (population: 20,000) and Idinthakarai (population: 12,000). The population in the 16-km radius is at least 70,000. Yet, NPCIL says nobody will be displaced.

Add to these the generic safety problems of nuclear power, including harmful radiation exposure at each stage of the “nuclear fuel cycle”, routine emissions and effluents, accidental radioactivity releases, and generation of huge quantities of waste which remains hazardous for thousands of years, which science has found no safe way of storing. And the case for stopping work at Kudankulam becomes compelling.

Jaitapur falls in the same category. The government has postponed the purchase of the French-origin reactors for Jaitapur until they clear post-Fukushima safety tests ( The Hindu, September 20). Logically, all work at the site must be stopped until the certification is obtained and independently reviewed.

Fukushima marks a watershed for the global nuclear industry, which has been on the decline especially in the countries of the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development since even before Chernobyl (1986). Not one new reactor has been ordered in the United States since 1973, and none completed in Western Europe for a quarter-century.

Reactor technology has stagnated and exhausted its potential. Nuclear generation costs are exorbitant in relation to not just fossil fuels but renewable sources such as wind and biomass too. Nuclear power competes poorly with renewables in reducing/averting greenhouse emissions.

Country after country is retrenching its nuclear plans, or opting out altogether – witness Germany, Japan, Italy and Switzerland. Investment banks say nuclear power has no future after Fukushima. Its unpopularity is spreading everywhere.

It would be suicidal for India not to impose a moratorium on new nuclear projects and subject all installations to an independent, thorough and transparent review by a broadly representative body, which includes non-DAE personnel and civil society.

Courtesy: Frontline, Oct 8-21, 2011

Nuclear or broke : India's obsession with nuclear power is proving extremely damaging.

India's obsession with nuclear power is proving extremely damaging. It is time to switch to and participate in the renewables revolution. 

ARE Indian diplomats, known for their negotiating skills and sense of timing, losing touch with reality? Going by the proposal Indian negotiators tabled at the just-concluded Bonn intersessional climate talks for including nuclear power as a “green” technology under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), it appears that they are either losing touch or are forced to adopt positions that attract disrespect and ridicule.

The CDM, part of the Kyoto Protocol under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, allocates carbon credits to technologies and processes (for instance, reafforestation, industrial-gas destruction) that, theoretically, avert/reduce greenhouse gas emissions in developing countries. These credits are sold profitably to developed-country governments or corporations, which can use them as a substitute for reducing domestic emissions, as they are obliged to do under the Protocol. The Kyoto Protocol is the world's sole legally binding agreement. But its early implementation phase, called First Commitment Period, runs out next year. Many developed countries are loath to negotiate a second period. The Protocol is on life support.

Apart from failing to recognise this, India's proposal was singularly ill-timed. It coincided with the still-continuing Fukushima disaster entering its fourth month, a serious worsening of the global nuclear industry's crisis, and a huge shift in public opinion against nuclear power. No wonder the proposal earned India the “Fossil of the Day” award given by the Climate Action Network of non-governmental organisations to governments that make outlandish or anti-green proposals.

The precise magnitude of the health and environmental damage from the radiation release from Fukushima is yet to be estimated. But it is indisputably the global nuclear industry's greatest accident, far greater than Chernobyl. At Chernobyl, only one reactor underwent a core meltdown. At Fukushima, three reactors did, and the spent fuel of a total of four reactors (containing even higher quantities of dangerous radionuclides) was exposed. This was equivalent to an estimated 20 Chernobyl-sized cores. The quantities of iodine-131 and caesium-137, just two dangerous isotopes, released from Fukushima are estimated to be of the same order as those released from Chernobyl. The releases of these and a host of other radionuclides continue uncontrolled.

Experts are still struggling to reconstruct the chain of mishaps beginning March 11. Each new or updated evaluation suggests that the disaster is far, far worse than earlier thought. Data released by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the station operator, show that the fuel rods in the three reactors started to melt down within hours of the earthquake at 2-46 p.m. By 8 p.m, an uncontrolled meltdown had begun at Reactor 1. Fuel slumped to the bottom of the pressure-vessel. By 9 p.m, temperatures had reached 2,800° Celsius, the fuel rods' melting point. The company admits a meltdown also happened at Reactors 2 and 3.

