UN Must Outlaw Nuclear Power Plants

A few days back, the Prime Minister accused Tirunevleli’s NGOs of using foreign funds for organising protest movements against the com-missioning of the Kundakulam nuclear plant. If he meant to say that the protest is foreign inspired, he is entirely mistaken. Now common people all over the world know that nuclear plants are based on a technology which spews deaths to hundreds of thousands in the event of a small human or machine error and that there can be no guarantee against such an error.

In 1963, in the USA, when the Consolidated Edison (Con-Edison) company, which supplied electricity to the city of New York, proposed to build a 1000 Mw nuclear plant in the borough of Queens (a part of the NY city), David Linienthal, who had been the USA’s very first Director of the Atomic Energy Agency, publicly declared that he would, then, not live in New York. Linienthal was known as a man who shared the sensitivity of the common people and was uncommon in his wisdom, to whom the US Administration turned first for heading the Atomic Energy Directorate in 1946 and also later, for the first chairmanship of the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Our Prime Minister is possibly relying on the report of some nuclear design engineers or some such experts that everything has been perfectly done and that they could not find any loophole anywhere in the Kundakulam plant. About the experts’ report, an interesting pointer is in order. In the USA, Linienthal’s public declaration had angered the members of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy and he was ordered to appear before the Congressional hearing. During the testimony he squarely said that in this matter, he had no faith in the so-called experts’ reports. “The greatest hazard has been the history of ignorance and complacency about the basic problems on the part of scientists, engineers, manufacturers and government authorities and their positive disdain of critics and questioners.” His denouncement of the experts was so trenchant because in matters relating to atomic fission-based operations, the imponderables are so many and so tangled that the worth of the ‘experts’ knowledge is next to nothing. The politicians, who give the clearance for the construction and commissioning of nuclear power plants, gamble with the people’s lives.

The USA, which operates the largest number of nuclear of atomic power plants in the world, had, up to 2009, to cancel some 138 projects, due to their poor economics and people’s opposition. In our democracy, if the Union Government’s Council of Ministers and the States’ Chief Ministers are on the same page, they tend to spill the people’s blood until the protest movement takes on the character of national mobilisation.

The nuclear reactor manufacturing industry in the world is in deep crisis. In the USA, from even before the Three-Mile Island disaster in 1979, the industry has remained starved of orders. The last order that it got was in 1978. The order that they had got in 1973 for Watts Bar in Tennessee took 23 years to complete and incurred exorbitantly high cost-overruns. Hence the US Administration felt that its dominance in the world would be threatened if it allowed this industry to die a natural death. The Russian Government, too, was in the same dilemma. After the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, the people of Russia—and also of Belarus and Ukraine—shudder at the prospect of any new reactor being installed within a radius of several hundred kilometers from their homes/workplace. Their reactor industry can be saved only if they get orders from distant lands. France, which has escaped a major disaster by conservatively sticking to the one Westinghouse PWR model, is heavily burdened with public debts. It seeks to improve its domestic finance by getting orders for exports. Therefore, the vested interests in these countries joined in loudly beating the drum about an upcoming “nuclear renaissance” when this industry had already run aground due to people’s rejections and soaring costs.
Nuclear lobbies, for their own survival, invented a false logic that atomic energy is the solution for averting the catastrophic climate change. Since nuclear power generation does not emit oxides of carbon or oxides of nitrogen or methane, they try to pass it off as “clean energy” and seek to hide the fact that in the event of even a partial melt-down, it becomes the purveyor of radioactive substances over vast land spaces, water bodies and the biosphere, causing near-instant deaths to thousands and breeding cancer for large numbers of men and animals for decades. Solar energy, direct and indirect (that is, wind energy, bio-energy, biomass power, tidal energy etc.) are the real non-polluting, low-entropy, inexhaus-tible alternatives to fossil fuels. This is the plain truth which they try to obfuscate.
In the European climatic zone, five countries—namely, Germany, Sweden, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands—have decided to phase out their nuclear plants and meet all their energy needs by renewables. It is strange that in India, where we enjoy a much brighter sunshine and lush vegetative growth (which can be turned into usable energy), our ruling politicians have not been able to acquire this confidence evidently because of their habit of trailing behind the dominant global powers’ technological choices. Our government pays homage to renewable forms of energy but allocates much higher resources for atomic energy. By so doing, they pre-empt the resources which could be deployed much more productively for optimal develop-ment of the renewables’ potential. This is in fact, in the way to aggravate energy shortage.

