|
|
|
|
Some Questions about the Indian Art Market discusses some issues pertaining to India's booming art market today and reflects on its reliability to the investor in art.
 Read |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
A sharply critical response to the review of Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss in the first issue of Phalanx and also a reply to this criticism from the reviewer.
Read |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Reclaiming the Present for Colonialism
Since the lecture finds itself exhibited on the Reserve Bank of India's web page, this piece reflects on Meghnad Desai's First P. R. Brahmananda Memorial Lecture delivered on September 20, 2004 at Mumbai, in which the economist attempts to draw similarities between the economic growth of India during the last 40 years of the 19th century and the neo-liberal era following 1991.
Read
Development and Accounting Malpractice
This is a reaction to a key argument offered those (especially industrialists) favoring large scale development of 'backward states' who appear to be riding on an accounting malpractice.
Read
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The Age of Shiva: A Novel by Manil Suri
Read |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Coffee as a Global Commodity
Read |
|
|
|
|
|
A Study of the Finances of Karnataka After 2000
Read |
|
|
|
|
|
The Choices Involved in the Nuclear Deal
Read |
|
|
|
|
|
Pluto: A Human Comedy
Read |
|
|
|
|
|
In Search Of A Family Doctor
Read |
|
|
|
|
|
The World as Narrative
Read |
|
|
|
|
|
Things fall apart: The cinematic rendition of the agrarian landscape in Kerala
Read |
|
|
|
|
|
uses and ab uses: Baudrillard, simulacra
and America
Read |
|
|
|
|
|
A Novelist on 'Writing the Self'
Read |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Home > Contents > Article: M. V. Ramana |
|
|
The Choices Involved in the Nuclear Deal
M. V. Ramana |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
There is now widespread debate about the nuclear agreement with United States. Much of the debate on the deal has been between what can be broadly called the nuclear hawks and the nuclear nationalists. The nuclear hawks believe India's nuclear programme is a great success and more than able to take care of itself. They see the deal as imposing unnecessary constraints on the programme and making more difficult the creation of the large nuclear arsenal, including thermonuclear weapons (hydrogen bombs), that they believe is essential for India to be a ‘great power.´
The clearest expression of this has come from the BJP, who seek the largest possible nuclear weapons capability. Early in the debate, Atal Behari Vajpayee argued that "Separating the civilian from the military would be very difficult, if not impossible. It will also deny us any flexibility in determining the size of our nuclear deterrent." When he refers to "flexibility" in determining the size of an Indian nuclear arsenal, he does not mean that it should be possible to make it much smaller (if not eliminate it altogether). He is expressing the fear that separating civil and military facilities may stop the arsenal from becoming as big as he and others like him might like it to be.
Nuclear nationalists have the less ambitious, more traditional perspective that sees the nuclear programme as a great national technological achievement and necessary for India's economic and social development. They see the deal as offering a way to sustain and expand the nuclear energy programme, while not unduly restricting the building of what they see as a 'minimum" nuclear weapons arsenal.
The government has embraced this view, as have many defenders of the deal. The Prime Minister laid it out most clearly to Parliament on July 29, 2005, saying "Our nuclear programme. is unique. It encompasses the complete range of activities that characterize an advanced nuclear power. our scientist have done excellent work and we are progressing well on this programme as per the original vision outlined by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and Dr. Homi Bhabha." He went to argue that "nuclear power has to play an increasing role in our electricity generation plans" and the deal offers a way where "our indigenous nuclear power programme based on domestic resources and national technological capabilities would continue to grow." The expected international support, both as nuclear fuel and nuclear reactors, would help "enhance nuclear power production rapidly." At the same time, he made it clear that "there is nothing in the joint statement that amounts to limiting or inhibiting our strategic nuclear weapons programme."
These two positions have by and large dominated the debate so far. There are many problems with both views. The first is their shared belief in the success of India's nuclear energy programme and the need to continue with and expand this effort. They fail to recognise that the deal is actually testament to the long standing, expensive, and large scale failure of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) and its tremendous but largely hidden costs, in terms of health, safety, environment, and local democracy.
