Although as yet in India, there has not been a severe accident leading to core meltdown or large radiation exposures to the public, on measures of occupational exposure to workers, and compliance with standards for accident prevention, Indian nuclear plants perform poorly.
Nuclear reactors contain large amounts of radioactive material; this health hazard makes safety in nuclear facilities especially important. An examination of the safety record in India's nuclear facilities reveals poor practices and routine accidents, ranging from leaks of oil to complete loss of power in a reactor causing all safety systems to be disabled. For example in the 1980's, for which data is available, radiation exposures to power plant workers were ten times the world average for each unit of electricity and twice the world average for each monitored worker. As recently as in 2003, there have been accidents involving high radiation exposures to workers.
Our government's track record in scientific innovation is debatable, at the very best. Nuclear safety is paramount at a point when our energy security policy is tilting towards more reliance on this method of power generation. An independent (read, non-governmental) system of checks and monitoring has to be put in place to ensure the safety of people working and living in and around nuclear reactor complexes. Doesn't something like that exist already?
Problems With Nuclear Energy
Early in 1995 a seminar on 'Nuclear Energy and Public Safety' was held in Delhi, co-sponsored by the India International Centre and some other organisations. A book, titled Nuclear Energy and Public Safety, edited by Dr. Vinod Gaur (incidentally one of the earliest members of the Indian Humanist Union) was published after the seminar, with contributions from about twenty eminent scientists, academicians and others. The picture that emerges from this is disturbing, as summed up in the Preface. Talking of "sloppy technology and management practices" it says: "The devastating fire at Narora, the major flooding of Kakrapara, and the collapse of the containment dome at Kaiga are recent examples of failures, details of which remain unavailable to the public, causing deep concern about the hazard potential of our nuclear installations. This situation supports a lax technological culture through immunity from public exposure at the expense of public anxiety , and clearly underlines the wisdom of creating public transparency of plans and designs and of hazards and failure analyses reports of large and crucial public utilities, as practiced by most democratic nations."
When the Report was published, the situation in nuclear-power generation was largely static worldwide. A number of accidents and incidents had led to widespread concerns regarding the hazards of nuclear power generation, and a slowdown – if not stoppage – in the building of new reactors. The Chernobyl disaster, the incidents at Three Mile Island and Windscale raised serious doubts about the viability of fission-based power generation. In the USA , "The accident was a watershed event for the US nuclear industry. Seventy-four plants under construction at the time of the accident have since been cancelled. Thirteen plants that were operating when the accident occurred have been permanently closed by their owners. Only fifty-three plants then under construction were completed and placed into service. No nuclear power plants have been ordered since the accident." The Bush administration had changed all that and heralded the Renaissance of Nuclear Power.
Efforts are being made to develop safer and more efficient reactor designs. An international task force has agreed on six nuclear reactor technologies for deployment between 2010 and 2030. All six are expected to yield advances in terms of sustainability, economics, reliability and safety. All these aspects involve highly complex as well as controversial technical considerations, and it would be presumptuous on my part to try to touch on these.
Here I shall try to confine myself to safety and security. In this context I believe it is important to make a distinction between safety and security; although the close relationship between the two must be borne in mind.
Safety Safety concerns safeguards against breakdowns, accidents arising out of negligence or mismanagement; and minimising the damage caused by natural disasters. In the case of nuclear energy the major areas of safety concerns are: mining, processing, reactor operations, spent fuel, waste management and decommissioning. Whether adequate safety can be ensured (in theory as well as in practice) in each of these areas has always been debated; but the issues are so highly technical that they are best left to the experts. It is probably true that for every expert there is an equal and opposite expert. This, of course, greatly helps in selective quotation.
On the subject of mining: "From the mining of uranium to the manufacturing of weapons and nuclear power, workers are faced with the risk of exposure to radiation. According to reports by the International Commission for Radiological Protection (ICRP), work-related deaths in uranium mines are estimated at between 5,500 deaths (for radiation workers @ 3 mSv) to 37, 500 deaths (for radiation workers @ 20 mSv) per million workers a year. This compared with deaths in the manufacturing industry (estimated at 110 deaths per year per million workers) and the construction industry (estimated at 164 deaths per million workers per year)".
