nuclear-news

Warning on India’s nuclear safety and on the excessive nuclear costs

Nuclear power is unsafe and too costly for India, ex-Power Secretary EAS Sarma tells Modi, Japan’s Abe, Scroll In, EAS Sarma  5 Dec 15  Ahead of the Japanese leader’s visit to India, former top bureaucrat urges New Delhi and Tokyo to be cautious about striking a deal. With Japan and India expected to sign an agreement on nuclear supply when the East Asian country’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, visits India later this month, former power secretary EAS Sarma has written an open letter to the leaders of the two countries laying out his concerns about nuclear energy.

To begin with, he contended that there were intense anxieties about the safety of nuclear energy. “While the protogonists of nuclear technology persistently try to justify proliferation of nuclear power on the ground that the probability of occurrence of a Fukushima-like accident in a nuclear power plant is low, none of them can ever deny that such accidents can take place one time or the other, either as a result of a natural disaster on which we have no control or as a result of a human failure that we cannot wish away,” he wrote.

He also claimed that nuclear power is unaffordable for a country like India. “When the global climate negotiations have their focus on replacing new megawatts with “negawatts” (saved megawatts) and green megawatts, it is anachronistic for the world to cling to expensive energy sources like nuclear power,” he said.

Here is the full text of his letter……. http://scroll.in/article/773920/nuclear-power-is-unsafe-and-too-costly-for-india-ex-power-secretary-eas-sarma-tells-modi-japans-abe

December 6, 2015 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | general