The Bhabha Atomic Research Centre has launched an awareness campaign to drive home the point that there is no risk of explosion associated with a nuclear power plant.
This comes in the wake of Nuclear Power Corpo-ration of India Limited’s plans to set up 20 mega-nuclear power plants in the country, including a “nuclear park” at Kovvada in Srikakulam district.
Dr R.K. Singh, chief of public awareness section, BARC, on Monday said, “Contrary to public perception, it is impossible for a nuclear reactor to explode like a nuclear bomb. Uranium-235 concentration within the reactor fuel is far too low to be explosive and reactors are self-limiting. Nuclear fuel in a bomb has different enrichment and configuration.”
Dr Singh was talking at the national conference on Emerging Trends in Nuclear and Chemical Technology, organised by Gitam University, Hyderabad. Public perception, he said, equates nuclear power with the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In an effort to address this “fear” of people, he said nuclear reactors are safe and harbour no threat to human, plant or animal life. He said discharges from nuclear power plants have same limits as that of thermal power plants.
The nuclear plants have controlled and monitored emissions of radiation, Dr Singh said, adding, one millirem is one-thousan-dth of the radiation exposure from a single whole-body CT scan, and an average citizen is exposed to 620 millirem radiation every year.