On reactor safety: "Nuclear power plants are and will always be vulnerable to accidents resulting in meltdown or other large radiation releases due to human error and worn out or defective parts. Even without an accident or attack, nuclear power plants threaten public health by routinely releasing radiation into the air, soil and water. Moreover, U.S. nuclear power plants have a concerning record of violating safety regulations while regulators delay, deny, and defer to the financial interests of nuclear plant owners and operators. These failures increase the risk that nuclear reactors pose to the public."
On waste management, "No technically or economically feasible methods have been proven for the ultimate disposal of radioactive waste; a grim legacy from the nuclear power program for future generations. Several proposals for dealing with the wastes exist and one or more of these approaches may eventually be shown to be satisfactory, but important questions remain unanswered today about all of them”.
Security
Security relates to protection from deliberately hostile actions such as sabotage, terrorist attack or attacks by missiles or bombs. Even if it is conceded that adequate safeguards can be instituted to prevent any catastrophic outcome in case of accident, negligence, mismanagement or natural disaster, vulnerability to enemy action still has to be taken into account - particularly for states like India, which live in a troubled neighbourhood. A successful attack on a nuclear plant can be incalculably catastrophic. In his landmark book on the subject: Nuclear Plants as Weapons for the Enemy: An Unrecognized Military Peril, Bennett Ramberg points out that any country that possesses nuclear energy facilities gives its adversaries a quasi- nuclear capability to use against it. A US Admiral is candid about this. "Once a war starts, the value system changes and anything you can do to hurt the adversary and cause him problems, you find justification for doing." He recalls hearing someone say, "You don't have to take the bang to the enemy; the bang is already there when you take out his nuclear plants." He was talking about the reported attack by the US on the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center reactor in Iraq, just ten kilometers southeast of Baghdad. It was a small Russian-built research reactor. Nuclear plants, static and prominently visible, are ideal military targets. The world has more than 300 research reactors and almost 500 large nuclear power plants – all sitting ducks. Every nuclear plant is, in effect, a potential nuclear bomb embedded in our territory. It would be unrealistic to count on our nuclear facilities not being attacked in a warlike situation, or in terrorist operations. As Matin Zuberi says, "The core of a typical nuclear plant contains about 1,000 times the radioactivity released by the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. A high explosive bomb used against it would acquire the attributes of a nuclear weapon without its blast effect. According to an environmental impact statement of the U.S Nuclear Regulatory Commission a large truck bomb used against a nuclear reactor in a highly populated area could produce 130,000 deaths. An ordinary conventional explosive could thus be turned into a large radiological weapon.
Within a nuclear power plant perhaps the most vulnerable part is the spent fuel pool. Spent fuel pools for boiling water reactors are located above ground. This can make these reactors even more vulnerable. Conventional explosives, by causing a breach in the pool water connections can cause a fire worse than even a reactor meltdown. As one report says, "If a fire were to break out at the Millstone Reactor Unit 3 spent fuel pond in Connecticut, it would result a three-fold increase in background exposures. This level triggers the NRC evacuation requirement and could render 29,000 square miles of land uninhabitable."
The nuclear power industry, with the support of the Bush administration, pushed for a revival of nuclear energy. The industry aggressively seeked to license and build the first new nuclear reactors in a generation. Toward this end, nuclear companies have sought public approval by disingenuously presenting the energy source as clean, renewable, and necessary to deal with global warming, environmental degradation, and dwindling petroleum resources. But nuclear energy is neither clean nor green. While nuclear reactors do release a smaller amount of greenhouse gases than their coal and natural gas counterparts, they create a significant amount of dangerous radioactive waste that remains toxic for hundreds of thousands of years. Beyond the health, safety, and security risks posed by nuclear generation of electricity-as well as its extremely high costs-this waste is a shameful legacy of our environmental exploitation that will beset generations to come.”
That the impediments in the way of India exercising the option to develop nuclear power-generation facilities are likely to be removed is certainly a cause for celebration, and represents the triumph of Indian diplomacy. That India is technologically ready to exercise this option does immense credit to India’s scientific establishment. But there seems to be a disquieting complacency, and surprising evasiveness or silence, on the issues of security and safety. Faced with the prospects of an energy famine, even environmentalists have changed sides. The stakes are incredibly high, permitting almost nil margin for error.
