An Underground Radioactive Waste Laboratory Coming Up In Gogi Village In Yadgir District Of Karnataka

By VT Padmanabhan & Joseph Makkolil

05 March, 2015
Countercurrents.org

The spent fuel from a nuclear reactor contains highly radioactive elements with half lives upto millions of years.  In India, the waste removed from the reactor every year is cooled in the spent fuel pool for about five years. After this, plutonium and the un-burnt uranium are extracted in a reprocessing plant.  Plutonium can be used to make bombs as well reactor fuel.  The waste from this process, known as high level waste (HLW), will contain almost 95% of the radioactivity generated in the reactor.  HLW has to be isolated from the water bodies and the biosphere for millions of years.  Scientists working in this field say that it can be safely kept in a deep geological repository (DGR), carved out below 500 meters from the surface.  DGR is considered as a reference solution by all because there is no other solution.  Before going in for a full fledged DGR, an underground research laboratory (URL) is built for undertaking studies and experiments.  If no adverse event is seen during this phase, the laboratory can be expanded to a full-fledged  repository.  A URL can be seen as a stepping stone for DGR.

India's Radioactive Waste Repository

India would need a repository by 2030, the latest.  Since it takes some 30 years for site selection, evaluation, construction and licensing, Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) is already late.  In India, hundreds of scientists have been working on locating a suitable repository site and experimenting on ways to place the waste in the holes.  They wroked in an abandoned mine at 1000 meters below in Kolar Gold Fields in Karnataka from1964 and terminated the experiment in 1990, when they realized that the place was not suitable for a DGR.  They claim to have selected half a dozen sites, but the details have not been released. In all the major nations with high level nuclear wastes, open discussions, consultations and negotiations between the waste generators and the communities living near the potential sites are happening. 

An Underground Research Laboratory (URL) at Gogi in Karnataka

In March last year, we reported a secret move by the DAE to set up a repository (DGR) for storing high level radioactive waste (HLW) under the hills of Idukki-Theni districts in Kerala-Tamil Nadu. [1]  TIFR published a blanket denial saying that INO has nothing to do with radioactive waste.   Our contention was that radioactive waste repository was a separate project, co-located at the same site. Now we report a similar effort to build an underground research laboratory (URL) in Gogi village of Yadgir district in Karnataka. 

The URL at Gogi was announced by Dr AK Rai, the director of atomic mineral division's southern region in an Indo-French theme meeting on geological repositories in October 2009. A team led by Prof. G.J. Chakrapani, Department of Earth Sciences in Indian Institute of Technology-Roorkee has been studying ‘Geochemical evolution of ground water in a limestone - Granite Terrain Underground Research Laboratory Site, Gulbarga' since 2011.(Gulbarga district was bifurcated in 2012 to form Yadgir district.)  Beyond these, nothing else is known about this novel project.

Uranium Mines at Gogi

Gogi has some uranium deposits, estimated at 4000 tons of U³O⁸.  DAE's atomic mineral division  started drilling in 1995 and exploratory mining commenced in 2007.  Soon after, the villagers started experiencing several health problems and they attributed this to the contamination of water by drilling and mining.  This received extensive coverage in the Hindu, Decccan Herald and the New Indian Express.  The problem became so severe by 2011 that the minister in charge of Yadgir district, Rajugowda, said that “residents of Gogi village have already started experiencing radiation- related ailments such as cancer and congenital malformation”.  He appealed to the chief minister of Karnataka to cancel the mining permit.  Ananth Hegde Ashisara, chairman of the Western Ghats Task Force and vice-chairman of the Bio-Diversity Board also supported the cause of the villagers.  Justice Shailendrakumar, Judge in the Karnataka High Court and the chairperson of the Jan Adaalat ruled on 15 September 2012 that norms were not followed when the public hearing was conducted on uranium mining earlier at Gogi village.  Responding to this judgement, in December 2012, the Central ministry of environment and forests cancelled the environmental clearance given in March 2012.  The ministry said that the Gogi mining chapter is closed. 

However, the district revenue administration reopened this chapter and started working on land aquisition in September 2013.  This means that the project has not been shelved.  Incidentally, the total estimated uranium reserve  at Gogi is less than 3% of the total uranium estimated in India by the atomic minerals division.  About 6 to 8 million tons of ore will have to be excavated to extract 4000 tons of uranium. This ecologically disastrous project, located on the banks of River Bhima, a tributary of River Krishna, is also economically unviable.  Uranium mining we feel is only a 'cover' story for carving the URL which will be upgraded to a repository.

