Tritium goes a walkabout

The mass radioactive poisoning of the Kaiga nuclear plant is the worst possible advertisement for India at a time when all and sundry are lining up to sign nuclear agreements with the country.

The mass radioactive poisoning of the Kaiga nuclear plant is the worst possible advertisement for India at a time when all and sundry are lining up to sign nuclear agreements with the country. The Department of Atomic Energy is clearly guilty of faulty internal procedures. Tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, is an internationally controlled nuclear substance.

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It should never have been possible for anyone to walk away with a vial of it without detection. That as many as 5,000 people may have had access to the area where it was stored is only further evidence that something is wrong in the management of India’s nuclear installations. And this is apart from the human tragedy of 55 workers unsuspectingly drinking water contaminated with a cancer-producing substance.

This is particularly embarrassing given that a civilian nuclear agreement with France has just been cleared in Paris, similar agreements with Canada and Argentina have been signed, and an agreement with the United States on enrichment and reprocessing technology is just weeks from completion. Underlying these and other agreements is international confidence in India’s strong nuclear safety record and an impeccable history of nonproliferation. Incidents like the Kaiga poisoning have the potential to undermine this confidence and make it all the more difficult for India to argue it deserves the rights of an accepted nuclear power. Tritium is not merely a health hazard. Because it is important in the development of nuclear warheads and also physically unstable there is a permanent demand for tritium in the nuclear black market. The International Atomic Energy Agency has calculated that global military demand for tritium outstrips its civilian production by a factor of ten to one — and only a handful of countries, including India, enjoy surplus stocks.

The signing of the Indo-US civilian nuclear cooperation agreement was, in many ways, just one rung on a ladder towards winning global acceptance of India as a legitimate nuclear weapons State and part of the international civilian nuclear regime. Signed pieces of paper are only part of the story. The other parts are what India does in the realms of diplomacy and nuclear practice. This is why it was important for India to join in censuring Iran for clearly violating its nuclear treaty obligations. And this is why it is important for India to find out what happened at Kaiga and ensure it does not happen again.