The major set back is due to inadequate Hazard Identification & Risk Assessment Process. Inadequate resources to conduct audits, inspection and training for the stake holders. Nuclear plants should go for HAZOP software to protect the facility and the people from loss and injury. They should allocate adequate budget to comply with rules regulations. Only compliance will save the industry from loss.
Having no job availability other than the nuclear establishment the DAE employees have been yearning that private sector will be ready to give a break for them from the personality oriented management practices of DAE establishment. It is rather pathetic in this country that Institutions like HOMI BHABHA NATIONAL INSTITUTE are propped up by the central government. This Institute of Higher(?) learning has more professors and associate professors than students. This closes down the only opportunity the DAE employees have to earn a decent research degree from reputed institutions like the IIT Mumbai or the Mumbai University. Disadvantaged at every stage the DAE employees are mostly forced to toe the line of that department or become spiritual accepting their fate.
DAE recruits always good manpower from the universities. But many get nowhere and it a sad story - an equivalent of intellectual genocide. "Are we in a democracy or some kind of autocracy?" is the question everybody knowledgeable in the nuclear field is asking. Once inside D A E most of the employees are in a fix ... not able to decide "to be or not to be scientific?" That is the real state of affairs.
Nuclear reactors contain large amounts of radioactive material; this health hazard makes safety in nuclear facilities especially important. An examination of the safety record in India's nuclear facilities reveals poor practices and routine accidents, ranging from leaks of oil to complete loss of power in a reactor causing all safety systems to be disabled. For example in the 1980's, for which data is available, radiation exposures to power plant workers were ten times the world average for each unit of electricity and twice the world average for each monitored worker. As recently as in 2003, there have been accidents involving high radiation exposures to workers.
Despite this record, claims about safe operation are sometimes made by the nuclear establishments in India. Sometimes, claims for safety are based on the technical features of the facilities, which suggest a bright future. The following excerpt from the Nuclear Power Corporation of India (NPC), administered by the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), is illustrative: "NPC engineers have shared their expertise internationally by participating in safety reviews and inspection of reactors in other countries conducted by the World Association of Nuclear Operators (WANO) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). We are continuously updating our safety systems and procedures even at the cost of short-term economic benefit. Besides, all our plants are designed, constructed, commissioned, operated and maintained under the strict supervision of the AERB."
Notions of safety differ, but what they all have in common are usually claims about the future. In making the connection between the past record of anomalies and future prospects for safety, one must go beyond the mere presence or absence of accidents to study the factors present.
The 'engineering' approach to safety
To engineers, a safe reactor is usually one which is reliable, meaning that things can be expected to perform correctly most of the time. Safety is improved by incorporating backup systems to make overall operation more reliable, and protection systems to prevent the escalation of accidents. Ultimately, physical barriers protect the public from leakage of radioactive material. Backup devices and physical barriers together constitute "redundancy", so called because they are, in the engineers' judgement, not likely to be needed when the reactor is functioning properly but could become important as independent safety measures when something goes wrong.
One problem with nuclear reactors is that components and subsystems often interact in unanticipated ways to cause accidents.
In such an approach, it is indeed possible to make reactors operate safely but this depends on everything operating reliably. When the DAE claims that its reactors are designed to operate safely because of the different safety devices, one could immediately ask to what extent these devices are present and operating as they should be. Here, the record is not good. Safety systems have been inadequate in many facilities. For example, the two reactors at Tarapur shared emergency core cooling systems for a long time in violation of standards that required each reactor to have its own system. The reactors at Madras and Rajasthan had been operating for many years without high pressure core cooling systems, which would be needed if coolant is lost during an accident. The need for such systems has been known since the 1970's but the Madras reactors, built in the mid-1980's, were operating without them until 2004.
Often, backup equipment has been part of the design but unavailable during operation. For example, backup pumps for coolant circulation have on many occasions been unavailable when the operating pumps have been disabled by external factors such as fluctuations in the grid. Sometimes, even the minimum requirement of pumps has been unavailable, causing the reactors to be operated at reduced power. In an engineering approach, this record illustrates poor reliability of backup systems, suggesting that safety is also not as good as it could be. The above information about inoperative backup equipment is obtained from International Atomic Energy Agency reports of operating experience; the DAE is required to internationally report events which involve shutdown of the reactor. Secrecy in the nuclear programme means that problems surface only when an accident has occurred or the reactor has to be shut down. Therefore, the public record is only a weak test for reliability.
