[Reader-list] points of meeting on Nuclear Energy in India and People's Struggles

[Nagraj Adve]

Delhi Platform has been organizing a series of discussion meetings on
various issues related to climate change. The latest was on 4 March,
on Nuclear Energy and People's Struggles. Copied below are the brief
points from the discussion.


DELHI PLATFORM


Points of Discussion meeting on Nuclear Energy in India and People’s
Struggles, Delhi University,
4 March 2011

Praful Bidwai, Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP):
The nuclear project started out with the development of nuclear
weapons under the Manhattan Project. But with the end of the 2nd World
War, the garb used was of nuclear power, the myth that nuclear power
would mean abundant and cheap power. President Eisenhower made the
famous statement in a speech, referring to ‘Atoms for Peace’. That
nuclear energy technology was then transferred to private companies,
particularly General Electric and Westinghouse. Over time, the Soviet
Union, France and China acquired nuclear weapons. The US and others
laid down two conditions to other aspiring nuclear powers: that they
remain without nuclear weapons/ disarm, and that they subject their
nuclear programme to external/ international scrutiny.
The myth propagated at the time was that nuclear power was abundant
and that it was cheap. The reality has been very different. It has not
even met 1 per cent of the targets claimed or set. And it has existed
at all only due to an enormous subsidy, of over US$ 1 trillion (1,000
billion dollars).
It has been a disaster at two levels: a public safety disaster, and a
financial disaster.

There are four assumptions/ myths about nuclear power: safety; costs;
that it is clean and green, and will help combat climate change; and
that it is needed to solve energy shortages. The reality has been
quite different.

1.  The question of Safety: Nuclear power is inherently hazardous. Its
radiation is invisible and it kills even in extremely tiny doses.
Also, the radiation is not only from a nuclear reactor. It emanates
from every stage in the process, from the mining of the uranium ore,
from the transport of the ore, from the processing, from the handling
of the waste, every stage of the fuel cycle has a radiation exposure
and a danger. It has been shown that for every 1,000 REM, there are
six cancer deaths. The nuclear plant at Tarapore outside Mumbai for
instance has 4,000 REM every year; this translates to about 25 deaths
every year from the Tarapore plant alone.
Nuclear power is the only form of electricity generation that can
cause serious illnesses and deaths. To have a basic understanding of
the process in a nuclear reactor, it involves the splitting of atoms.
In a nuclear reactor, the process is controlled, in a nuclear bomb the
process is not and it involves the release of a massive amount of
energy. But even in a nuclear reactor, a small imbalance can adversely
affect the process. That was what happened at Chernobyl in the
Ukraine, in 1986. The biggest industrial accident in the world so far
was not Bhopal, it was Chernobyl. The government claimed that few
thousand deaths had taken place, in actual fact over 65,000 people
died at the time, and that number has increased to 1,10,000 now. The
numbers are rising with each passing month, as people die of cancers
and other serious illnesses. Children are born with serious
deformities. People as far as western Europe have been show to have
been affected by the Chernobyl disaster.
Yet another aspect of safety is the nuclear waste that gets generated.
Nuclear waste has an incredibly long lifespan. Plutonium 239 has a
half-life of 24,000 years. It is ten half-lives before material is
safe, which means 2,40,000 years or almost a quarter of a million
years before it is safe. And U-235 has a half life of 710 million
years. For all our technological development, absolutely no solution
has been found to this problem of nuclear waste.
Also, the decommissioning of a nuclear plant, even that has low-level
radiation that is hazardous, that persists in workers’ clothing,
shoes, etc.
India: does not have an independent regulatory authority, on the
lines, say of the US National Regulatory Commission. India’s AERB is
not an independent body. There’s little transparency of the
functioning of nuclear reactors or of accidents. In 1993, there was an
accident at Narora plant at Bulandshahr in UP. Fire spread to the
turbine. We could easily have had another Chernobyl. Fact is that the
procedures were not in place to prevent this from happening. More
recently, in the Keyla (spelling?) plant, a worker spiked the water of
a water cooler, put tritium into the water cooler. Hundreds of workers
drank the water before it was discovered in their urine sample. That
is something that can easily happen elsewhere.