BARC-Mangalore University study of groundwater in Gogi

Scientists from the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) and the Mangalore University (MU) discussed the results of a study  on the  concentrations of uranium and radium in water samples from around the Gogi mining region in an internal meeting at Mamallapuram in December 2012 [2] .  A total of 22 samples - 18 from tube wells, 3 from open wells and 1 from the river Bhima – from within 30 km radius of the mining centre were analysed.  There were three samples from within  a radius of 5 km of the mining centre.

Results in a nutshell

Gogi Water is Unfit for human consumption

The authors of the study estimated an internal (radiation) dose of 1619 micro-Sv (or 1.62 milliSv) from the water alone. For estimating the internal dose, one must know the total intake.  Scientists say that  “since site-specific data on daily intake of water by the population of the region was not available (sic), the dose calculation was performed for an intake of 1 litre a day”.  Since average water intake in this arid tropic region will be about 3 litres pd, the annual dose will be (1.619x3) 5.67 mSv, which is more than the reported average occupational  exposure of radiation workers in India's nuclear power stations.

Let us believe that the people in Gogi drink only one liter of water a day and that the annual dose they receive from water is 1.62 mSv. WHO's current Guidelines for drinking water are based on a “reference dose level (RDL) of the committed effective dose, equal to 0.1 mSv from 1 year's consumption of drinking-water (from the possible total radioactive contamination of the annual drinking-water consumption).  WHO says that “if the RDL of 0.1 mSv/year is being exceeded on aggregate, then the options available to the competent authority to reduce the dose should be examined.” [3]  

The internal dose to the Gogi people, as estimated by the authors, are 16 times the WHO's RDL. At this contamination level, the government is supposed to act and ensure that the communities do not receive unnecessary and avoidable exposures. The source of contamination, whether natural or human-made is not an issue.  The competent authority in India is the Department of Atomic Energy and BARC is its research wing.  In the paper presented at the Mamallapuram meeting, the authors say that mining has not started in Gogi and hence the high concerntration of uranium and radium in drinking may be due to the uranium ore in the underground. Licensed mining did not start, but a total of 500 holes (sum 55,000 meters) were drilled in a small area and exploratory mining had commenced in 2007.

Peoples' Health or Profit? 

This study was conducted by scientists paid by the governments, using facilities owned by the government.  Not by scientists employed by a multinational giant. 

Apart from the presentation at Mamallapuram internal meeting of DAE, this paper was not presented in any open conference or published in any journal.  We could not find the details of this study in any DAE-affiliated website either.  A copy of the paper has been uploaded in Research Gate, a network of scientists by one of the authors based in Mangalore University.

Why did BARC refuse to share the findings with the communities, the media and the government?  In this case, the resources required for decontaminating the water source and for providing safe drinking water is too small for DAE which is one of the richest government outfits in India.  Do they expect mass desertion by people, so that they have all the land they need for mining the uranium and setting up the waste repository?

BARC-Mangalore University study of groundwater in Gogi raises this age old question of ethics in science.  Are scientists supposed to sit idle over such discoveries, which will have serious consequences for the health and well being of thousands of people over several generations?  Let us not forget that in the aftermath of nuclear disaster, these very same people will be in charge of monitoring the environment?  Will they tell us the truth?

We also feel that URLs and DGRs must be set up in time, before the wastes accumulating in the reactor sites and reprocessing plants ‘overflow' and turn into a nightmare in heavily populated, high value areas like Kalpakam. During a year-long research, we could collect only a handful of documents on the Indian DGRs. In the issue of site characterization, all of them are vague. There should be open flow of information, discussions and debates at all levels, starting from the Panchayat to the Parliament.  DAE's way of doing these things without transparency is unlikely to work in modern times.  The senior scientists who lead DAE and BARC must learn their basic lessons from their counterparts in Europe and America. 

A detailed 16 page paper on this topic can be read at:

https://www.academia.edu/10993804/Indias_Underground_Radioactive_Waste_Disposal_site_at_Gogi_in_Karnataka 

The authors are independent researchers working on nuclear safety, food safety and other environmental-health issues. VTP is associated with Society of Science, Environment and Ethics (SO-SEE) and JM with Cochin University of Science and Technology (CUSAT)

Contact: [email protected] 919846763770,

              [email protected]    919447165746

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