Among the early culprits identified in the scientific analysis were hydrogen explosions of March 12 and 14, which seriously damaged the cores and reactor structures. These are the very events which Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) Secretary Srikumar Banerjee and Nuclear Power Corporation Chairman S.K. Jain dismissed as “purely chemical reactions” not signifying a nuclear emergency or even an “event”.

Fukushima has precipitated the closure of as many as 37 of Japan's 54 nuclear reactors, six of them probably for good. Yet more reactors are likely to be shut down for mandatory annual maintenance, and local authorities are unlikely to permit their early restarting. Japan is reviewing its energy policy and will almost certainly phase out nuclear power. Germany, Switzerland and Italy are opting out. Italy's referendum showed that 95 per cent of people opposed atomic power.

Even in France, nuclear power's most ardent advocate, 62 per cent of people recently polled wanted a nuclear phase-out, and 15 per cent immediate decommissioning. France, for all its advocacy, has only one reactor under construction; it is in deep trouble. The near-bankrupt nuclear company Areva's CEO, Anne Lauvergeon (“Atomic Anne”), has just been sacked, not least because of the fiasco involving the European Pressurised Reactor (EPR) in Finland and the exorbitant costs and multiple failures of Areva's ventures in Europe, Africa and Japan. With this, says The Economist, “the future of France's nuclear-energy industry just became more uncertain”. Yet, India is planning to instal six EPRs at Jaitapur.

Both the United States and the European Union, which is doing a nine-month review of nuclear reactor safety, including “stress tests”, will probably halt the practice of uprating and extending the lifetimes of reactors. In the U.S., no new reactor has been ordered since 1973. And the European nuclear industry has not yet fully recovered from the Chernobyl shock.

Global financial institutions evaluating Fukushima's impact believe it will lead to the immediate shutdown of old reactors, suspension of new plant approvals, review of reactors in seismically active zones, higher safety and other costs, and re-evaluation of energy policies in all nuclear countries. An HSBC analysis concludes: “Overall, we expect a number of impacts from the public and political backlash against nuclear, which means the focus shifts to renewables.” Standard and Poor's nuclear and clean energy indices are moving divergently. The Swiss investment bank UBS says Fukushima casts doubt on “whether even an advanced economy can master nuclear safety. … We believe the Fukushima accident was the most serious ever for the credibility of nuclear power.”

It will be a miracle if nuclear power survives in the developed world. Before Fukushima, only China and India among developing countries had plans to expand nuclear generation substantially. But China has since imposed a moratorium on further nuclear activity. It has become the world's biggest renewable energy investor. It has 45 gigawatts in wind power, compared with just 10 GW in nuclear. It plans to generate 100 GW in wind and 10 GW in solar-photovoltaics and is already the world leader in solar-thermal.

India alone is playing the boy on the burning deck as far as nuclear power goes. This would carry a fig leaf of credibility if India's nuclear programme were indigenous, big and successful. Alas, it is not. All its reactors are based on imported designs.

Despite annually sinking thousands of crores into the nuclear programme for six decades, India gets only 2.7 per cent of its electricity from nuclear reactors. Its economic, environmental and safety costs are high and rising. The DAE has mismanaged its projects and failed to keep costs under check. Its last 10 reactors were 300 per cent over budget. Its frequent revisions of nuclear generation targets have rendered its energy planning meaningless.

Yet, so insistent is the Manmohan Singh government on forcibly instigating a “nuclear renaissance” that it is ready to violate its own legislation to hand out sweetheart deals to foreign nuclear companies. At stake is the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damages Act, passed last year after a bitter, prolonged debate, during which the government discredited itself by repeatedly trying to doctor the Parliamentary Standing Committee's draft.

The law was originally drafted to meet the nuclear industry's demand that only the operator of nuclear facilities be held liable for accidents. But the government, under public pressure, made suppliers, too, liable in case of faulty equipment or design. It is now trying to bypass the Act in respect of Russian-designed Koodankulam reactors to allow a “cost mark-up” to cover additional insurance costs ( The Hindu, June 9). This despicable violation of the very spirit of the Act shows total disdain for Parliament. It must be strongly opposed.

The government confronts yet another unpleasant moment as it moves heaven and earth to be admitted to four plurilateral export-control regimes, which it long termed “cartels” run by “nuclear Ayatollahs”, including the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), the Wassenaar Agreement and the Australia group. This is happening just when the NSG is moving to ban enrichment and reprocessing technology (ENR) transfer to countries that have not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). India claims this breaches the “clean waiver” and “full cooperation” assurances it got in 2008, without ENR exclusion.

