India has a poor record of radiation safety. Quoting from the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) annual reports, Greenpeace has listed 16 cases of loss, theft and misplacement of radioactive sources since 2000. From these, in 11 cases, the source remains untraced to this day.
Amongst the cases which remain untraced is that of a raidographer boarding a train at New Delhi’s Hazrat Nizamuddin railway station carrying an Industrial Gamma Radiography Exposure Device (IGRED) which was stolen from him and never found.
This incident occurred in September 2008.
In April 2007, a radiography camera was stolen from Jagadishpur near Lucknow which remains untraced to this day.
More serious are the cases of nuclear accidents in India’s nuclear power facilities.
Last year in November, 55 employees consumed radioactive material after tritiated water found its way into the drinking water cooler in Kaiga nuclear plant in Karnataka.
In January 2003, the failure of a valve in the Kalpakkam Atomic Reprocessing Plant in Tamil Nadu exposed six workers to high doses of radiactive radiation.
Greenpeace activists reveal, the leaking area of the plant had no radiation monitors or mechanisms to detect valve failure which could have prevented the employees exposure.
This was all the more serious because a safety committee had previously recommended that the plant be shut down.
Other serious accidents involved a leakage of between 4-14 tonnes of heavy water from the pipes at Madras Atomic Power Station at Kalpakkam during a test process.
Forty two people were involved in mopping up the radioactive liquid.