Safety hazards of India’s Kudankulam nuclear plant

Behind the scenes at Kudankulam… THE HINDU, VASUDEVAN MUKUNTH, 7 May 13 “…. the people of Kudankulam and its surrounding fishing villages protest against the plant and call for its shutdown. Why? Despite accidents being unpredictable by definition, they do occur because the enterprise is immensely complex for anyone to keep track of all its components at the same time.

While the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) could be addressing this issue well, etc., the complexity increases the opportunities for accidents to occur rather than directly precipitating them. Despite a decent track record for maintenance, the one for compensation in India is dismal, and so the people’s fears are bound to persist.

In order to explain how a nuclear power plant works, I’ve divided it up into short chapters, each explaining the role of an important component. …

1. The Reactor
2. The Pile
3. The Repository
4. The Refrigeration
5. The Big Picture
6. Points to note

The Reactor

KKNPP houses two VVER-1000 nuclear fission reactors, with four more to come. Each reactor produces 925 MW. As of now, one reactor is being brought to life, and it will supply 460 MW to Tamil Nadu and the remaining 465 MW to other states.

In each reactor – the heart of the plant – a special composition of uranium, called the U-235 isotope, undergoes a nuclear fission reaction, ……..

The Repository…….. Note that in the KKNPP case, the Nuclear Power Corporation of India, Limited (NPCIL) is yet to find a location for setting up repositories to store waste from the plant. As the Supreme Court Bench reportedly said, “… it is of utmost importance that the Union of India, NPCIL, etc., should find out a place for a permanent deep geological (sic) repository [DGR]. Storing of spent nuclear fuel at the site will, in the long run, poses dangerous long-term health and environmental risks. … Noticeably, the NPCIL does not seem to have a long-term plan, other than stating and hoping that in the near future, it would establish a DGR.”………

Points to note…….. 3. The amount of nuclear waste produced by a nuclear reactor is almost equal to, or just a little less, than the amount of fuel used in the reactor itself. Because of this equation, the amount of waste is not revealed lest it betray the amount of uranium used in the reactor. Such care is taken because both the reactants and products are weaponisable. The downside is that even though the uranium used in KKNPP and other such plants is for civic purposes, it is hard to maintain accountability of quantities of nuclear waste and their locations……

5. In light of NPCIL still having to find a location for the repository, it may be noted that the Fukushima Dai’ichi disaster was compounded by the storage of nuclear waste beneath the reactor core in the nuclear power plant. ……… the consequent contamination would have been far lesser had the repository been in a different location…..

7. U-235 doesn’t always decay into isotopes of rubidium and caesium; they are just the most formed products. Less likelier products include xenon-135 and iodine-135, which decay into barium-135 in about 3 million years. Many of these ‘waste’ products are today capable of being reprocessed to yield more fissile material……. http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/blogs/blogs-the-copernican/article4692062.ece