Koodankulam Struggle: Spotlights On India's Nuclear Porgram
By Dr. Peter Custers
16 October, 2011
Countercurrents.org
The struggle did not gain the same national prominence as the hunger strike waged by Anna Hazare, against rampant corruption of India’s top-politicians. Yet a landmark it surely was, - a landmark in the history of India’s nuclear program. On August 17 last, a group of activists started a hunger strike near Koodankulam, in the southern tip of Tamil Nadu state. The action was directed against plans of the Indian government to commission a 1000 MW Russian-built nuclear plant soon. From the very start it was apparent that this was not a struggle waged by a small disgruntled minority. For the hunger strike was both preceded and accompanied by mass demonstrations in which literally thousands of fisher folk from surrounding villages took part. Moreover, whereas the Gandhian-style protests were temporarily suspended in late August, they were resumed after the Department of Energy (DAE) indicated it would ignore the protestors’ demand. Then, in the second phase starting September 11, the movement peaked once more. This time, over a hundred people, including priests and nuns, went on an indefinite hunger strike in the village of Idinthakarai. Every day 10 thousand people or more would gather from the surrounding area to demonstrate their support. And every day support kept expanding, as students boycotted schools, merchants closed their shops, and gruel kitchens were set up in adjacent villages where fisher-folk refused to go out to catch fish. This time Tamil Nadu’s politicians just had to respond. On September 19, Jayalalitha, Tamil Nadu’s Chief Minister wrote an open letter to India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, insisting the protestors should be heard.
Jayalalitha’s move capped an initial success for the protests, which arguably are the most widespread and sustained local protest ever to have occurred against nuclear energy in India. They closely follow on the open discontent which earlier this year was registered against nuclear construction plans in Jaitapur, along the coast of Maharashtra. Both Jaitapur and Koodankulam are crucial links in India’s plans to expand its reliance on nuclear energy. But whereas the technology for the new nuclear plants in Jaitapur are to be supplied by the French company Areva, - the reactors being installed at the plants in Koodankulam are Russian in origin. They are known as the ‘VVER-1000/392’-design. Though based on a design for light- water reactors that has been in use for long, the design is a new variant. Indian scientists have for long questioned whether Russia’s VVER-1000 technology is safe. Doubts have further been fuelled by last March’s Fukushima disaster in Japan, and by the new assessments on nuclear safety made since then. In a report leaked to environmental organizations in June, an amalgam of Russian state agencies admitted that Russia´s nuclear industry is extremely vulnerable to natural and man-made disasters. Some 31 security flaws were listed. The document amongst others questions the capacity of Russian reactors to continue functioning safely, if cooling systems fail. It also pinpoints the risks of hydrogen explosions. Sergei Kiriyenko, the chief of Russia´s nuclear coordinating body Rosatom, reacted saying the deficiencies can be overcome if only enough money is forthcoming (!). But Indian critics don´t feel re-assured. Fisherfolk in the south of Tami Nadu are also concerned that the dependence of the light-water reactors on sea water for cooling, and the flushing of effluents into the sea, will seriously disrupt the ecology along their coast.
Furthermore, Koodankulam protesters have pointed their finger at experiences gathered at Kalpakkam, the nuclear complex located close to Tamil Nadu´s capital Chennai, along the state‘s eastern coast. In fact, here the wider significance of their movement becomes quickly evident. For the Kalpakkam complex does not just harbor a nuclear power plant, but also a reprocessing facility, i.e. a plant where nuclear fuel rods, after they have outlived their use in reactors, are chemically treated so as to extract raw materials for re-use as energy source. The method of reprocessing nuclear fuel rods has always been defended as an appropriate method to dispose of dangerous nuclear waste, i.e. as a method of ´recycling´. Yet nuclear reprocessing results in new waste, being the most damaging industrial waste in the entire nuclear production chain. For the given waste is high-level waste. It has to be stored and put aside in nuclear waste tanks for an indefinite period of time. In the past, the storage of high-level waste in tanks has resulted in catastrophic accidents, notably in Cheliabinsk (former Soviet Union). The nuclear fuel rods from the reactors at Koodankulam, once depreciated, will most likely be reprocessed at Kalpakkam. Yet Kalpakkam has already proven to be a dangerous hotspot. Here, in January 2003, a valve connecting a high-level radioactive liquid waste tank and a low level waste tank leaked, leading to radiation exposure for at least six employees, an unknown number of deaths, and temporary closure of Kalpakkam´s main plant. The Kalpakkam nuclear complex also holds the dubious distinction of having been flooded when the devastating tsunami of 2004 struck.
Kalpakkam hence is an additional reason for worries. Not least because of the fact that the nuclear complex harbors a test reactor constructed towards enabling India build a plutonium economy. Indian peace activists have expressed suspicions that the plutonium separated at Indian civilian reprocessing facilities will be diverted and used to increase the country’s stock of atomic weapons. These suspicions have not been allayed by recent developments. Since the beginning of this year, India boasts three reprocessing plants. Further, the US government has in principle granted the Indian government permission to domestically reprocess fuel elements from reactors to be supplied under the 2008 US-India deal. Hence, diversion of plutonium towards India’s weapons’ program is quite well possible. Again, the use of plutonium separated at Kalpakkam for civilian purposes is no less questionable. For plutonium is the very most toxic substance humanity has ever created. Even microgram quantities of plutonium, if inhaled or ingested by humans, are known to result in fatal cancers. In Europe, fast breeder reactors - so termed since they create additional plutonium even as they burn plutonium – have long been considered unfeasible. The fast-breeder reactor at Kalkar in Germany, built in the 1970s and 1980s against fierce international opposition, could not be put into operation. And France´s fast breeder, the Superphoenix, had to be closed in the late 1990s, after a poor record of 12 years´ operation. Yet these negative experiences are apparently being ignored by India. Technological preparations towards the building of a full scale ´fast breeder´-reactor at Kalpakkam reportedly are in an advanced stage.
In short, the significance of the struggle waged by villagers in the south of Tamil Nadu stretches well beyond the Koodankulam nuclear project itself. Resistance was called off after the Union Government in Delhi sent a Minister of State, Narayanasamy, to Tamil Nadu, to talk to the Koodankulam protestors. Still, it would be wrong to believe that the demand of the protestors – that no nuclear production in Koodankulam be started – will easily be accepted. For the stakes are very large, since India’s nuclear lobby has set its mind on turning India into a plutonium power. Yet because the Koodankulam project is closely intertwined with plans for expansion of the Kalpakkam complex, the struggle is bound to reverberate throughout the state of Tamil Nadu and beyond.
Dr. Peter Custers
Leiden, the Netherlands, September 30, 2011
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