India’s nuclear program leaving people in the dark

The reluctance of India’s nuclear authorities to release certain information surrounding the development of the country’s nuclear energy system is garnering few fans among an increasingly frustrated public.

Just yesterday, it was reported that four people at a power plant in the Rawatbhata area of the Kota district in Rajasthan had been exposed to radiation, when they were repairing a reactor at unit number four which reported heavy water leakage.

The amount of radiation the workers were exposed to is equivalent to between 10-20 percent of the annual limit permitted and set by the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board. However, this incident comes just one month after a similar event at the same plant, when two workers were exposed to radiation beyond investigation limits. In both instances, authorities have been quick to downplay any cause for alarm yet this quick succession of events inevitably raises questions surrounding the safety of nuclear energy and governing bodies’ role in disseminating information to the public.

There are currently 20 nuclear power plants across India, with another three in the pipeline. The proposed benefits of nuclear power are spread to all and sundry (high energy output potential, substantially less CO2 emissions than fossil fuels) though local nuclear authorities remain tightlipped when dealing with the flipside of the nuclear argument. The authorities hold their cards close to their collective chest and it is this lack of information dissemination that is earning them little support.

Residents of Gorakhpur and surroundings turned out in droves last week to protest the plan for a nuclear plant in the Fatehabad district. One of the main points they were most vocal about was that the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) report on the project was never released to the public, which strictly goes against the EIA Notification of 2006, which states that any EIA report must be made available to the public.

Another recent public outcry centered on the Kudankulam plant, currently under construction near Tamil Nadu. In addition to ongoing safety concerns, one of the key protest points surrounds the authorities’ lack of transparency, which opponents say is evidenced by the fact that the original design of the reactor pressure vessel shows it was not supposed to have welds in its core region yet two welds are present in the existing vessel.

Local authorities continually fly the “no need to panic” flag whenever there is a safety breach, claiming that worries about nuclear power or exposure to radiation are unfounded as radiation is everywhere and a fact of life. One official even tried to flip the argument on its head at the Fatehabad plant protest, touting the benefits of radiation as it is a treatment for cancer.

India’s governing nuclear body, Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL), declines to release its “Safety Analysis Report”, using a legal loophole to circumvent its imperative to make such information public while there is little or no assessment of some plants’ impact on their regional water supplies, despite continued calls from the public for such tests.

This constant demand for information by the public compared to the trickle that is being supplied by authorities is leading to a situation where more questions are being asked than answered, with many of these queries now focusing on the management of India’s nuclear program. One thing that is for certain, if recent protests are anything to go by, the Indian public won’t be backing away from the debate anytime soon.