How pertinent is the nuclear option?

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Democratic protests against nuclear plants are the flavour of the season.

What began in Jaitapur has come down south to Koodankulam in Tamil Nadu and protests are bound to spread across the country to wherever nuclear power plants are being planned.

There is a fundamental conflict here between the aims of the government to arm the country with clean nuclear energy and the people’s fears over nuclear power plant catastrophes fanned further by the Fukushima experience.

When nuclear energy was first harnessed for widespread civilian use in the mid-50s, it was freely said that the power was so cheap and clean that even meters were not really needed. Electricity from nuclear reactors was to be given away free to the world, or so the early protagonists of N-power had us believe.

What added to the enormous costs of nuclear power as we know them today were the safety features that had to be built in to assure the world there would no catastrophic events. And then came the nuclear civilian liability laws making it incumbent on the producer to compensate fairly in the unlikely event of a disaster in the atomic production process.

The Three Mile Island experience (1979) showed quite the other face of safety, pointedly stressing the hazardous nature of the source, however clean such power might seem in an era in which global warming and other environmental concerns are in the forefront of human thought.

Strangely enough, India’s 20 nuclear power plants generate only 3% of the country’s electricity output.

Enormous funds have been earmarked for plans in the anvil following the Indo-US nuclear deal. All that was before the double whammy of earthquake and tsunami hit Japan this year, reminding the world of the horrors of Chernobyl (1986), the worst civilian nuclear disaster in the history of mankind.

Ghoulish tourists have only recently been stopped from going to the ghost town in Ukraine from near where nuclear power was being generated until the plant blew up sending plumes of radiation. The links of the former Soviet Union to the tragedy is not that easily explained away considering Koodankulam (5300 MW) is being built to Russian designs and their safety standards.

For Tamil Nadu, a state that has lived for years with a nuclear power plant by the sea in Kalpakkam even during a tsunami, such a power option should not, in theory, seem too risky. However, there are also other issues like land acquisition and after effects on marine life possibly affecting livelihood in areas heavily dependent on the sea.

The state may be in a less dangerous seismic zone so far as earthquakes are concerned. But after the 2004 tsunami struck several sections of the long coastline, a Fukushima type of disaster can never be ruled out altogether.

The point to ponder is can a historically power-deficient Tamil Nadu forego power that promises to help bridge a widening gap. The answer according to experts is to expand capacity at existing nuclear power plants.

Given the politics that has enmeshed the issue, that too might not be an easy solution.

Clean energy source, but not so clean image

Safety record at Kalpakkam facility

*In 1987, a refuelling accident ruptured the reactor core.

*In 1991, workers were exposed to a radioactive heavy water leak.

*In 1999, another leak exposed 42 workers.

*In 2002, 100 kg of radioactive sodium leaked.

*In 2003, high-level radioactive waste was released into a work area, exposing six workers to nuclear radiation.