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| N-power project caught in a cleft | |
| Sanjay Jog / Kudankulam October 24, 2011, 0:47 IST | |
Amma, as she is popularly called in the locality, knows only three English words – fusion, fission and radiation. And, she uses these quite liberally. The 70-year-old from Uvuri village speaks, non-stop, in chaste Tamil, to whoever is willing to listen.
“If the prime minister is so sure about the safety of Indian nuclear plants, he can shift the Kudankulam plant to the backyard of his spacious residence or near Parliament,” says Amma.
“Vendam Vendam Anu Ulay Vendam (We don’t want the nuclear power project),” the local people say. That’s the overriding sentiment here that non-government organisations and Chief Minister Jayalalithaa have been quick to capitalise on.
From teenagers to octogenarians, all seem to have hit the roads in almost 20 villages in the region. Their demand: Scrapping of the 2,000-Mw project being set up at a cost of Rs 17,000 crore. In the first phase of the project, 99 per cent work has been completed, and the second, almost 97 per cent. The agitation gained ground after the Fukushima nuclear accident in March and reached its pinnacle after an 11-day fast Idindakarai village, dominated by fishermen, in September.
Amid this generally negative mood, even the fine line between fact and fiction looks blurred. Bible Venseslaus, a teacher at the local polytechnic college, goes a step forward and talks about the “danger of tsunami” in the region. “There has already been a sharp rise in the incidence of cancer and thyroid-related diseases,” Venseslaus points out.
Work on the Kudankulam project has been stalled. Due to sit-in protests by villagers, Nuclear Power Corporation (NPC) scientists and engineers have been debarred from entering the plant. More than 6,000 contract labourers are in the process of leaving the area. NPC says this is a big setback, as mobilising such a large number of people is going to be a mammoth task.
At the centre of discontent has been the possible side-effects of the project on fishing — the main source of livelihood in the region. S P Udayakumar, coordinator of the People's Movement Against Nuclear Energy, claims that Thoothukudi, Kanyakumari and Tirunelveli districts contribute a third to the state’s total fish catch, clocking an annual turnover of Rs 3,000 crore.
“Some rare species of fish have already vanished and local fishermen are convinced that the discharge of hot water from the Kudankulam project would further affect fish population in the region,” he notes.
The authorities, however, dismiss these “wild” allegations. They say it is shocking that politicking has hijacked the situation here.
NPC Chairman and Managing Director S K Jain says such incidents have demotivated the people involved in the nuclear project. “Safety has been and will continue to be of paramount importance for us,” he says. He adds that the Kudankulam project’s cooling water system provides for fish protection and there is no threat to marine ecology around the plant.
M K Balaji, Kudankulam’s site director, lists the many advanced safety features deployed in the project’s design. These include a passive heat-removal system that ensures cooling of the fuel even when power and cooling water are not available, as was in the case of Fukushima. “There are 154 passive recombiners to avoid the formation of explosive mixtures inside the containment by maintaining the volumetric hydrogen concentration in the mixture within safe limits. The catalytic recombiners work passively without any external or diesel power or manual intervention,” he says.
Balaji says, a comprehensive awareness programme will be launched to remove villagers’ fears. He hopes that the situation will soon be normal.
However, that may look like a wishful thinking at this stage. Pushpa Rayan, a member of the steering committee of People’s Movement Against Nuclear Energy, says scrapping of the project is non-negotiable and the government should use the site for solar and wind power.
Many locals admit that the project has led to a spurt in economic activity in region and that is evident from the increasing number of small-scale units, petrol stations and construction projects.
But the positive side of the story has completely got immersed in the negative sentiment – a fact that has intrigued many. M R Srinivasan, former chairman of Atomic Energy Commission, blames Germany, Finland, US, France, Australia and Norway for NGOs’ “ill-informed” protests. “This is clearly a campaign against India. This is also meant run down the Russian VVER-1000 reactors that have been deployed in the Kudankulam project," Srinivasan says.
EN Dudkin, head of the Russian specialist group at the Kudankulam project, says he is “plain amused” by the sudden protest by villagers. “The VVER 1000 reactors have four active safety system and they are designed to withstand the fall of any flying object including plane crash and also high- magnitude tsunami,” Dudkin says.
As the mudslinging goes on, Dhanashekharan, a senior faculty member in Kanyakumari’s arts and commerce college, has a solution. “The project is good, but it has to be seen by local people as good. The government has to be more proactive in taking people into confidence. A peace committee must be activated fast to have a regular dialogue between the protesters and the authorities,” he says.
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