Assurances aside, it is totally unrealistic to think ENR can be transferred to any country today, regardless of NPT membership. The U.S. made it clear that it would not sell this to India. India's exertions on this issue, then, are about symbolic recognition as a “responsible” nuclear weapons-state – a contradiction in terms. On nuclear matters, India has always placed an irrational premium on symbols and demanded equal treatment within a regime it long described as “Atomic Apartheid”.

However, a more important, substantial and worthy battle must be fought – working for total global nuclear disarmament. India would gain immensely in global prestige and credibility if it invested in the liability legislation a small fraction of the energies it put into the U.S.-India nuclear deal and in deceiving the public. Equally handsome gains are to be made by participating in and leading the Renewables (Energy) Revolution that is now under way. Both entail abandoning our nuclear obsession.

-PRAFUL BIDWAI 

Courtesy: FRONLINE, July 02-15

Can N-Power be safe? (by) Praful Bidwai

A resounding no is the answer on the 25th anniversary of Chernobyl and two months after Fukushima.

VIVEK BENDRE

The project site.

THE Maharashtra government has plumbed yet another low by detaining and harassing 200-plus citizens from different parts of India who undertook a yatra (march) from Tarapur, the site of India's first nuclear reactors, southwards to Jaitapur, in Ratnagiri district, where India's newest nuclear project is being planned. The yatra began at Tarapur on April 23. It was to reach Pen the next morning, near the Mumbai-Goa Highway junction, and eventually, Jaitapur on April 25. The aim of the yatra, led by eminent citizens such as former Navy Chief Admiral L. Ramdas and former Supreme Court and Bombay High Court Judges P.B. Sawant and B.G. Kolse-Patil, was to express solidarity with the people who have fought the Jaitapur project for five years.

The police decided to break up the yatra and detain the yatris near Tarapur for eight hours without stating the reason. They bullied the drivers of the two hired buses carrying the yatris into abandoning the trip. The yatris arrived at Pen at 6 a.m., bedraggled and starved. Some were arrested and all of them detained for the whole day – under ludicrous sections of the colonial Bombay Police Act. Eventually, the yatra was stopped at Mahad in Raigad district, way short of Jaitapur.

The government's apologists have defended the shameful episode by arguing that the state was right to guard the “fragile peace” in Jaitapur after the unprovoked firing on April 18 in which one person, Tabrez Sayekar, was killed and at least 15 persons were injured. But the yatra had forsworn violence and its leaders could be expected to exercise restraint. However, the government allowed Shiv Sena leader Uddhav Thackeray to stir up things when he visited Sayekar's family on April 25.

The Maharashtra government has brought ignominy upon itself by abusing power and resorting to intimidation. It has dealt with the entire Jaitapur agitation over five years by harassing peaceful protesters with arbitrary arrests and detention and externment orders, confiscating their land, and threatening them. The area's sub-divisional officer (SDO) Ajit Pawar has gained notoriety for threatening to break their necks and legs. Even worse, former Chief Minister and currently Industries Minister Narayan Rane, known to prefer strong-arm tactics, accused the agitators of being brainwashed by “outsiders”. The Jaitapur project, planned to be the world's largest nuclear power station, can only go through with the use of the lathi, the bulldozer and, eventually, the gun. This would mock the very idea of development – officially regarded as something to be imposed upon unwilling populations, not as a process of deepening people's rights and expanding their freedoms – and democracy itself. The official approach must be condemned by citizens, political parties and public-spirited experts.

So far, the Left parties alone have issued such condemnations while opposing the Jaitapur project and warning against importing untested and potentially hazardous reactors. Communist Party of India (Marxist) general secretary Prakash Karat now explicitly opposes not just Jaitapur but also the Haripur nuclear plant proposed for West Bengal. The Right, too, has got into the opposition act. The Shiv Sena, which had zealously supported the United States-India nuclear deal, now opposes its most tangible and visible outcome: Jaitapur. The Shiv Sena has no critique of nuclear power on grounds of safety, environmental sustainability or appropriateness, but opposes the project as a way of winning local support. But the autonomous grass-roots movement remains firmly outside its control.

In the early 1990s, the Shiv Sena had threatened to dump the Enron power project into the Arabian Sea. As soon as it came to power in Maharashtra, it was lobbied by Enron's Rebecca Mark into tripling the project's size! Much has been made of the Shiv Sena's desperation to shore up its base in Ratnagiri. But the Congress, too, is desperate to recover the considerable ground it has lost there. Narayan Rane sees himself as the Konkan region's unquestioned leader and a potential challenger to any Chief Minister. He foolishly thought the nuclear project would make the Congress popular.

