Version imprimableOct 19 2011
Last Friday, 13 individuals who would be considered pillars of the establishment, including a former cabinet secretary, several retired secretary-level and state chief secretary-level officials, and many top-level scientists, did something stunningly unconventional. They joined hands with two of India’s best-known non-government organisations, Common Cause and Centre for Public Interest Litigation, to file a writ petition in the Supreme Court asking for “a safety reassessment of all nuclear facilities in India”, and “comprehensive long-term cost-benefit analysis” of nuclear power, pending which there must be a stay “on all proposed nuclear plants”. They also challenged the constitutional validity of the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act, 2010.
The petition comes when grassroots opposition to nuclear power is raging, most notably Koodankulam at India’s Southern tip, and Jaitapur in Maharashtra on the western coast. People living close to Koodankulam, where two Russian reactors are under construction, have been through two rounds of hunger strikes in five weeks.
The first of these led to the Tamil Nadu cabinet resolving to ask the Centre to suspend project construction until people’s “apprehensions” about it are “allayed”. As discussed in this column four weeks ago, these apprehensions are genuine, strong and well-grounded both in respect of the inherent hazards of nuclear power and recent revelations about the safety problems with all Russian-designed reactors.
In deference to popular sentiment, prime minister Manmohan Singh agreed to meet civil society delegates from Koodankulam on October 7, but treated them as if they were infants, or at best, ignorant and misguided adults who needed to be coached by a nanny state. He first inflicted Department of Atomic Energy secretary Srikumar Banerjee upon them to lecture them on nuclear power’s virtues. When they protested, he promised he would halt work at Koodankulam. But he soon went back on his word, and told Tamil Nadu chief minister J Jayalalithaa that India needs nuclear power for “energy security”; “I count on your support” in ensuring the project’s “timely implementation”. Rather than respect the people’s informed opinion against nuclear power and conduct a thorough, independent and credible review of the economics and safety of the reactors it wants to import from Russia, France and the US, the government has decided to launch an aggressive “outreach” campaign to get DAE “experts” to “educate” the people. The assumption is that the people’s opposition is grounded in ignorance. But most leaders of the anti-Koodankulam agitation are well-informed and sensible professionals, including SP Udayakumar, who has for years taught at a good US university, M Pushparayan, a lawyer, and Tuticorin’s Catholic Bishop Yvon Ambroise.
But what if the DAE experts come across to the people like dogmatic men who have been brainwashed into believing that running a nuclear power plant is safer than crossing the road, and who have spent a lifetime covering up their incompetence? What if the people ask them searching questions, which they cannot answer? What if the people aren’t convinced? What should the government then do?
Should it uphold democratic principle and suspend work on the project? Or should it do what independent India’s governments have always done, by ramming projects down an unwilling people’s throats, uprooting some 45 million of them, without even resettlement, leave alone proper rehabilitation, thus impoverishing them and turning them destitute? The second course would propitiate the all-powerful and unaccountable nuclear bureaucracy, and reward foreign nuclear suppliers from countries that helped seal the US-India nuclear deal and ensured its endorsement by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Former DAE secretary Anil Kakodkar outlined this logic in an article in Marathi daily Sakaal (January 5, 2011): “We have to keep in mind the commercial interests of foreign countries and of the companies there... 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.” This won’t convince any rational person who favours a sustainable energy policy with reasonable safety.
How can DAE “experts” possibly persuade Jaitapur’s people that France’s European Pressurised Reactor is “perfectly safe” when its design hasn’t even been frozen and they have no access to it, leave alone ability to evaluate it? A 20-page report by the French Nuclear Safety Authority has highlighted a series of “gaps and weaknesses” in work being carried out at the EPR at Flamanville in Normandy. It points out a number of differences from construction requirements affecting 13 essential parts of the reactor, including the steam generators, water injection filters and batteries in the cooling system, as well as fabrication defects in structures supporting spent-fuel pools.
In even worse trouble is the world’s first EPR, being built in Finland. Originally meant to be completed in 2009, it has now been further delayed, from 2012 to 2014. It’s already the world’s most expensive reactor, with capital costs, last quoted, exceeding $6,000 per kilowatt, compared to $1,500 for Indian reactors. Nothing could be more disastrous than importing a white elephant of a reactor unlicensed anywhere in the world, about which 3,000 safety issues have been raised by western regulatory authorities.
(The writer Praful Bidwai is an independent commentator on political and economic issues)
