Jaitapur will become the world’s largest nuclear power station, generating 9,900 MW, or more than double India’s current nuclear capacity (4,780 MW). It will also wreck 40,000 people’s livelihoods and generate electricity that’s three to five times costlier than power from other sources, thus magnifying the economic disaster called Enron, also located in Ratnagiri.
IMAGINE a beautiful ecosystem with virgin rainforests, great mountains and immense plant, animal and marine biodiversity, in which two great rivers (Krishna and Godavari) originate. Combine it with a flourishing farming, fisheries and horticultural economy which grows the world-famous Alphonso mango.
And you have the Jaitapur-Madban region in Maharashtra’s Ratnagiri district, in the Konkan strip of the Western Ghats.
Now, suppose a monstrous force wanted to destroy this ecosystem. What better way than nuking it? That’s precisely what Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd and the government are doing, by erecting six giant (1,650 MW) reactors designed by the French firm Areva.
A Nuclear Enron
Jaitapur will become the world’s largest nuclear power station, generating 9,900 MW, or more than double India’s current nuclear capacity (4,780 MW). It will also wreck 40,000 people’s livelihoods and generate electricity that’s three to five times costlier than power from other sources, thus magnifying the economic disaster called Enron, also located in Ratnagiri.
However, Jaitapur will be a nuclear Enron–capable, like all commercial reactors, of undergoing a catastrophic accident like Chernobyl in 1986, which killed an estimated 65,000 to 110,000 people from radiation-induced cancers and other effects.
Such fears are not alarmist. Scientists and engineers who have designed, operated or licensed nuclear reactors warn that they are all susceptible to an accident in which the fission chain reaction goes out of control, leading to a loss of coolant (usually water, to rapidly remove heat from the reactor), eventually melting the core and releasing huge quantities of radioactivity. This likelihood is low, but its consequences are wholly unacceptable.
The Jaitapur project could be riskier because it’s in a seismically active zone and based on an untested reactor design: Areva’s European Pressurised Reactor. The EPR design hasn’t been cleared by nuclear regulators anywhere. Yet, India wants to install six EPRs. The government started acquiring 968 hectares (2,392 acres) for the Jaitapur project four years before an agreement with France was signed, an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) report prepared, and environmental clearance granted.
It has treated the project’s critics as ignorant anti-science, anti-development Luddites, although they’re well-informed on nuclear and environmental issues.
The state has unleashed savage repression on Jaitapur’s people. It routinely arrests and serves externment notices to peaceful protesters, and promulgates prohibitory orders, under which eminent citizens like former Navy chief L Ramdas and former Supreme Court judge P B Sawant were barred from Jaitapur, and former Bombay High Court judge BG Kolse-Patil was detained for five days without being produced before a magistrate within 24 hours.
Others have had false charges framed against them, including attempt to murder. The higher judiciary has refused them anticipatory bail. This unprecedented repression resembles the police raj in Maharashtra’s Naxalite-affected areas.
In what has become a massive assault on democracy, the government lies to, ignores, or beats the local people at will.
Non-Cooperation
The government is turning lower Konkan into a horrible collection of polluting projects involving mining, pesticides, steelmaking and power. Its power need is just 180 MW, but it is being made to produce over 4,500 MW, and eventually 20,000-plus MW.
The people oppose the project because it will destroy their livelihoods, just as the Tarapur reactors nearby have done. They know of the hazards of radiation and the DAE’s poor safety performance, including the exposure of hundreds in Tarapur to radiation exceeding permissible limits, genetic deformities from uranium mining in Jaduguda, and higher-than-normal incidence of cancers near reactors.
The villagers have launched a non-cooperation or civil disobedience movement. Over 95 per cent have refused the ` 10 lakhs-an-acre compensation for land; most of those who accepted it are absentee landowners living in Mumbai. The villagers refuse to sell food and other goods to state functionaries. Ten villages didn’t hoist the Tricolour on Republic Day.
The government will be tempted to use diabolical divide-and-rule tactics in Jaitapur, including fomenting tensions between Muslims (30 percent of the population) and Hindus; violence by agents provocateurs; and branding all dissidents as Maoists/Naxalites—the latest lie used to suppress popular movements. These methods must be exposed and resisted.
Scrap Jaitapur
The Jaitapur public should fear EPRs. Western Europe’s first reactor after Chernobyl, an EPR, under construction in Finland, is delayed by four years and 90 percent over budget.
Finnish, French, British and US nuclear regulators have raised 3,000 safety issues about its design, including control and emergency-cooling systems. Given its size, the EPR will generate seven times more toxic iodine-129 than normal reactors, posing many other problems. Any design changes will add to the EPR’s capital costs, already two to five times higher than for power from other sources. Its unit power cost will be two to four times higher.
However, the greatest problem is safety. Nuclear power generation routinely exposes occupational workers and the public to radiation. There’s no remedy for the effects, including cancer and genetic damage. Radiation is unsafe in all doses. All reactors leave behind high-level wastes which remain hazardous for centuries. Plutonium-239’s half-life is 24,400 years and uranium-235’s is 710 million years. Science hasn’t found a way of safely storing, leave alone neutralising, radioactive waste. When a reactor exhausts its economic life (25 to 40 years), it must be “decommissioned”, or entombed at a cost that’s one-third to one-half of the construction cost. All these hazards are unacceptable. The Jaitapur reactors pose an additional one: the coolant water discharged into the sea will be 5 °C hotter and destroy mangroves, corals and numerous marine species.
The EIA conducted by the ill-reputed National Environmental Engineering Research Institute hasn’t analysed these effects, or the ecosystem’s carrying capacity. And it doesn’t even mention high-level wastes! Yet, the MoEF cleared the project for political reasons only days before French President, Mr Nicolas Sarkozy’s India visit last December, without properly going through the mandatory public hearing.
Globally, nuclear power has exhausted its technological potential. It has a bleak future. India must stop chasing the nuclear mirage–and scrap Jaitapur!
Source: http://www.navhindtimes.in/opinion/courting-nuclear-trouble-jaitapur