The second belief shared by the nuclear hawks and the nuclear nationalists is that nuclear weapons are a source of security. This belief has been extensively debunked. Those who persist in this belief also ignore the essential moral, legal, and criminal questions of what it means to have and be prepared to use nuclear weapons. The only difference between the two camps is on the character and size of the genocidal weapons they aspire to, and how many people in how many cities they are prepared to threaten to kill.
Background
The 123 agreement that is being discussed is just the latest episode in a saga that began publicly in July 2005 when President George Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh issued a joint statement laying the grounds for the resumption of U.S. and international nuclear aid to India. Such international support was crucial to the nuclear infrastructure and capabilities developed by the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE). Even the 1974 nuclear weapons test used plutonium resulting from technology and materials supplied by the United States and Canada. These were supplied with the understanding that it would be used only for peaceful purposes. In turn, that provided one reason for the Indian diplomatic effort at trying to make the 1974 test to be a peaceful nuclear explosion; few outside the country bought into that charade.
Following India's 1974 test, the United States and other countries formed the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) with the aim of preventing exports for commercial and peaceful purposes from being used to make nuclear weapons. NSG Guidelines list specific nuclear materials, equipment, and technologies that are subject to export controls. The Guidelines are comprised of two parts. Part I was created specifically in response to the 1974 test and lists materials and technology designed specifically for nuclear use, including fissile materials, nuclear reactors, and reprocessing and enrichment equipment. Part II lists dual use goods, such as machine tools and lasers, which are non-nuclear items but which can also be used to develop weapons; this was adopted in 1992 after discovering how close Iraq came to making nuclear weapons material by employing dual use imports in a covert programme.
In 1978 the United States also passed the Nuclear Non Proliferation Act that required any country, other than the five nuclear weapon states, to accept International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards on all its nuclear facilities ("full scope safeguards") before the United States would engage in any nuclear cooperation with it. Safeguards are merely accountancy mechanisms to make sure that no fissile material (plutonium or enriched uranium) is diverted from electricity production purposes to making nuclear weapons. Despite the name, safeguards have nothing to do with enhancing safety of a reactor, which will continue to be accident prone. The Indian government's refusal to give up its nuclear weapons and sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) meant that no NSG state, including the United States, would sell nuclear technology to it.
This embargo has not been strictly followed and commercial or other institutional interests have sometimes  overridden non proliferation considerations. One example is in the case of the Tarapur I & II reactors that were supplied by the United States with a fuel supply guarantee; NSG members like Russia have sold enriched uranium fuel (which the DAE does not have the capacity to manufacture in adequate quantities) for these reactors by using an exception clause – somewhat disingenuously – that allows for the sale of material or equipment in case there are safety considerations involved. Likewise, Russia is also supplying the Koodankulam reactors by claiming that the agreement governing that deal was signed in the 1980s by the then Soviet Union before it joined the NSG.
The 2005 joint statement requires the United States to amend both its own laws and policies on nuclear technology transfer, and work to adjust international regimes on the supply of nuclear fuel and technology so as to make an exception for India. In exchange, the Indian government has designated, through the separation plan offered in March 2006, several nuclear facilities as civilian, and volunteered them for IAEA inspection in a phased manner. This was followed by the Henry Hyde Act being passed by the United States Congress and now the 123 agreement.
The agreement marks a new phase in the nuclear relationship between United States and India. Both countries have gone against their historical policies, the United States with regard to its stance on nuclear non-proliferation and India with regard to its long standing opposition to having international safeguards at domestically constructed nuclear facilities.
Of Failures and Motivations
On the Indian side, a primary motivation for the deal has been the history of failure of the DAE to produce large quantities of nuclear electricity. In 1954, Homi Bhabha, the founder of the nuclear programme, announced that there would be 8000 MW of nuclear power in the country by 1980. As the years progressed, these predictions were to increase. By 1962, the prediction was that nuclear energy would generate 20-25,000 MW by 1987 and by 1969 the DAE predicted that by 2000 there would be 43,500 MW of nuclear generating capacity. All of this was before a single unit of nuclear electricity was produced in the country.
