Fears Rise in India of Fukushima-style Nuclear Disaster
Protestors in India have clashed with police over the building of a massive nuclear power plant.
Thousands of villagers in western Maharashtra are frustrated over the government’s determination to allow the construction of six large reactors in an active earthquake zone.
They fear a repeat of Japan’s nuclear disaster.
Bismillah Geelani in New Dehli has the story.
Protestors in Maharstra’s Ratnagiri town clash with police.
They throw stones and bricks at the officers injuring a few. The police retaliate with batons and teargas.
One protester has been killed and dozens of others injured in the past three weeks.
Umakant Kambli is a local farmer.
“People who live close to other reactors have told us that there will be devastating consequences. The next generation will have nothing to survive on. We will lose our paddy fields, our orchards and fisheries and we will die of hunger.”
The Jaitapur Plant about a day's journey by road south of Mumbai is said to be the world’s largest nuclear power project.
It will house six of India’s newly planned nuclear power reactors with a power generation capacity of nearly 10,000 megawatts.
There is a sharp disagreement between the authorities and independent experts about how severe the earthquake risk is for the area.
Viashali Patil is from a local environment protection group.
“You are going to build the world’s biggest nuclear plant in an area that’s a biodiversity hot spot and an earthquake-prone area. Thousands of fishermen here depend on the sea for their livelihood. You will take millions of litres of water from the same place every day which will go back to the sea after cooling the reactors. The difference in the temperature will ruin the marine life.”
The government has ordered a safety review of all the reactors but it has refused to put on hold the Jaitapur project.
The government says that extra safety measures will be put in place.
Jairam Ramesh is the Environment minister.
“A very important decision has been taken that each reactor in Jaitapur will have a stand-alone safety system, a stand-alone dedicated operation and maintenance system and this is a very major step forward.”
The project was approved last year a few days ahead of a visit by French President Nicholas Sarkozy.
A French multinational company Areva has been given the contract. India already has 20 fully operational nuclear power reactors but the government says many more are need.
SK Malhotra is the head of public awareness division at the Department of Atomic Energy.
“We have such a huge growing population and we don’t have many options to meet the energy needs of this population. If we don’t use nuclear power we will have a shortage of 400,000 megawatts of electricity by the year 2050. Nuclear energy is very important for us to accelerate economic growth.”
But it’s not only the locals and activists opposing the Jaitapur project; some of India’s prominent nuclear scientists also have expressed concerns about it on technical grounds.
A Gopal Krishnan former Chairman of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board says the European Pressure Reactors or EPRs being built at the site are untested and an expensive technology.
“You cannot have a conflict situation existing at any nuclear site present or future between the local communities and the management. But we are moving in a diametrically opposite direction. Every site of ours has now opposition building and we write it off as political but it is not political I think people are becoming wiser, they are aware of how the rest of the world operates and they can clearly see that this government is not being transparent and it leads to the right kind of suspicions.”
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