Delayed Reaction

THERE WERE MANY DIFFERENCES between my grade school in Los Angeles and the one I entered in Bombay in 1967. Take safety drills, for example. In my convent school in India, there were none. In California, in addition to fire drills, we practised earthquake drills, hunched tightly under our desks with our hands cupped behind our necks, and Soviet attack drills, during which we ran to the wall farthest from the windows and covered our eyes so that we wouldn’t be blinded by the flash of a nuclear blast. We did not, however, practice any drill that combined an earthquake with a nuclear disaster: there was no reason to do so at the time.

According to India’s Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) and the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB), there is still no reason to associate natural disasters, such as earthquakes and tsunamis, with nuclear risk. In the wake of the catastrophe in Japan, India’s nuclear establishment rushed to assure alarmed citizens that the country’s existing and planned reactors were completely safe, built in seismic zones where earthquakes as strong as Japan’s temblor, which cleared 8.9 on the Richter scale, have never occurred, and, therefore, could not possibly ever occur. According to these authorities, the country’s many coastal reactors—nuclear plants require large amounts of water to cool radioactive material—are located where tsunamis do not occur; or are located at elevations superior to the 10-metre height of the Japanese tsunami; or have already been proven to withstand any tsunami because the Madras Atomic Power Station, though flooded by the 2004 tidal wave, did not fail.

Alas, in nuclear safety, as in financial investment, past performance is no guarantee of future results. Just because there never has been a catastrophic nuclear incident in a country doesn’t mean there never will be. As Japan proves, it takes just one of these to inflict immense and long-lasting damage to even the most advanced economy.

In the nuclear domain, as elsewhere, India’s technocrats tend to see every problem as an engineering one. But the risk of a catastrophic nuclear event cannot be engineered away. Even assuming a new generation of nuclear plants that could withstand a Richter scale magnitude 10.0 earthquake, located beyond the reach of a 20-metre tsunami—twice the height of Japan’s—and equipped with the latest emergency shutdown and backup cooling systems, there remains the unpredictable human foible. According to the US-based Union of Concerned Scientists, nuclear plant disasters at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986 occurred not because of any design flaw but “when a series of known problems—aggravated by a few worker miscues—transformed fairly routine events into catastrophes”.

Greed, corruption and national hubris pose a far greater threat to nuclear safety than earthquakes and tsunamis. And for these concerns, no nation has yet found a cure, least of all India. Time and time again, around the world, including in Japan, safety has been compromised at nuclear plants in order to cut costs. In this respect, the nuclear industry worldwide suffers from that well-known Indian affliction I call jugaaditis: if something is working, and it has been working, why think that it might someday not work? This is pretty much what doomed Japan’s Fukushima plant.

As one might expect, India is no exception to the nuclear jugaad syndrome. One need only point to the well-documented accident in November 2009 at the Kaiga atomic power plant 450 km from Bengaluru, where 55 employees had to be treated for exposure to radioactive tritium-contaminated drinking water; or the incident in Mayapuri, Delhi, in May 2010, where cobalt-60 discarded in a scrapyard caused one fatality. In 2010, Tehelka ran a series of articles on India’s nuclear track record that revealed a long history of mishaps at or near the country’s reactors. In 1999, Time magazine had run a story on the high rates of cancer near the Uranium Corporation of India’s mines at Jadugoda in southern Bihar (today’s Jharkhand). India’s nuclear industry consistently denies safety breaches. Information on any incidents is tightly guarded, with the AERB reporting to the DAE, the agency it is supposed to regulate. As historian Ramachandra Guha observed, India’s “cosseted and grossly overrated nuclear industry” is simply not accountable.

Neither are the nuclear industries of other countries. The industry as a whole shrouds itself in secrecy, and when forced to acknowledge that despite its efforts lapses persist, regularly dissembles. The close association of nuclear power with nuclear weapons and national security, not to mention the vast sums of money involved, is at the root of the inherently untrustworthy behaviour of the nuclear industry and its friendly regulators. The biggest reason for opacity, however, is that despite all the lullabies, nuclear power remains a highly dangerous undertaking. As we have just witnessed at Fukushima, catastrophic nuclear accidents are more catastrophic than other accidents. Radioactive material—even in the form of nuclear waste, which in India is stored at the plants where it is produced—remains toxic for a very long time, far longer than India’s 5,000-year-old civilisation. That’s a long time for which to guarantee safety. Radiation itself is a sinister poison, odourless, tasteless, colourless. By the time a person begins to have symptoms of radiation sickness, it is often too late to prevent crippling illness or death. And if advanced economies with mature nuclear industries, such as the United States or Japan, can’t prevent catastrophic accidents, then who can?