2. Costs: Nuclear power is 2-3 times costlier than conventional
electricity, per unit power. Part of the reason for that is that the
time it takes to build a nuclear reaction has lengthened. It used to
take 5-6 years to build a reactor in the 1960s, nowadays it takes
10-15 years, resulting in huge cost over-runs. Also, in most
technologies, costs tend to fall 30-50% when capacity is raised. In
nuclear power, the cost curve is upward.
Areva – the French company that is contracted to build the nuclear
reactor at Jaitapur, Maharashtra – has had huge over-run issues in
Finland. The Areva EPR there is 42 months behind schedule, it was due
to cost 3 billion euros, costs have reached 5-7 billion euros. The
German company Siemens has walked out of the project. In the US, not a
single reactor has been built since 1973. President Bush tried to push
it ten years ago but has had little success. The main countries where
nuclear power is expanding are: China and India, and to a lesser
degree, South Korea and Indonesia.
Another aspect of costs (not that commonly considered) is the costs to
decommission an old nuclear plant, it’s as much as 1/3rd to half of
what it takes to build it, which is huge.

3. Nuclear power and climate change: Ten years ago, climate change
became a big issue, this began to be used for nuclear power to be
pushed as the solution, claiming that nuclear power has no or little
carbon emissions. This is totally fraudulent. Nuclear fission is only
one element of the process. There are CO2 emissions at every stage of
the process – in the mining, from the building of the nuclear plant,
reprocessing, etc. Take Japan, which added 40,000 MW of nuclear power
between the 1960s and the 1980s. It tripled its carbon dioxide
emissions at the same time. Fact is, nuclear power can only replace
centralized electricity generation, where energy use has many other
forms, such as in transport etc. Wind and solar will give you three
times the cuts in emissions. What’s more, nuclear power has a long
gestation period, it is not appropriate for the deep and urgent cuts
necessary in CO2 emissions, not only 80% or more cuts needed by 2050,
we need 40% cuts by 2020, nuclear power cannot do that.
If one looks at nuclear plants worldwide, there are roughly 420
functioning nuclear plants; they provide 12% of the world’s
electricity generation, only 5% of its energy use, and barely 2% of
final use. 1/3rd of these number would retire in the next decade, and
only 18 plants are under construction. Fact is that nobody wants
plants in their neighbourhood.

4. Meeting energy needs: The fourth assumption is that nuclear power
is needed because energy needs have to be met, particularly since
fossil fuels may run out. Fact is that in India, other energy forms
have a much higher potential. India’s current nuclear power generation
is barely 4,200 MW, and its potential is merely 9,000 MW. In
comparison, wind power is 45,000 MW, probably higher. Concentrated
solar power (CSP), hydro all have potential, the latter is 80,000 MW
in the Northeastern states alone.
Actually, what we need is decentralized energy generation. Nuclear
power is inherently too centralized and can only feed into a
centralized power grid. . Nuclear power is not flexible, unlike, say,
hydro power and wind. Bear in mind that 40% villages/ people have no
access to energy in India and decentralized power would be essential
for them. Electricity after all is only the most refined and expensive
form of energy. Generally, two thirds is lost as heat. Amulya Reddy,
one of the world’s foremost authorities on energy, particularly
decentralized energy forms that are both ecologically benign and less
costly, studied the issue in detail for over 25 years. He concluded
that micro and hydel were much more benign.

State’s repressive role: Since no one wants nuclear plants in their
vicinity, the state plays a repressive role in pushing plants through.
In Jaitapur, on the Konkan coast in Maharashtra, one day after the
chief minister visited and failed to convince local people, the arrest
of activists began, to date 22 people have been arrested. Admiral
Ramdas, and others have been prevented from entering the area.
A number of plants are being planned, two in Andhra, one in West
Bengal, in Jabalpur in MP, in Haryana (the movement my fellow speaker
Yashbir Arya is from), etc. There is resistance everywhere. In Haripur
in West Bengal, local people have cordoned off the area and not a
single government official has been allowed to enter to conduct a
survey.

V. T. Padmanabhan, activist and independent researcher
(he had a slide show, sketchy points only here):
>From nuclear tests, we have to date exploded 440 million tonnes of
TNT. This is several thousands of  times those of the atomic bombs at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There have been 540 bomb tests since the mid
20th century. Caused the release of hazardous particulate matter to
the extent of 2.9 E +29 (or 2.9x 10 to the power 28, or 2.9 followed
by 28 zeros). It is equivalent to 600 trillion particles per square
metre of land.
In a reactor core, 99.999% gets contained, 0.001% gets released into
air and water. That is sufficient, releases 10E+19 atoms a day. Pico
particles. These spread around with the wind. Since plants have a high
‘exhaust chimney’, more than the workers in the plant, it is the
villagers around who get affected. We did a study of three villages/
village clusters at varying distances from the Kalkpakkam nuclear
plant – 6 km away, ?? km away and 1,642 km  away. We found
unacceptably high levels of goiter, autoimmune thyroidism, thyroid
cancers in all three places, even several hundred kms away. Thyroid
cancers, women tend to get more affected.

