The Truth about the Jaitapur Nuclear Power Plant
The truth about the Jaitapur Nuclear Power Plant
January 2011
Factsheet of the Jaitapur Nuclear Power Project
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1
Power generation
2
Reactors
3
Land requirement
2.
Completion: 1650 MW x 6 = 9900 MW
1. 6 European Pressurized Reactors (EPRs) of 1650 MW each
(India’s installed capacity: 4780 MW). In first phase, 2 reactors will be operated
Expected date of commissioning of first 2 reactors 3
1. First stage: 1650 MW x 2 = 3,300 MW
2. Total 4 EPRs in world under construction: 2 in China, 1 in
Finland (Olkiluoto), 1 in France (Flamanville); none operational, none proven
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938 Ha land in Madban and Jaitapur, of which 938 Ha already procured USD 25 billion (Kakodkar’s interview in Sakal (05 Jan 2011))
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Investment
5
Fuel supply
25 years by France, this is less than the operating life of the plant,
35 years (AREVA claims it is 60 years)
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Type of fuel
Fuel will be 5% enriched uranium oxide or uranium-plutonium oxide Our estimate @ USD 6.5 million per MW, works out to USD 64.36 billion = Rs. 283,140 Crores (ref needed)
1.
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Joint venture
Areva (France) and Nuclear Power Corporation of India
(NPCIL) for EPRs (Areva is Supplier)
2.
Department of Atomic Energy will sign a separate agreement for supply of nuclear fuel.
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Required manpower
6,000 to 8,000 (during construction); i.e. Rs. 35 to 46 Crores/job.
At this level of investment, each job is equivalent to a factory.
(However, operations needs only 800 highly skilled personnel)
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Exclusion zone
1.6 km radius from the centre of reactor
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Expected electricity generation (9,900 MW)
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Nuclear waste
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Cooling Water
69.4 billion units per annum @ 80% PLF and best assumptions
1. The waste will be buried in cement-concrete based blocks
2. Waste will be under surveillance for 30 years
1. The plant will suck in 5,200 Cr lit. of water every day from the
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sea & throw it back into sea at a higher (+50C) temperature
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Affected land owners
2355
1. A critical component in Areva 's architecture is "extra-large forgings", is only available in Japan.
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Possible objections from
Japan and Australia
2. Japan has consistently demanded India 's signature to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), which New Delhi has
1
refused
3. Australia has recently refused to supply uranium fuel, citing
2
NPT
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Cost of electricity
Not revealed
Introduction:
The Jaitapur project in Ratnagiri district of Maharashtra has been in the public eye in recent months due to a host of controversies that surround the project. These controversies range over the massive size of the project, the potential impact of radio activity on the entire region and it’s eco systems, the untested reactor technologies to be used with particular reference to safety aspects, the international conditionalities imposed on the country for supply of nuclear fuel, the cost of the project and the subsequent cost of electricity generated from the project, the assumption of accident liability by the
Government of India, the preliminary grant of environmental clearance to the project without sufficient public dissemination and healthy debate, the involvement of a public sector undertaking in an activity that poses long term health and security risks to citizens of this country, the involvement of foreign political and commercial interests in the pursuit of this project and the lack of institutional accountability from various institutional levels within both central and state governments. As if this list is not sufficiently long to be damning, there is the additional list of activities which have now become common place whenever any large project not perceived to be in the public interest is sought to be bulldozed through the inevitable spread of disinformation at the local level, suppression of the truth, political and bureaucratic obfuscation through the media, and ultimately the use of instruments of state power for repression when local protests erupt in opposition to the project. We intend to address most of these issues so that citizens of the country can ultimately decide whether a project of the size and scope of the
Jaitapur nuclear project is genuinely in the public interest and whether public money and public institutions can be permitted to undertake and implement decisions whose detrimental and life threatening consequences may well last for thousands if not tens of thousands of years after the life of the project. These decisions do not fall into the purview of routine day to day decisions – they demand a much longer term view and public values of the highest order to be exercised prior to approval of such decisions. Science, it is said, is the pursuit of truth at the highest level. In the land of Mahatma Gandhi, we as citizens would assume that truth would play an over riding role in defense of public interest and the
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rights of citizens of India. Both sets of values are being violated in the insistence on this project. Despite the wide range of opposition, based on exposure of the untruths that this project has garnered, not merely at the local level but also nationally and internationally. Our insistence that the highest public values have to be upheld in this domain are the basic justification for putting this document into the public domain. The consequences of this project are so dire that citizens of India as well as all thinking and conscientious citizens of the world should be taking note of this project, more so as it is likely to be a forerunner of other such gigantic nuclear projects in other parts of India and around the world.
This state of affairs arises because of the false claim by the nuclear industry that nuclear power is ‘clean’.
As we will try to show in the course of this document, not only is nuclear power one of the most life threatening and dangerous of technologies, it has also been historically associated with a high level of non transparent politics and power play, with no accountability and little respect for truth. In essence, the nuclear establishment all across the world, in both its military and civilian avatars and its public and private manifestations, has been a state within a state, highly dangerous to the open functioning of democracy in every country of the world where it has spread. So grave is the danger posed by the various dimensions of this technology that democratically conscious citizens around the world will have to reflect and act on the future of this technology.
The global debate on climate change and the need to curb carbon emissions into the atmosphere has given a fresh lease of life to nuclear technology under the thin pretext that it does not emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The truth is that the radio-nuclides that result from the entire nuclear cycle
(from an objective and inter-disciplinary cradle-to-grave analysis) are far longer lasting and far more dangerous than climate change; while the effects of climate change may last from a few hundred years to a few thousand years, the life threatening damages from radio-nuclides can last from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years. There is simply no comparison between these dangers. While some degree of adaptation by human society is possible to counteract the worst effects of climate change, there is no possibility of adaptation to the consequences of radio-nuclides in the environment, which will spread death and mutation amongst all life forms exposed to radiation, including human beings. Recent research shows that children and pregnant women are particularly susceptible to radiation damage resulting in leukemia (cancer of the blood), other types of solid cancers and cellular tissue damage to
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unborn children . In the light of these growing evidences, is it at all conscionable that in the country of
Mahatma Gandhi, those who claim to wear the mantle of science should be going ahead with the pursuit of such a dangerous technology, that too at the public cost. Evidences and arguments will be briefly presented in the remaining part of this document, from which appropriate conclusions may be drawn.
Lies in the Public Domain:
The Jaitapur nuclear project has engendered so many lies in the public domain that it is now possible to classify these lies into categories. Of particular importance are the following categories of lies:
i.
Generic lies put out by the worldwide nuclear industry
ii.
Generic lies put out by the Indian nuclear establishment
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iii.
Specific lies related to the Jaitapur project
iv.
Specific lies disseminated at the local level
We shall take up the above categories of lies for further discussion below. In the context of the Jaitapur project, the situation has now begun to resemble the ill fated Dabhol - Enron Project. There is a cynical view that ‘public memory is short’. However, it is not so short that the people of Maharashtra or indeed across India have forgotten the Dabhol – Enron Project and its aftermath. Government at the Central and
State levels would be well advised to draw on their organizational memory (if they have any, which is doubtful) about the course of the Enron project, and the path by which it ended up in the present mess.
Similarly, citizens movements as well as informed public opinion would also be well advised to draw upon the way the Enron project was finally brought to its knees, rather painfully. The similarities between the
Dabhol - Enron Project and the present Jaitapur- Areva Project are so startling that they can no longer be dismissed. These similarities are indicated in a table below and form part of the category of lies specific to the Jaitapur Project. However, the differences between the Dabhol - Enron and Jaitapur-Areva Project stem from the differences in the technologies and fuels for the purposes of power generation in the two projects. Hence the need to critically look at the generic lies put out by the worldwide nuclear industry and their Indian counterparts, undertaken below.
i.
Generic lies put out by the worldwide nuclear industry
As indicated above, the worldwide ‘nuclear renaissance’ is premised on the assertion that in the context of climate change, nuclear energy is a clean and reliable source of energy, which is at complete variance with the truth.
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a) Information now publicly available internationally indicates that the life cycle of nuclear power plant operations generates a large variety of radio-nuclides with half-lives ranging from a few hundred days to a few million years (see table below).
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The above table also includes tritium (half life 12.32 years) and carbon 14 (half life 5715 years).
These radio-nuclides are present in the cooling water that will be pumped out in huge quantities into the sea. Amongst the radio-active emissions from the plant, alpha emitters are classified as amongst a most harmful type of radio nuclides in living organisms if they are ingested or inhaled, leading to exposure of unshielded tissue, causing biological damage. The same holds true for beta emissions both positive and negative. Gamma radiation is more energetic than X-rays and can pass through thick layers of metal and concrete. These radio-active emissions can affect both cellular as well as DNA materials in all living systems, including humans. As can be seen from the above table Americium-243 has a half life over 7000 years, Plutonium-240 over six thousand five hundred years, Plutonium-239 and Niobium-94 have a half life over twenty-four thousand years,
Nickel-59 have years of seventy-six thousand years, Calcium-41 with a half life of one hundred thirty thousand years, Chlorine-36 with a half life of three hundred thousand years, Tecnetium99 with a half life of two hundred thousand years and Iodine one twenty nine with a half life of seventeen million years, are all part of the dangerous radio nuclide associated with the nuclear cycle. There are no known technologies for isolating these radio-active materials for such long periods of time. In the light of this knowledge, to assert that nuclear energy technology is ‘clean’ is a travesty of the truth. Yet governments with a life span of five years choose to take decisions whose consequences may last for many thousands of years. Both the political and bureaucratic part of the governance structure must be held to account before such decisions can be ratified.
b) "A major study (called KiKK)
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commissioned by the German Government revealed
that the leukemia incidence among young children living near nuclear reactors was increased by
120%, and solid cancers were increased by 60%. This result has been affirmed in other studies.
The study was conducted around sixteen nuclear power plants in Germany with 1592 cases of exposure victims in the sample group and 4735 interviews of equivalent persons in the non exposed control group.
"With regard to the incidence of cancers with children before their 5th birthday, living within a distance of 5 km from a nuclear power plant, the KiKK study concluded:
• 1.2x increase in child leukemias (120% increase)
• 0.6x increase in child solid cancers (60% increase)
• strong association with proximity to a nuclear reactor".
The pathways of tritium and carbon-14 into the human body via drinking water and the food chain are briefly discussed. These radio-nuclides, which are routinely released into the environment from nuclear power plants, are biologically very active to the extent that these nuclides are deposited near DNA in cell nuclei and pose serious radiation hazards."
