Amid safety risks, India’s ambitious nuclear plan gets a sham safety regulator

Fear over India’s nuclear embrace, Narromine News BEN DOHERTY With SOM PATIDAR 23 Dec, 2011 “…..The Indian government is seeking to dismantle the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, proposing to abandon the long-standing independent regulator in favour of a new body directly controlled by the central government.

Critics have condemned the move, arguing the new regulator will be captive to government and unable to properly pursue safety concerns. Although the law is expected to pass the national Parliament without significant alteration, a former head of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, Dr A Gopalakrishnan, has labelled the proposed replacement body
as a sham.

”Nuclear safety, suppliers’ liability in case of major accidents, and
the potential for environmental degradation from haphazard import
decisions all take a back seat, while a handful of persons and
organisations rush to maximise their individual gains from such
imports,” he said.

India is basking in the emerging international acceptance of its
nuclear industry but, beyond issues of regulation, there are other
serious concerns over its direction. For one thing, the country’s
nuclear industry is growing at rapid pace. Presently, India has 20
operating nuclear power reactors, built, owned and run by the
state-owned Nuclear Power Corporation. They provide about 3 per cent
of the country’s energy.

Only half of India’s established plants run under international
safeguards, and are therefore eligible to use imported uranium. But 44
more reactors are either slated for construction or already being
built, and India is keen to attract foreign investment.

Part of India’s energy plan – this is a country where 400 million
people still live without access to electricity – is the creation of
five massive ”Nuclear Energy Parks”, each capable of producing
10,000 megawatts of electricity, three times the power used by India’s
biggest city, Mumbai.

India plans to treble its nuclear output by the end of the decade, and
to get a quarter of its energy from nuclear sources by 2050. But,
almost as quickly as plants are being approved, new concerns about the
burgeoning industry are raised.

The ”Nuclear Parks”, which will see farmlands and villages seized in
five states in the south, east and west of India, have attracted the
most widespread criticism. Landholders have staged sit-ins, hunger
strikes and launched violent protests at the sites already under
construction.

The fiercest opposition has been reserved for the plant under way at
Jaitapur, on India’s west coast, which is being built on a cliff top
on a Seismic Zone 3 (Zone 5 being the most earthquake-prone).

In the two decades between 1985 and 2005, there were 92 earthquakes in
the area, the largest being a 6.3 magnitude quake in 1993.

A research paper by Roger Bilham, professor of geological sciences,
University of Colorado, last month found: ”If stress in the region is
sufficiently mature to have brought an existing subsurface fault close
to failure, an earthquake may be imminent.”

Bilham, along with Professor Vinod Gaur from the Centre for
Mathematical Modelling and Computer Simulation in Bangalore, wrote
that a quake measuring above six on the Richter scale could occur
directly beneath the power plant….
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