Reality was quite different. Installed capacity in 1979-80 was about 600 MW, about 950 MW in 1987, and 2720 MW in 2000. The only explanation that the AEC has offered for its failures has been to blame the cessation of foreign cooperation following the 1974 nuclear weapons test. At the same time, these sanctions also provided the DAE with an opportunity: each development, no matter how small or routine, could be portrayed as a heroic success, achieved in the face of staunch opposition by other countries and impossible odds, while any failures could be passed off as a result of the determination of other countries to block and prevent India achieving technological advancement.
Such continued failures were not because of a paucity of resources. Practically all governments have favoured nuclear energy and the DAE's budgets have always been high. The only period when the DAE did not get all that they asked for and therefore consider the dark years were the early 1990s, a period marked by cutbacks on government spending as part of an effort at economic liberalization. But this trend was reversed with the 1998 nuclear weapons tests: since then the DAE's budget has increased from Rs. 18.4 billions in 1997-98 to Rs. 55 billions in 2006-07, i.e., more than doubled even in real terms.
The high allocations for the DAE have come at the cost of promoting other, more sustainable, sources of power. In 2002-03, for example, the DAE was allocated Rs. 33.5 billions, dwarfing in comparison the Rs. 4.7 billions allocated to the Ministry of Non-conventional Energy Sources (MNES), which is in charge of developing solar, wind, small hydro, and biomass based power. Despite the smaller allocations, installed capacity of these sources was 4800 MW (as compared to 3310 MW of nuclear energy). While their contribution to actual electricity generated would be smaller since these are intermittent sources of power, they have much lower operations and maintenance costs. Further, most of these programs, like the wind energy program, started in the earnest only in the last decade or two and there is ample scope for improvement.
Today, notwithstanding over five decades of sustained and lavish government support, nuclear power amounts to just 4120 MW, less than 3% of the country's total electricity generation capacity. Over the next few years, this capacity is to increase, largely because of the import of two 1000 MW reactors from Russia. The DAE has only just started operating a reactor not fully based on an imported design, a 540 MW heavy water reactor, which is scaled up from the design of the 220 MW reactor that was imported from Canada.
Despite this less than modest history and the hand wringing about international sanctions, the DAE has continued to make extravagant predictions. The current projections are for 20,000 MW by the year 2020 and for 207,000 to 275,000 MW by the year 2052. The likelihood of these goals being met is slim at best. But even if they are met, nuclear power would still contribute only about 8-10% of the projected electricity capacity in 2020, and about 20% in 2052. There is thus little chance of nuclear electricity becoming a significant source of power for India anytime over the next several decades.
There is at least one good technical reason why these targets are unlikely to be met. The DAE's plan for the future of nuclear power in India involves constructing hundreds of breeder reactors - the much touted three stage nuclear programme. While country after country has abandoned breeder reactors as unsafe and uneconomical, the DAE has been stubbornly ploughing a lone furrow, heroically in its own eyes as well as the handful of breeder enthusiasts elsewhere but needlessly by most other counts. Reliance on an unproven technology, or more precisely a technology shown to be unreliable in most countries that have experimented with it, makes it likely that nuclear power will never become a major source of electricity in India.
The limited nuclear capacity has been expensive. Since nuclear reactors were clearly much costlier than thermal plants, the DAE's strategy was to compare nuclear power costs with thermal power plants that were situated far away from coal mines, thereby increasing the transport cost of coal and thus the fuelling costs of thermal power.
In 1958, Bhabha projected "the contribution of atomic energy to the power production in India during the next 10 to 15 years" and concluded that "the costs of [nuclear] power [would] compare very favourably with the cost of power from conventional sources in many areas" (emphases added). The "many areas" referred to regions that were remote from coalfields, which was estimated as 600 kilometers (km) in the early days. By the 1980s the DAE had changed this distance and stated that the cost of nuclear power "compares quite favourably with coal fired stations located 800 km away from the pithead and in the 1990s would be even cheaper than coal fired stations at pithead". This projection was not fulfilled and a 1999 Nuclear Power Corporation (NPC) internal study came to the less optimistic conclusion that the "cost of nuclear electricity generation in India remains competitive with thermal [electricity] for plants located about 1,200 km away from coal pit head, when full credit is given to long term operating cost especially in respect of fuel prices".
