nuclear-news

Aruna Roy, India’s powerful voice against nuclear energy

Stop new nuclear projects, Aruna Roy urges Sonia Gandhi  http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Stop-new-nuclear-projects-Aruna-Roy-urges-Sonia-Gandhi/articleshow/15649860.cms  TNN | Aug 25, 2012,  NEW DELHI: National Advisory Councilmember Aruna Roy has asked the chairpersonSonia Gandhi to stop the installation and commission of new nuclear projects, including the one at Kudankulam.

Adding her voice to protestors at the Tamil Nadu site, Roy in a letter addressed to Sonia said, “The prime minister’s recent remarks about the liability issue related to reactors 3 and 4 at the Kudankulam nuclear power plant has brought out the lack of clarity regarding the liability issue related to reactors 1 and 2, which are to be commissioned soon.”

Roy said she had visited the site and met the people, “All of them expressed anguish and dismay at the government’s insistence on going ahead with the plant, turning a deaf ear to their legitimate concerns of safety and survival.”

She noted that “many of them had police cases against them for expressing dissent. This included charges as serious as sedition, and waging war against the state”. 

She wrote, “People are no longer ignorant of the costs that are paid by them in terms of irreversible damage to health and genetic distortion. This is reflected in the continued resistance to nuclear plants at Jaitapur, Gorakhpur, Chutka, Banswara, Haripur, Rawatbhata and in Kudankulam.”

Asking for a review of the costs and threats from nuclear power plants, Roy wrote, “There has to be a realistic cost benefit analysis, taking all these factors into consideration while examining alternative sources of safe, free and friendly forms of renewable energy, including wind and solar energy.”

Referring to the CAG report which had criticized the functioning of Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, the NAC member wrote, “The demand for information and re-evaluation cannot be deemed sedition and war against the state. There is nothing sinister in the questions raised by ordinary people of the area about their safety, and the well being of future generations.”

August 25, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | India, opposition to nuclear