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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Perspectives |
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Politics |
Delayed Reaction
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| Can the Fukushima disaster in Japan force an overdue reassessment of India’s civilian nuclear programme? |
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BABU / REUTERS |
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| A nuclear reactor safety vessel is erected at the Indira Gandhi
Centre for Atomic Research at Kalpakkam.
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HERE WERE MANY DIFFERENCES between my
grade school in Los Angeles and the one I entered
in Bombay in 1967. Take safety drills, for example.
In my convent school in India, there were
none. In California, in addition to fire drills, we practised
earthquake drills, hunched tightly under our desks with
our hands cupped behind our necks, and Soviet |
attack drills, during which we ran to the wall farthest from the windows and covered our eyes so that we wouldn’t be blinded by the flash of a nuclear blast. We did not, however, practice any drill that combined an earthquake with a nuclear disaster: there was no reason to do so at the time.
According to India’s Department of Atomic Energy (DAE)
and the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB), there is
still no reason to associate natural disasters, such as earthquakes
and tsunamis, with nuclear risk. In the wake of the
catastrophe in Japan, India’s nuclear establishment rushed
to assure alarmed citizens that the country’s existing and
planned reactors were completely safe, built in seismic
zones where earthquakes as strong as Japan’s temblor,
which cleared 8.9 on the Richter scale, have never occurred,
and, therefore, could not possibly ever occur. According to
these authorities, the country’s many coastal reactors—nuclear
plants require large amounts of water to cool radioactive
material—are located where tsunamis do not occur; or
are located at elevations superior to the 10-metre height of
the Japanese tsunami; or have already been proven to withstand
any tsunami because the Madras Atomic Power Station,
though flooded by the 2004 tidal wave, did not fail.
Alas, in nuclear safety, as in financial investment, past
performance is no guarantee of future results. Just because
there never has been a catastrophic nuclear incident in a
country doesn’t mean there never will be. As Japan proves,
it takes just one of these to inflict immense and long-lasting
damage to even the most advanced economy.
In the nuclear domain, as elsewhere, India’s technocrats
tend to see every problem as an engineering one. But the
risk of a catastrophic nuclear event cannot be engineered
away. Even assuming a new generation of nuclear plants
that could withstand a Richter scale magnitude 10.0 earthquake,
located beyond the reach of a 20-metre tsunami—twice the height of Japan’s—and equipped with the latest
emergency shutdown and backup cooling systems, there
remains the unpredictable human foible. According to the US-based Union of Concerned Scientists, nuclear plant disasters
at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986
occurred not because of any design flaw but “when a series
of known problems—aggravated by a few worker miscues—transformed fairly routine events into catastrophes”.
Greed, corruption and national hubris pose a far greater
threat to nuclear safety than earthquakes and tsunamis.
And for these concerns, no nation has yet found a cure, least
of all India. Time and time again, around the world, including
in Japan, safety has been compromised at nuclear plants
in order to cut costs. In this respect, the nuclear industry
worldwide suffers from that well-known Indian affliction
I call jugaaditis: if something is working, and it has been
working, why think that it might someday not work? This is
pretty much what doomed Japan’s Fukushima plant.
As one might expect, India is no exception to the nuclear
jugaad syndrome. One need only point to the well-documented
accident in November 2009 at the Kaiga atomic
power plant 450 km from Bengaluru, where 55 employees
had to be treated for exposure to radioactive tritium-contaminated
drinking water; or the incident in Mayapuri, Delhi,
in May 2010, where cobalt-60 discarded in a scrapyard
caused one fatality. In 2010, Tehelka ran a series of articles
on India’s nuclear track record that revealed a long history
of mishaps at or near the country’s reactors. In 1999, Time
magazine had run a story on the high rates of cancer near
the Uranium Corporation of India’s mines at Jadugoda in
southern Bihar (today’s Jharkhand). India’s nuclear industry
consistently denies safety breaches. Information on any
incidents is tightly guarded, with the AERB reporting to
the DAE, the agency it is supposed to regulate. As historian
Ramachandra Guha observed, India’s “cosseted and grossly
overrated nuclear industry” is simply not accountable.
Neither are the nuclear industries of other countries. The
industry as a whole shrouds itself in secrecy, and when
forced to acknowledge that despite its efforts lapses persist,
regularly dissembles. The close association of nuclear power
with nuclear weapons and national security, not to mention
the vast sums of money involved, is at the root of the inherently
untrustworthy behaviour of the nuclear industry and
its friendly regulators. The biggest reason for opacity, however,
is that despite all the lullabies, nuclear power remains
a highly dangerous undertaking. As we have just witnessed
at Fukushima, catastrophic nuclear accidents are more
catastrophic than other accidents. Radioactive material—even in the form of nuclear waste, which in India is stored
at the plants where it is produced—remains toxic for a very
long time, far longer than India’s 5,000-year-old civilisation.
That’s a long time for which to guarantee safety. Radiation
itself is a sinister poison, odourless, tasteless, colourless.
By the time a person begins to have symptoms of radiation sickness, it is often too late to prevent crippling illness or
death. And if advanced economies with mature nuclear industries,
such as the United States or Japan, can’t prevent
catastrophic accidents, then who can?
This is why the issue of nuclear liability has loomed so
large in India’s participation in the global nuclear renaissance.
