Soumya Dutta, soumyadutta.delhi@gmail.com
New push for Nuclear Energy : In the recently presented Union Budget for 2025-26, the Indian government announced a “Nuclear Energy Mission for Vikshit Bharat”, with a significant budgetary support of Rs.20,000 crores for R&D to develop an ‘indigenous’ Small Modular Reactor and install at least five such SMRs by the year 2033. The budget also announced a target of installing 100GW of Nuclear Energy capacity by 2047 (!) from today’s just over 8 GW. As part of the Nuclear Energy Mission, it was also proposed to amend the Atomic Energy Act and the Civil Liabilities for Nuclear Damages Act, to enable and attract private investments in the nuclear energy sector and reduce liability of nuclear power plant operators in case of any accidents ! In the light of massive nuclear power plant disasters like Fukushima, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island etc (also many others smaller ones including in India’s Rawat Bhata, Narora.., these steps seem to be designed to go against all accepted risk reduction and response principles, throwing all caution to the winds.
Why is it that the Govts of several countries are still pursuing this dangerous dream? And most important for us, we the Indian Citizens must ask – Why India ? The “reason” offered by the Govt and Nuclear lobbyists was that – “a power starved country” like India needs a “reliable source” of electricity in nuclear. That “logic” was false earlier, and even more senseless now. If we recollect the earlier claims of the Indian nuclear establishment, India was to have an installed Nuclear (fission) power capacity of 20,000 MW by around 2000, and 63,000 MW by 2030….!! Today, in the beginning of 2025, India’s total installed Power capacity is about 430 GW (with a tiny part, just 8.2 GW, about 1.9% of installed capacity contributed by nuclear), while the peak summer demands touch about 250 GW. Many of the coal fired power plants are being run at low Plant Load Factors of less than 60%, wasting installed capacity built with public financing. So, Why waste our hard earned savings into dangerous non-productive “assets”? Why indeed!
The World has Changed from the Nuclear heydays : The World has changed from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, when the world went gaga over Nuclear power. There were few alternatives then, and the mainstay coal power is heavily polluting. The situation has changed completely. Today, the Cheapest source of new electricity plants is Solar Photovoltaic or Wind turbines. Their per MW installation costs came down to less than Rs.5 crores/MW, while even a comparatively less costly PHWR nuclear power plant costs around 10-12 crores/MW. Generated power is also cheapest from Solar and Wind, at Rs.2.80–3.00 per KWHr. Nuclear power, taking subsidies into account, costs about double. And what about the continuous stream of radioactive by products, which is poisoning land-water-air, and will keep poisoning us for thousands of years to come. Apart from the massive costs and dangers of radioactive leakages and regular emissions (even when the NPPs are running ‘normally’, the cooling water consumption for nuclear (and thermal) power plants are very high. In the face of critical summer and winter water shortages accentuated by Climate Change, this decision to push nuks in a big way seems even suicidal.
The devastation that the entire nuclear fuel chain causes, starts right at the beginning, from the mining and refining of Uranium. One has only to visit the Indian mine sites of Jaduguda, Turamdih and Tummalapalle, to see the untold sufferings the local populations are undergoing. Lots of diseases, severely deformed chldren being born,….are commonplace in Jaduguda, the oldest of India’s Uranium mining sites. Even the newest – Tummlapalle in Andhra Pradesh, has started causing devastation within 8-9 years of operation. Anyone visiting the nearby villages of KK Kottala, Mabbuchintalapalle,…. will be struck by the cancerous lesions on skins of dozens of children, domestic animals strangely dying by the hundreds, the only cash crop of these poor villagers – banana plantations – being devastated by contamination from the mine wastes.
Looking Back at Fukushima : Almost exactly 14 years ago, on the 11th of March 2011, ‘all hell broke loose’ in the Pacific coast of Japan. A huge Tsunami, triggered by the monstrous ‘Tohuku earthquake’ (of magnitude 9 in Richter scale), swept away towns and villages near the coast, killing about 20,000 people. The gigantic tsunami waves also hit the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plants on the coast, overwhelming the ‘defensive sea walls’, cutting off power supply, disabling backup generators and triggering a devastating nuclear accident . What followed is now well known to the whole world, as the live television coverage of the apocalyptic events streamed into all homes around the globe. Three of the six boiling-water nuclear reactors went completely out of control into meltdown spreading deadly radioactive materials, lakhs were evacuated, huge areas became uninhabitable for decades or even centuries, massive amounts of radioactively contaminated water was (and is still being) dumped into the Pacific ocean causing untold damage to marine life……. An area with a radius of 30 KMs from the devastated NPP still remains heavily contaminated by radioactivity and practically out of bounds for normal living. The pains and sufferings of lakhs of Nuclear Refugees, first time in the 21st century (after the disaster of Chernobyl in 1986) were seen almost live by people on their TV screens, throughout the world.
