| MAGAZINE | MAR 28, 2011 India's Nuclear Neros N-power isn't the low-risk option the deceitful, inept DAE says it is The colossal hubris, ignorance and smugness of India's nuclear czars take one's breath away. The day Japan's crisis took a decisive turn for the worse, with an explosion in a third Fukushima reactor and fresh radiation leaks, Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) secretary Sreekumar Banerjee declared that the nuclear crisis "was purely a chemical reaction and not a nuclear emergency as described by some section(s) of media". Nuclear Power Corporation chairman S.K. Jain went one better: "There is no nuclear accident or incident. It is a well-planned emergency preparedness programme which the nuclear operators...are carrying out to contain the residual heat after...an automatic shutdown". This is proof, if proof were at all needed, that our nuclear power programme is in the hands of men who are totally cut off from reality and have a default conviction in their own omniscience and infallibility. Their denials are as despicable as their pathetic parroting of the virtues of India's nuclear installations and their safety. Let's get this straight. The Fukushima crisis is the world's worst nuclear accident since the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986. The earlier (partial, largely contained) meltdown at Three Mile Island (1979) pales beside it. The Fukushima reactors have spewed large amounts of radioactivity into the air. The vessel containing the core of Reactor 2, which fully lost water cover for hours, has been damaged. The fire in Reactor 4 released yet more radiotoxins. At the time of writing, only a miracle can prevent further radiation release. The Fukushima disaster is the world's first multi-reactor crisis; controlling it is more difficult. It also poses three special problems. Large quantities of spent fuel, containing extremely radioactive nuclear wastes, are stored in pools in the reactor building, following General Electric's design. These are no longer being cooled. A spent fuel leak, spreading due to the flooding, could have unspeakably lethal effects. Second, Fukushima reactors' primary containment—similar to India's Tarapur reactors, also GE-designed—has been found by a US laboratory to be vulnerable to molten fuel burning through the reactor vessel, eventually breaking out. Third, Reactor 3 burns a mix of uranium-plutonium oxide (MOX). Researchers say mox generally increases the consequences of severe accidents with large radioactivity releases, resulting in a five-fold increase in latent cancer fatalities. Even if the Fukushima crisis doesn't worsen further, it highlights the inherent hazards of nuclear power, in which small individual mishaps can precipitate a runaway crisis. The reactors were shut down by the earthquake; and their still-hot cores were no longer cooled. The diesel back-up came on, but went out in an hour. The loss of coolant led to the explosions and radioactivity releases. That this happened in industrially advanced Japan, with high nuclear safety standards, underscores the gravity of the generic problem with nuclear reactors. They are all vulnerable to a catastrophic accident irrespective of safety measures. Nuclear power generation is also bound up with radiation exposure, harmful in all doses, and radioactive waste streams, which remain hazardous for thousands of years. India's nucleocrats have been in denial of these problems and suppressed their abysmal safety record. The list of failures is long: a serious fire at Narora, which moved from the turbine to the reactor room amidst panic-driven abandonment of fire-fighting procedures; collapse of a containment-dome safety system at Kaiga; frequent radiation exposure of workers and lay public to doses above the permissible; and the spiking of drinking water with deadly tritium in Kaiga. India has the distinction of running two of the world's most contaminated reactors. This necessitates a radical reform of the DAE, the government's worst-performing department, which has never completed a project on time and within budget. We must have an independent, credible nuclear safety audit, with outside experts and civil society representatives. We must review our nuclear power policy for appropriateness, safety, costs, and public acceptance, based on a holistic view of the best ways of meeting our energy needs. If nuclear power emerges as the least desirable option, we should discard it. The environment ministry must also revoke all conditional clearances granted to nuclear projects, including Jaitapur. Nuclear power has subjugated our energy policy and budgets to an unaccountable, self-perpetuating, pampered technocracy, imposed unacceptable hazards upon unwilling populations, and degraded our democracy. The juggernaut must be halted. (Praful Bidwai is a columnist and activist of the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace.) II. http://www.sacw.net/article1966.html DAFT's All (Doctorate in Allaying Fears about Technology)by Surendra Gadekar Friday 18 March 2011 At a time when the whole world has been shocked by the multiple and continuing tragedies that have befallen Japan and most people completely shit scared by the daily news of new nuclear catastrophes, various functionaries in the nuclear establishment in India are outdoing each other in a race issuing reassuringly outrageous statements. What would you make of this:
