Does People’s Life Matter to You, Dr. Kalam? by DiaNuke.org

Sethu Nezeer | Countercurrents.org

The commissioning of the Koodankulam Nuclear Plant seems imminent. The mainstream media will be soon seen lauding and licking the sweet development dessert made from the crushed pulp of mass protest. The persecuted fisher folks of the koodankulam village will bite the silver bullet and bleed to silence. Dr.Kalam has always been vocal about his dreams of a young India equipped with state of the art space technology, building a synthetic nation where rocketry and space missions shall build a gateway to elevate India into the league of the invincible global powers; The gateway of dreams which denies entry to 80% of Indians languishing in the peripheries of our development.

Dr.Kalam vouched for the safety of nuclear energy in a special essay in the op-ed page of The Hindu on Nov-6, 2011-‘Nuclear power is our gateway to a prosperous future’. The article throws light on the economic, social and environmental concerns that rely on both factual and mythical doctrines on the safety, inevitability and feasibility of nuclear energy and its reactors. In most part of the essay he highlight the energy guzzling development agenda for the Neo- India and further substantiated the urgency to meet the soaring energy demand by skillfully aligning retrospect events of trial and error and meticulously stating comparative advantages of incremental risks of nuclear accident to that of non-nuclear ones. The nuclear accidents in Fukushima and Chernobyl are quoted by him as a ‘’Mishandled’’ and “Mismanaged’’ disasters that were “Unfortunate”. Lives lost, environment devastated, possible hazard to posterity –and he comfortably trivialize it as ‘mismanaged’, ‘mishandled’. I would call the statement grossly ‘misappropriate’. And his claim that there is no substantiated study to prove the pernicious corollaries of a nuclear accident is like farming on a mine laden field and hoping to not step on one. All the much promulgated facts about nuclear energy and the holy healing effect it has on the energy depleting economy are globally disputed propositions.

The disclosure by a Norwegian group doing informed and authentic activism of a special report from nuclear safety experts from Russia reveals 31 grievous flaws of the VVER-TYPE reactor, to our dismay is the same installed in koodamkulam.

The unpreparedness of these reactors to handle both man-made and natural disasters is traumatizing and shall evoke certain dire repercussions if anything is to go wrong. Optimism evades my comprehension as we begin our nuclear endeavor in the wrong footing. The agitators are enraged because they fear that their land, their air, their sea, their biodiversity and their life itself is at stake for a dream that was never theirs. I couldn’t resist myself from quoting these lines from Atharva veda that kalamji has so passionately inscribed in his autobiography ‘wings of fire’.