Even this claim does not stand up to analysis. Two collaborators from the International Energy Initiative and I compared the costs of generating electricity at the Kaiga atomic power station and the Raichur Thermal Power Station (RTPS) VII - both plants of similar size and vintage - using the standard discounted cash flow methodology (Ramana et al., 2005). The coal for RTPS VII was assumed to come from mines that were 1400 km away. The nuclear reactors were assumed to have an economic lifetime of forty years (as against a much longer radioactive lifetime) but the coal plants were assumed to have an economic lifetime of only thirty years. The comparison showed that nuclear power would be competitive only with unrealistic assumptions; for a wide range of realistic parameters, nuclear power is significantly more expensive. These results are summarized in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Levelized cost (the bare generation cost which does not include other components of electricity tariff like interest payments and transmission and distribution charges) of Kaiga I&II (operating nuclear reactors), Kaiga III&IV (nuclear reactors under construction; projected costs), and the Raichur VII (operating coal fueled thermal plant) as a function of real discount rate (a measure of the value of capital after taking out the effects of inflation) at 80% Capacity Factor.
One particularly key variable is the discount rate, a measure of the value of capital. Nuclear power, because of its capital intensive nature, is competitive only for low discount rates. In a country where there are multiple demands on capital for infrastructural projects, including for electricity generation, such low discount rates are not realistic. The electricity sector in India, as elsewhere, is being reorganized to make it more economically viable. The 2003 national Electricity Act emphasizes competition as the basis for energy policy. The nuclear establishment has so far managed not to be put to the economic test, but this state of affairs could change.
This economic comparison is largely based on assumptions favourable to nuclear power. In particular, following the methodology adopted by the DAE, we have not included the costs of dealing with radioactive wastes from nuclear power. Since there is no credible solution to the problem of radioactive waste, the best that can be done is short term management. The DAE treats spent nuclear fuel by reprocessing it and segregating the waste into different categories on the basis of their radioactivity. As mentioned earlier reprocessing is expensive. If our estimate of the cost of reprocessing in India is included in the tariff for nuclear power, it would increase the unit cost by roughly one cent. This would make it even more expensive than thermal power from coal.
Neither does the comparison include any provision for insurance liability against accidents since the government has not required that of nuclear power plants. In the United States, private companies considering the construction of nuclear reactors were concerned that such an accident would likely bankrupt them and tried to get insurance coverage. No insurance company was willing to take on the risk of indemnifying against such a huge liability; nor could they commit to pay beyond their own resources. The U.S. Congress had to introduce the Price-Anderson act that allowed the government to act as the ultimate insurer, offering in essence a subsidy to the nuclear industry. Such subsidies are not included in the quoted economic costs of nuclear power.
It is by no means clear that even with the resumption of international nuclear trade the DAE will be able to generate a significant fraction of the country's electricity requirements for decades. Further, such electricity is likely to be expensive. In the case of French reactors which are typical of Western supplied power plants, M. R. Srinivasan, former head of the DAE, has stated that, "Recent cost projections show that if an LWR were to be imported from France, the cost of electricity would be too high for the Indian consumer. This is because of the high capital cost of French supplied equipment". The estimated capital cost of each 1000 MW foreign reactor is about $2 billion or about Rs. 8000 crores. To this must be added the interest cost during construction, roughly another Rs. 2000 crores. In all, if one were to think of 10,000 MW of foreign reactors being imported over next decade, the total cost will be Rs. 100,000 crores - no small sum.
These costs will ultimately have to be paid by electricity consumers through their monthly bills or by the tax payer if the government decides to subsidize these costs. Even if a few reactors were built as a result of the deal, it is quite certain that consumers will be unable to pay the high electricity costs and that might result in the reactors being shut down. This is what has happened with the infamous gas plant near Dabhol, Maharashtra that was supplied by Enron.