"Within a radius of some 30 km an increasing occurrence of childhood cancer with decreasing living distance from a nominally operating nuclear power plant is proved to exist"(ref 3, pp. 65).
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Compare this 30 km impact radius with the 1.6 km exclusion zone for Jaitapur, cited in the box item below Kakodkar 's interview in Sakal (January 5, 2011; English translation of interview in
Appendix-1).
c)
With regard to the presence of radio-active tritium and carbon-14 in the cooling water, an international report has this to say: ‘the cooling water from the reactor becomes highly radioactive by tritium and, to a lesser extent, by carbon-14, fission product and activated corrosion products. Therefore, the cooling water should be treated as radio-active waste. In today’s
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practice the cooling water is discharged into rivers and sea’ .
It may be noted that 53000 million liters per day of radio-active cooling water will be deposited into the sea of the coast of Jaitapur. This will continue for thirty-five years, (or sixty years, going by AREVA’s claims of the plant life) which is the normative life of the nuclear power plant unless extended further. Over a period of time, this radio-active water will spread all along the Konkan and Goa coasts and may reach upto Mumbai, endangering the lives of its citizens. Radiation products will also enter into fish from the region, other sea food as well as breeding grounds and coastal aquifer areas up and down the entire coast. In effect, any fish or sea food consumed by local or distant populations including citizens of foreign countries could have adverse health impacts through the consumption of marine products. Marine product exports would have to be stopped causing further economic damage to the region. The same would hold true for Alphonso mangoes from the region and their exports.
‘The British government has been at pains over the years to play down attempts to correlate cancers with Sellafield radioactivity, particularly when it involves individuals living near the plant
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but not working at it” . The Sellafield complex houses one of the largest reprocessing operations in Britain and stores enough plutonium to make twenty thousand nuclear bombs. People living near Sellafield generally shun locally caught fish and most of it ends up elsewhere in Europe.
Instead of viewing these evidences which are mounting around the world, the entire debate around cooling water is sought to be diverted to whether the water will be 5 degrees centigrade above ambient temperature and what will be the impact of this thermal pollution at the local level (see para 9 in Appendix 1). Similarly, the impact on ‘bio-diversity’ is underplayed by diverting it towards flora and fauna (see para 10 in Appendix-1). In both instances it is the impact of radioactivity over extremely long durations of time as well as spread over space that need to be considered. Such diversions fall into a pattern which we call a category of lies.
d) The next category of lies revolves around the concept of ‘immobilization’ of waste and long term storage. There is no known technology for immobilizing radioactive products for ten thousand to a million years, nor are there any safe geologic repositories which can be guaranteed to hold these wastes safely for such long periods of time. The US, with seventy thousand tonnes of nuclear waste, has been unable to have the Yucca Mountain (Nevada) storage facilities operational and certified. In the US, the revised court mandated time frame to the Environmental
Protection Agency, is to prevent leakage of nuclear waste over the next million years (ref. 7, pp.
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386-398). Compare this with the thirty year ‘cooling period’ which is being promised in the case of the Jaitapur Power Plant.
e) The next category of lies revolves around decommissioning of the nuclear plant after completion of its operational life of thirty-five years. No plant anywhere in the world which is remotely the size of the Jaitapur plant has ever been fully decommissioned; in the few known instances, the reactors have been dismantled and taken away for storage to state owned storage facilities while the radio-active concrete parts have simply been blasted by explosives. Amongst the scarce data available in the public domain, the cost of dismantling is estimated to vary between 60% - 160%
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of the cost of construction . Again, this cost of dismantling or decommissioning of reactors is not factored into the cost of generation of electricity. Hence, it becomes possible for the nuclear industry to argue that nuclear electricity is cheap (see para 14 in Appendix 1), because many of the costs and dangers are simply wiped off the books. As we shall show below, the investment cost per mega watt of nuclear electricity is six to seven times the cost of coal thermal generation, which is the reason that nuclear electric plants have not received new orders for many decades in the developed countries.
Despite all the above evidences, it is being asserted that nuclear energy is “clean”. Perhaps the Govt of
India and its Ministry of Environment attach a different meaning to the word “clean” as compared to what is publicly understood by the word.
Generic lies put out by the Indian nuclear establishment:
The Indian nuclear establishment, in consonance with the world wide nuclear industry, has propagated untruths with regard to nuclear energy being clean, safe, free of radiation hazard, affordable and reliable.
However, it can also be credited with some particularly India-specific untruths: these relate to competence in developing breeder reactors, possibilities of future thorium based reactors and so on. It is time that these untruths were pinned down.
a) Breeder reactors: a variety of international sources as well as discussions with nuclear physicists and other experts indicate that the successful future development of breeder reactors is a very remote possibility. However, the fantasy is appealing because it posits that breeder reactors will produce more fuel than they consume, leading to a future of plentiful and cheap nuclear electricity. This untruth is related to the historically earlier assertion by the nuclear industry, in the early stages of nuclear energy development, that nuclear electricity would be ‘too cheap to meter’. However, the performance reality of breeder reactors is that in over fifty years of intensive research, seven countries (USA, UK, France, Germany, Former USSR now Russia, Japan and India) have invested hundreds of billions of dollars and have so far failed to demonstrate that the breeder cycle is technically feasible (ref 3, part B, pp. 4). Problems of the breeder system are
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discussed in more detailed by UNIPEDE/CEC (1981) and Lidsky and Miller (1998) . The authors concluded that the breeder system is not feasible, not only due to technical hurdles, but also
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because the system cannot meet the requirements of safety, proliferation and economy. Yet, the lollypop has continuously been dangled in front of ignorant politicians and decision makers. This fantasy has probably helped to ensure a plentiful supply of public funds to the Indian nuclear establishment without any accountability, behind the veil of secrecy.
b) It follows from the above that thorium breeder reactors are an even more remote fantasy because they would have to be based on the prior success of plutonium breeders whose technical feasibility is in doubt, as above. Yet, this untruth is found appealing based on the claim that India has large deposits of thorium. An overview of research projects in the past and of
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advanced thorium reactor concepts is given in the references . In reality, thorium breeder cycle has never even reached the prototype phase.
c) Both these untruths continue to get propagated in the public domain because of the false prestige attached to nuclear bomb development. In actuality, the development of a nuclear explosive device is not all that complicated technologically as is made out to be. The real difficulty lies in either enriching uranium or obtaining plutonium from nuclear fuel waste through reprocessing. This is the reason why the Nuclear Supplier Group of countries (NSG) insists on taking back the nuclear fuel after use, with strict accounting procedures, international inspections, etc. Since India has more or less complied with these requirements in practice, where is the question of recognition under NPT and false prestige regarding development of nuclear devices.
For the country of Mahatma Gandhi, this should be a matter of shame rather than false pride. iii. Specific lies related to the Jaitapur project
With the above generic categories of lies, we now examine the vast number of specific lies being propagated about the Jaitapur nuclear power project. In essence, there is a startling similarity between the Jaitapur-Areva Project and the earlier Dabhol-Enron Project, also located in the Konkan region. The table below shows a detailed comparison between various aspects of the two projects.
Readers are advised to recall their memories of the entire course of events which happened in the public domain, ultimately resulting in the mothballing of the Dabhol-Enron Project with a massive loss to Maharashtra and to Indian financial institutions. Based on this comparison, it may be fair to conclude that the powers - that - be have very poor learning capabilities.
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Similarities between Dabhol Enron and Jaitapur Areva Projects:
Issue
A.
Dabhol – Enron
Jaitapur – Areva
Technical –
Economic
i.
Size
At that time, touted as the largest private power project in the world, with false pride attached to size; financial size around Rs.10,000 crore.
Probably the largest NPP in the world as planned at present (9900 MW), over 3 times the size of the Enron project with false prestige attached to size; based on present information, this project will cost in the range of Rs.260,000 –
Rs.280,000 crore.
ii.
Fuel linkage
Gas linkage for 25 years not confirmed Nuclear fuel supply linkage not confirmed; France has no nuclear fuel
(uranium), Australia (with world’s largest uranium deposits) has refused to supply India citing NPT; data indicates insufficient international availability of uranium to meet life time requirements
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of plant . iii. Fuel price
Not available at contract stage, hence Cost of Generation (CoG) could not be independently verified. Not available, hence CoG can not be independently verified
iv.
Fuel price risk
Risk not specified, hence risk guarantee cost not available
Risk not specified, hence risk guarantee cost not available
v.
Investment cost Artificially high (capital cost padding), to justify higher cost of generation
Very high at $ 6.0-6.5 million per MW which works out to around Rs.27 Crore per MW. The reference investment cost for coal would be Rs. 5 – 5.5 crore per
MW
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Issue vi. Financial status of supplier
Dabhol – Enron
Enron was near bankruptcy, hence desperate for large contract Jaitapur – Areva
Areva is also near bankruptcy (debts estimated 8 billion euro), hence desperate for large order; its larger partner state-owned EdF also in financial trouble with estimated debts
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50 billion euro . vii. Proof of
Technology
GE introduced Frame 9F turbine about whose performance technical details were not available Areva wants to introduce EPWR
(European Pressurized Water Reactor), a technology which is yet to be proven in the nuclear plant under construction at Olkiluoto in Finland. Several design / safety features of the EPR have been
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questioned
by European & US Nuclear
Regulatory Commissions; there have been stoppages of construction in
Finland and disputes with contractors,
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cost escalation as a consequence etc .
Of particular concern are the Regulators questions related to nuclear safety aspects. viii.
Transfer of
Risks
All risks were systematically transferred to public domain such as Foreign Exchange risk, fuel price risk etc.
Nuclear Liability Bill, recently and hurriedly passed by Parliament, transfers very major part of the accident risk to the public domain; minimal risk to technology supplier with risk being transferred to plant operator and thence to public domain; hence unproven technology can be tried out with minimal risk to technology supplier
(Areva).
ix.
Nontransparent
Subsidies
Pioneered a new regime of using subsidies from Govt. of
India and State Govt. to their own benefit such as customs and excise duty reduction, cheap land, infrastructure
Framework of public subsidies completely non-transparent, not enough information available in public domain. 12
development etc.
Similarities between Dabhol Enron and Jaitapur Areva Projects: (contd.)
Issue
B.
x.
