from Ares
Daijiworld Special Correspondent – Panaji (GA)
Panaji, Oct 22: Ruling out the fear that Nuclear power stations are prone to accidents, a renowned Indian nuclear safety expert said that India needs nuclear power to achieve long term energy security using our vast resources of thorium.
“Nuclear power is a reality, fear of accidents notwithstanding. Currently 439 nuclear power plants in 30 countries provide 16 per cent of world’s electricity. A few European nations retain anti-nuclear posture; they import electricity from France which produces 78.4 per cent of its electricity from nuclear reactors. These countries are quietly moving away from nuclear phase out as they have no alternative,’’ Dr K S Parthasarathy, former secretary of the Atomic Energy regulatory board and consultant of the international atomic energy agency (IAEA), Vienna, stated.
Parthasarathy was in Goa to participate in the second conference on "Energy, Climate, and Security: The Inter-Linkages" organized by the Tata Energy Research Institute (TERI) and Konrad Adenauer Foundation recently.
He said that anti-nuclear activists ignore the fact that we have mastered the entire fuel cycle technology including waste management.
Hitting out at anti-nuclear activists, Parthasarathy said that they (activists) are indulgent towards coal power, though the collective radiation dose to population from coal power stations is hundred times more than those from nuclear power plants of comparable capacity.
‘In either case, the doses are too low to be of any health consequence,’ he added.
‘Coal is a very impure material. A thousand mega watt coal-fired power station releases annually 5.2 tons of uranium and, 12.8 tons of thorium besides ten other elements including mercury and arsenic and copious amounts of carbon dioxide, a green house gas,’’ the expert pointed out.
He also ruled out the common contention of nuclear reactors being prone to accidents. ‘Anti-nuclear activists caution that nuclear reactors could lead to catastrophic accidents; during the past fifty years of nuclear power production, two accidents occurred. The first one in three Mile Island, USA did not kill or injure any one,’’ Parthasarathy stated.
‘The Chernobyl Forum, consisting of eight agencies which studied the second accident estimated that as of mid-2005, fewer than fifty people died due to radiation exposure, almost all being highly exposed rescue workers,’’ the expert opined.
He said that no country abandoned nuclear power because of accidents. ‘The electric companies connected 50 out of the 104 operating nuclear power plants in USA to the grid after 1979, the year in which the accident at the Three Mile Island occurred; nineteen of them after 1986, the year in which the Chernobyl accident took place,’’ Parthasarathy said.
‘Canadian companies connected all the operating nuclear power reactors to the grid after 1979. Fifty three out of the 59 French reactors came on line after 1979,’’ he added.