nuclear-news

Indian villagers have sound reasons to distrust their government

Despite mass opposition, India pushes ahead with operationalizing nuclear plant WSWS, By Arun Kumar and Kranti Kumara  27 September 2012“…….It is not just the safety of the plant that the villagers are angry about. While the Indian government has spent huge amounts to build ultra-modern facilities for the nuclear plant’s employees, including a fully-equipped hospital, villagers are barred from using them. Most of the villagers and fishermen live in squalor and poverty lacking even basic facilities such as running water.
Moreover the villagers put no faith in the ability of the Indian elite to manage a nuclear accident given the government’s display of a mixture of incompetence and callousness during and after the 1984 Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal. The uncontrolled release of toxic gas at Bhopal, which caused over half a million casualties including over 20,000 deaths, was the worst industrial disaster in world history. Even after the passage of 38 years, the government has left the plant site and its surroundings severely contaminated with toxic substances. No one has been held criminally responsible and the Indian government has essentially connived to this mass crime by agreeing to accept a measly $470 million in compensation from Union Carbide.
Despite this horrible precedent, the Indian government has agreed that the Russian firm that has supplied and built KNPP’s reactor will have zero liability in the event of an accident
In a desperate attempt to justify the state suppression of the protests, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has brazenly declared that the anti-nuclear protestors are acting at the behest of United States-based Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) that want to derail India’s “progress”.
The Indian establishment is justifying its single-minded pursuit of nuclear power plants by claiming that it will help reduce the chronic electricity shortage that afflicts the country. Such arguments are duplicitous as there are far more cost-efficient ways to produce electricity than from nuclear power plants.
But motives other than providing cheap electricity are propelling the Indian elite to expand the country’s nuclear power industry—first and foremost its drive to increase its arsenal of nuclear weapons. With the signing of the India-US Nuclear Accord in 2008, the Indian elite can now utilize domestic uranium reserves for weapons production while obtaining and gaining expertise in the latest state-of-the-art nuclear technology. http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/sep2012/indi-s27.shtml

September 29, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | civil liberties, India