If nuclear power is so safe, why won’t GE or Westinghouse
build plants in India until they are protected from
liability in case of an accident? Like Union Carbide and its
inheritor, Dow Chemical, in the wake of the Bhopal disaster,
GE and Westinghouse are afraid that they could be held liable
for damages to life and property in the event of a catastrophic
nuclear event.
While government subsidies and the offloading of risks
from corporate spreadsheets on citizens can make nuclear
power profitable for industry, they do not make it a cheap
source of energy for consumers. Electricity produced by nuclear
plants, including the next generation of fast-breeder reactors
and the French Areva’s still-untested EPR pressurised
water reactor, is far more expensive than electricity from
other sources. Yet, a public relations campaign by energy-hungry
governments and industries had just about succeeded,
before the Fukushima crisis, in restoring nuclear power
to its postwar, atoms-for-peace promise of a miraculous, inexhaustible
source of “clean energy”. Citizens were told that
nuclear power was the only way humanity could avoid global
warming without having to sacrifice economic growth.
The US nuclear deal with India in 2008 was the nuclear
industry gamechanger. Potential profits—$100 billion for
US corporations alone—were incentive enough to pour millions
of dollars into lobbying for the deal. In India, the Congress
party-led government pulled out all the stops to secure
its passage. In the midst of the recent tragedy in Japan,
The Hindu published a US diplomatic cable from WikiLeaks
recounting an eager Congress operative showing off boxes
of cash and boasting of the money the party had had at its
disposal to buy the needed votes.
Countries and corporations around the world want in on
the nuclear boom. India’s major business houses are no exception,
from Larsen & Toubro and Reliance to Tata. India
Inc sees the nuclear boom as a tremendous profit-making
opportunity and a chance to become global suppliers. Japan
succumbed to this temptation as well, signing—over the vehement
protests of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors—civil nuclear agreements with Vietnam and India.
Fukushima offers a new kind of disaster spectacle. When
cyclones, earthquakes and floods strike poor countries, the
images are quite different. When a hurricane devastated the
Gulf of Mexico coast of the US, the global superpower revealed
its incapacity to deal effectively and humanely with
a crisis far more limited than Japan’s. It is this fact that has shaken the world. We think: “If Japan can’t manage this,
what country can?”
With the veil of safety ripped from the dark side of nuclear
power, governments around the world have been forced to
react. Germany, Switzerland and China have announced a
freeze on the operations and construction of nuclear plants.
France, Russia and the US have announced internal reviews.
Whither India? No other country in the world has as
much national pride wrapped up in nuclear power. Of necessity,
India painstakingly built up its nuclear capability,
both civilian and military, largely on its own. The country’s
ambition to achieve total energy self-reliance for its rapidly
industrialising economy via thorium-fuelled reactors seems
on the verge of being realised. It is no more likely, whatever
the arguments, that India will abandon nuclear power
than, say, China, the US or France. At most, India may be
forced to make compromises, such as abandoning the highly
unpopular and expensive Areva nuclear park in Jaitapur in
Maharashtra, or leaving the liability rule standing.
Still, with the credibility of India’s government in tatters
after a series of high-profile corruption scandals, its reassurances
about the country’s nuclear programme ring hollow,
especially with the evidence of Fukushima before our eyes.
How are Indian citizens to trust the management of nuclear energy to the band of crony-capitalists and corrupt politicians
who run the country, and a nuclear establishment accountable
to no entity other than itself? The announcement
that India will revise its nuclear safety rules is welcome, but
the rules already on the books are regularly flouted. A truly
independent nuclear oversight and regulatory body with
enforcement capability would be a more serious gesture—and a real commitment to the development of truly sustainable,
renewable and locally controllable energy over nuclear
power would be even better.
In Japan, sceptical citizens fled the advancing radiation
cloud from Fukushima well in advance of the official advisory.
They simply didn’t trust authorities to tell them the
truth about how bad the situation was. After Fukushima,
the confident cries of the world’s nuclear authorities, which
tell citizens that the sky isn’t falling—and cannot possibly
ever fall—may never be believed again.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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Lissa Weinmann
29 April 2011
06:31 AM
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Excellent piece. I wonder what it will take to create a worldwide effort to halt creating more waste until the waste we've accumulated is adequately dealt with. There are now 104 nuclear plants in the US, all are now radioactive waste dumps, a situation nobody anticipated but there it was all along, the writing on the wall. Plants on the San Andreas fault, we're assured, can withstand an 8.5 quake but hey -- Fukishima was a 9. The nuclear industry and the 'regulators' that protect and encourage them should be tarred and feathered. They're poisoning us all.
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Laurance
1 April 2011
02:24 AM
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One favorable aspect to Japans unfortunate mishap has been the willingness of so many countries to begin reviewing the safety aspects of their own nuclear facilities, as if they had not done this in the past. Yet as you point out Mira, the errors by industrial workers are a leading cause of a number of the history making incidents as well as many of the smaller 'incidents' that we don't hear about so much. And regardless of a good or decent record of safety in the past, all it will take is one very bad accident to create a horrendous situation that will greatly eclipse the Bhopal disaster.
What I particularly find appalling is that many of these countries (as the U.S.) are still 'temporarily' storing the radioactive wastes (spent fuel rods) for the most part, until a permanent site is located and constructed. And the radioactive waste continues to build up in greater quantity of tonnage from these hundreds upon hundreds of sites, all the while creating additional possibilities for disaster. As the radioactivity remains for 100,000 years, the chances of something going awry during that time will only increase.
Killer garbage! Not a nice legacy we're leaving for future generations.
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