Are physical barriers good enough?
Ultimately, reactor designers rely on physical barriers to prevent harm to the public. In most reactors, there is a primary vessel that contains the fuel, radioactivity, and heat produced in the reaction. Outside there is a secondary containment building, meant as a physical barrier to prevent leakage of radioactive gases and material to the environment. Integrity of these barriers is often demonstrated through mathematical models up to a certain limit of pressure and temperature; during normal operation and under most accidents, these limits must be met.
In some reactor types, there might be accidents for which it is difficult if not impossible to design barriers. For example fast reactors, one of which is being built in Kalpakkam, are vulnerable to a reactivity increase that could lead to explosive breakup of the fuel, leading to high energies that are difficult to physically contain. In fact, once the fuel becomes hot enough to melt, it is difficult to know what will happen next and the effectiveness of protective barriers cannot be guaranteed. Severe accidents apart, the effectiveness of these barriers also depends on their quality of design and construction. While the containment building was being constructed for the Kaiga reactor in Karnataka, its inner shell collapsed due to deficiencies in design. If this problem is widespread, it weakens the case for safety on the basis of 'defense-in-depth'. Unfortunately, until an accident happens and the barriers are tested, one might never know. And subsequently, attribution might be difficult.
Reliability in design and operations is necessary for safety, but it might not be enough. One problem with nuclear reactors is that components and subsystems often interact in unanticipated ways to cause accidents ('interactive complexity'). A classic example is the Three Mile Island accident, in which operators did not know the state of the reactor at the time and performed actions that actually worsened it. Redundancy could sometimes be part of the problem. For example in the Fermi fast breeder reactor in the United States, a safety device meant to catch the core in case it melted actually initiated a near meltdown when a part of it broke away and blocked the flow of coolant.
While such problems can often be fixed once they are identified, all such interactions might not be identified before they actually occur. There is plenty of evidence elsewhere of nuclear plant operators being surprised by unexpected interactions during accidents. While in some cases, accidents could have still been prevented if warning signs had been heeded, that is no consolation to the operators who are trying to fix the reactor as the accident is happening or the designers who are trying to build safe systems but cannot understand how things might go wrong.
What makes an accident?
Multiple failures must occur at the same time for a severe accident to happen. This has happened in the past, for example in the Narora reactor in Uttar Pradesh in 1993. The accident happened when a fire spread through the cables and shut down all the safety systems and operators had to intervene manually to shut down the reactor. This might appear quite unusual, but the operating records reveal how the conditions leading up to the accident were always present.
The fire started when a poorly designed turbine experienced large vibrations and its blades broke away. Large vibrations in Indian turbines have happened before, but this was the first time that the blades broke and ruptured a pipe containing hydrogen, which then leaked and caught fire. Around the same time, oil was leaking in the turbine building. Oil leaks too are common in DAE's reactors, but this time the oil also caught fire. Fire spread through the power carrying cables and disabled them. Backup cables were present but had been placed in close proximity without being encased in fire retardant sheaths, in violation of international design guidelines. Therefore, they did not function effectively as backups. The accident was preventable, and the DAE had not learnt from best practices in cabling design, nor did it heed warnings from the turbine manufacturer about blade fatigue problems, especially significant in Indian reactors where excessive shaking of the turbines has occurred many times.
Nuclear reactors are tightly coupled, which means that there are few alternate pathways to diffuse accidents, which can often progress very quickly. To ensure safety, the appropriate interventions - whether by humans or automatic safety equipment - must occur quickly and be adequately planned for. This also requires a culture of reliability throughout the organisation. Our government's track record in scientific innovation is debatable, at the very best. Nuclear safety is paramount at a point when our energy security policy is tilting towards more reliance on this method of power generation. An independent (read, non-governmental) system of checks and monitoring has to be put in place to ensure the safety of people working and living in and around nuclear reactor complexes. Doesn't something like that exist already?
