Abstract
Shielded from scrutiny by the government, India's nuclear establishment faces growing public distrust.
On March 26, a team of nuclear engineers was busy testing a special device in the second unit of the Madras Atomic Power Station at Kalpakkam in southern India. The device, called barccis (short for Bhabha Atomic Research Center Channel Inspection System), was designed to inspect the reactor's coolant tubes, which had been routinely plagued by cracks and vibration problems. On that day, Channel K-05 had been defuelled to enable the inspection, but as an extension tube was being fitted, the plug slipped away and huge quantities of tritium-containing radioactive heavy water leaked out.
Nearly 50 workers were nearby. Seven of the technicians who helped plug the leak have since been removed from any duty involving radioactive materials as they reportedly received heavy doses of radiation during the operation. Though officials of the staterun Nuclear Power Corporation (npc) and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) claim that the spilled heavy water has been “recovered through leakage collection systems,” what remains to be recovered is confidence in India's nuclear safety standards.
Whether it's near accidents such as this one at Madras, fires caused by failing equipment, or underground contamination due to aging welds, the DAE has failed to maintain a safe and reliable nuclear infrastructure. Often protected by claims of national security or a catchall Official Secrets Act, the country's nuclear establishment has long been shielded from the scrutiny that would lead to better standards of safety.
The countdown
For more than two weeks after the Madras incident, the nuclear establishment sought to downplay the leak. The only version that was immediately available to the press was from the workers' union at Madras, which has lately become vocal on safety issues. The same union made headlines in September 1997 after it refused to obey management orders and went public with allegations of high levels of radioactivity in the plant.
Last April, after a determined media decided to go after the authorities this time, the power corporation admitted that six tons of heavy water had leaked during the incident. Strangely, the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, India's nuclear watchdog, followed the DAE's say-nothing lead and refused to answer general questions from the media. Power plant officials meanwhile explained that the leak was an “insignificant” and “anticipated incident,” claiming that the level of tritium released that day was “within permissible limits.” Madras station director Krishna Hariharan claimed the operation had involved the “planned escape of heavy water from the fuel machine vault.”
But if the situation was not serious, why did management declare a plant emergency when the reactor had already been shut down? Former regulatory board chairman Adinarayana Gopalakrishnan told the Indian magazine Frontline, “Declaring [a] plant emergency is just a step short of evacuating the personnel from the station under [an] extraordinary situation. If the leak was only like that from the tap, why [declare an] emergency? I think that a lot of radioactivity must have been released into the plant.”
In fact, the eight pressurized heavy water reactors at Rawatbhatta, Kakrapar, Kalpakkam, and Narora have separate primary and secondary systems to transport heavy water in the reactor. Two scenarios are possible. If the coolant tube had ruptured, the primary coolant would have leaked out. On the other hand, if the calandria tube had ruptured, the leak would have been of moderator heavy water, which is more contaminated because of the continuous formation of tritium as the fuel bundle is irradiated. Authorities at Madras eventually clarified that it was coolant water that spilled, which they described as “not radioactive.”
Independent experts say, however, that the coolant heavy water is radioactive because it runs close to the fuel. The same heavy water is in the system from the time the reactor attains criticality, and the tritium that is formed remains in the heavy water even if the reactor is shut down for months. Although Hariharan told the media that it was only an “insignificant” leak, six tons leaked out, nearly one-tenth of the total amount of heavy water in the coolant tubes.
One of India's troubled nuclear plants, the Narora Atomic Power Station in Uttar Pradesh, India.
“Release of tritium was well within operational limits,” explained Manavendra Das, chief engineer for health, safety, and public awareness, in an official release that explained the power corporation's position. (Authorities point out that the reactor had been under annual shutdown since February 15, but fuel continues to give off decay heat even when the reactor is shut down.)
The NPC has not released any actual data about the radioactivity, however, and there is no independent way of getting it. Even the regulatory board does not have separate mechanisms to measure individual exposures; all medical information originates from health physicists appointed by the NPC.
The Narora fire
The Madras heavy-water leak is not an isolated incident; it is one in a long series of near-mishaps and other safety lapses. There are many glaring examples that bear testimony to the DAE's poor safety record, and many legendary tales are slowly coming to light from beneath the veil of secrecy that shrouds India's nuclear establishment.
One incident occurred in the wee hours of March 31, 1993, when two blades in the turbine generator of the first unit of the Narora Atomic Power Station in Uttar Pradesh snapped under accumulated stress and sliced through the other blades, destabilizing the rotor system and causing it to vibrate excessively.
