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Jaitapur nuclear plan should be scrapped – cost and safety issues

Globally, nuclear power has exhausted its technological potential. It has a bleak future. India must stop chasing the nuclear mirage — and scrap Jaitapur!

Nuclear trouble in Maharashtra, The Daily Star, 3 Feb 2011, Praful Bidwai“…….The Jaitapur public should fear EPRs. Western Europe’s first reactor after Chernobyl, an EPR, under construction in Finland, is delayed by four years and 90% over budget.Finnish, French, British and US nuclear regulators have raised 3,000 safety issues about its design, including control and emergency-cooling systems. Given its size, the EPR will generate seven times more toxic iodine-129 than normal reactors, posing many other problems.Any design changes will add to the EPR’s capital costs, already two to five times higher than for power from other sources. Its unit power cost will be two to four times higher.

However, the greatest problem is safety. Nuclear power generation routinely exposes occupational workers and the public to radiation. There’s no remedy for the effects, including cancer and genetic damage. Radiation is unsafe in all doses.

All reactors leave behind high-level wastes which remain hazardous for centuries. Plutonium-239’s half-life is 24,400 years and uranium-235’s is 710 million years. Science hasn’t found a way of safely storing, leave alone neutralising, radioactive waste.

When a reactor exhausts its economic life (25 to 40 years), it must be “decommissioned,” or entombed at a cost that’s one-third to one-half of the construction cost.

All these hazards are unacceptable. The Jaitapur reactors pose an additional one: the coolant water discharged into the sea will be 5 °C hotter and destroy mangroves, corals and numerous marine species.

The EIA conducted by the ill-reputed National Environmental Engineering Research Institute hasn’t analysed these effects, or the ecosystem’s carrying capacity. And it doesn’t even mention high-level wastes!Yet, the MoEF cleared the project for political reasons only days before French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s India visit last December, without properly going through the mandatory public hearing.

Globally, nuclear power has exhausted its technological potential. It has a bleak future. India must stop chasing the nuclear mirage — and scrap Jaitapur!

Nuclear trouble in Maharashtra

February 3, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, India