Regarding the French EPR reactors which are proposed for Jaitapur plant in Ratnagiri district, Banerjee and Jain said the design of EPR was based on the design experience of 58 reactors running in Europe, and when the Indian EPR will come up it would have seen the experience of five such similar plants in Finland, France, China and UK. (Press Trust of India March 15, 2011). Reading the above, would you guess that not a single EPR reactor has yet been built let alone operating anywhere in the world. Reactors under construction in Finland and in France itself are years over schedule and way over budget. Even if all these reactors in all these countries did start operating before Jaitapur reactors were completed, how would their experience help in design modification of Jaitapur reactors which these very officials assure us, are planned for early construction. The 58 reactors whose running experience is supposed to reassure us, are all of different design. Mr. S K Jain is the Chairman and Managing Director of the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd. (NPCIL). He said that, "India was uniquely placed as it had a centralised emergency operating centre with well drawn procedures scrutinised by regulators." This when India is one country where the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board is not an independent organisation but a part of the Department of Atomic Energy(DAE) and does not even have a separate building to house itself and needs to share rooms and toilet facilities with their bosses in DAE premises. If you were still in confusion about the uniqueness of Indian reactors he adds, "Our plants also have multiple level of heat removal system." So all you may have known about the "defense in depth" philosophy and how there are multiple shields between you and nuclear catastrophe, gentle reader is true only if you happen to be lucky enough to live in this "uniquely placed" country known as India. But Mr Jain is not finished yet. He joins Dr Bannerjee in saying that In the case of Japanese nuclear plants it was the station blackout which was the root cause and such a thing will not happen in the existing as well as future Indian reactors." Just to remind ourselves, on the night of March 31st, 1993, there was a devastating fire that started in the turbine room of the reactors at Narora Atomic Power Station, at 3.31AM and continued to rage uncontrolled for over two hours causing extensive damage to the generator and power supply cables. Unlike the reactors at Fukushima that shut down automatically when their sensors detected the massive earthquake, the reactors had to be shut-down manually by brave station staff. During most of this time, the control room of the reactor was filled with smoke and the emergency control room – a special 'safety' feature at Narora – was rendered useless in the absence of emergency power supply. The second reactor unit at Narora had been shut down for several months after a generator identical to that in unit-1 was reportedly damaged on account of overheating. The most serious aspect of this fire was complete loss of station power for a period of 17 hours and the fact that none of the three emergency diesel generators were able to work, since the cables connecting them had also burned down in the fire. However, Mr Jain and Dr Bannerjee knowing all about the future are technically correct in their statement, since they say that a station blackout will not happen in Indian reactors. But some of the statements they have now come up with are in a category all their own worthy of international awards. So we have Mr S.K.Jain, saying, "There is no nuclear accident or incident in Japan's Fukushima plants. It is a well planned emergency preparedness programme which the nuclear operators of the Tokyo Electric Power Company are carrying out to contain the residual heat after the plants had an automatic shut-down following a major earthquake." (Press Trust of India March 15, 2011). Not to be left behind, his boss, Chairman of Atomic Energy Commission, Dr Srikumar Banerjee D.Sc. (Honouris Clausa, Dhanbad School of Mines) helpfully added, "Once the plant shuts down after an emergency situation automatically, the fission reaction stops and it is only the residual heat that has to be quenched and that is what the Japanese were doing. "Because of the unprecedented Tsunami, the external power was unavailable for the emergency diesel generators to take over… during the process the pressure was building up in the reactor which had to be released in a phased manner, that resulted in the exothermic reaction due to hydrogen generation. "It was purely a chemical reaction and not a nuclear emergency as