Dabhol – Enron
Jaitapur – Areva
Very weak; Detailed Project Report
(DPR) and Environmental Impact
Assessment Report (EIA) were not made available in public domain
Very weak, despite RTI Act; DPR and EIA not available despite project being undertaken by PSU
Political
Information
available in public domain
xi.
Political endorsement by foreign political interests Open backing to the Enron deal by Backing from Sarkozy; well orchestrated then US Ambassador to India Frank quid pro quo of rewarding foreign
Wisner and US Energy Secretary; well commercial interests in exchange for political mediation with Nuclear Suppliers orchestrated Group.
xii.
Jurisdiction
Unlike normal commercial projects, Jurisdictional issue unclear with IAEA
Govt. of Maharashtra had to agree to inspection and other treaty obligations
(such as Nuclear Liability Bill supposedly in foreign arbitration in London. line with practices in other countries) being contentious issues.
xiii.
Endorsement by Suspicious involvement of Ministers vested Indian from both Govt. of India and political interests successive political Govts. in
Maharashtra with no accountability, no action till date
Endorsement by vested Indian political interests has started; since Dept. of Atomic
Energy is with PM, it is ultimately his responsibility as decision maker.
xiv.
Political naiveté Exhibition of various degrees of and corruption on naiveté and corruption amongst section of politicians and section of the Indian side bureaucracy at both Central and
State levels. Four political parties involved in the decisions – Congress,
NCP, BJP and Shiv Sena, along with
Same exhibition of naiveté and duplicity amongst public officials , both political and bureaucratic; 15% of Rs.283,000 crore is Rs.
42,000 cores which will eventually emerge as the potential corruption, not accounting for escalation of construction costs.
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their bureaucratic favorites
Similarities between Dabhol Enron and Jaitapur Areva Projects: (contd.)
Issue
C.
Strategic risk of naval attack during war or target of terrorist attack D.
Institutional
xvi.
Jaitapur – Areva
Strategic Risks
xv.
Dabhol – Enron
Never properly addressed; the war risk included attack on the gas supply tankers and the associated public cost of naval protection, which could be considered a public subsidy; the same holds true for protection against attack by terrorists.
Not being properly addressed; the risk of terrorist attack has to also cover fuel shipment, fuel offloading, spent nuclear fuel transportation and nuclear waste storage over and above direct attack on the facility.
Associated costs have to be considered public subsidy.
Coordination between various institutions of
State
Usual exhibition of lack of coordination between Central and State institutions, obfuscation of issues and responsibilities followed by improvements upon the truth.
Repetition of entrenched institutional habits, nothing having been learnt from the earlier Enron fiasco.
xvii.
Institutional accountability Lacking; no public official either political or bureaucratic has been found guilty and punished till date, though “beneficiaries” are known Lacking; official statements are being made in defence of the project by the former Chairman of the Atomic
Energy Commission of India and former Secretary, Dept. of Atomic
Energy. This provides for “plausible deniability” at the official level.
xviii.
Regulatory
Oversight
No functioning regulatory institutions in India when the project was being finalized, the
Regulatory Commissions Act having been passed in 1998.
What Regulatory Commission can disallow a project on which Rs.
2,80,000 crore would have been spent? It will be a fait accompli.
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The above tables show the process of history repeating itself, which is hardly desirable given both the dangers and sizeable cost that are involved. This is precisely the reason that it is necessary that these issues be placed squarely in the public domain, to prevent a sorry repetition of the earlier episode.
Citizens of India need to remember that whereas the guilty parties from Enron were put on trial in the US and found guilty, the entire matter has been successfully suppressed in India though there have been massive public losses to the Indian economy. The matter was never brought to trial in India, the guilty never identified nor punished. This is a sorry record of democracy in India.
Beyond these issues, the following questions need to be posed to the Ministry of Environment and
Forests:
i.
What happens to the Constitutional obligation of every citizen to protect the environment? Can citizens be arrested for attempting to protect the environment? Or shouldn’t the police be put behind bars for preventing citizens from protecting the environment?
ii. Under the Environment Protection Act and the Solid Waste Management Rules, has due diligence been exercised by the Ministry before granting clearance to the project, considering that the project involves highly dangerous radioactive solid wastes which need to be immobilized for very long periods of time? iii. Under the Prevention and Control of Water Pollution Act, has the Ministry considered cooling water from the project as a radioactive pollutant? iv. Since neither the Hazardous Waste (Management and Handling) Rules, 1989 nor the Hazardous
Waste (Storage Export and Import) Rules, 1989 include radioactive wastes under the schedule of the hazardous substances, what protection is afforded to the Indian citizen from exposure to radioactive substances?
v. What happens to the constitutionally mandated right to life of ordinary citizens of India?
We find no answers to these questions. iv. Specific lies disseminated at the local level
There is a familiar pattern to the dissemination of lies at the local level; generally, it is asserted by local politicians that ‘outsiders’ are provoking ‘innocent locals’ into opposing the project. Simultaneously, the carrot of enhanced compensation for land and property is held out in order to entice some of the locals away from the protest mode. Once this has been successfully achieved, a rift is created at the local level thereby permitting manipulation of one faction of locals against another, by co-opting the first faction.
Subsequently, the other faction can be politically or institutionally repressed as they have been
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weakened due to the rift that is engineered. This process is now visible at Jaitapur , as an excellent
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example of the rhetoric that is unleashed on such occasions. Key phrases include: 1. Vested interests were behind the opposition, people having no relation with the area, poisoning the minds of the people, spreading rumors and misunderstandings. 2. Enhanced compensation package for those affected by the project. 3. Communists and NGOs are coming here. 4 . There are other people and organisations behind these people, maybe from abroad who want to stop development).
From the previous section, it may be appreciated that the issues underlying Jaitapur are not local; in different ways, they are regional, national, institutional and international. They fall outside the purview of politics - as – usual, due to the extremely long term nature of risk and hazards that are consequent upon decisions being contemplated at present. A gentle reminder may be necessary that the Constitution of India guarantees freedom of speech and expression as well as freedom of association to all its citizens.
The State of Maharashtra violated this sacrament when it detained former Justice Shri Kolse Patil on the way to Jaitapur for participation in the public protests.
In conclusion
There is an interesting definition of fascism, given by Benito Mussolini:
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." 17
There is no need to question Mussolini 's authority to define fascism.
When this definition is applied to the relationship between states and corporate nuclear interests, what emerges is nuclear fascism.
The merger of state and corporate interests can be seen in a wider set of public actions that have been undertaken in the last 15 to 20 years. These include: the establishment of SEZs, the corporatization of agriculture, the attempts to privatize water, the auctioning of coal blocks and oil/gas fields for exploration, the free reign given to mineral exploitation in rich forest areas irrespective of long term environmental damage, the increasing “public-private partnerships” in infrastructure projects wherein the public treasury bears the burden of risks and costs and private partners are assured profits and subsidies; the attempts to privatize the banking, insurance and pension funds which are the backbone of national savings for long term public investment; and so on. In the name of reforms, the privatization and globalization processes that favor unbridled corporate interests, have been unleashed by the state and met with an increasing storm of protests by citizens across the country, as well as a large number of suicides in the farming community, a phenomenon never witnessed earlier in free India.
The Jaitapur project fulfils all the criteria in the above definition: State power being represented by the
Department of Atomic Energy directly under the PM, corporate power being represented by Areva backed by state owned Electricite de France (EdF). Jaitapur is a merger of the two.
Jaitapur, therefore, represents the final test case for the country.
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The environmentalist Denis Hayes, writing over 30 years ago, has concluded, “The increased deployment of nuclear power facilities must lead society toward authoritarianism. Indeed, safe reliance upon nuclear power as the principal source of energy may be possible only in a totalitarian state.”18
This merger is a threat to open democratic processes; hence the challenge must be faced squarely by all citizens of India and others.
As the above comparison between Dabhol Enron and Jaitapur Areva shows, the Jaitapur project will be much more damaging in both political and economic terms as compared to the Dabhol Enron Project.
Moreover, unlike the Enron project, the long term health risks and costs as well as the strategic security risks are much higher in the case of the Jaitapur project. It is time to stop bandying lies in the public domain, anchored to false notions of national pride and nuclear grandstanding. It is obnoxious that all this is being done by agencies and institutions of the state in the name of ‘development’, ‘energy security’ and ‘economic growth’.
The pretence is that it is not possible to generate electricity by other means and technologies; therefore, we have to accept all these long term risks and consequences in the national interest; and that somehow, it is necessary to play this game with foreign interests, even if it means life-threatening consequences to the people of the Konkan region as well as to others far away.
Both the falsehood and the ignorance underlying this pretense become visible when we consider a
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recent document published by the UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) which lists various technologies increasingly available for electricity generation in tune with climate mitigation objectives. The list, which is four pages long, does not include electricity from nuclear sources.
Political decisions based on such falsehoods bring democracy to shame.
The Jaitapur project must be halted before it is too late and any preliminary agreements in this regard must be scrapped. Even if the country loses some money at this stage, this would be preferable rather than being committed to the much larger disaster that this project will entail.
"Satyameva Jayate" (Sanskrit: "Truth Alone Triumphs") is the national motto of India, inscribed at the base of the national symbol.
Will truth prevail?
****
17
References:
1.
'Jaitapur not a done deal ', Jan 12, 2011 / Times of India
2.
‘Australia snubs India, refuses to lift ban on Uranium sale’, Jan 20, 2011 Indian Express
3.
Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen, ‘Health Risks of Nuclear Power’, Ceedata Consultancy, Chaam,
Netherlands, (2010), pp. 29-31
4.
Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen, ‘Reactor: construction operation, maintenance and refurbishments decommissioning and dismantling’ in ‘Nuclear Power – the Energy Balance’, Part
F , Ceedata Consultancy, Chaam, Netherlands, (2007), pp.46
5.
KiKK 2007: Kaatsch P, Spix C, Schmiedel S, Schulze-Rath R, Mergenthaler A & Blettner M,
Epidemiologische Studie zu Kinderkrebs in der Umgebung von Kernkraftwerken,
Vorhaben StSch 4334 (in German), Im Auftrag des Bundesministeriums für Umwelt, Naturschutz und Reaktorsicherkeit und des Bundesamtes für Strahlenschutz, Germany, 2007, www.bfs.de/de/bfs/druck/Ufoplan/4334_KiKK_Gesamt_T.pdf 6.
Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen, ‘Reactor: construction operation, maintenance and refurbishments decommissioning and dismantling’ in ‘Nuclear Power – the Energy Balance’, Part
F , Ceedata Consultancy, Chaam, Netherlands, (2007), pp. 42
7.