A major fire quickly broke out in the turbine room, knocking out the electric supply to the reactor's cooling systems. The cables for the stand-by power supply were also burned and total darkness engulfed the plant within minutes. Some brave technicians–fearing a fuel melt-down–climbed up the reactor in the dark with flashlights, cranked opened the valves, and poured in a borated heavy water solution to bring all nuclear chain reactions to a halt. This prevented what could otherwise have been a “localized explosion.” That instinctive action by the technicians (in nuclear engineering parlance, a “gravity addition of boron solution”) was the fourth and last level of safety protection. “The timely use of [the boron solution] saved the day and the reactor was very close to a partial fuel meltdown that day,” Gopalakrishnan said in Frontline.
And why did the incident occur? Sources say that Britain's General Electric Company–the firm that transferred the turbine blade technology to Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited–had warned authorities as early as 1989 that the blades might develop multiple cracks. General Electric advised them to replace the blades and suggested design modifications after 10,000 running cycles. (The first unit at Narora had completed more than 16,000 cycles.) The power corporation failed, however, to heed these recommendations.
Luckily, the 1993 fire in the turbine room did not spread to the two giant oil tanks or the spare hydrogen tanks that were stored nearby. Otherwise, things could have been much worse. According to Gopalakrishnan, the event would not have happened if the blades had been replaced in time. The regulatory board committee that probed the incident found that the total loss of power led to other failures, such as loss-of-containment integrity. Although the reactors at Narora were the first to be built with double containment features, the nitrogen backup system reportedly failed to function during the power failure.
Despite protests from NPC and DAE authorities, the regulatory board classified the Narora fire as a serious incident meriting a “scale three” rating–judging the incident the worst in India's nuclear history.
But there are other noteworthy incidents in the department's annals that haven't received much public or media attention. In 1985, an overheated cable joint at the second unit of the Rajasthan Atomic Power Station caused a fire that spread through the cable trays and disabled four pumps. In 1991, a fire in the first unit of the Kakrapar Atomic Power Station switch gear room led to a complete loss of the emergency power system and partial loss of the electrical power supply. Sadly, the department does not seem to have learned from its past experiences and still paints a rosy picture of its safety culture.
Inherited problems at Tarapur
Documents obtained from department sources clearly indicate the preponderance of safety concerns even during the days of active Indo-U.S. cooperation with the Tarapur Atomic Power Station project. The two boiling-water reactors at the Tarapur station are of vintage U.S. design. Although experts note that all similar reactors have been shut down for safety reasons, the two at Tarapur dangerously share the same subsystems, including a nitrogen emergency core cooling system, a method the DAE had “long discontinued,” as Gopalakrishnan told the Bulletin. He added that operating in the present mode could lead to a containment explosion in case of a loss-of-coolant accident.
India's Atomic Energy Department head, Rajagopalan Chidambaram. His goal: “20,000 megawatts by 2020.”
The documents detail communications between the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and then-chairman of India's Atomic Energy Commission, Homi Sethna, which clearly establish that the first unit at Tarapur has been beset with a variety of problems from the beginning. “Leaking fuel elements, end caps that became dislodged, and mechanically damaged reactor fuel” are some of the problems mentioned in the communication. The cleanup system was inadequate to the load, and in-plant radioactivity became very high; liquid and gas effluent levels have also been very high.
The second unit at Tarapur has had similar problems. Department documents claim that the plant's liquid effluents contain “about one curie of mixed long-life radioactivity per day,” and that there is substantial radioactivity in the tidal area and in the local fish-eating population. Cobalt, in the form of magnetic particles, was also found in the environmental samples.
There seems to be no solution in sight to this mess. Many parts of the Tarapur reactor are uninspectable, and the department lacks the equipment and/or technology to correct its problems. The intergranular corrosion of primary piping at the station is another well-known glitch. A regulatory board report notes that due to a leaky emergency condenser tube in the second reactor, about 11.9 curies of radioactivity were released into the atmosphere in 1992.
After India caught the world by surprise by conducting its first nuclear test in 1974, the United States cut off all spare parts and assistance. Experts say that the Tarapur station cannot run without a supply of genuine spares. The regulatory board doesn't know where the plant is currently obtaining its spares, or if they are reliable.
European companies would be willing to manufacture spare parts, but only if the power corporation provides drawings for them. This is no easy task. Britain's General Electric, which no longer manufactures the parts, left no instructions with Indian scientists when it severed ties in 1974. Fresh drawings cannot be made because portions of the reactor are not approachable because of accumulated radioactivity.
The plant's operators are aware of the unit's problems. Because of various failures, the reactors have long been de-rated from 210 megawatts to 160. According to Gopalakrishnan, however, they “should have been shut down in the interest of public safety long back.”