And that disaster is still unfolding 14 years down the line, with no certainty about when the technologically and financially sound Japanese government and Corporate world (TEPCO owns and ran the Fukushima Daiichi NPP) will be able to fully contain and decommission these reactors. The Pacific ocean, which came to big help in trying to cool the melted down reactors, with their nearly infinite supply of water, were subjected to massive discharges of ‘radioactively contaminated water’ .One was reminded of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in then existing Soviet Union, as the only comparably horrendous nuclear disaster, both being classified at the highest rank of Level-7 in the deceptively named “International Nuclear and Radiological Events Scale INES”. These are Not just Events, these are apocalyptic events. Many such nuclear disasters have
happened every decade, in many countries operating nuclear power projects, in various smaller scales.
And let’s not forget the cataclysmic nuclear bombings of Hiroshima (over 120,000 dead from one small fission bomb) and Nagasaki. That’s not the end of nuclear bombs destructive story though, as the ‘nuclear powers’ have tested over 2000 of these nuclear weapons of mass destruction in several designated areas of the world. The tales of the major US testing site, the Marshal Islands and how its unsuspecting citizens were used as nuclear-exposure guinea pigs, is another horror story. Similar but lesser known stories exist from the Soviet nuclear test sites of Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan, Novaya Zemlya and others, the French nuclear test sites of Reggane & Akker in Algeria and the Mururoa Atoll in the Pacific, the British test sites in the Australian territories of Monte Bello, Maralinga, Emu Field., and the Chinese test site of Lop Nur in the Uyghur Autonomous region.
Global nuclear fission power industry was in decline for the past three decades, but has started being revived – with the spectre of Climate Change Crisis staring down the world. From its glory days in the 1960s to the 1980s, many countries built these reactors, with scientists hoping that they will find some ‘solution’ to the intractable problems of nuclear wastes. Then the Three-some happened – Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, to show the world that this is one very dangerous Genie out of the bottle. In a desperate effort to revive itself, the dying nuclear fission power industry tried to present itself as a “climate solution’, claiming itself to be Carbon-neutral. Even that claim has been debunked, with clear calculations showing the significant amounts of carbon emission through its entire fuel cycle, from mining, refining, fabrication, very high embedded emission of construction etc.
India is a party to the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor or ITER, the biggest scientific experiment so far to harness the power of another and much safer form of nuclear energy, that of hydrogen fusion – the process that powers the Sun and most other stars. Controlled Thermonuclear Reactor experiments – with no possibility of explosion and minimal radioactive footprint, is a promise shown to us for the last 50+ years, but is now nearing first scientific breakeven demonstration. The predecessor Tokamaks before ITER – the Joint European Torus in UK. the Chinese Tokamak EAST (Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak), and the French WEST Tokamak, have already come tantalisingly close to a ‘technical break-even’. If scientists are successful in harnessing this with commercial viability, which is expected by the year 2045-50, humanity’s need for energy can be tackled for many millennia. For now, we have to shift out from the climate damaging fossil fuels to the emerged Renewables, in a manner empowering the millions of landholders in the country, not by dispossessing them for the large land requirements of renewable. In the meantime, the old, highly dangerous and toxic technology of Nuclear Fission power must be placed where it belongs – in the “tried and failed” bin of history as one more dangerous and failed experiment. We the Citizens must demand from our governments – Scrap All New planned Nuclear (Fission) Power Projects, and Phase-out the existing ones in a Planned manner. In memory of all the people of the world who suffered terribly from this 20th century legacy of Nuclear bombs and nuclear reactors, and with respect to many future generations who will have to contend with large amounts of long lived radioactive waste materials,
— Soumya Dutta
Please find the pdf below