described by some section of media," Dr Banerjee said. By now I am sure, most of you readers, having watched these horrible scenes of reactors exploding like Diwali firecrackers, hearing about alarmingly elevated levels of radiation, and about evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people and seeing radiation monitors scanning scores of citizens, must be completely confused. But that is only because you are not DAFT (Doctorate in Allaying Fears about Technology). Having met many DAFTs in my time, let me try to explain. Reactors exploding in a puff of white smoke releasing all kinds of radioactive poisons all over the country side; fires in spent fuel pools whose inventory of long lived radioactive nuclei is much higher than inside the reactor core and which will do far greater and longer lasting damage to the environment and to human health, besides blighting the future of future generations, is not a nuclear emergency! A nuclear emergency is only when the process driving the explosion is a nuclear chain reaction like that taking place in a nuclear bomb and that, as these worthies will hasten to rightly assure you, just cannot take place in a nuclear reactor. So Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Windscale, (all serious past accidents) were none of them, nuclear emergencies. Chernobyl was just a steam explosion. Three Mile Island, where the reactor core had melted and there was a huge bubble of hydrogen that luckily did not explode was therefore no emergency at all. Windscale was just a fire in a block of graphite that happened to sit inside a nuclear reactor: could happen to any body. If you happen to live near a nuclear power plant like I do, this is very good news. As you might probably know, it is impossible to obtain life or property insurance in case of a nuclear emergency. But since nuclear emergencies are only a figment in the imagination of some in the media who don't know a chemical exothermic reaction when they see one, getting insurance should be a breeze. Private insurance is a necessity especially since Dr Bannerjee was bending over backwards in trying to accommodate the interests of poor multinational companies as opposed to those of the rich Indian multitudes during the debate over the Nuclear Liability Act. I feel so much better already. III. http://www.himalmag.com/component/content/article/4332-the-nature-of-nuclear.html
The nature of nuclear 21 March 2011The lessons of Fukushima. A week after the 11 March earthquake and tsunami in Japan, there were already 7000 confirmed deaths with over 10,000 people still missing. This disaster was compounded by the nuclear accidents at four out of the six reactors at the Fukushima-Daiichi plant, in the country's northeast, and the continuing threat of widespread radioactive contamination. Radiation levels close to the reactors have been above the legal limit, while traces of radiation have arrived on the West Coast of the United States, 5000 miles across the Pacific Ocean. There are many lessons for Southasia from the earthquake and tsunami about the need to be better prepared for natural disasters, to anticipate and take precautions in designing buildings, public infrastructure and communications, to assume that everything that can go wrong will go wrong, and to be organised and transparent. But there are as many lessons regarding the nuclear accident and what it means for Southasia. This is a critical time for nuclear energy in this region. India has 20 operating nuclear-power reactors, with several more under construction and plans for a vast expansion over the next few decades. Pakistan has two operating nuclear plants, another one under construction, and plans to buy two more as part of a planned eight-fold increase in its reliance on nuclear energy in the next 30 years. Both countries also have military reactors that are part of their nuclear-weapons programmes. Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have plans to build their first nuclear reactors. Today, all should stop and think about what they can learn from the Fukushima accident. The first lesson is that the nuclear accident happened in Japan, in a country that is technologically very advanced and is a manufacturer of nuclear reactors which it supplies to other countries. Japanese expertise in nuclear technology is second to none. A loss of control over the destroyed nuclear reactor is not due to any technological weakness or lack of skilled operators. Previous serious reactor accidents took place at Chernobyl, in the Soviet Union, in 1986, at Three Mile Island in the US in 1979, at Windscale in the UK in 1957 and at Chalk River in Canada in 1952. All these accidents happened in spite of sound technical expertise. It is in the nature of nuclear technology. Despite the nuclear industry's assurances about safety, reactors and other nuclear facilities are susceptible to major accidents. But after each accident, the passage of time dulls the memories and allows advocates of nuclear power again to assert that nuclear energy is a safe source of