Problems at Rajasthan, Madras, and others
India's much-touted, three-stage nuclear program began at the Rajasthan power station with two reactors built with Canadian assistance. The first unit went critical in 1972, and the second in 1980, but because of various technical problems neither unit worked at its installed capacity. A major crack in the end shield of the first reactor's core forced the NPC to shut it down for several years in the 1980s. The second unit also faced many problems caused by tube leakage. It has spent one-third of its lifetime in shutdown and repairs. It was restored last year after the much-publicized replacement of 306 coolant channels.
Another deficiency in the Rajasthan and Madras reactors is the absence of a high-pressure emergency-core cooling system for avoiding core meltdown in the case of a loss-of-coolant accident. No pressurized heavy-water reactor in the world operates with as “obsolete and unsafe” testing as at Rajasthan and Madras, observed Gopalakrishnan.
In the 1980s, the discovery of bits and pieces of zircalloy in the first unit at Madras was traced to substantial cracking of the reactor's inlet tubes. The same problem also surfaced in the second unit. Instead of welding the tubes as an integral unit as the Canadians advised, the department ordered them welded in three sections. Poor welding reportedly led the inlet tubes to crack, forcing the NPC to de-rate the Madras reactors from 235 megawatts to 175. Experts note that continued operation in this mode is not safe, even at lower levels.
A regulatory board report observed that the problem was caused by the composition of the pressure tubes. The pressure tubes of the first seven pressurized heavy-water reactors were made of zircalloy-2, which was later found to be “prone to creep deformation under irradiation.” Canada, from whom India borrowed the technology, long ago changed over to tubes made of a zirconiumniobium alloy. “All the Indian reactors have to be retubed en masse” or a serious loss of coolant accident could take place as happened in Canada in 1984, warned Gopalakrishnan in a press conference.
Flooding has also been a concern at various sites. For example, in June 1994 flood waters entered the condenser pit and the turbine building basements in the Kakrapar Atomic Power Station because sealing arrangements were not provided to prevent water from getting through the cable trenches and valve pits. Similar flooding occurred twice at Rajasthan, in 1976 and 1982, caused by the same construction error.
A technician trapped inside a shielded room at Druva saved himself by shutting off the coolant.
Another major incident struck the nuclear establishment five years ago at Kaiga in Karnataka, where two 220-megawatt units were being built. The Kaiga project, which will be commissioned late this year or early next year, was delayed after a section of its pre-stressed concrete dome collapsed on May 13, 1994, during the final stages of construction. (When I visited the site three years ago, officials preferred the term “delamination” to “collapse.”) All construction activities at Kaiga halted after a regulatory board order. The NPC and the board were at loggerheads for a long time before work was allowed to continue.
Subsequent investigations proved that the dome fell because of a design flaw and not because of the use of substandard construction materials by Larsen & Toubro, as was generally believed at the time. In all the power projects, the regulatory board had directed that integrated emergency core cooling tests be carried out in each reactor before startup, that proof and leakage tests be carried out on the reactor containment, and that a full-scope simulator be installed for operator training. Gopalakrishnan alleges that none of these tests has been carried out.
Research community fares no better
India's nuclear research establishments are in no better shape. Even when compared to the nuclear power stations, the safety culture at the Bhabha Atomic Research Center is extremely poor.
One horrific example took place in October 1989 when a reactor technician was inadvertently locked inside a shielded room at Dhruva. The reactor had been hurriedly prepared for startup and no one had checked to see that all the staff had been accounted for. Radiation from a fully operational Dhruva could have killed the worker within minutes. Only the technician's extraordinary presence of mind saved his life. He repeatedly shut off the coolant pump, causing the reactor to trip several times in a row. He was discovered by chance almost an hour later when another technician decided to find out why the reactor was shutting down so frequently.
Then there was the time in 1991 when Dhruva operated for almost a month with a malfunctioning emergency cooling system. Or the time in July 1995 when the inlet hose of a temporary ion exchange unit was disconnected and huge amounts of water drained from the wet storage block containing the submerged uranium fuel rods. Had someone not noticed the reduced water level, the radioactive fuel would have been exposed to open air, potentially causing a major disaster.
A similar incident happened in November 1994 when technicians transferring an irradiated fuel rod from the reactor pile to a wet storage block forgot to connect the hose that supplies water for cooling the fuel.
Aside from these near catastrophes, there are more insidious problems lurking at Bhabha. For example, bursting underground pipelines carrying radioactive waste within the campus have contaminated tons of subsoil. Then there are the two million tons of liquid waste stored in tanks that are reportedly leaking because of aging, corrosion, and faulty welds. And in 1991, an underground pipeline near the reactor developed a crack, leaking lethal radioactive isotopes.
The regulatory board also found that radioactive water was being pumped through a leaky pipeline. In 1992, underground soil at the facility became contaminated by liquid waste leaking from the pipeline of the effluent treatment plant. Even the waste immobilization plant witnessed radioactive leakage from cracked pipelines in 1995. The situation in the fuel reprocessing units and fuel fabrication units is similar.