This is why the issue of nuclear liability has loomed so large in India’s participation in the global nuclear renaissance. If nuclear power is so safe, why won’t GE or Westinghouse build plants in India until they are protected from liability in case of an accident? Like Union Carbide and its inheritor, Dow Chemical, in the wake of the Bhopal disaster, GE and Westinghouse are afraid that they could be held liable for damages to life and property in the event of a catastrophic nuclear event.

While government subsidies and the offloading of risks from corporate spreadsheets on citizens can make nuclear power profitable for industry, they do not make it a cheap source of energy for consumers. Electricity produced by nuclear plants, including the next generation of fast-breeder reactors and the French Areva’s still-untested EPR pressurised water reactor, is far more expensive than electricity from other sources. Yet, a public relations campaign by energy-hungry governments and industries had just about succeeded, before the Fukushima crisis, in restoring nuclear power to its postwar, atoms-for-peace promise of a miraculous, inexhaustible source of “clean energy”. Citizens were told that nuclear power was the only way humanity could avoid global warming without having to sacrifice economic growth.

The US nuclear deal with India in 2008 was the nuclear industry gamechanger. Potential profits—$100 billion for US corporations alone—were incentive enough to pour millions of dollars into lobbying for the deal. In India, the Congress party-led government pulled out all the stops to secure its passage. In the midst of the recent tragedy in Japan, The Hindu published a US diplomatic cable from WikiLeaks recounting an eager Congress operative showing off boxes of cash and boasting of the money the party had had at its disposal to buy the needed votes.

Countries and corporations around the world want in on the nuclear boom. India’s major business houses are no exception, from Larsen & Toubro and Reliance to Tata. India Inc sees the nuclear boom as a tremendous profit-making opportunity and a chance to become global suppliers. Japan succumbed to this temptation as well, signing—over the vehement protests of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors—civil nuclear agreements with Vietnam and India.

Fukushima offers a new kind of disaster spectacle. When cyclones, earthquakes and floods strike poor countries, the images are quite different. When a hurricane devastated the Gulf of Mexico coast of the US, the global superpower revealed its incapacity to deal effectively and humanely with a crisis far more limited than Japan’s. It is this fact that has shaken the world. We think: “If Japan can’t manage this, what country can?”

With the veil of safety ripped from the dark side of nuclear power, governments around the world have been forced to react. Germany, Switzerland and China have announced a freeze on the operations and construction of nuclear plants. France, Russia and the US have announced internal reviews.

Whither India? No other country in the world has as much national pride wrapped up in nuclear power. Of necessity, India painstakingly built up its nuclear capability, both civilian and military, largely on its own. The country’s ambition to achieve total energy self-reliance for its rapidly industrialising economy via thorium-fuelled reactors seems on the verge of being realised. It is no more likely, whatever the arguments, that India will abandon nuclear power than, say, China, the US or France. At most, India may be forced to make compromises, such as abandoning the highly unpopular and expensive Areva nuclear park in Jaitapur in Maharashtra, or leaving the liability rule standing.

Still, with the credibility of India’s government in tatters after a series of high-profile corruption scandals, its reassurances about the country’s nuclear programme ring hollow, especially with the evidence of Fukushima before our eyes. How are Indian citizens to trust the management of nuclear energy to the band of crony-capitalists and corrupt politicians who run the country, and a nuclear establishment accountable to no entity other than itself? The announcement that India will revise its nuclear safety rules is welcome, but the rules already on the books are regularly flouted. A truly independent nuclear oversight and regulatory body with enforcement capability would be a more serious gesture—and a real commitment to the development of truly sustainable, renewable and locally controllable energy over nuclear power would be even better.

In Japan, sceptical citizens fled the advancing radiation cloud from Fukushima well in advance of the official advisory. They simply didn’t trust authorities to tell them the truth about how bad the situation was. After Fukushima, the confident cries of the world’s nuclear authorities, which tell citizens that the sky isn’t falling—and cannot possibly ever fall—may never be believed again.