MORE ON THE JAITAPUR NUCLEAR PLANT by Joaquim Correia-Afonso

As the events at the Fukushima nuclear reactor plants, in Japan, unfold, one comes across stories of mismanagement and faulty communication. It is a long list of scandals. Inspite of all the efforts to control the damage, none of the solutions have worked. It has been well argued thus: “If that is how things are in highly disciplined, organised Japan, what hope for chaotic, institutionally corrupt India, without enough transparency?”

Turning the searchlight on India’s plans to harness nuclear energy, one Professor of Strategic Studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi has argued that India’s nuclear thrust is a “giant scandal” in the making – “These multi-billion dollar imports constitute a giant scandal in the making, with long-term safety implications. Take the plan to install 9,900 MW of nuclear-generated capacity at Jaitapur: Not only was the environment impact assessment hurriedly approved, coercive efforts are also being made to acquire land to allow France’s AREVA to build six reactors – none on these of a type operational anywhere. It is only after the serial incidents at Japan’s six-reactor Fukushima Daiichi plant that India’s nuclear chief has acknowledged the need for an earthquake-cum-tsunami-related safety evaluation of AREVA’s reactor model. Why wasn’t this done before reserving Jaitapur for AREVA?”

So we see that AREVA’s reactors have not been tested anywhere in the world. The scam driven government has accepted untested plants for installation in a zone that is susceptible to very strong seismic activity, where there have been 92 earthquakes in 20 years, where in one case over 9000 people died, where a road just vanished and turned into a gorge, where the plant would be an environmental disaster, destroying one of India’s greatest natural landscapes and the habitats of a good many animal species. It appears quite true, therefore, that, in a country “without enough transparency” and much less accountability, the speed with which the project was approved, without a proper environment impact assessment, without a safety assessment and with the use of coercion for land acquisition, was in direct proportion to the Mb and Kb – the megabucks involved (“Multi-billion dollar imports”) and the kickbacks that must have accrued to those involved in the “giant scandal”.

And it is these kickbacks that put a speed breaker in the kick-out of the project.