Problems With Nuclear Energy
Early in 1995 a seminar on 'Nuclear Energy and Public Safety' was held in Delhi, co-sponsored by the India International Centre and some other organisations. A book, titled Nuclear Energy and Public Safety, edited by Dr. Vinod Gaur (incidentally one of the earliest members of the Indian Humanist Union) was published after the seminar, with contributions from about twenty eminent scientists, academicians and others. The picture that emerges from this is disturbing, as summed up in the Preface. Talking of "sloppy technology and management practices" it says: "The devastating fire at Narora, the major flooding of Kakrapara, and the collapse of the containment dome at Kaiga are recent examples of failures, details of which remain unavailable to the public, causing deep concern about the hazard potential of our nuclear installations. This situation supports a lax technological culture through immunity from public exposure at the expense of public anxiety , and clearly underlines the wisdom of creating public transparency of plans and designs and of hazards and failure analyses reports of large and crucial public utilities, as practiced by most democratic nations."
When the Report was published, the situation in nuclear-power generation was largely static worldwide. A number of accidents and incidents had led to widespread concerns regarding the hazards of nuclear power generation, and a slowdown – if not stoppage – in the building of new reactors. The Chernobyl disaster, the incidents at Three Mile Island and Windscale raised serious doubts about the viability of fission-based power generation. In the USA , "The accident was a watershed event for the US nuclear industry. Seventy-four plants under construction at the time of the accident have since been cancelled. Thirteen plants that were operating when the accident occurred have been permanently closed by their owners. Only fifty-three plants then under construction were completed and placed into service. No nuclear power plants have been ordered since the accident." The Bush administration had changed all that and heralded the Renaissance of Nuclear Power.
Efforts are being made to develop safer and more efficient reactor designs. An international task force has agreed on six nuclear reactor technologies for deployment between 2010 and 2030. All six are expected to yield advances in terms of sustainability, economics, reliability and safety. All these aspects involve highly complex as well as controversial technical considerations, and it would be presumptuous on my part to try to touch on these.
Here I shall try to confine myself to safety and security. In this context I believe it is important to make a distinction between safety and security; although the close relationship between the two must be borne in mind.
Safety Safety concerns safeguards against breakdowns, accidents arising out of negligence or mismanagement; and minimising the damage caused by natural disasters. In the case of nuclear energy the major areas of safety concerns are: mining, processing, reactor operations, spent fuel, waste management and decommissioning. Whether adequate safety can be ensured (in theory as well as in practice) in each of these areas has always been debated; but the issues are so highly technical that they are best left to the experts. It is probably true that for every expert there is an equal and opposite expert. This, of course, greatly helps in selective quotation.
On the subject of mining: "From the mining of uranium to the manufacturing of weapons and nuclear power, workers are faced with the risk of exposure to radiation. According to reports by the International Commission for Radiological Protection (ICRP), work-related deaths in uranium mines are estimated at between 5,500 deaths (for radiation workers @ 3 mSv) to 37, 500 deaths (for radiation workers @ 20 mSv) per million workers a year. This compared with deaths in the manufacturing industry (estimated at 110 deaths per year per million workers) and the construction industry (estimated at 164 deaths per million workers per year)".
On reactor safety: "Nuclear power plants are and will always be vulnerable to accidents resulting in meltdown or other large radiation releases due to human error and worn out or defective parts. Even without an accident or attack, nuclear power plants threaten public health by routinely releasing radiation into the air, soil and water. Moreover, U.S. nuclear power plants have a concerning record of violating safety regulations while regulators delay, deny, and defer to the financial interests of nuclear plant owners and operators. These failures increase the risk that nuclear reactors pose to the public."
On waste management, "No technically or economically feasible methods have been proven for the ultimate disposal of radioactive waste; a grim legacy from the nuclear power program for future generations. Several proposals for dealing with the wastes exist and one or more of these approaches may eventually be shown to be satisfactory, but important questions remain unanswered today about all of them”.
