Prof.T.Shivaji Rao,
Director, Center for Environmental Studies, GITAM University, Visakhapatnam
http://www.ib.cnea.gov.ar/~protrad/biblioteca/3Accidentes.pdf
see details undder Serial Nos.369,722,729,812,857,877,and 1012[Accidents ,Nuclear]
http://archive.greenpeace.org/comms/nukes/chernob/rep02.html
[accidents ,nuclear]
http://www.ib.cnea.gov.ar/~protrad/biblioteca/3Accidentes.pdf
see details undder Serial Nos.369,722,729,812,857,877,and 1012[Accidents ,Nuclear]
http://archive.greenpeace.org/comms/nukes/chernob/rep02.html
[accidents ,nuclear]
http://www.uottawa.ca/services/ehss/ionizconversion.htm [conversion Units]
http://www.klimaatkeuze.nl/wise/monitor/644/4 (Safety impacted by terrorist attacks)
AS AN IRRITATED SNAKE KILLS A MAN, NUCLEAR PLANTS SILENTLY KILL MANKIND AND NATURE FOR FINANCIAL GAINS BY CONTRACTORS,OFFICIALS& POLITICIANS ?
Nuclear Plants are just silent killers of man and Nature created by the GOD. In nature the Uranium ore contains 99.3% of Uranium-238 and the remaining 0.7% is Uranium-235. Uranium-238 and Uranium-235 in nature are least harmful. But business people and other vested interests dig the iron ore and convert the least harmful Uranium-235 into the fuel form of Uranium-235 by purifying it to make a fuel by enriching it to about 4% of Uranium-235 that is packed in pellets and inserted into the core of the nuclear reactor for producing both electricity and material for making the bombs. The reactor when the nuclear atom is given a blow by a neutron, enormous heat and other poisonous Radio-active atoms like Xenon, Barium, Cesium, Strontium, Plutonium and other dangerous radioactive substances are produced. These radioactive substances are discharged into the air and water by several ways and when they enter into the environment consisting of air, water and soil and foods like vegetables, fishes, prawns they ultimately get into human beings and produce cancers and birth defects in generations of people for many decades to come. These poisonous radioactive substances destroy natural and human life and culture and convert lands upto hundreds of kilometers into permanent nuclear burial grounds for ever.
How harmless Uranium ore materials in nature are converted into destructive and killer materials by man can be understood by the following simple example. For instance king cobras live in nature in anthills in forests and lead their normal life peacefully by catching their prey for food during nights But greedy people go and poke their iron rods into their abodes and disturb the Cobras when they become angry and bite the trespassers to inflict death over them by their poisons. Similarly, the selfish people are mining the harmless Uranium and converting it into harmful Enriched Uranium and then using it to produce electricity by means of the Nuclear plants and in the process they are producing Radioactive pollutants that poison man and nature slowly due to routine releases of radioactivity into the environment. In course of time if an accident occurs in the Nuclear plant due to several reasons like in Fukushima or Chernobyl, the poisonous pollutants are thrown into the atmosphere and they kill thousands of people slowly and inflict cancer to millions of people living downstream upto hundreds of Kilometers as in case of Fukushima and Chernobyl accidents. The Nuclear plant operators are misleading the public by stating that Nuclear power is safe and cheap just like the medical representatives of various pharmaceutical companies praise before the doctors about the virtues of their medical tablets and tonics as part of their sale promotion activity the nuclear authorities are praising the nuclear plants as safe and cheap energy producers which is wrong. This misinformation is dangerous to public health and welfare because in European states almost all people agree that safety of Nuclear (power is a Myth as accepted by Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany. She had consulted the genuine experts on nuclear plants and realized that nuclear safety is a myth and ordered for gradual closure of all the nuclear plants in Germany. If Indian Prime Minister and Union Cabinet Ministers including the Chief Ministers of the state want to know the truth about the safety of the nuclear power plants they must go and visit advanced countries like Germany and Japan and discuss the issue with foreign experts so that they can refrain from promoting nuclear plants as is done by the peoples leader like Mamata Banerjee, Chief Minister of West Bengal. For more scientific details see the above web sites on this topic prepared by independent experts.
Environmental Impact Analysis report are fabricated by consultants according to the national Green Tribunal and also according to the Chief Justice of India, S.H.Kapadia who said “If you leave report preparation to the project proponent, I am sorry to say the person who pays will get the answers he asks for” and hence he called for a change in the system of preparation of EIA reports for the development projects. See website: http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article2886141.ece
Thus the claims of Indian Atomic Energy experts on safety of existing reactors are unbelievable.
VIOLATION OF NUCLEAR SAFETY NORMS AND ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATIONS:
The Government authorities are violating the regulations under the Environmental Protection Act and also the Atomic Energy regulation Acts in preparing the relevant reports on nuclear safety, nuclear plant explosion scenarios, risk analysis, Emergency Response Plans including disaster management. Even while considering nuclear reactor safety problems they are ignoring the potential pathways for causation of small accidents, medium accidents and large scale accidents which may lead to large scale explosions that cause national economic losses estimated at Rs.5 lakh crores and such failures may make the Indian states and the nation to become not only economically bankrupt but also convert the healthy and prosperous land into nuclear burial ground. In order to avoid this man-made disaster the millions of Indian people must understand how even the advanced nuclear reactors may fail in the long run.