A second motivation for the deal represents another of DAE's failures: in ensuring sufficient supplies of uranium to fuel its nuclear reactors. For the reasons mentioned earlier, India has been unable to import uranium for most of its nuclear reactors. Current uranium production within India is far less than the fuel requirements of its reactors if they are run efficiently. DAE has been able to continue to operate its reactors by using uranium stockpiled from when the nuclear capacity was much smaller. This explains DAE's desperate efforts to open new uranium mines in the country, including in Meghalaya and Andhra Pradesh, which have met with stiff public resistance, primarily because of health impacts of uranium mining and milling on the communities around existing mines.
More and more Bombs
If U.S.-India deal goes through the DAE will be able to purchase the uranium it needs to fuel those reactors it chooses to put under IAEA safeguards from international sources. This will free up domestic uranium for potential use in the nuclear weapons programme and could allow a significant and rapid expansion in the nuclear arsenal. This option has been suggested by, among others, K. Subrahmanyam, former head of the National Security Advisory Board, who has argued that "Given India's uranium ore crunch and the need to build up our .nuclear deterrent arsenal as fast as possible, it is to India's advantage to categorize as many power reactors as possible as civilian ones to be refueled by imported uranium and conserve our native uranium fuel for weapons grade plutonium production."
As has been emphasized time and again by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and various other government officials, such production of fissile materials for nuclear weapons is not constrained by the deal. This is why the DAE insisted that several of its reactors will not come under safeguards.
This fact has not escaped Pakistan's attention and its National Command Authority (NCA), chaired by President Pervez Musharraf, has declared that "In view of the fact the [U.S.-India] agreement would enable India to produce a significant quantity of fissile material and nuclear weapons from unsafeguarded nuclear reactors, the NCA expressed firm resolve that our credible minimum deterrence requirements will be met." This suggests that an expansion of fissile material stockpiles in South Asia may ensue - in other words an arms race.
The capacity to further build up fissile materials for nuclear weapons comes with a price tag. Even without being exploded on civilian populations, nuclear weapons have, through the process of manufacture, taken a toll on our security, economy, environment, public and occupational health. Particularly affected have been poor people living near nuclear facilities.
As with most nuclear matters, there is enormous secrecy about how much plutonium the DAE has already produced. Most estimates suggest that there is enough to make 60-100 nuclear weapons. Each of these can kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Should we really increase the capacity to commit such mass murder?
U.S. Motivations
The potentially large increase in fissile material production capacity that the deal would allow should not be news to most U.S. policy makers. Why then do they want to renew nuclear trade?
As is often the case, the publicly stated reasons are not the real ones. The Bush administration often claims that the deal will reduce India's carbon emissions or its oil imports. Without going into the points about whether nuclear power is a sensible way to reduce carbon emissions or whether nuclear electricity driven vehicles are going to become a significant fraction of our transport sector, it should be obvious that when an administration known for its anti-environmental views is espousing environmental reasons for some action, then something else is at stake.
The significance of the nuclear deal can be appreciated only in the context of a changing U.S. geopolitical strategy under the Bush Administration and an evolving U.S. India relationship. In an article published in Foreign Affairs in 2000, Condoleezza Rice, the main foreign policy adviser to Bush in his presidential campaign, indicated that a future Bush administration would take a new approach to India and argued that the United States "should pay closer attention to India's role in the regional balance. India is an element in China's calculation, and it should be in America's, too. India is not a great power yet, but it has the potential to emerge as one." How to include India in the U.S. calculations was explained by another key player in U.S. India relations of the past few years - Ashley Tellis. Tellis wrote: "If the United States is serious about advancing its geopolitical objectives in Asia, it would almost by definition help New Delhi develop strategic capabilities such that India's nuclear weaponry and associated delivery systems could deter against the growing and utterly more capable nuclear forces Beijing is likely to possess by 2025."
One of the first steps in operationalising the idea of the U.S. and India as strategic "partners" in managing regional and international security was the "Next Steps in Strategic Partnership" agreement. Signed in January 2004, it announced that the United States would help India with its civilian space programs, high-technology trade, missile defense aid, and its civilian nuclear activities. The subsequent nuclear deal is but one of the building blocks promised in this larger arrangement. The purpose of this "Strategic Partnership" accord was made clear by a U.S. official who said the "goal is to help India become a major world power in the 21st century. We understand fully the implications, including military implications, of that statement".