Stephanie Cooke, ‘In Mortal Hands - A Cautionary History of the Nuclear Age’, Orient Blackswan
(2010), pp. 356
8.
Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen, ‘Reactor: construction operation, maintenance and refurbishments decommissioning and dismantling’ in ‘Nuclear Power – the Energy Balance’, Part
F , Ceedata Consultancy, Chaam, Netherlands, (2007), Table F-15, pp 49.
9.
‘Role of breeder reactor system in the European Community’, by UNIPEDE/CEC Breeder Reactor
Study Group, Published by ENEL, Roma, September 1981.
10.
Lidsky LM & Miller MM, ‘Nuclear power and energy security. A revised strategy for Japan’,
PARESWorkshop: Energy Security in Japan, Tokyo, Japan, 13 July 1998.
11.
UIC-67 (2005) Thorium, Uranium Information Centre Nov. 2004, UIC Nuclear Issues Briefing Paper
No. 67, www.uic.com.au/nip67.htm.
12.
Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen, ‘Reactor: construction operation, maintenance and refurbishments decommissioning and dismantling’ in ‘Nuclear Power – the Energy Balance’, Part
D , Ceedata Consultancy, Chaam, Netherlands, (2007), pp 71.
13.
2009 annual reports of EdF and Areva
18
14.
http://www.hse.gov.uk/newreactors/joint-regulatory-statement.pdf
15.
Fact sheet: Olkiluoto 3, Greenpeace, November 2009
16.
Indian Express, January 23, 2011, page-2
17.
Chip Berlet, ‘Mussolini on the Corporate State’, carried on the website of Political Research
Associates.
18.
Winner Langdon (1980): Do Artifacts Have Politics? in Daedalus – Modern Technology: Problem or Opportunity? Vol. 109 (1) Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, pp. 121.
19.
Handbook for Conducting Technology Needs Assessment for Climate Change, UNDP (2010),
Annex 7, pp. 127-135 http://unfccc.int/ttclear/jsp/TNAHandbook.jsp
***
Appendix – I
English translation of the interview of Dr. Kakodkar published in Daily Sakal on 5th Jan 2011
Paragraph 1 In the intermediate stages of the economic development of any nation, the growth rate depends on the availability of energy. In developed countries, per capita electricity consumption is roughly 15,000 to 18,000 units, whereas in India it is in the range of only 650 units. Thus, to allow an average Indian citizen to live a reasonably comfortable life, we need to make available at least 5000 units to him.
Paragraph 2 It is expected that the population of India will stabilize somewhere around 160 Crores. To fulfill the energy requirement of this vast population, we will need at least ten times of the current available electricity in coming 30-40 years. Today’s power is mainly produced by coal (65 to 70%) and hydro (25%) based power generation. Considering the future power requirement, it is certain that these options will prove insufficient. In that case, we have to consider solar and nuclear-based power generation alternatives. Solar power generation is still expensive; thus the option of nuclear power generation is not only necessary but also inevitable.
Political inevitability
Paragraph 3 India has successfully developed nuclear power generation technology (in the areas such as fast reactor technology and thorium use, India ranks second behind Russia) However, our domestic reserves of uranium are limited; they will suffice only 10,000 MW power generation. Our future electricity demand is much more than this number. Secondly, since India has developed its own nuclear
19
technology and rising as a nuclear power, the whole world now understands the implications of declaring war against India. That is why many countries extend their co-operation in nuclear technology.
Paragraph 4 Under these circumstances, it may be asked, why don’t we concentrate only on uranium import and why are we taking foreign help in other areas. However, we have to consider the foreign interests, or more precisely, the economic interests of the companies in some foreign countries. From their point of view, If there is more real business interest in other areas other than uranium, then India had to consider it seriously. For lifting sanctions and recognizing India as a nuclear power through undertaking nuclear commerce with India, it was unavoidable to carry out such business deals with a few countries. Paragraph 5 Of the 45 nuclear supplier nations who are organized into a body, we sought help from countries such as US, Russia and France, as mediators in lifting sanctions against India, and that is why in order to cater to their commercial interests, we have concluded nuclear power agreements with these countries. Areva: allegations and refutations
Paragraph 6 In France, still 75% of the power generation to date is done by pressurized water reactor based nuclear technology. This and the related reactor technologies have been developed gradually over the years. All the safety aspects have been thoroughly considered while developing these technologies
The European power reactors, which we will buy from France based Areva company, have also been developed through this gradual process. This company is currently building two nuclear reactors in China and one each in France and Finland. We will of course verify that all safety aspects have been considered before taking decision on buying such types of reactors from Areva.
Paragraph 7 It is true that there has been some delay in building the reactor in Finland. However, this delay was mainly caused by some disputes between the reactor building contractors and supervisors. We will only benefit from this situation by understanding all the potential problems that we may need to face while constructing our nuclear reactors.
Paragraph 8 Areva is well-experienced and well-known in this field. Although this company was founded in 2001, its roots can be traced back to Framatome company during the Charles de Gaulle era. Today’s
Areva is a conglomerate of companies Framatome, Cogema and Technicatome.
Jaitapur: allegations and refutations
20
Paragraph 9 Water temperature: Jaitapur was selected for this project because it is a very convenient location for this project. Since this place is situated on the coast, the reactor cooling concern will not be there. As there is no human habitat there, no question arises of displacement of population.
Paragraph 10 There will not be any ash or particle emission from this project. Thus, there is no possibility of having their adverse effects on biodiversity and crops. We, in collaboration with some universities, have also conducted a study on ‘thermal ecology’ at the plant locations of some other nuclear plants, and we haven’t found any such effects there.
Paragraph 11 It is fact that hot water will be emitted from the Jaitapur power plant. However, when all the six stages of the project become operational, all the hot (+50C) water will be discharged deep into the sea. When this water is carried in a pipe from the plant, its temperature will be lowered by 1.50C before actually discharging into the sea. Now, the effect of the +3.50C water temperature will be felt only within
300 m radius from the discharge, and that too until the water gets cooled to normal temperature in a short duration of time
Paragraph 12 No risk of radioactivity: One has to admit that there will be some radioactivity from this project within, which means that there will be no net radioactive emission from this project. Moreover,
95% of the radioactive waste will be recycled; thus the concern is only for the limited amount of the waste. The rest 5% waste undergoes immobilisation and is encapsulated in a closed environment. Just to explain in a simple language: the net radioactive emission from such nuclear power plant is in the range of 2 nGy/h, whereas the radioactive emission during a normal x-ray treatment is almost 1,00,000 times
(i.e. 2,00,000 nGy/h) to the former. Besides, the radioactive emission from any such power plant is always equal to (or even less than) the natural radioactivity at that location. All the power plants are daily monitored for radioactive emissions.
Paragraph 13 Employment opportunities for the locals: Since advanced technology is being used in this project, the local people will be assigned at the high level posts only with exceptions. However, at lower level duties, the locals or displaced will be given preferences. Besides, if the native people jointly decide to enter in the related service sectors, then they have big opportunities in this project. Considering all these favorable aspects, it was not clear why the Ministry of Environment and Forest has given its go ahead to this plant with only certain terms and conditions; and that needs to be checked. After all any such projects are permitted only after fulfilling certain norms, and Jaitapur project will also strictly follow them. Paragraph 14 Will this electricity be expensive? Any consumer has a right to get electricity at a competitive cost from all the available options. There are several negotiations going on to make this happen. That is why it is not possible to declare the cost of the electricity at this point. It will also not be worthwhile to unnecessarily doubt anything at this moment of time.
Paragraph 15 While concluding the agreement with France, India has considered all the practical aspects: there was an option to go for a “turn key” nuclear project for us, but considering the cheap availability of labor and overall cost effectiveness, it was always our strategy to only import the critically required equipment from abroad and then to commission them in India. While dealing with Areva, our Nuclear
21
Power Corporation (NPCIL) will always keep this in mind. The implementation activities of this project will also be conducted by NPCIL; thus the overall cost of this project will also be reduced.
Future opportunities: The hike in the fuel prices not only affects India but the whole world. However, countries like France are least affected with this rise. Nuclear based power generation option is the main reason behind that. Nuclear fuel is least polluting and even recyclable. France even recycles the whole fuel. Paragraph 16 There are even proof-of-concept projects in France on producing biomass using nuclear power, which are aimed to subsequently produce fuel for automobiles. That is one of the options of clean energy. It is also possible to produce such automobile fuel using hydro power; however in this process CO2 is emitted. Thus to produce biomass using nuclear power can be proved as the most environment-friendly option. The initial cost of nuclear power generation is very high; however the subsequent expenditure is very less. The technology component of this project is also very expensive, which in due course of time will definitely be lowered.
***
22
References: 'Jaitapur not a done deal ', Jan 12, 2011 / Times of India 2. ‘Australia snubs India, refuses to lift ban on Uranium sale’, Jan 20, 2011 Indian Express 3. Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen, ‘Health Risks of Nuclear Power’, Ceedata Consultancy, Chaam, Netherlands, (2010), pp F , Ceedata Consultancy, Chaam, Netherlands, (2007), pp.46 5. Vorhaben StSch 4334 (in German), Im Auftrag des Bundesministeriums für Umwelt, Naturschutz und Reaktorsicherkeit und des Bundesamtes für Strahlenschutz, Germany, 2007, F , Ceedata Consultancy, Chaam, Netherlands, (2007), pp. 42 7. Stephanie Cooke, ‘In Mortal Hands - A Cautionary History of the Nuclear Age’, Orient Blackswan (2010), pp F , Ceedata Consultancy, Chaam, Netherlands, (2007), Table F-15, pp 49. UIC-67 (2005) Thorium, Uranium Information Centre Nov. 2004, UIC Nuclear Issues Briefing Paper No D , Ceedata Consultancy, Chaam, Netherlands, (2007), pp 71. Indian Express, January 23, 2011, page-2 17. Winner Langdon (1980): Do Artifacts Have Politics? in Daedalus – Modern Technology: Problem or Opportunity? Vol Handbook for Conducting Technology Needs Assessment for Climate Change, UNDP (2010), Annex 7, pp
January 2011
Factsheet of the Jaitapur Nuclear Power Project
1
1
Power generation
2
Reactors
3
Land requirement
2.
