Rawatbhata: NPCIL Blatantly Lies On Tritium by DiaNuke.org

Anuj Wankhede

Anuj is a Masters in Management Studies, an avid environmentalist who believes that bigger the problem, bigger the opportunity.

He can be reached at benchmark.anuj (at)gmail.com and 9757475875

The Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd. (NPCIL) operates all nuclear power plants across the country. It is government owned, controlled, financed and is the de facto face of the Indian civilian nuclear program.

Unfortunately, NPCIL has made it a compulsive habit to lie about the safety of its nuclear power plants, blissfully unaware that its lies will be exposed and it will forever lose the faith and trust of the Indian people.

Post every incident (sic), NPCIL covers it by either, claiming only a few workers were affected or by blatantly saying the leaks were of a non-hazardous nature.

Last month a tritium leak occurred at Rawatbhata, Rajasthan. It affected 38 people. After hiding the facts for a week, the matter was reported in local media. WhenDiaNuke.org published it, NPCIL immediately released a statement stating that:

"The uptake occurred due to inadvertent rise in tritium levels in a localized area of the containment building of the Reactor-5."

In 2009, over 50 workers at the Kaiga generating station in Karnataka were affected after drinking tritium-laced water from a water cooler at the plant. NPCIL was quick to disclaim its responsibility, teeming the incident to "insider mischief."

The then NPCIL CMD S.K. Jain said contamination caused by heavy water in the human body is “quickly flushed out” through natural biological processes like urination and perspiration and is not a cause for concern.

False and misleading.

Tritium is a radioactive material released in significant amounts in nuclear reactors (and nuclear weapons facilities.)

It has a half-life of 12 years and when inhaled or ingested, it is a cause for cancer.

The NPCIL released a press statement within a couple of days of the Kaiga incident that the affected workers were found to have negligible level of tritium and had resumed work. The same story is repeated at Rawatbhata.