ESSAY ON ENVIRONMENT FACTOR - NUCLEAR ENERGY The people's energy When nuclear companies are unwilling to stake their financial health on
the safety of a reactor, how can the Government ask local residents to risk
their lives, ask
- As the local people determinedly continue to resist the commissioning
of the Koodankulam reactors, the statements of the nuclear establishment have
acquired a desperate edge. The chief of the Nuclear Power Corporation (NPCIL)
declared that a "foreign hand" was behind the protests. The former president, A
P J Abdul Kalam, while assuring the locals that the reactors were "100 per cent
safe," also wrote an article in The Hindu arguing that nuclear energy is
India's ticket to modernity and prosperity.
Second, uranium-233 is produced in conjunction with
uranium-232, which emits energetic gamma rays, and this is the main reason it
hasn't been used to make weapons. This property is even more problematic when
uranium-233 is used as nuclear fuel, because it makes fuel fabrication hazardous
to the health of workers and expensive. Thus, the very properties that make
thorium unsuitable for weaponisation pose a greater hurdle for energy
generation.
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Such claims go back several decades; for example, Jawaharlal
Nehru compared the "Atomic Revolution" to the "Industrial Revolution," arguing
that "either you go ahead with it or ... others go ahead, and you ... gradually
drag yourself" (Nehru 1958). However, in the intervening half a century, atomic
energy has failed to live up to its promise, and the idea that it is linked to
progress and economic success is now both cliched and historically inaccurate.
The grand hopes for nuclear power in India must be evaluated in
light of the history of the numerous pronouncements of the Department of Atomic
Energy (DAE) about the dominant role for atomic energy it envisioned - and
failed to deliver. In the early 1970s, for example, it projected 43,500 MW of
nuclear generating capacity by 2000 (Sethna 1972), whereas what materialized was
a mere 2720 MW (DAE 2002). Last year, the nuclear contribution to electricity
generated in the country was 2.8 per cent. What little energy has been generated
has been expensive (Ramana 2007b; Ramana 2007c; Ramana, D.Sa, and Reddy 2005e).
When viewed in light of the ample financial and political support from
successive governments, the nuclear programme has been a failure.
The gap between pronouncements and achievement is largest where
thorium is concerned. In 1970, the Atomic Energy Commission explained that
although "the programme [had] slipped badly," the country would be in a position
to start setting up thorium reactors within about 15 years (AEC 1970). Forty
years later, there is no thorium reactor in existence, and there is yet no
solution to several serious technical problems with the thorium cycle.
Unlike uranium, thorium itself cannot be used as reactor fuel,
but must be put through a nuclear reactor to first produce a fissile isotope of
uranium, uranium-233. Uranium-233 has three key properties. First, it can be
used to make nuclear weapons, being superior, in some respects, to weapon-grade
uranium (lower critical mass) and plutonium (smaller spontaneous fission rate)
(Kang and von Hippel 2001).
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Third, the DAE's plans for producing uranium-233 in bulk
involve the use of plutonium-fueled fast breeder reactors, which, when compared
to heavy water reactors, carry significantly greater risk of catastrophic
accidents and produce much more expensive electricity (Kumar and Ramana 2008;
Kumar and Ramana 2011; Suchitra and Ramana 2011; Ramana and Suchitra 2009;
Ramana and Suchitra 2007d).
For some or all of these reasons, most countries have abandoned
thorium; India is a leader in this field by virtue of being one of the only
participants.
In recent years, dreams of a nuclear powered future got a
fillip with the Indo-US nuclear deal. The deal served as the flagship of the
Manmohan Singh Government's efforts to give its foreign policy a pro-Western
tilt. For the United States, the deal was, in the words of Ashley Tellis, an
important adviser to the Bush administration, intended to craft "a full and
productive partnership with India". But this relationship is not one between
equals. India soon fell in line with U.S. strategic objectives, for example, by
twice voting against Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency, and halting
the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline project - an important potential source of
energy.
The Singh Government is also willing to pay generously to
reinforce this "partnership." As the former DAE head, Anil Kakodkar, admitted in
an article for a Marathi daily earlier this year, India must import reactors
worth billions of dollars because "we also have to keep in mind the commercial
interests of foreign countries and of the companies there". It is these imports
and the larger foreign policy shift that hasten the process of "neo-age imperial
subjugation."
So the "foreign hand" is partly behind the nuclear expansion,
not behind the local protests that have sprung up at every site earmarked for a
nuclear plant. The conspiracy theory peddled by the NPCIL amounts to dismissing
genuine local concerns out of hand. The end result of this policy is visible in
Koodankulam. The local villagers, who have been opposed to the project since the
beginning were ignored and ridiculed till they finally escalated their protest
in desperation. The public money that has been spent on the Koodankulam plant is
imperilled not by the intransigence of the local residents, but by the failure
of the Government to heed their concerns earlier.
Local residents have a right to be worried. Nuclear accidents
can have very destructive public health consequences. The impacts of Fukushima
can be gauged only over the long term but are certain to be grave . Although
some nuclear advocates quote the absurdly low and misleading figure of 57 direct
deaths in Chernobyl, the World Health Organization estimated about 9000 excess
deaths due to cancer globally. Many more thousands will have cancers that are
assumed to be curable. The American Cancer Institute's recent study found that
children who were exposed to Iodine-131 from Chernobyl are continuing to develop
thyroid cancer. Other epidemiologists estimate even higher figures.
Even today an area of about 10,000 square kilometers around
Chernobyl is under "strict control" because it is polluted by Cesium-137, which
has a radioactive half-life of 30 years. A recent study conducted by a team of
atmospheric scientists in Europe and the United States estimates that the
multiple accidents at Fukushima released over 40 percent of the estimated
Cesium-137 emission from Chernobyl (Stohl et al. 2011). However, because the
wind was luckily blowing towards the Pacific ocean for a significant fraction of
the period, the area polluted with the same concentration of Cesium-137 is
estimated to be only about 10 percent of the area at Chernobyl (von Hippel
2011).
The wind may not always be propitious. These figures should be
of great concern in India, since, most people are dependent on the land and the
sea for their livelihoods.
The claim that modern reactors, such as the VVER reactors in
Koodankulam, are "100 per cent safe" is scientifically untenable; every nuclear
reactor has a finite, albeit small, probability of undergoing a catastrophic
failure. More specifically, the VVER reactors have previously had problems with
the the control rod mechanism (Kastchiev et al. 2007).
On 1 March 2006, for example, one of the four main circulation
pumps at Bulgaria's Kozluduy unit 5 tripped because of an electrical failure.
When the system reduced the power to 67 per cent of nominal capacity, three
control rod assemblies remained in an upper-end position. Follow-up tests of the
remaining control rod assemblies identified that in total 22 out of 61 could not
be moved with driving mechanisms. Control rod insertion failures can seriously
compromise safety in an accident.
There is a very simple indirect test by means of which even a
non-expert can evaluate the question of nuclear safety. If there was really a
"zero per cent chance" of an accident, why would nuclear vendors work so hard to
indemnify themselves? Atomstroyeksport, the vendor of the Koodankulam plant is
protected by a special intergovernmental agreement, which would prevent victims
from suing it in the event of an accident. Companies like Westinghouse are
holding back on reactor sales to India, since the new liability law includes
some very mild liability for suppliers.
When nuclear companies are unwilling to stake their financial
health on these claims of "100 per cent safety", how can the Government ask
local residents to risk their lives?
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