India has a spectacular tradition of common people’s innovations of homespun technologies. But in the post-independence period, particularly since the 1980s, the establishment’s accent has been on pro-elite economic growth and the building of centralised military prowess. Hence the emphasis has shifted from the nurture of people’s innovations to complex gadget-oriented engineering. Indians had been the pioneers of biogas plants. Now, China is far ahead of India. The solar cooker was invented in India. Its use has not spread to the masses because of the government’s accent on expansion of petroleum refineries and supplies of LPG as cooking gas. A farmer in a village in Uttar Pradesh, without any training in technology, developed a technique for producing hydro-electricity from a small-gradient canal flow which was used for pumping irrigation water to the neighbouring crop fields. But the local people’s interest in small irrigation got submerged under the national leaders’ craze for large-scale irrigation.
Despite all these hurdles, the march of renewables in the coming period will be irresistible, because of (i) their intrinsic worth, and (ii) the society’s compulsive search for these forms of energy in these challenging times. A study of the data published in the Government of India’s own publications would show that in spite of our political parties’ lackadaisical attitude, this country, by the end of 2010, attained a capacity of 18,000 MW of grid-interactive power and another 460 MW of distributed production of power from renewables. This is admirable, compared to only 4700 MW of nuclear power despite the establishment’s persistent efforts over longer years. In India, it was only in January 2010 that the Jawaherlal Nehru Solar Mission was started in right earnest. During the last two years, it has made commendable progress even though it has still remained only one Ministry’s—the Ministry of Renewable Energy’s—effort. It seems, by March 2013, it will able to achieve 1000 MW grid-connected solar power and another total of 100 MW of “stand-alone” and mini-grid solar power. Release of mass initiative for harnessing renewable forms of energy (biogas, wind power, mini-and micro-hydels, solar photovoltaics, biomass power, gas from sewages and sludge etc.) can take us to a position higher than self-sufficiency in non-hazardous, non-polluting forms of renewable energy. Hazardous nuclear power is totally unnecessary.
In today’s world, many countries use nuclear power generation for civil population as a cover for nuclear weapons production. So long as India continues its programme of nuclear power generation, it cannot emerge as a power with a different civilisational ideal before the world and take positive steps towards universal nuclear disarmament, which is of paramount importance for life’s survival on this planet.

This writer, during the last 50 years of his engagement with energy questions, intuitively felt in the mid-1970s that man must obey Nature’s “energy alerts” or face extinction. Nature has preserved her reserves of coal and mineral oils deep in her underground vaults. Hydro-carbons, in which the rare hydrogen gas is mixed with carbons. are kept in deep interiors of the earth. Hence these must be treated as the resource meant for feeding the curative processes in the evolution of life. But Man started using these as fuels in day-to-day use. To this, Nature started protesting by emitting green-house gases causing crisis of survival for the human race. Hence since 1975, he (this writer) has been campaigning for utmost conservation of hydrocarbon resources and minimising their use as fuels or sources of mechanical power. It was not heeded in those days. Later, the world has come to accept its essential truth.

Nature has preserved nuclear power in her far harder-to-penetrate vaults, in the nuclei of atoms, which can be split only by hitting these hard with the electrical-charge-free sub-atomic particles, neutrons. Normally neutrons are found paired with protons in the nucleus, with the electrons orbiting around. Separate neutrons are rare. Hence, splitting the atoms’ nuclei would be a rare achievement, almost unthinkable. Lord Rutherford, who was the first to discover the structure of atoms, thought it was impossible. Hence, 1930s, when Leo Szilard came to him to say that the energy in the atom’s nucleus could be used for meeting man’s energy needs, he threw Szilard out of his laboratory. Lord Rutherford was only marginally wrong. Splitting the atom’s nucleus was not impossible: it should never be viewed as an energy source for men’s use. Those who take the nuclear power route, commit a crime against humanity.

It is ridiculous that when man seeks energy by taking the hazardous route of splitting the atom’s nucleus, he pays less attention to Nature’s free, open, and easily accessible gifts in the sun’s rays, wind’s flows, the tides of rivers and waves of the seas for harnessing energy for day-to-day uses.

Then, there is the grim fact that man does not as yet know how to safely dispose of the radio-active wastes emanating from the nuclear power plants. It is the height of irresponsibility to start a nuclear power plant and embark on piling up the radioactive wastes. These lethal wastes will take their toll. If the operating plants do not cause disasters during our lifetime, their spent fuels will keep on creating cancers and killing our future generations.

The proponents of nuclear power generation must reckon that an international law is inevitably coming up, defining this reckless venture of setting up nuclear power plants as a crime against humanity and more particularly against the unborn generations. The UN General Assembly and International Court of Justice must outlaw the nuclear weapons and also nuclear power plants that spread deadly radioactive wastes.

[I acknowledge my debt to my younger brother and esteemed friend, Prof Sujay Basu, for data regarding the international nuclear industries and events.—S.N.G.]

The author was the Director of the Bureau of Petroleum and Chemical Studies (1961-77). Since 1961 he has been engaged for the last fifty years with the question of energy. He is also one of the country’s earliest environmentalists. He can be contacted by e-mail at: sailendranathghosh@ yahoo.com and sailendranathg@gmail.com