Yashbir Arya, activist with the anti-nuclear plant movement in
Fatehabad, Haryana.
The government is planning a nuclear power plant at Fatehabad,
Haryana. It is a 2,800 MW plant that has been planned. We have been
sitting on dharna non-stop since 17 August 2010. People sit there
night and day. We sat even through the cold of winter. One farmer died
due to the cold. People protested and did not allow his cremation to
take place for 3 days. Despite all this, there has been no response
from the government/ authorities.
Kumharia, Nehla etc are among the 8 villages that will be directly
affected/ displaced. The effects would be over a much wider area. Why
is located at this precise spot? Because the Bhakra canal flows nearby
and the plant needs 300 cusecs of water every single day. The plant
was supposed to be in Punjab but was taken away from there because of
‘security’ reasons, because it was deemed too close to the border.
This is an ecologically rich area, particularly with species of deer.
The region grows three crops and the main crops are wheat, rice and Bt
Cotton. So far, no one from the government no official has come to us
for any dialogue. They have not begun talking of cases and FIRs.
The issue is also steeped in local party politics. Chautala’s party
and the BJP and the Congress are all only for more compensation. No
one is saying don’t take away the land. Farmers are leading the
struggle by themselves (to a question, during the discussion that
followed, he later said that the mass base/ those leading the struggle
are large farmers with over 10-20 acres of land)

Some points of the discussion that followed:
Praful’s responses.
- The jaitapur struggle is not against displacement alone but also
against nuclear power per se. Besides the local population, there are
a whole range of professionals, teachers, lawyers who are active in or
support the struggle and are very aware of Chernobyl or the general
dangers of nuclear power.
- India’s entire nuclear power set up is based on imports not
indigenous technologies. The 1974 Sirius plant was built by the
Canadians, and the US gave the heavy water needed
- (There was a question to Praful, about his statement that wind or
hydel preferable. There have been opposition to run of the river
projects in Himachal and elsewhere, that one needs to argue against
energy consumption per se not just the forms of energy. To which
Praful responded that the hazards of hydel, micro and pico and wind
power are not comparable to the dangers of nuclear power, to a
Chernobyl. Wind farms take over small plots. Key is how much should be
used for local needs. Micro and mini hydel power based on streams.
- Re international finance, international finance institutions (IFIs)
don’t fund nuclear projects. Also, nuclear power not covered under the
Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol. There are
powerful lobbies in the atomic energy establishment and the nuclear
industry pushing for nuclear power. The Dept of Atomic Energy gets
subsidies to the tune of 1 billion dollars a year, it had promised
43,000 MW of power by 2000. Currently it is a mere 4,200 MW! But they
got a big funding boost after the nuclear tests of the late 1990s. In
Mumbai for instance, they have the plushest housing etc.
- the entire nuclear power/ arms industry and process is opaque. Under
the Atomic Energy Act of 1962, they can withhold information from the
public.
- of India’s 22 plants, 14 are covered under the deal with the US, 8
are not. They are reserved for weapons production in India.
- Mines in East Singhbhum, in West Khasi Hills in Meghalaya, etc. In
Meghalaya, the government itself is divided over uranium mining there.
India’s ore very low uranium content
- In India, electricity is less than one-fifth of total energy use,
particularly since Indians use a lot of non-commercial energy. In the
world in general, nuclear energy less than 5%.

- (Yashbir Arya): The movement in Fatehabad are of mostly large
farmers, who own 20 acres of land and more, there are few with 1-2
acres. It is a relatively prosperous agriculture: a farmer gets Rs
60,000 an acre for rice. The government is promising all kinds of jobs
at the plant but what kind of jobs will a local get, other than as a
chaparasi? The electricity itself that may be generated will be sent
to SEZs and to industry does not help local people. Industry wants 24
hours power.

- VT Padmanabhan: Chernobyl affected people not only in western
Europe. The key factors are wind direction and rainfall at the time.
There is thyroid cancer corridor in India. The accident happened on 26
April, when the rains came, there was a corridor from Kanyakumari to
the Konkan with very high rates of thyroid cancer. In Kerala, well
water is used a lot for drinking which had got contaminated.
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NB: This is only the gist of the meeting, to convey to those who were
not present and those outside Delhi what was covered and discussed.
Speakers should not be held accountable based on these notes.

Delhi Platform is a non-funded organization that works on issues
related to global warming. We stand for and support struggles for
equity and sustainability.

This meeting was part of a regular series of meetings that Delhi
Platform has been organizing on various issues related to global
warming. The next meeting will be on 17 March, on Food Security, Peak
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