PASSIVE NUCLEAR SAFETY IMPOSSIBLE EVEN IN ADVANCED REACTORS:
It must be understood that passive nuclear safety is merely a safety feature of a nuclear reactor that does not depend upon operator actions or electronic feed back to shut it down safely in case of an accident usually caused by overheating consequent to a loss of coolant accident. These modern reactors rely on engineered components so that the anticipated behavior according to laws of physics will be slow rather than accelerate the nuclear reaction in those circumstances. But in the case of older reactor designs the natural tendency for the reaction is to get accelerated rapidly due to increased temperatures so that either operator triggered intervention or electronic feedback was needed to prevent damage to the reactor. In considering the safety aspects of an advanced reactor the words “Passively Safe Reactor” is to be considered more as a description of the methods and strategy employed to maintain a degree of safety rather than it is a description of the level of safety as clarified in the following examples.
Whether a passive safety reactor is really safe or dangerous depends upon the criteria used to evaluate the safety level. Advanced designs use both active and passive safety systems to make them more safer than older designs. Reactor manufacturers brand them as “Passively safe” but this term causes confusion as compared with “inherently safe reactors” in the public view. Actually there are no “Passive safe rectors or passively safe systems but only passively safe components of safety systems exist. Such safety systems are employed to control the reactor when it goes outside normal working conditions due to anticipated operational small scale failure occurrences or accidents while the control systems are used to operate the reactor under the normal working conditions. A system sometimes combines both features. Passive safety refers to various components of the safety system whereas inherent safety refers to control system processes irrespective of the presence or absence of safety specific subsystems. In an advanced reactor the passively safe reactors are the concrete walls and the steel liner while active systems operate by use of components like valves for prompt closure of the piping leading outside the containment, feed back of the reactor status to the external instrumentation and control systems both of which need external power to function.
The degree of passive safety of components are classified into 4 categories namely, A,B,C and D depending upon what the system does not make use of the parameters;
1. No moving working fluid, 2. No moving mechanical part
3. No signal inputs of intelligence, 4. No external power plant
Under Category A (1+2+3+4) falls the fuel cladding that uses none of these four parameters and the fuel cladding is always closed and maintains the fuel and fission products inside and is not open before it reaches the reprocessing plant.
Under category B (2+3+4) comes the surge line that connects the hot leg with the pressurizer and helps to control the pressure in the primary loop of a pressurized water reactor and it uses a moving working fluid to fulfill its mission.
Under category C (3+4) comes the accumulator which does not require signal output of intelligence or external power. When the pressure in the primary circuit drops below the set of point of the spring loaded accumulator valves, the valves open and the water is injected into the primary circuit by compressed nitrogen.
Under category D (4 only) comes the scram which uses moving working fluids, moving mechanical parts and the signal inputs of intelligence but not the external power or forces. The control rods drop by being driven by gravity once they have been released from the magnetic clamp.
Unfortunately nuclear safety engineering is never that simple. Even when the rod is thus released it may not fulfill its function because it may get stuck up due to earthquake conditions or due to deformed core structure. This clearly shows that though it is a passively safe system and has been properly actuated it may not fulfill its mission and nuclear engineers have considered this aspect. Infact only a fraction of the rods dropped are enough to shut down the reactor. Passive safety components are seen in almost all nuclear power plants like the containment, hydro-accumulators in the pressurized water reactors or pressure suppression systems in boiling water reactors. The important issue is that no pumps are required to fulfill the function of a safety system and all the active components like valves and other components of the systems work with electric power from the batteries.
Passive safety is not synonymous with reliability or availability and even less with assured adequacy of safety features although several factors potentially adverse to anticipated performance can be more easily counter acted through passive design as per public perception. But active designs using variable controls do permit much more precise fulfillment of safety functions and this may be particularly useful under accident management conditions. Many water cooled and moderated reactors when scramed cannot remove residual production and decay heat without either process heat transfer or the active cooling system. In other words while the inherently safe heat transfer process provides a passive safety component and prevents excess heat in operational mode “ON” the same process does not provide a passive safe component in operational mode “OFF SCRAM”. The accident at Three Mile Island nuclear plant exposed this design deficiency. The reactor and steam generator were “OFF” but with loss of coolant it still suffered a partial melt down. In the case of Kudankulam reactors although passive core cooling system provides some extra additional degree of safety components it has still a minor flaw of possible rusting related to containment structure liner. When the dome rusts through the shell and if it remains unattended for sometime in the highly corrosive coastal atmosphere at Kudankulam there is a definite possibility of expulsion of poisonous radioactive pollutants into the atmosphere. These new technologies do not take it into full consideration their design basis for handling the Tsunami type scenarios as underestimated in the case of Fukushima where multiple safety systems failed simultaneously. Similar failures occurred in Bhopal industrial plant disaster. Reactors with a few centimeters thick iron shell first and many inches thick concrete shell on top of it can perhaps withstand the impact of only light airplane crashes or other moving objects but cannot withstand serious missile attacks or meteorite crashes, particularly when the reactor contains several soft pockets in and around the nuclear containment shell. Infact about 15 to 25 pipeline penetrations in the containment shell allow process fluids to move from containment to turbine building and back. Further more penetrations for compressed air system, instrumentation and control systems and power supply cable connections are provided and the designers must analyse the risk problems associated with the failure of these penetration plants. During the pipe rupture analysis certain assumptions that breakages will occur in these penetrations are made. The reactors are located at lower level in the containment shell and if the containment is exposed to tsunami waves these penetrations may fail due to the impact of debris and other floating materials and consequently the containment gets flooded and the failure of critical components and systems become inevitable.