These implications became clearer with the U.S.-India Defense Relationship Agreement of June 28, 2005. The thinking behind this agreement was explained by Robert Blackwill, who served in the Bush administration as U.S. ambassador to India and then as deputy national security adviser for strategic planning, in his rhetorical question: "Why should the U.S. want to check India's missile capability in ways that could lead to China's permanent nuclear dominance over democratic India?". Less than a month later, the nuclear deal was announced.
Recruiting India may help reduce the immediate costs to the United States of exercising its military, political, and economic power to limit the growth of China as a possible rival. More generally, the United States sees Asia as central to global politics after the demise of the Soviet Union, and it needs strong regional clients there. The search for allies and friends is all the more important at a time when the United States is isolated because of its invasion and occupation of Iraq. On all these counts, India is seen as a major prize and support for its military build-up and its nuclear complex seems to be the price the Bush administration is willing to pay.
And Indian policy makers have not been particularly resistant to helping the U.S. advance its geopolitical objectives. An example is India's vote against Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency a couple of years ago. Till then India had supported Iran's right to develop its nuclear programme in any way it saw fit. Its sudden switch can only be interpreted within the context of the deal and direct and indirect U.S. pressure to join it against Iran. More recently, we have seen a series of joint military exercises, which may well be the first step in joining the United States in armed interventions around the world. Indian participation in a future Iraq-like situation is not such a remote possibility.
It may be added that while the Bush Administration and its advisors are willing to see India emerge as a major power, there are limits that the United States would not like to see crossed. One obvious one is that it would not like India to be capable of challenging the US militarily. Since Indian missile capabilities are relatively limited - it certainly no intercontinental ballistic missile that can reach mainland United States - the growth of its nuclear arsenal is not a direct problem for US planners. What is less obvious is that while the U.S. would like to see India keep China "off balance", it would not want it to pose such a major challenge to China in military terms that it prompts Chinese military planners to go on a major expansion. In this context, one particular concern is that India conducts a fresh round of nuclear weapons tests, which might be expected to feature high yield thermonuclear weapons. The concern in some US circles is that this may prompt China to expand and refine its nuclear arsenal, a prospect that is not attractive to these planners. This is one unspoken reason, apart from the obvious one of historical legislation, for the focus on weapons testing during the negotiations.
Conclusions
The debate around the nuclear deal has often revolved around the minutiae of the Henry Hyde Act and the 123 Agreement. This tends to obscure the real issues involved. Despite pages and pages of newspaper reports, columns, and editorials, few have talked about the fundamental choices that India is making by entering the nuclear deal. The deal is intimately tied with a choice that privileges nuclear power, further legitimizes nuclear arms, and ties India to the strategic interests of the United States. None of these are desirable for anyone who seeks a peaceful and environmentally sustainable future.
Accidents and Dangers
There is reason, though, to be concerned about the safety of the DAE's reactors. Practically all the nuclear reactors and other facilities associated with the nuclear fuel cycle operated by the DAE have had accidents of varying severity. Other facilities associated with the nuclear fuel cycle have also had accidents. These are euphemistically described as incidents by nuclear establishments around the world in order to mollify justified public concerns. One can barely imagine the consequences of a Chernobyl-like accident involving the release of large quantities of radioactive materials in a densely populated country like India.
The observed safety problems seem to be systemic. In 1995 the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB), which is supposed to oversee the safe operation of all civilian nuclear facilities, produced a detailed report that identified 134 safety issues, of which about 95 were considered "top priority." It of greater concern that many of these problems had been identified in earlier DAE evaluations in 1979 and 1987 as items requiring "urgent action" but had not been addressed. Not surprisingly the DAE has kept the AERB report a secret. Even now not all of these safety issues have been addressed.