Completion: 1650 MW x 6 = 9900 MW
1. 6 European Pressurized Reactors (EPRs) of 1650 MW each
(India’s installed capacity: 4780 MW). In first phase, 2 reactors will be operated
Expected date of commissioning of first 2 reactors 3
1. First stage: 1650 MW x 2 = 3,300 MW
2. Total 4 EPRs in world under construction: 2 in China, 1 in
Finland (Olkiluoto), 1 in France (Flamanville); none operational, none proven
2018
938 Ha land in Madban and Jaitapur, of which 938 Ha already procured USD 25 billion (Kakodkar’s interview in Sakal (05 Jan 2011))
4
Investment
5
Fuel supply
25 years by France, this is less than the operating life of the plant,
35 years (AREVA claims it is 60 years)
6
Type of fuel
Fuel will be 5% enriched uranium oxide or uranium-plutonium oxide Our estimate @ USD 6.5 million per MW, works out to USD 64.36 billion = Rs. 283,140 Crores (ref needed)
1.
7
Joint venture
Areva (France) and Nuclear Power Corporation of India
(NPCIL) for EPRs (Areva is Supplier)
2.
Department of Atomic Energy will sign a separate agreement for supply of nuclear fuel.
8
Required manpower
6,000 to 8,000 (during construction); i.e. Rs. 35 to 46 Crores/job.
At this level of investment, each job is equivalent to a factory.
(However, operations needs only 800 highly skilled personnel)
9
Exclusion zone
1.6 km radius from the centre of reactor
10
Expected electricity generation (9,900 MW)
11
Nuclear waste
12
Cooling Water
69.4 billion units per annum @ 80% PLF and best assumptions
1. The waste will be buried in cement-concrete based blocks
2. Waste will be under surveillance for 30 years
1. The plant will suck in 5,200 Cr lit. of water every day from the
2
sea & throw it back into sea at a higher (+50C) temperature
14
Affected land owners
2355
1. A critical component in Areva 's architecture is "extra-large forgings", is only available in Japan.
15
Possible objections from
Japan and Australia
2. Japan has consistently demanded India 's signature to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), which New Delhi has
1
refused
3. Australia has recently refused to supply uranium fuel, citing
2
NPT
16
Cost of electricity
Not revealed
Introduction:
The Jaitapur project in Ratnagiri district of Maharashtra has been in the public eye in recent months due to a host of controversies that surround the project. These controversies range over the massive size of the project, the potential impact of radio activity on the entire region and it’s eco systems, the untested reactor technologies to be used with particular reference to safety aspects, the international conditionalities imposed on the country for supply of nuclear fuel, the cost of the project and the subsequent cost of electricity generated from the project, the assumption of accident liability by the
Government of India, the preliminary grant of environmental clearance to the project without sufficient public dissemination and healthy debate, the involvement of a public sector undertaking in an activity that poses long term health and security risks to citizens of this country, the involvement of foreign political and commercial interests in the pursuit of this project and the lack of institutional accountability from various institutional levels within both central and state governments. As if this list is not sufficiently long to be damning, there is the additional list of activities which have now become common place whenever any large project not perceived to be in the public interest is sought to be bulldozed through the inevitable spread of disinformation at the local level, suppression of the truth, political and bureaucratic obfuscation through the media, and ultimately the use of instruments of state power for repression when local protests erupt in opposition to the project. We intend to address most of these issues so that citizens of the country can ultimately decide whether a project of the size and scope of the
Jaitapur nuclear project is genuinely in the public interest and whether public money and public institutions can be permitted to undertake and implement decisions whose detrimental and life threatening consequences may well last for thousands if not tens of thousands of years after the life of the project. These decisions do not fall into the purview of routine day to day decisions – they demand a much longer term view and public values of the highest order to be exercised prior to approval of such decisions. Science, it is said, is the pursuit of truth at the highest level. In the land of Mahatma Gandhi, we as citizens would assume that truth would play an over riding role in defense of public interest and the
3
rights of citizens of India. Both sets of values are being violated in the insistence on this project. Despite the wide range of opposition, based on exposure of the untruths that this project has garnered, not merely at the local level but also nationally and internationally. Our insistence that the highest public values have to be upheld in this domain are the basic justification for putting this document into the public domain. The consequences of this project are so dire that citizens of India as well as all thinking and conscientious citizens of the world should be taking note of this project, more so as it is likely to be a forerunner of other such gigantic nuclear projects in other parts of India and around the world.
This state of affairs arises because of the false claim by the nuclear industry that nuclear power is ‘clean’.
As we will try to show in the course of this document, not only is nuclear power one of the most life threatening and dangerous of technologies, it has also been historically associated with a high level of non transparent politics and power play, with no accountability and little respect for truth. In essence, the nuclear establishment all across the world, in both its military and civilian avatars and its public and private manifestations, has been a state within a state, highly dangerous to the open functioning of democracy in every country of the world where it has spread. So grave is the danger posed by the various dimensions of this technology that democratically conscious citizens around the world will have to reflect and act on the future of this technology.
The global debate on climate change and the need to curb carbon emissions into the atmosphere has given a fresh lease of life to nuclear technology under the thin pretext that it does not emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The truth is that the radio-nuclides that result from the entire nuclear cycle
(from an objective and inter-disciplinary cradle-to-grave analysis) are far longer lasting and far more dangerous than climate change; while the effects of climate change may last from a few hundred years to a few thousand years, the life threatening damages from radio-nuclides can last from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years. There is simply no comparison between these dangers. While some degree of adaptation by human society is possible to counteract the worst effects of climate change, there is no possibility of adaptation to the consequences of radio-nuclides in the environment, which will spread death and mutation amongst all life forms exposed to radiation, including human beings. Recent research shows that children and pregnant women are particularly susceptible to radiation damage resulting in leukemia (cancer of the blood), other types of solid cancers and cellular tissue damage to
3
unborn children . In the light of these growing evidences, is it at all conscionable that in the country of
Mahatma Gandhi, those who claim to wear the mantle of science should be going ahead with the pursuit of such a dangerous technology, that too at the public cost. Evidences and arguments will be briefly presented in the remaining part of this document, from which appropriate conclusions may be drawn.
Lies in the Public Domain:
The Jaitapur nuclear project has engendered so many lies in the public domain that it is now possible to classify these lies into categories. Of particular importance are the following categories of lies:
i.
Generic lies put out by the worldwide nuclear industry
ii.
Generic lies put out by the Indian nuclear establishment
4
iii.
Specific lies related to the Jaitapur project
iv.
Specific lies disseminated at the local level
We shall take up the above categories of lies for further discussion below. In the context of the Jaitapur project, the situation has now begun to resemble the ill fated Dabhol - Enron Project. There is a cynical view that ‘public memory is short’. However, it is not so short that the people of Maharashtra or indeed across India have forgotten the Dabhol – Enron Project and its aftermath. Government at the Central and
State levels would be well advised to draw on their organizational memory (if they have any, which is doubtful) about the course of the Enron project, and the path by which it ended up in the present mess.
Similarly, citizens movements as well as informed public opinion would also be well advised to draw upon the way the Enron project was finally brought to its knees, rather painfully. The similarities between the
Dabhol - Enron Project and the present Jaitapur- Areva Project are so startling that they can no longer be dismissed. These similarities are indicated in a table below and form part of the category of lies specific to the Jaitapur Project. However, the differences between the Dabhol - Enron and Jaitapur-Areva Project stem from the differences in the technologies and fuels for the purposes of power generation in the two projects. Hence the need to critically look at the generic lies put out by the worldwide nuclear industry and their Indian counterparts, undertaken below.
i.
Generic lies put out by the worldwide nuclear industry
As indicated above, the worldwide ‘nuclear renaissance’ is premised on the assertion that in the context of climate change, nuclear energy is a clean and reliable source of energy, which is at complete variance with the truth.
4
a) Information now publicly available internationally indicates that the life cycle of nuclear power plant operations generates a large variety of radio-nuclides with half-lives ranging from a few hundred days to a few million years (see table below).
5
6
The above table also includes tritium (half life 12.32 years) and carbon 14 (half life 5715 years).
These radio-nuclides are present in the cooling water that will be pumped out in huge quantities into the sea. Amongst the radio-active emissions from the plant, alpha emitters are classified as amongst a most harmful type of radio nuclides in living organisms if they are ingested or inhaled, leading to exposure of unshielded tissue, causing biological damage. The same holds true for beta emissions both positive and negative. Gamma radiation is more energetic than X-rays and can pass through thick layers of metal and concrete. These radio-active emissions can affect both cellular as well as DNA materials in all living systems, including humans. As can be seen from the above table Americium-243 has a half life over 7000 years, Plutonium-240 over six thousand five hundred years, Plutonium-239 and Niobium-94 have a half life over twenty-four thousand years,
Nickel-59 have years of seventy-six thousand years, Calcium-41 with a half life of one hundred thirty thousand years, Chlorine-36 with a half life of three hundred thousand years, Tecnetium99 with a half life of two hundred thousand years and Iodine one twenty nine with a half life of seventeen million years, are all part of the dangerous radio nuclide associated with the nuclear cycle. There are no known technologies for isolating these radio-active materials for such long periods of time. In the light of this knowledge, to assert that nuclear energy technology is ‘clean’ is a travesty of the truth. Yet governments with a life span of five years choose to take decisions whose consequences may last for many thousands of years. Both the political and bureaucratic part of the governance structure must be held to account before such decisions can be ratified.
b) "A major study (called KiKK)
3,5
commissioned by the German Government revealed
that the leukemia incidence among young children living near nuclear reactors was increased by
120%, and solid cancers were increased by 60%. This result has been affirmed in other studies.
The study was conducted around sixteen nuclear power plants in Germany with 1592 cases of exposure victims in the sample group and 4735 interviews of equivalent persons in the non exposed control group.
"With regard to the incidence of cancers with children before their 5th birthday, living within a distance of 5 km from a nuclear power plant, the KiKK study concluded:
• 1.2x increase in child leukemias (120% increase)
• 0.6x increase in child solid cancers (60% increase)
• strong association with proximity to a nuclear reactor".
The pathways of tritium and carbon-14 into the human body via drinking water and the food chain are briefly discussed. These radio-nuclides, which are routinely released into the environment from nuclear power plants, are biologically very active to the extent that these nuclides are deposited near DNA in cell nuclei and pose serious radiation hazards."
"Within a radius of some 30 km an increasing occurrence of childhood cancer with decreasing living distance from a nominally operating nuclear power plant is proved to exist"(ref 3, pp. 65).