As the government weighs the options of imposing the project or putting it on hold, the public must reflect on the record of nuclear power generation in the quarter-century since the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine. Chernobyl, coming seven years after another core meltdown, at Three Mile Island in the United States, is the world's worst-ever industrial accident, whose effects have unfolded gradually through radiation-induced cancers and leukaemias. Estimates of additional cancers, based on the conservative methods adopted by the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, vary from 34,000 to 140,000, leading to 16,000 to 73,000 fatalities.

This puts Chernobyl in a unique class. The global nuclear industry never fully recovered from its political, psychological and economic effects. In the U.S., which has the world's highest number of reactors (104, followed by France's 58 and Japan's 55), the industry was already down in the dumps, having received no new reactor orders since 1973. Wall Street never embraced nuclear power despite low liability under the Price-Anderson Act. Nuclear power failed the market test. In Western Europe, not a single reactor has been built since Chernobyl.

Even before Fukushima, the global nuclear industry was in a structural crisis – some experts say, on “life support”. U.S. President George W. Bush tried to instigate a “nuclear renaissance” through subsidies. A decade later, this has turned sour. In fact, nuclear reactor start-ups have been in steady decline since the 1980s. Only China bucked the trend. But China, which has frozen all new projects since Fukushima, already has 4.5 times more installed wind power than nuclear capacity. In 2011, China will probably generate more electricity from wind than from nuclear reactors.

World nuclear-generating capacity has stagnated for 20 years. The number of operating reactors this past April 1 was 437 – compared with 444 in April 2002. Nuclear power output has declined annually by 2 per cent over the past four years and now accounts for only about 13 per cent of the world's electricity generation and 5.5 per cent of commercial primary energy.

These facts have been detailed in the just-released World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2010-2011: Nuclear Power in a Post-Fukushima World. In a report preview, at an event in Berlin hosted by the Heinrich Boll Foundation, which I attended, Mycle Schneider, its lead author and an independent energy expert, observed: “When the history of the nuclear industry is written, Fukushima is likely to introduce its final chapter.”

Renewable energy is growing rapidly worldwide. Says the report: “Annual renewables capacity additions have been outpacing nuclear start-ups for 15 years. In the U.S., the share of renewables in new capacity additions skyrocketed from 2 per cent in 2004 to 55 per cent in 2009, with no new nuclear coming on line.” In 2010, for the first time, “worldwide cumulated installed capacity of wind turbines (193 gigawatts), small hydropower (80 GW), biomass and waste-to-energy plants (65 GW), and solar power (43 GW) reached 381 GW, outpacing the installed nuclear capacity of 375 GW prior to the Fukushima disaster”. Total investment in renewable energy is estimated at $243 billion in 2010.

“The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) currently lists 64 reactors as ‘under construction' in 14 countries. By comparison, at the peak of the industry's growth phase in 1979, there were 233 reactors being built concurrently. In 2008, for the first time since the beginning of the Nuclear Age, no new unit was started up, while two were added in 2009, five in 2010, and two in the first three months of 2011. During the same time period, 11 reactors were shut down.”

In the European Union, 143 reactors were officially operational on April 1, down from the 1989 peak of 177. Western Europe's first reactor under construction since Chernobyl, at Olkiluoto in Finland, is in deep crisis – four years behind schedule, 90 per cent over budget, and caught in bitter litigation and disputes. The reactor is none other than the French government-owned Areva's European Pressurised Reactor (EPR) – the design to be installed in Jaitapur.

Meanwhile, Fukushima has dealt a huge blow to the global nuclear industry. As the Swiss investment bank UBS puts it: “At [Fukushima], four reactors have been out of control for weeks – casting doubt on whether even an advanced economy can master nuclear safety.… We believe the Fukushima accident was the most serious ever for the credibility of nuclear power.”

Fukushima will almost certainly exacerbate the global nuclear industry's crisis and accelerate its decline. To imagine that nuclear power is the energy source of the future is to indulge in daydreaming. But India's nuclear czars are doing just that while denying the gravity of the Fukushima crisis. Their rosy assumptions about Jaitapur ignore a cardinal fact: namely, the EPR has become the world's most controversial reactor. Its capital costs have surged to $5,000 a kilowatt – compared with just over $1,000/kW for coal-based power and under $1,500 for wind in India.