The most serious of the accidents at nuclear reactors in India occurred on March 31, 1993, when two blades in the turbine generator of the first unit of the Narora Atomic Power Station snapped under accumulated stress and caused a major fire in the turbine room, nullifying all electrical safety systems. What saved the reactor from a potential meltdown was the timely action of some technicians, who flooded the reactor with a solution containing boron, a neutron absorber. This was considered "a last-level protection in the event of a prolonged station power blackout".
What is really cause for concern in the case of the Narora accident is that it came after the DAE had been warned by the manufacturer of the turbine blades that they were susceptible to fatigue failure. But the DAE ignored the warning. Further, at least two of the DAE's reactors had experienced major fires in the preceding decade: the Rajasthan 2 reactor in 1985and the Kakrapar 1 reactor in 1991. In the latter, the fire led to a complete loss of emergency diesel power and a partial loss of D.C. power supply. And finally the DAE had ignored what reactor designers around the world had learnt from the 1975 fire at the Browns Ferry nuclear plant in the United States: always put electric cabling to emergency shut down and cooling systems in separate fire proof channels.
A further source of concern is that as mentioned earlier the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB), which is supposed to oversee the safe operation of all civilian nuclear facilities, is not independent of the DAE. This is compounded by the AERB's lack of technical staff and testing facilities. As A. Gopalakrishnan, a former chairman of the AERB, has observed, "95 per cent of the members of the AERB's evaluation committees are scientists and engineers on the payrolls of the DAE. This dependency is deliberately exploited by the DAE management to influence, directly and indirectly, the AERB's safety evaluations and decisions. The interference has manifested itself in the AERB toning down the seriousness of safety concerns, agreeing to the postponement of essential repairs to suit the DAE's time schedules, and allowing continued operation of installations when public safety considerations would warrant their immediate shutdown and repair."
Elsewhere, Gopalakrishnan has pointed to an example of direct interference from the AEC. This was in the context of the collapse of the Kaiga containment dome that was mentioned earlier. "When, as chairman, I appointed an independent expert committee to investigate the containment collapse at Kaiga, the AEC chairman wanted its withdrawal and matters left to the committee formed by the NPC [Managing Director]. DAE also complained to the [Prime Minister's Office] who tried to force me to back off."
All of this suggests that the DAE is not an organization that can reliably avoid accidents at its nuclear facilities. Since generating nuclear power involves a complex technology where events can spin out of control in a very short time, even seemingly minor accidents should be cause for serious concern. In studying the safety of nuclear reactors and other hazardous technologies, sociologists and organization theorists have come to the pessimistic conclusion that serious accidents are inevitable with such complex high-technology systems (Perrow, 1999). The character of these systems makes accidents a "normal" part of their operation, regardless of the intent of their operators and other authorities. In such technologies, many major accidents have seemingly insignificant origins. Because of the complexities involved, all possible accident modes cannot be predicted and operator errors are comprehensible only in hindsight. Adding redundant safety mechanisms only increases the complexity of the system allowing for unexpected interactions between subsystems and increasing new accident modes. All of this means that there is no way to ensure that reactors and other nuclear facilities will not have major accidents.
|
M V Ramana is Senior Fellow at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Environment and Development, Bangalore and co-editor of Prisoners of the Nuclear Dream (Orient Longman, 2003).
There are questions that need asking about India's nuclear options before the lay reader begins to take sides. While there are vocal groups protesting against India's nuclear programme - usually on moral grounds - the destruction of Iraq and the recent playing of The Star Spangled Banner in North Korea provide evidence of the respect that nations command when they possess 'weapons of mass destruction'. No intelligent Indian seriously believes that the nuclear tests in Pokhran were for 'peaceful purposes' but most people deem it true that going nuclear is the only way out of energy shortages. This paper is disquieting in much as it suggests that this is not a possibility and that India's Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) has not demonstrated its capability to provide nuclear energy at a viable cost. The essay argues convincingly that India is, instead, only being co-opted into a strategic military alliance against a neighbour like China and friendly countries like Iran. Arguments on the nuclear issue will always be controversial and Phalanx welcomes other views.
Editor
Courtesy: evworld.com
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 Print this articleTop |
|
|
|
|
|