7
Compare this 30 km impact radius with the 1.6 km exclusion zone for Jaitapur, cited in the box item below Kakodkar 's interview in Sakal (January 5, 2011; English translation of interview in
Appendix-1).
c)
With regard to the presence of radio-active tritium and carbon-14 in the cooling water, an international report has this to say: ‘the cooling water from the reactor becomes highly radioactive by tritium and, to a lesser extent, by carbon-14, fission product and activated corrosion products. Therefore, the cooling water should be treated as radio-active waste. In today’s
6
practice the cooling water is discharged into rivers and sea’ .
It may be noted that 53000 million liters per day of radio-active cooling water will be deposited into the sea of the coast of Jaitapur. This will continue for thirty-five years, (or sixty years, going by AREVA’s claims of the plant life) which is the normative life of the nuclear power plant unless extended further. Over a period of time, this radio-active water will spread all along the Konkan and Goa coasts and may reach upto Mumbai, endangering the lives of its citizens. Radiation products will also enter into fish from the region, other sea food as well as breeding grounds and coastal aquifer areas up and down the entire coast. In effect, any fish or sea food consumed by local or distant populations including citizens of foreign countries could have adverse health impacts through the consumption of marine products. Marine product exports would have to be stopped causing further economic damage to the region. The same would hold true for Alphonso mangoes from the region and their exports.
‘The British government has been at pains over the years to play down attempts to correlate cancers with Sellafield radioactivity, particularly when it involves individuals living near the plant
7
but not working at it” . The Sellafield complex houses one of the largest reprocessing operations in Britain and stores enough plutonium to make twenty thousand nuclear bombs. People living near Sellafield generally shun locally caught fish and most of it ends up elsewhere in Europe.
Instead of viewing these evidences which are mounting around the world, the entire debate around cooling water is sought to be diverted to whether the water will be 5 degrees centigrade above ambient temperature and what will be the impact of this thermal pollution at the local level (see para 9 in Appendix 1). Similarly, the impact on ‘bio-diversity’ is underplayed by diverting it towards flora and fauna (see para 10 in Appendix-1). In both instances it is the impact of radioactivity over extremely long durations of time as well as spread over space that need to be considered. Such diversions fall into a pattern which we call a category of lies.
d) The next category of lies revolves around the concept of ‘immobilization’ of waste and long term storage. There is no known technology for immobilizing radioactive products for ten thousand to a million years, nor are there any safe geologic repositories which can be guaranteed to hold these wastes safely for such long periods of time. The US, with seventy thousand tonnes of nuclear waste, has been unable to have the Yucca Mountain (Nevada) storage facilities operational and certified. In the US, the revised court mandated time frame to the Environmental
Protection Agency, is to prevent leakage of nuclear waste over the next million years (ref. 7, pp.
8
386-398). Compare this with the thirty year ‘cooling period’ which is being promised in the case of the Jaitapur Power Plant.
e) The next category of lies revolves around decommissioning of the nuclear plant after completion of its operational life of thirty-five years. No plant anywhere in the world which is remotely the size of the Jaitapur plant has ever been fully decommissioned; in the few known instances, the reactors have been dismantled and taken away for storage to state owned storage facilities while the radio-active concrete parts have simply been blasted by explosives. Amongst the scarce data available in the public domain, the cost of dismantling is estimated to vary between 60% - 160%
8
of the cost of construction . Again, this cost of dismantling or decommissioning of reactors is not factored into the cost of generation of electricity. Hence, it becomes possible for the nuclear industry to argue that nuclear electricity is cheap (see para 14 in Appendix 1), because many of the costs and dangers are simply wiped off the books. As we shall show below, the investment cost per mega watt of nuclear electricity is six to seven times the cost of coal thermal generation, which is the reason that nuclear electric plants have not received new orders for many decades in the developed countries.
Despite all the above evidences, it is being asserted that nuclear energy is “clean”. Perhaps the Govt of
India and its Ministry of Environment attach a different meaning to the word “clean” as compared to what is publicly understood by the word.
Generic lies put out by the Indian nuclear establishment:
The Indian nuclear establishment, in consonance with the world wide nuclear industry, has propagated untruths with regard to nuclear energy being clean, safe, free of radiation hazard, affordable and reliable.
However, it can also be credited with some particularly India-specific untruths: these relate to competence in developing breeder reactors, possibilities of future thorium based reactors and so on. It is time that these untruths were pinned down.
a) Breeder reactors: a variety of international sources as well as discussions with nuclear physicists and other experts indicate that the successful future development of breeder reactors is a very remote possibility. However, the fantasy is appealing because it posits that breeder reactors will produce more fuel than they consume, leading to a future of plentiful and cheap nuclear electricity. This untruth is related to the historically earlier assertion by the nuclear industry, in the early stages of nuclear energy development, that nuclear electricity would be ‘too cheap to meter’. However, the performance reality of breeder reactors is that in over fifty years of intensive research, seven countries (USA, UK, France, Germany, Former USSR now Russia, Japan and India) have invested hundreds of billions of dollars and have so far failed to demonstrate that the breeder cycle is technically feasible (ref 3, part B, pp. 4). Problems of the breeder system are
9
10
discussed in more detailed by UNIPEDE/CEC (1981) and Lidsky and Miller (1998) . The authors concluded that the breeder system is not feasible, not only due to technical hurdles, but also
9
because the system cannot meet the requirements of safety, proliferation and economy. Yet, the lollypop has continuously been dangled in front of ignorant politicians and decision makers. This fantasy has probably helped to ensure a plentiful supply of public funds to the Indian nuclear establishment without any accountability, behind the veil of secrecy.
b) It follows from the above that thorium breeder reactors are an even more remote fantasy because they would have to be based on the prior success of plutonium breeders whose technical feasibility is in doubt, as above. Yet, this untruth is found appealing based on the claim that India has large deposits of thorium. An overview of research projects in the past and of
11
advanced thorium reactor concepts is given in the references . In reality, thorium breeder cycle has never even reached the prototype phase.
c) Both these untruths continue to get propagated in the public domain because of the false prestige attached to nuclear bomb development. In actuality, the development of a nuclear explosive device is not all that complicated technologically as is made out to be. The real difficulty lies in either enriching uranium or obtaining plutonium from nuclear fuel waste through reprocessing. This is the reason why the Nuclear Supplier Group of countries (NSG) insists on taking back the nuclear fuel after use, with strict accounting procedures, international inspections, etc. Since India has more or less complied with these requirements in practice, where is the question of recognition under NPT and false prestige regarding development of nuclear devices.
For the country of Mahatma Gandhi, this should be a matter of shame rather than false pride. iii. Specific lies related to the Jaitapur project
With the above generic categories of lies, we now examine the vast number of specific lies being propagated about the Jaitapur nuclear power project. In essence, there is a startling similarity between the Jaitapur-Areva Project and the earlier Dabhol-Enron Project, also located in the Konkan region. The table below shows a detailed comparison between various aspects of the two projects.
Readers are advised to recall their memories of the entire course of events which happened in the public domain, ultimately resulting in the mothballing of the Dabhol-Enron Project with a massive loss to Maharashtra and to Indian financial institutions. Based on this comparison, it may be fair to conclude that the powers - that - be have very poor learning capabilities.
10
Similarities between Dabhol Enron and Jaitapur Areva Projects:
Issue
A.
Dabhol – Enron
Jaitapur – Areva
Technical –
Economic
i.
Size
At that time, touted as the largest private power project in the world, with false pride attached to size; financial size around Rs.10,000 crore.
Probably the largest NPP in the world as planned at present (9900 MW), over 3 times the size of the Enron project with false prestige attached to size; based on present information, this project will cost in the range of Rs.260,000 –
Rs.280,000 crore.
ii.
Fuel linkage
Gas linkage for 25 years not confirmed Nuclear fuel supply linkage not confirmed; France has no nuclear fuel
(uranium), Australia (with world’s largest uranium deposits) has refused to supply India citing NPT; data indicates insufficient international availability of uranium to meet life time requirements
12
of plant . iii. Fuel price
Not available at contract stage, hence Cost of Generation (CoG) could not be independently verified. Not available, hence CoG can not be independently verified
iv.
Fuel price risk
Risk not specified, hence risk guarantee cost not available
Risk not specified, hence risk guarantee cost not available
v.
Investment cost Artificially high (capital cost padding), to justify higher cost of generation
Very high at $ 6.0-6.5 million per MW which works out to around Rs.27 Crore per MW. The reference investment cost for coal would be Rs. 5 – 5.5 crore per
MW
11
Issue vi. Financial status of supplier
Dabhol – Enron
Enron was near bankruptcy, hence desperate for large contract Jaitapur – Areva
Areva is also near bankruptcy (debts estimated 8 billion euro), hence desperate for large order; its larger partner state-owned EdF also in financial trouble with estimated debts
13
50 billion euro . vii. Proof of
Technology
GE introduced Frame 9F turbine about whose performance technical details were not available Areva wants to introduce EPWR
(European Pressurized Water Reactor), a technology which is yet to be proven in the nuclear plant under construction at Olkiluoto in Finland. Several design / safety features of the EPR have been
14
questioned
by European & US Nuclear
Regulatory Commissions; there have been stoppages of construction in
Finland and disputes with contractors,
15
cost escalation as a consequence etc .
Of particular concern are the Regulators questions related to nuclear safety aspects. viii.
Transfer of
Risks
All risks were systematically transferred to public domain such as Foreign Exchange risk, fuel price risk etc.
Nuclear Liability Bill, recently and hurriedly passed by Parliament, transfers very major part of the accident risk to the public domain; minimal risk to technology supplier with risk being transferred to plant operator and thence to public domain; hence unproven technology can be tried out with minimal risk to technology supplier
(Areva).
ix.
Nontransparent
Subsidies
Pioneered a new regime of using subsidies from Govt. of
India and State Govt. to their own benefit such as customs and excise duty reduction, cheap land, infrastructure
Framework of public subsidies completely non-transparent, not enough information available in public domain. 12
development etc.
Similarities between Dabhol Enron and Jaitapur Areva Projects: (contd.)
Issue
B.
x.
Dabhol – Enron
Jaitapur – Areva
Very weak; Detailed Project Report
(DPR) and Environmental Impact
Assessment Report (EIA) were not made available in public domain
Very weak, despite RTI Act; DPR and EIA not available despite project being undertaken by PSU
Political
Information
available in public domain
xi.