IF NUCLEAR REACTOR SUPPLIERS DO NOT BELIEVE IN SAFETY, WHY SHOULD INDIANS BELIEVE IN IT?
The western countries like United states and Germany do not believe that nuclear power is safe. The proof is provided by a few illustrations. In Germany the Chancellor Ms.Angela Merkel discussed nuclear safety with the experts in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear reactor explosion and concluded that nuclear safety is a myth and hence decided to phase out nuclear power plants in Germany. Germans are taking steps to provide energy to the people by means of alternative sources like wind, solar power, hydro-power and other fossil fuels which are safer and cheaper. Infact the people in the United States and the nuclear power industry itself does not believe in the safety and economy of the nuclear power. Consequently after Three Mile Island accident US has not promoted nuclear power for 3 decades . That American contractors do not believe in nuclear safety is proved by the enactment of the Price-Anderson Nuclear industries indemnity Act of 1957 which was expected to expire in 1967 but was recently extended to be in operation upto 2025. This Act was passed in USA because no private Insurance company was willing to come forward to grant insurance policy for nuclear plants to cover the true costs of the risks of nuclear reactor accidents. If the American nuclear power industrialists plan to convince the public that nuclear power is absolutely safe they must actively campaign to repeal the Price-Anderson Act and express their willingness to pay the real costs of compensation to the victims of the accident caused by the risky behavior of the plant. It was originally expected that within 10 years from 1957 the reactor manufacturers would be able to overcome all the problems connected with nuclear safety and thereby demonstrate the insurance companies about the safety of the reactors and purchase the required private insurance policies at market rate without depending upon any Government subsidies or interventions to protect the hazardous nuclear industry at the cost of the public health welfare and national economy.
NUCLEAR TECHNOLOGY CANNOT BE CENT PERCENT SAFE AS ACCIDENTS ARE BOUND TO OCCUR:
The concept of absolute safety of a nuclear reactor verges on the idealistic level while the achievement of a relatively safer reactor will always be possible. Any system process or product is only as safe as our current knowledge of how to test for safety is balanced against our need to make it economically viable, ecologically sound and socially useful and acceptable.
Even destructive testing is limited to “known unknowns” because one cannot test for what one has not anticipated. There will be always “unknown unknowns” to challenge the state of art in safety design and engineering. For instance in the case of reactors nobody is going to design a reactor to withstand even the remote chances of a direct hit by a large meteorite or a freak powerful lightening strike that disables all electronics or an aerial bombing directly over the reactor that is powerful enough to rip most of the structures of a nuclear plant.
The question on safety of reactors is not whether the present designs are safer and if so to what degree because any measures taken will only just reduce the risk but do not eliminate it. The actual danger with the nuclear reactors is not the likelihood of an accident but the potentially catastrophic consequences of the problem and thus truly safe reactor can never be achieved. Even if the reactor failure occurs once in 1000 years for a Fukushima like accident it is still far too high because affected area due to radioactive contamination becomes uninhabitable in case of plutonium contamination for the next 2.5 lakh years. Unlike most other forms of disaster like a dam collapse, a fire accident or an aeroplane crash there is no second chance after nuclear accident.
No technology can be made 100% safe and accidents happen at anytime and anywhere. Nothing can never be truly safe and the risks associated with nuclear plant failure can be reduced and mitigated. Moreover the risks associated with nuclear waste disposal will last for such a long time extending over decades and centuries that any other alternative energy sources must be used even if they are costly. No sane people living in present society have the right to take such a risk in order to protect future generations because the Indian constitution provides guarantee to the right to life and the right to livelihood as well.
If the experts of the Nuclear Power Corporation of India and the Atomic Energy Commission, the Union Cabinet and the members of Parliament and state legislature honestly believe that nuclear plants are absolutely safe let them agitate for cancellation of the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act 2010 and prove to be millions of Indians that they are truly known as patriotic in serving the cause of the nation as Mahatma Gandhi and other leaders who laid their lives in fighting for securing the freedom of India from the tyrannical rule of the imperialistic Britishers for ushering in a true welfare state that uphold the traditional Indian slogan “SARVE JANA SUKHINO BHAVANTHU”
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