IAEA team to visit India's nuke plants by year-end

A team of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will visit India later this year to analyse the safety aspects of the country's nuclear power plants.

Updated on: Aug 19, 2012, 23:23:15 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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A team of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will visit India later this year to analyse the safety aspects of the country's nuclear power plants.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2011 had extended invitation to IAEA to conduct safety review of the nuclear power plants after Fukushima nuclear disaster and growing concern in India over safety of its plants.

The PM's invitation was also to allay fears of citizens regarding upcoming nuclear reactors at Jaitapur in Maharashtra and Koodankulum in Tamil Nadu, which are facing opposition from by residents and non-government organisations.

Now, the IAEA has informed the government that its Operational Safety Review Team (OSART) will visit India from October 29 to November 15 to review safety of nuke reactors three and four at Rajasthan Atomic Power Station at Rawatbhata. It had earlier conducted safety review of nuclear establishment in Iran amid concerns raised by western countries including US and Britain.

The Rajasthan nuclear plant had been in news for a reported leak of tritium radiation on July 19, which the officials at the plant termed as a "routine" matter. Four workers were exposed to radiation, while repairing a pipe in a pressurised heavy water reactor. Unofficial sources,however, said 38 workers were exposed to radiation.

The Department of Atomic Energy told Parliament this week that OSART will review safety features of the Rajasthan plant. The government is keen to have best safety systems in the plants as it plans to expand country's nuke power generation to 20,000 MW by 2020, a senior government official said. "The suggestions of OSART will be taken seriously".

The department, however, clarified that no formal invitation has been sent yet to the IAEA for peer review of the regulatory system of Atomic Energy Regulatory Board.

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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