Four more Kudankulam reactors to get green signal

New nuclear reactors at the Kudankulam nuclear plant will withstand crash of Cessna-type aircraft and tsunami waves several times more intense than the ones that damaged Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan last year.

Updated on: Jun 9, 2012, 01:27:23 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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New nuclear reactors at the Kudankulam nuclear plant will withstand crash of Cessna-type aircraft and tsunami waves several times more intense than the ones that damaged Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan last year.

These are some of the reasons likely to be cited by the environment ministry for giving approval to four new reactors at the Kudankulum nuclear plant which has witnessed a long spell of protests from local residents.

The Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL) has sought the ministry’s clearance under the coastal regulation zone act for the 6,000-MW plant being set up with a loan from the Russian government. The two reactors have already been built and NPCIL had sought permission to construct four more.

The ministry’s expert appraisal committee (EAC) has asked it to approve the expansion stating that the plant has most advanced safety features.

“Active safety systems have a backup of passive systems also. To increase redundancy, each active safety systems are supplied from four independent and separated channels,” the panel said.

On structural safety, it said the plant’s elevation was designed to cope with tsunami and subsequent flooding. The plant system, structures and components are designed to withstand quakes, explosions and other natural calamities and can bear Cessna-type aircraft crash, it said. Cessna is small aircraft that can fly at a high speed. The EAC, however, has not explained why not impact of a bigger aircraft crash was assessed.

The clearance comes at the time when Aruna Roy, a member of Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council, has sought Gandhi’s intervention to make the safety aspects of the plant public. Roy had written to Gandhi after the NPCIL failed to comply with the Central Information Commission’s decision to make the safety reports public.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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