PTI

AT A PROTEST by residents of Jaitapur and Madban, in Maharashtra's Ratnagiri district, against the nuclear power project, on April 9.  

Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) officials claim, parrot-like, that the EPR design is safe. But the design has not received approval anywhere, including France. Nuclear regulators in Finland, France, Britain and the U.S. have raised 3,000 queries about it. A French government-appointed expert recommends further design modifications and optimisation. The design is yet to be frozen.

So the DAE's claim is absurd and irrational. But then, the DAE has never been known for rationality and responsible conduct. Its top officials became the laughing stock of the world scientific community by declaring that the March 12 and 14 hydrogen explosions at Fukushima, at the root of which lay serious fuel damage, were “a purely chemical reaction and not a nuclear emergency” (Secretary Srikumar Banerjee). Nuclear Power Corporation Chairman S.K. Jain even described the crisis not as a “nuclear accident or incident” but “a well-planned emergency preparedness programme… to contain the residual heat after… an automatic shutdown”.

Fukushima raises troubling questions about nuclear safety, in particular the important question as to whether nuclear reactors can ever be operated safely. Engineers who have designed, operated and licensed reactors tell us that all existing reactor types are vulnerable to a loss-of-coolant-accident (LOCA), leading to a partial or complete core meltdown and a catastrophic release of radioactivity. A LOCA may be precipitated by any number of causes, including operator error, equipment failure or malfunction, loss of power, or natural disasters. Its consequences are hard to predict and control.

Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were not caused by natural disasters. Nor, accurately speaking, was Fukushima. What triggered Fukushima's three LOCAs was a station blackout caused by the reactor shutdown after the earthquake, followed by a tsunami which knocked out the backup power and cooling system. But a station blackout is not rare and may be triggered by a variety of factors.

Most industry claims about the low likelihood of nuclear accidents are based on probabilistic risk analysis (PRA), a flawed method, as the physicist M.V. Ramana argues in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (April 19). In 1975, a U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission study predicted that a meltdown would only occur once in 20,000 reactor-years (number of reactors multiplied by years of operation).

Globally, there have been close to 15,000 reactor-years of operation. But meltdowns have already occurred in five reactors. As Thomas Cochran of the Natural Resources Defence Council said, depending on how core damage is defined, other accidents should also be included. Says Ramana, “The actuarial frequency of severe accidents may be as high as 1 in 1,400 reactor-years.” For the world's 437 reactors, an accident may occur every 3.2 years.

This is unacceptable. The world simply cannot afford two Chernobyls every seven years. The generic problems of nuclear safety cannot be resolved by installing multiple safety systems with redundancy. They can fail simultaneously – and far more frequently than assumed. At Fukushima, says Ramana, “the same event that knocked out external power also caused the failure of other systems” for core cooling, including loss of oil tanks and replacement fuel for diesel generators, and flooding of the electrical switchyard. The truth is, nuclear power generation is inherently, irredeemably, hazardous. Nuclear reactors are complex internally tightly coupled systems. A minor mishap in one subsystem gets quickly transmitted to others and magnified, putting the entire reactor in crisis.

Accidents are inevitable in nuclear reactors. Their probability may be low, albeit usually – and disastrously – understated by PRA. But their consequences are enormous. Their human, environmental and economic damage is unconscionably high and will cost hundreds of billions of dollars to remedy. This is much, much higher than the Nuclear Liability Bill limit of a paltry few hundred millions. The central lesson from Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima is this: If you do not want nuclear disasters, do not generate nuclear power. In India, what the country needs is an independent safety review of all its nuclear installations conducted by a team which includes non-DAE experts and civil society representatives. Pending it, there must be a moratorium on further nuclear activities and revocation of recent clearances to nuclear projects.

This means that projects such as Jaitapur, cleared for political, strategic, economic and diplomatic reasons, in violation of sound environmental considerations, must be put on hold. There are compelling reasons for revoking the clearance granted to Jaitapur just six days before French President Nicolas Sarkozy's last visit to India. Overwhelming, informed public opposition is not the least of them.

The alternative is to push through the Jaitapur project by crushing peaceful opposition and by riding roughshod over all considerations of political decency, democracy and the fundamental right of people to reject a project they consider wantonly destructive and unsafe.

-Praful Bidwai

Courtesy: FRONTLINE