Safety of Nuclear Power Plant at Koodankulam: A Dangerous Illusion

Prof. T. Shivaji Rao

Prof.T.Shivaji Rao is the Director of Center for Environmental Studies,GITAM University, Visakhapatnam (India)

Here are some recent articles by Prof Rao:

Koodankulam: Official Experts Have Misled People on Nuclear Safety

Why Koodankulam Official Site Evaluation is Faulty

Pro-Nuclear Experts Mislead India on Low Radiation Doses

Lessons of Chernobyl and Fukushima: Nuclear Safety is an Oxymoron

In the light of major nuclear reactor explosions at Three Mile Island (TMI) in USA (1979),  Chernobyl in Russia (1986) and Fukushima in Japan (2011) intelligent people question why we had ever started nuclear power plants in the first instance? Why did people fail to realize how dangerous the nuclear power was?  Why we failed to think about health risks to people living in the neighbourhood of nuclear plants? Why people failed to estimate the most damaging consequences of generating so much nuclear waste?  Even today most people refuse to think on these life and death issues due to perhaps ignorance, apathy and lack of social responsibility.

INTRODUCTION:

But during second world war the defeat of the enemy countries like the Nazi Germany and aggressive Japan was a major issue for the Western countries like USA which dropped killer Atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki to make Japan surrender.  Subsequently a cold war developed between Russia and America and the US wanted to produce nuclear weapons to show its superior military strength to the world and for this purpose nuclear plants for civil purposes like electricity production began to be built with the ulterior motive of producing enriched Uranium and plutonium as byproducts to be used for making nuclear weapons.  People were not informed about the health risks due to living around a nuclear plant.  Risk was treated as a technical issue and was left in the hands of the engineering experts.  Under the Atomic Energy Act, the Atomic Energy Commission in USA was directed to promote nuclear power and in the process safety of nuclear power had to be ensured on public demand. If more money were to be spent for nuclear plant development the experts had to cut the costs and compromise with nuclear, vice versa if safety has to be promoted it will slow down nuclear plant development activities. Thus a contradiction developed between nuclear development and nuclear safety and the later was given a very low priority.

NUCLEAR SAFETY BY RULE OF THUMB:

In the beginning, the safety of nuclear plants was ensured by the simple law of locating the reactors far away from human habitations.  In 1950 a thumb rule was used to link the power of the reactor with an exclusion zone where people could not live and in case of a reactor explosion people in the off-site area were not expected to be exposed to a fatal dose of radioactivity.  For small research reactors  the exclusion zone was one or 2 miles in  radius and for larger plants that supply electricity to the cities the exclusion zone would be 10 times higher.  But the cost of land acquisition proved to be very high.  In order to overcome this problem the designers came up with the idea of putting the reactor inside a large steel shell, a containment building that would keep the radioactive pollutants from escaping to outside environment in case of an accident.