Nuclear Power Commission chief for transparency in nuke matters

Of the 13 nuclear events recorded in Indian NPPs nuclear power plants, five were graded at 0 level, six at level 1 and one each at level 2 and level 3. The level 2 event related to the leak of 6 tonnes of heavy water at MAPS in December last year and the level 3 event occurred at Narora when the hydrogen leaked and caught fire in March 1993.

This compares well with China with 5 events of which twowere of level three, 12 in the US including the Three Mile Island accident rated at level 4, and a total of 50 incidents in Russia and the Ukraine under former USSR with 5 rated at level three and one Chernobyl at level 7. In the international scale only, levels 4 to 7 are considered to be nuclear accidents and curiously enough, these occurred in the two most advanced nuclear countries.

Insiders say that if the program to construct NPPs is hampered in terms of cost over-runs and delays, it is primarily because of uninformed public fear of the fall out of a nuclear accident and the consequent restrictive regulatory regime of the AERB. This is compounded by the relative absence of nuclear glasnost within the DAE.

On the other hand, anti-nuke activists claim that a regulatory mechanism that is genuinely impartial does not exist since the AERB and the DAE are headed by the same entity. How can a body that needs to be regulated be the regulator of itself, they ask. There is also the perception of the Westthat NPPs in India are put to dual use, i.e., to obtain and stockpile plutonium and tritium for creation of nuclear weapons and the Pokharan tests, leading to a sanctions regime imposed by the US and its allies. They do not distinguish between the research reactors like Apsara, Cirus, Dhruva, Kamini and Purnima and the uranium enrichment plant in Ratanahalli in Karnataka used to obtain the fissile material for Pokharan testing and the reactors set up to produce electricity.

It is to address these problems, chairman and managing director of NPC, Y S R Prasad, has devised a strategy. In a recent presentation at the BARC, Prasad identified two reasons for the slow progress of the nuclear power plant technology. One of them was the suspension of Central funding during the period of the Eighth Five-Year Plan which has now resumed in the Ninth Plan making Tarapur III and IV possible, the other was the abnormal delays in securing 8220;necessary clearances from the regulatory authority8221; read AERB. Prasad8217;s veiledattacks sends out interesting signals.

On the one hand, it is a clear indication that the BJP-led Government8217;s pro-active nuclear policy has enthused the nuclear establishment, on the other, the AERB comes under attack for not issuing clearances in one tranche, so to speak. Prasad wants the entire designs of the whole plant to be cleared at one go so that the construction could proceed without any further interference from the AERB.

Once the system of seeking and being granted piece-meal clearances is done away with, Prasad envisages that the gestation time for a NPP to become functional could be brought down to as low as four years from the present 8 to 10 years. Kaiga Project Director V K Sharma too was highly critical of the methodology adopted by the AERB to issue clearances for each phase of setting up of the plant.

What, in fact, the NPC sources are saying is that the methodology of the AERB serves primarily to divest itself of any blame should a nuclear event of some consequence take place.However, others who want the AERB to be a completely independent entity and out of the shadow of the DAE, see the new NPC stance as a ploy to legitimise the AERB8217;s watch-dog role. For the record, Sharma told The Indian Express that he would be happy to deal with an independent authority, as it would make things 8220;less complicated8221;.

On the other side of the coin is the DAE8217;s argument that the AERB is a truly independent body and if a DAE entity heads it, it is only a matter of convenience. To buttress the stand it is pointed out that though members of the review and investigative committees are drawn from within the DAE family, experts outside it are also appointed to head them.

Given the monolithic and monopolistic control exercised by the DAE over the nuclear industry, including the private sector collaborators, detractors point out nuclear-related expertise outside the DAE family has no existence in real terms. This is because the DAE has been consistently resisting proliferation of nuclearengineering within the country.

IIT Kanpur had set up a nuclear engineering department, but closed down inexplicably. According to sources, permission was also denied to IIT, Mumbai, to open a nuclear engineering department. This is because, say detractors, even within the nuclear establishment, the DAE does not want a peer review of its decisions from a truly independent source within the country.

Aware of the situation, NPC chief Prasad has launched a policy of his own brand of glasnost. 8220;I have no intention of hiding anything,8221; Prasad told The Indian Express, 8220;The NPC is an open book. Ask for any information and you shall have it.8221;

Having said that, he categorically asserts that no NPC reactors8217; by-products are used for weapons-related purposes. Sharma also reiterates the assertion. 8220;I am not saying that low-grade plutonium a mixture of plutonium 239, 240, 241 an 242 cannot be processed to make nuclear weapons or that highly polished plutonium 239 cannot be extracted from our plants. Toproduce electricity, we need to burn the fuel at above 6800 MW/day per tonne of natural uranium.

This gives only low-grade plutonium that needs to be processed to be of any use. To extract weapons-grade plutonium, the burn up cannot exceed 1000 MW/day. And this would seriously jeopardise electricity production,8221; he says. He also categorically denies that Kaiga-II or the other reactors under construction would have detritiation facility to lower the radioactivity of the heavy water. 8220;Only Kalpakkam has the facility for experimental purposes. There are no plans to equip the other NPPs with the facility,8221; he asserts. Detritiation by method of cryogenic distillation yields highly enriched tritium used to trigger thermonuclear reactions, i.e., to make hydrogen bombs.

Since all the NPPs are indigenously produced, they are not under international safeguards, but Prasad opened up his plants to peer reviews of teams from abroad in keeping with his new policy of nuclear transparency. It is Prasad8217;s thesis thatsuch openness coupled with the ability to produce cheap power at a rate of about 70 paise per unit would go a long way to ease public apprehensions about safety and make nuclear power more acceptable than other sources of electricity. In the same vein, BARC director Anil Kakodkar, it is learnt, has of late been involving institutes of higher learning like the IITs in the department8217;s nuclear projects. Not giant strides perhaps, but certainly steps in the right direction.