Security
Security relates to protection from deliberately hostile actions such as sabotage, terrorist attack or attacks by missiles or bombs. Even if it is conceded that adequate safeguards can be instituted to prevent any catastrophic outcome in case of accident, negligence, mismanagement or natural disaster, vulnerability to enemy action still has to be taken into account - particularly for states like India, which live in a troubled neighbourhood. A successful attack on a nuclear plant can be incalculably catastrophic. In his landmark book on the subject: Nuclear Plants as Weapons for the Enemy: An Unrecognized Military Peril, Bennett Ramberg points out that any country that possesses nuclear energy facilities gives its adversaries a quasi- nuclear capability to use against it. A US Admiral is candid about this. "Once a war starts, the value system changes and anything you can do to hurt the adversary and cause him problems, you find justification for doing." He recalls hearing someone say, "You don't have to take the bang to the enemy; the bang is already there when you take out his nuclear plants." He was talking about the reported attack by the US on the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center reactor in Iraq, just ten kilometers southeast of Baghdad. It was a small Russian-built research reactor. Nuclear plants, static and prominently visible, are ideal military targets. The world has more than 300 research reactors and almost 500 large nuclear power plants – all sitting ducks. Every nuclear plant is, in effect, a potential nuclear bomb embedded in our territory. It would be unrealistic to count on our nuclear facilities not being attacked in a warlike situation, or in terrorist operations. As Matin Zuberi says, "The core of a typical nuclear plant contains about 1,000 times the radioactivity released by the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. A high explosive bomb used against it would acquire the attributes of a nuclear weapon without its blast effect. According to an environmental impact statement of the U.S Nuclear Regulatory Commission a large truck bomb used against a nuclear reactor in a highly populated area could produce 130,000 deaths. An ordinary conventional explosive could thus be turned into a large radiological weapon.
Within a nuclear power plant perhaps the most vulnerable part is the spent fuel pool. Spent fuel pools for boiling water reactors are located above ground. This can make these reactors even more vulnerable. Conventional explosives, by causing a breach in the pool water connections can cause a fire worse than even a reactor meltdown. As one report says, "If a fire were to break out at the Millstone Reactor Unit 3 spent fuel pond in Connecticut, it would result a three-fold increase in background exposures. This level triggers the NRC evacuation requirement and could render 29,000 square miles of land uninhabitable."
The nuclear power industry, with the support of the Bush administration, pushed for a revival of nuclear energy. The industry aggressively seeked to license and build the first new nuclear reactors in a generation. Toward this end, nuclear companies have sought public approval by disingenuously presenting the energy source as clean, renewable, and necessary to deal with global warming, environmental degradation, and dwindling petroleum resources. But nuclear energy is neither clean nor green. While nuclear reactors do release a smaller amount of greenhouse gases than their coal and natural gas counterparts, they create a significant amount of dangerous radioactive waste that remains toxic for hundreds of thousands of years. Beyond the health, safety, and security risks posed by nuclear generation of electricity-as well as its extremely high costs-this waste is a shameful legacy of our environmental exploitation that will beset generations to come.”
That the impediments in the way of India exercising the option to develop nuclear power-generation facilities are likely to be removed is certainly a cause for celebration, and represents the triumph of Indian diplomacy. That India is technologically ready to exercise this option does immense credit to India’s scientific establishment. But there seems to be a disquieting complacency, and surprising evasiveness or silence, on the issues of security and safety. Faced with the prospects of an energy famine, even environmentalists have changed sides. The stakes are incredibly high, permitting almost nil margin for error.
The major set back is due to inadequate Hazard Identification & Risk Assessment Process. Inadequate resources to conduct audits, inspection and training for the stake holders. Nuclear plants should go for HAZOP software to protect the facility and the people from loss and injury. They should allocate adequate budget to comply with rules regulations. Only compliance will save the industry from loss.
Having no job availability other than the nuclear establishment the DAE employees have been yearning that private sector will be ready to give a break for them from the personality oriented management practices of DAE establishment. It is rather pathetic in this country that Institutions like HOMI BHABHA NATIONAL INSTITUTE are propped up by the central government. This Institute of Higher(?) learning has more professors and associate professors than students. This closes down the only opportunity the DAE employees have to earn a decent research degree from reputed institutions like the IIT Mumbai or the Mumbai University. Disadvantaged at every stage the DAE employees are mostly forced to toe the line of that department or become spiritual accepting their fate.
DAE recruits always good manpower from the universities. But many get nowhere and it a sad story - an equivalent of intellectual genocide. "Are we in a democracy or some kind of autocracy?" is the question everybody knowledgeable in the nuclear field is asking. Once inside D A E most of the employees are in a fix ... not able to decide "to be or not to be scientific?" That is the real state of affairs.