Political endorsement by foreign political interests Open backing to the Enron deal by Backing from Sarkozy; well orchestrated then US Ambassador to India Frank quid pro quo of rewarding foreign
Wisner and US Energy Secretary; well commercial interests in exchange for political mediation with Nuclear Suppliers orchestrated Group.
xii.
Jurisdiction
Unlike normal commercial projects, Jurisdictional issue unclear with IAEA
Govt. of Maharashtra had to agree to inspection and other treaty obligations
(such as Nuclear Liability Bill supposedly in foreign arbitration in London. line with practices in other countries) being contentious issues.
xiii.
Endorsement by Suspicious involvement of Ministers vested Indian from both Govt. of India and political interests successive political Govts. in
Maharashtra with no accountability, no action till date
Endorsement by vested Indian political interests has started; since Dept. of Atomic
Energy is with PM, it is ultimately his responsibility as decision maker.
xiv.
Political naiveté Exhibition of various degrees of and corruption on naiveté and corruption amongst section of politicians and section of the Indian side bureaucracy at both Central and
State levels. Four political parties involved in the decisions – Congress,
NCP, BJP and Shiv Sena, along with
Same exhibition of naiveté and duplicity amongst public officials , both political and bureaucratic; 15% of Rs.283,000 crore is Rs.
42,000 cores which will eventually emerge as the potential corruption, not accounting for escalation of construction costs.
13
their bureaucratic favorites
Similarities between Dabhol Enron and Jaitapur Areva Projects: (contd.)
Issue
C.
Strategic risk of naval attack during war or target of terrorist attack D.
Institutional
xvi.
Jaitapur – Areva
Strategic Risks
xv.
Dabhol – Enron
Never properly addressed; the war risk included attack on the gas supply tankers and the associated public cost of naval protection, which could be considered a public subsidy; the same holds true for protection against attack by terrorists.
Not being properly addressed; the risk of terrorist attack has to also cover fuel shipment, fuel offloading, spent nuclear fuel transportation and nuclear waste storage over and above direct attack on the facility.
Associated costs have to be considered public subsidy.
Coordination between various institutions of
State
Usual exhibition of lack of coordination between Central and State institutions, obfuscation of issues and responsibilities followed by improvements upon the truth.
Repetition of entrenched institutional habits, nothing having been learnt from the earlier Enron fiasco.
xvii.
Institutional accountability Lacking; no public official either political or bureaucratic has been found guilty and punished till date, though “beneficiaries” are known Lacking; official statements are being made in defence of the project by the former Chairman of the Atomic
Energy Commission of India and former Secretary, Dept. of Atomic
Energy. This provides for “plausible deniability” at the official level.
xviii.
Regulatory
Oversight
No functioning regulatory institutions in India when the project was being finalized, the
Regulatory Commissions Act having been passed in 1998.
What Regulatory Commission can disallow a project on which Rs.
2,80,000 crore would have been spent? It will be a fait accompli.
14
The above tables show the process of history repeating itself, which is hardly desirable given both the dangers and sizeable cost that are involved. This is precisely the reason that it is necessary that these issues be placed squarely in the public domain, to prevent a sorry repetition of the earlier episode.
Citizens of India need to remember that whereas the guilty parties from Enron were put on trial in the US and found guilty, the entire matter has been successfully suppressed in India though there have been massive public losses to the Indian economy. The matter was never brought to trial in India, the guilty never identified nor punished. This is a sorry record of democracy in India.
Beyond these issues, the following questions need to be posed to the Ministry of Environment and
Forests:
i.
What happens to the Constitutional obligation of every citizen to protect the environment? Can citizens be arrested for attempting to protect the environment? Or shouldn’t the police be put behind bars for preventing citizens from protecting the environment?
ii. Under the Environment Protection Act and the Solid Waste Management Rules, has due diligence been exercised by the Ministry before granting clearance to the project, considering that the project involves highly dangerous radioactive solid wastes which need to be immobilized for very long periods of time? iii. Under the Prevention and Control of Water Pollution Act, has the Ministry considered cooling water from the project as a radioactive pollutant? iv. Since neither the Hazardous Waste (Management and Handling) Rules, 1989 nor the Hazardous
Waste (Storage Export and Import) Rules, 1989 include radioactive wastes under the schedule of the hazardous substances, what protection is afforded to the Indian citizen from exposure to radioactive substances?
v. What happens to the constitutionally mandated right to life of ordinary citizens of India?
We find no answers to these questions. iv. Specific lies disseminated at the local level
There is a familiar pattern to the dissemination of lies at the local level; generally, it is asserted by local politicians that ‘outsiders’ are provoking ‘innocent locals’ into opposing the project. Simultaneously, the carrot of enhanced compensation for land and property is held out in order to entice some of the locals away from the protest mode. Once this has been successfully achieved, a rift is created at the local level thereby permitting manipulation of one faction of locals against another, by co-opting the first faction.
Subsequently, the other faction can be politically or institutionally repressed as they have been
16
weakened due to the rift that is engineered. This process is now visible at Jaitapur , as an excellent
15
example of the rhetoric that is unleashed on such occasions. Key phrases include: 1. Vested interests were behind the opposition, people having no relation with the area, poisoning the minds of the people, spreading rumors and misunderstandings. 2. Enhanced compensation package for those affected by the project. 3. Communists and NGOs are coming here. 4 . There are other people and organisations behind these people, maybe from abroad who want to stop development).
From the previous section, it may be appreciated that the issues underlying Jaitapur are not local; in different ways, they are regional, national, institutional and international. They fall outside the purview of politics - as – usual, due to the extremely long term nature of risk and hazards that are consequent upon decisions being contemplated at present. A gentle reminder may be necessary that the Constitution of India guarantees freedom of speech and expression as well as freedom of association to all its citizens.
The State of Maharashtra violated this sacrament when it detained former Justice Shri Kolse Patil on the way to Jaitapur for participation in the public protests.
In conclusion
There is an interesting definition of fascism, given by Benito Mussolini:
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." 17
There is no need to question Mussolini 's authority to define fascism.
When this definition is applied to the relationship between states and corporate nuclear interests, what emerges is nuclear fascism.
The merger of state and corporate interests can be seen in a wider set of public actions that have been undertaken in the last 15 to 20 years. These include: the establishment of SEZs, the corporatization of agriculture, the attempts to privatize water, the auctioning of coal blocks and oil/gas fields for exploration, the free reign given to mineral exploitation in rich forest areas irrespective of long term environmental damage, the increasing “public-private partnerships” in infrastructure projects wherein the public treasury bears the burden of risks and costs and private partners are assured profits and subsidies; the attempts to privatize the banking, insurance and pension funds which are the backbone of national savings for long term public investment; and so on. In the name of reforms, the privatization and globalization processes that favor unbridled corporate interests, have been unleashed by the state and met with an increasing storm of protests by citizens across the country, as well as a large number of suicides in the farming community, a phenomenon never witnessed earlier in free India.
The Jaitapur project fulfils all the criteria in the above definition: State power being represented by the
Department of Atomic Energy directly under the PM, corporate power being represented by Areva backed by state owned Electricite de France (EdF). Jaitapur is a merger of the two.
Jaitapur, therefore, represents the final test case for the country.
16
The environmentalist Denis Hayes, writing over 30 years ago, has concluded, “The increased deployment of nuclear power facilities must lead society toward authoritarianism. Indeed, safe reliance upon nuclear power as the principal source of energy may be possible only in a totalitarian state.”18
This merger is a threat to open democratic processes; hence the challenge must be faced squarely by all citizens of India and others.
As the above comparison between Dabhol Enron and Jaitapur Areva shows, the Jaitapur project will be much more damaging in both political and economic terms as compared to the Dabhol Enron Project.
Moreover, unlike the Enron project, the long term health risks and costs as well as the strategic security risks are much higher in the case of the Jaitapur project. It is time to stop bandying lies in the public domain, anchored to false notions of national pride and nuclear grandstanding. It is obnoxious that all this is being done by agencies and institutions of the state in the name of ‘development’, ‘energy security’ and ‘economic growth’.
The pretence is that it is not possible to generate electricity by other means and technologies; therefore, we have to accept all these long term risks and consequences in the national interest; and that somehow, it is necessary to play this game with foreign interests, even if it means life-threatening consequences to the people of the Konkan region as well as to others far away.
Both the falsehood and the ignorance underlying this pretense become visible when we consider a
19
recent document published by the UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) which lists various technologies increasingly available for electricity generation in tune with climate mitigation objectives. The list, which is four pages long, does not include electricity from nuclear sources.
Political decisions based on such falsehoods bring democracy to shame.
The Jaitapur project must be halted before it is too late and any preliminary agreements in this regard must be scrapped. Even if the country loses some money at this stage, this would be preferable rather than being committed to the much larger disaster that this project will entail.
"Satyameva Jayate" (Sanskrit: "Truth Alone Triumphs") is the national motto of India, inscribed at the base of the national symbol.
Will truth prevail?
****
17
References:
1.
'Jaitapur not a done deal ', Jan 12, 2011 / Times of India
2.
‘Australia snubs India, refuses to lift ban on Uranium sale’, Jan 20, 2011 Indian Express
3.
Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen, ‘Health Risks of Nuclear Power’, Ceedata Consultancy, Chaam,
Netherlands, (2010), pp. 29-31
4.
Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen, ‘Reactor: construction operation, maintenance and refurbishments decommissioning and dismantling’ in ‘Nuclear Power – the Energy Balance’, Part
F , Ceedata Consultancy, Chaam, Netherlands, (2007), pp.46
5.
KiKK 2007: Kaatsch P, Spix C, Schmiedel S, Schulze-Rath R, Mergenthaler A & Blettner M,
Epidemiologische Studie zu Kinderkrebs in der Umgebung von Kernkraftwerken,
Vorhaben StSch 4334 (in German), Im Auftrag des Bundesministeriums für Umwelt, Naturschutz und Reaktorsicherkeit und des Bundesamtes für Strahlenschutz, Germany, 2007, www.bfs.de/de/bfs/druck/Ufoplan/4334_KiKK_Gesamt_T.pdf 6.
Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen, ‘Reactor: construction operation, maintenance and refurbishments decommissioning and dismantling’ in ‘Nuclear Power – the Energy Balance’, Part
F , Ceedata Consultancy, Chaam, Netherlands, (2007), pp. 42
7.
Stephanie Cooke, ‘In Mortal Hands - A Cautionary History of the Nuclear Age’, Orient Blackswan
(2010), pp. 356
8.
Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen, ‘Reactor: construction operation, maintenance and refurbishments decommissioning and dismantling’ in ‘Nuclear Power – the Energy Balance’, Part
F , Ceedata Consultancy, Chaam, Netherlands, (2007), Table F-15, pp 49.
9.
‘Role of breeder reactor system in the European Community’, by UNIPEDE/CEC Breeder Reactor
Study Group, Published by ENEL, Roma, September 1981.
10.
Lidsky LM & Miller MM, ‘Nuclear power and energy security. A revised strategy for Japan’,
PARESWorkshop: Energy Security in Japan, Tokyo, Japan, 13 July 1998.
11.
UIC-67 (2005) Thorium, Uranium Information Centre Nov. 2004, UIC Nuclear Issues Briefing Paper
No. 67, www.uic.com.au/nip67.htm.
12.
Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen, ‘Reactor: construction operation, maintenance and refurbishments decommissioning and dismantling’ in ‘Nuclear Power – the Energy Balance’, Part
D , Ceedata Consultancy, Chaam, Netherlands, (2007), pp 71.
13.
2009 annual reports of EdF and Areva
18
14.
http://www.hse.gov.uk/newreactors/joint-regulatory-statement.pdf
15.
Fact sheet: Olkiluoto 3, Greenpeace, November 2009
16.
Indian Express, January 23, 2011, page-2
17.
Chip Berlet, ‘Mussolini on the Corporate State’, carried on the website of Political Research
Associates.
18.
Winner Langdon (1980): Do Artifacts Have Politics? in Daedalus – Modern Technology: Problem or Opportunity? Vol. 109 (1) Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, pp. 121.
19.
Handbook for Conducting Technology Needs Assessment for Climate Change, UNDP (2010),
Annex 7, pp. 127-135 http://unfccc.int/ttclear/jsp/TNAHandbook.jsp
***
Appendix – I
English translation of the interview of Dr. Kakodkar published in Daily Sakal on 5th Jan 2011
Paragraph 1 In the intermediate stages of the economic development of any nation, the growth rate depends on the availability of energy. In developed countries, per capita electricity consumption is roughly 15,000 to 18,000 units, whereas in India it is in the range of only 650 units. Thus, to allow an average Indian citizen to live a reasonably comfortable life, we need to make available at least 5000 units to him.
Paragraph 2 It is expected that the population of India will stabilize somewhere around 160 Crores. To fulfill the energy requirement of this vast population, we will need at least ten times of the current available electricity in coming 30-40 years. Today’s power is mainly produced by coal (65 to 70%) and hydro (25%) based power generation. Considering the future power requirement, it is certain that these options will prove insufficient. In that case, we have to consider solar and nuclear-based power generation alternatives. Solar power generation is still expensive; thus the option of nuclear power generation is not only necessary but also inevitable.
Political inevitability
Paragraph 3 India has successfully developed nuclear power generation technology (in the areas such as fast reactor technology and thorium use, India ranks second behind Russia) However, our domestic reserves of uranium are limited; they will suffice only 10,000 MW power generation. Our future electricity demand is much more than this number. Secondly, since India has developed its own nuclear
19
technology and rising as a nuclear power, the whole world now understands the implications of declaring war against India. That is why many countries extend their co-operation in nuclear technology.
Paragraph 4 Under these circumstances, it may be asked, why don’t we concentrate only on uranium import and why are we taking foreign help in other areas. However, we have to consider the foreign interests, or more precisely, the economic interests of the companies in some foreign countries. From their point of view, If there is more real business interest in other areas other than uranium, then India had to consider it seriously. For lifting sanctions and recognizing India as a nuclear power through undertaking nuclear commerce with India, it was unavoidable to carry out such business deals with a few countries. Paragraph 5 Of the 45 nuclear supplier nations who are organized into a body, we sought help from countries such as US, Russia and France, as mediators in lifting sanctions against India, and that is why in order to cater to their commercial interests, we have concluded nuclear power agreements with these countries. Areva: allegations and refutations
Paragraph 6 In France, still 75% of the power generation to date is done by pressurized water reactor based nuclear technology. This and the related reactor technologies have been developed gradually over the years. All the safety aspects have been thoroughly considered while developing these technologies
The European power reactors, which we will buy from France based Areva company, have also been developed through this gradual process. This company is currently building two nuclear reactors in China and one each in France and Finland. We will of course verify that all safety aspects have been considered before taking decision on buying such types of reactors from Areva.
Paragraph 7 It is true that there has been some delay in building the reactor in Finland. However, this delay was mainly caused by some disputes between the reactor building contractors and supervisors. We will only benefit from this situation by understanding all the potential problems that we may need to face while constructing our nuclear reactors.
Paragraph 8 Areva is well-experienced and well-known in this field. Although this company was founded in 2001, its roots can be traced back to Framatome company during the Charles de Gaulle era. Today’s
Areva is a conglomerate of companies Framatome, Cogema and Technicatome.
Jaitapur: allegations and refutations
20
Paragraph 9 Water temperature: Jaitapur was selected for this project because it is a very convenient location for this project. Since this place is situated on the coast, the reactor cooling concern will not be there. As there is no human habitat there, no question arises of displacement of population.
Paragraph 10 There will not be any ash or particle emission from this project. Thus, there is no possibility of having their adverse effects on biodiversity and crops. We, in collaboration with some universities, have also conducted a study on ‘thermal ecology’ at the plant locations of some other nuclear plants, and we haven’t found any such effects there.
Paragraph 11 It is fact that hot water will be emitted from the Jaitapur power plant. However, when all the six stages of the project become operational, all the hot (+50C) water will be discharged deep into the sea. When this water is carried in a pipe from the plant, its temperature will be lowered by 1.50C before actually discharging into the sea. Now, the effect of the +3.50C water temperature will be felt only within
300 m radius from the discharge, and that too until the water gets cooled to normal temperature in a short duration of time
Paragraph 12 No risk of radioactivity: One has to admit that there will be some radioactivity from this project within, which means that there will be no net radioactive emission from this project. Moreover,
95% of the radioactive waste will be recycled; thus the concern is only for the limited amount of the waste. The rest 5% waste undergoes immobilisation and is encapsulated in a closed environment. Just to explain in a simple language: the net radioactive emission from such nuclear power plant is in the range of 2 nGy/h, whereas the radioactive emission during a normal x-ray treatment is almost 1,00,000 times
(i.e. 2,00,000 nGy/h) to the former. Besides, the radioactive emission from any such power plant is always equal to (or even less than) the natural radioactivity at that location. All the power plants are daily monitored for radioactive emissions.
Paragraph 13 Employment opportunities for the locals: Since advanced technology is being used in this project, the local people will be assigned at the high level posts only with exceptions. However, at lower level duties, the locals or displaced will be given preferences. Besides, if the native people jointly decide to enter in the related service sectors, then they have big opportunities in this project. Considering all these favorable aspects, it was not clear why the Ministry of Environment and Forest has given its go ahead to this plant with only certain terms and conditions; and that needs to be checked. After all any such projects are permitted only after fulfilling certain norms, and Jaitapur project will also strictly follow them. Paragraph 14 Will this electricity be expensive? Any consumer has a right to get electricity at a competitive cost from all the available options. There are several negotiations going on to make this happen. That is why it is not possible to declare the cost of the electricity at this point. It will also not be worthwhile to unnecessarily doubt anything at this moment of time.
Paragraph 15 While concluding the agreement with France, India has considered all the practical aspects: there was an option to go for a “turn key” nuclear project for us, but considering the cheap availability of labor and overall cost effectiveness, it was always our strategy to only import the critically required equipment from abroad and then to commission them in India. While dealing with Areva, our Nuclear
21
Power Corporation (NPCIL) will always keep this in mind. The implementation activities of this project will also be conducted by NPCIL; thus the overall cost of this project will also be reduced.
Future opportunities: The hike in the fuel prices not only affects India but the whole world. However, countries like France are least affected with this rise. Nuclear based power generation option is the main reason behind that. Nuclear fuel is least polluting and even recyclable. France even recycles the whole fuel. Paragraph 16 There are even proof-of-concept projects in France on producing biomass using nuclear power, which are aimed to subsequently produce fuel for automobiles. That is one of the options of clean energy. It is also possible to produce such automobile fuel using hydro power; however in this process CO2 is emitted. Thus to produce biomass using nuclear power can be proved as the most environment-friendly option. The initial cost of nuclear power generation is very high; however the subsequent expenditure is very less. The technology component of this project is also very expensive, which in due course of time will definitely be lowered.
***
22
References: 'Jaitapur not a done deal ', Jan 12, 2011 / Times of India 2. ‘Australia snubs India, refuses to lift ban on Uranium sale’, Jan 20, 2011 Indian Express 3. Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen, ‘Health Risks of Nuclear Power’, Ceedata Consultancy, Chaam, Netherlands, (2010), pp F , Ceedata Consultancy, Chaam, Netherlands, (2007), pp.46 5. Vorhaben StSch 4334 (in German), Im Auftrag des Bundesministeriums für Umwelt, Naturschutz und Reaktorsicherkeit und des Bundesamtes für Strahlenschutz, Germany, 2007, F , Ceedata Consultancy, Chaam, Netherlands, (2007), pp. 42 7. Stephanie Cooke, ‘In Mortal Hands - A Cautionary History of the Nuclear Age’, Orient Blackswan (2010), pp F , Ceedata Consultancy, Chaam, Netherlands, (2007), Table F-15, pp 49. UIC-67 (2005) Thorium, Uranium Information Centre Nov. 2004, UIC Nuclear Issues Briefing Paper No D , Ceedata Consultancy, Chaam, Netherlands, (2007), pp 71. Indian Express, January 23, 2011, page-2 17. Winner Langdon (1980): Do Artifacts Have Politics? in Daedalus – Modern Technology: Problem or Opportunity? Vol Handbook for Conducting Technology Needs Assessment for Climate Change, UNDP (2010), Annex 7, pp
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In the essay “The Clan of One-Breasted Women,” Terry Tempest William’s purpose is to reveal her experience with respect to nuclear testing. By using her family history, statistics, personal memory, historical facts, and court cases to elegantly and adequately portray her personal experience in the nightmare of cancer due to above ground nuclear testing in 1957.…
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Good Essays -
The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.…
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Lee, David. Australia and the World in the Twentieth Century; International Relations since Federation, Melbourne, Melbourne Publishing Group, 2006.…
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