power. Small failures The second lesson is that accidents have occurred in a wide variety of reactor designs and there is no design that can claim to be completely immune to any kind of catastrophic accident. The five most serious accidents before Fukushima were in five different reactor designs. The Fukushima plants are boiling water reactors, similar in basic design to the Tarapur I and II reactors near Mumbai. As in all plants, even though the reactors were shut down automatically once the earthquake hit, the nuclear fuel in the cores continued to produce heat, albeit a small fraction of that produced when the reactor is operating normally. Pumps must continue to circulate water to remove this heat, or the reactor fuel heats up and will melt. Nuclear-reactor designers put in multiple systems to ensure such cooling. But at Fukushima, all of these safety systems failed. Hot nuclear fuel was exposed to the air, releasing radioactive gases into the atmosphere. The exposed fuel is also a source of hydrogen, which produced the explosions that damaged the four reactor buildings and the inner concrete-and-steel containment at one of the four units. The third lesson is that small failures can combine to produce disastrous results and this cannot be avoided. At the Fukushima reactors, many safety systems failed simultaneously or serially. For example, on 14 March, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, which operates the Fukushima plants, revealed that some safety valves did not open, for unknown reasons. This made it difficult to pump cooling water into the reactor. To anticipate every such possible eventuality and build in fail-safes would make reactors impossibly complicated. Also, each additional component is something else that can go wrong. Eventually, reactors become too expensive to build. The fourth lesson is that extreme natural disasters only make nuclear accidents more likely. It is important to remember that neither the Three Mile Island accident or the Chernobyl disaster, nor Windscale nor Chalk River, needed a natural disaster to start them off. Reactor accidents are more likely during earthquakes because they simultaneously affect large parts of the plant, taking out multiple safety systems or create multiple failures. Common failures are also caused by fires. It was a fire that caused the blackout in Narora in 1993, India's closest brush with a major nuclear accident. The fifth lesson is that new reactors might not always be safer than old ones. It is true that many of the Fukushima reactors were designed during the 1960s. But what happened was that operators lost the ability to cool the core of the reactors and, as a result, the pressure inside the reactor vessel could only keep building as water boiled away into steam. As the fuel in the core started to melt, it interacted with the water or steam to produce explosions. No currently existing reactor will likely survive all of that any better than the Fukushima reactors. Measured exit The sixth lesson is that reactors and people do not mix. Those who have been most affected by the nuclear accidents at Fukushima are, of course, the workers, who have been braving explosions and high levels of radiation exposure to try to maintain control over the reactor and associated facilities. Next to them are the inhabitants of the areas near the plant, nearly 200,000 of whom have been forced to leave their homes. In Southasia, there are some reactors close to major population centres or major rivers that provide vital water for drinking and agriculture. Take for example Pakistan, which has a nuclear reactor on the Karachi coast and is vulnerable to tsunamis. Built over 40 years ago, the Karachi plant was originally far away from the populated areas of the city. Since then, however, many housing schemes have sprung up within 20 km of the site. A sea breeze blows over the plant towards northern parts of Karachi. In Japan, the population within 20 km of the Fukushima reactors has been evacuated, and those up to 30 km away have been told to remain confined to their homes to avoid being contaminated by radioactivity. The US has told its citizens in the area to move at least 80 km away from the reactor. It is unthinkable that such arrangements would be possible in Karachi. Around the world, people are today rethinking nuclear energy. Speaking in the German Parliament this week, the chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, someone who has been committed to nuclear energy and had adopted a policy of extending the lifetime of that country's 17 nuclear power plants, said 'when … the apparently impossible becomes possible and the absolutely unlikely reality, then the situation changes.' She announced a new policy of a 'measured exit' from reliance on nuclear energy. Southasian leaders would do well to pay heed. M V Ramana and Zia Mian are physicists at Princeton University's Program on Science and Global Security, and A H Nayyar is a Visiting Professor of Physics at LUMS, Lahore. |
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