There have also been complaints that workers at the uranium mines and the extraction plant in Jaduguda, Bihar, and the Nuclear Fuel Complex in Hyderabad–which churns out 50,000 tons of contaminated wastes every day–are not adequately protected from radiation intake and external exposure. The threat posed by dumping wastes into a storage pond (known as the “lagoon”) is already causing grave environmental concerns. The public-sector Uranium Corporation of India, Ltd. mines the ore in Jaduguda and transports it to the Nuclear Fuel Complex. After the ore is processed, radioactive waste is discharged, collected, and brought all the way back to Jaduguda, where it is dumped amid tribal villages.
Although the Uranium Corporation has acknowledged that 31 people suffered from the possible effects of radiation, it is not yet prepared to admit that the deaths of 53 workers on its payroll during the past four years were caused by radiation intake while dumping the waste into ponds. Though the Bihar government initiated a health survey, the findings have not yet been released.
Questionable commitments
Clean and cheap have been the selling points of nuclear power industries worldwide. Still, the countries that pioneered and helped develop these technologies are now realizing that nuclear power is no longer economical, and public pressure is mounting to phase out existing nuclear power plants. However, the DAE is determined to prove that nuclear energy is the “natural and inevitable choice” to supplement dwindling fossil resources. It has even succeeded in convincing the government to invest heavily in various nuclear power projects in the next century. Department head Rajagopalan Chidambaram has set a target of reaching “20,000 megawatts by 2020.”
The Department of Atomic Energy says nuclear power is the natural and inevitable choice.
Concerned critics say it would be “counterproductive” to have a big nuclear power base without a competent and independent regulatory mechanism in light of the department's prevailing safety culture, which experts feel is “much below international standards.” An even greater concern, as of today, is the department's ambivalent stand in matters of nuclear safety and regulation. India is sorely in need of an autonomous nuclear watchdog, which the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board is supposed to be, but for all practical purposes is not.
The state of the regulatory board would never have come to light if it were not for the controversial exit of its former chairman, Adinarayana Gopalakrishnan. In 1996, Gopalakrishnan ordered the regulatory board to go ahead with a “comprehensive stocktaking” of safety issues and deficiencies at the department's installations. The inquiry committee found to its surprise that a large number of “significant” issues had accumulated over the years.
“In a major departure from the past, all these shortcomings were documented, along with references,” and submitted to the highest levels of the government, much to the ire and discomfort of the department, Gopalakrishnan recounted in Frontline.
Gopalakrishnan set the ball rolling by disclosing to the media that there were 130 safety-related issues in various nuclear facilities, of which 95 belonged to the NPC alone. He has yet to elaborate on the specifics because he is still bound by India's Officials Secrets Act.
Following a public outcry and a flood of editorials that appeared in various newspapers in the ensuing period, Bombay's Sarvodaya Mandal and the People's Union for Civil Liberties filed a petition in August 1996 in the Bombay High Court, demanding that the complete report be made public. To date, the department has avoided making the report public by hiding behind the cover of the Atomic Energy Act and the Official Secrets Act.
Claiming that the report contained sensitive information regarding nuclear installations, the department invoked secrecy and privilege. After the court expressed the view that safety issues were a matter of public concern, the department found a way out by promising to look into the matter of restructuring the regulatory board. Upon this assurance, the court dismissed the petition but kept the “doors of the court open.”
The subsequent appointment of Raja Ramanna, who served as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission from 1983 until 1987, to head the inquiry committee was a sequel to this assurance. The People's Union for Civil Liberties questions Ramanna's appointment because he was the one who structured the regulatory board in 1983. The union claims it is unreasonable to expect Ramanna to overhaul and criticize a system that he himself built.
The union's complaint was that the regulatory board's powers are effectively clipped. The issue surfaced again after a long hiatus in the Supreme Court due to the initiatives taken by the union in Delhi. In response, the department filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court (again invoking the Atomic Energy Act and the Official Secrets Act) and explained its difficulty in making the controversial report public. “The documents and other information, the disclosure of which has been sought by the petitioners, belong to a class which is per se classified. The respondents are entitled to withhold the information.”
Furthermore, the department maintains that not every document can be made public as most of them are “highly technical and sensitive in nature.” The department maintains that “due to the sensitive nature of the technology,” transparency must be subservient to the interests of national security. The affidavit also asserts that technical issues related to nuclear installations “cannot be a matter of judicial review.”
Even before the issue surfaced in court, the department was severely criticized for mixing the issue of nuclear safety and national security on the ground that it was a ploy to cover up the department's lapses in matters relating to safety.
“The Indian nuclear establishment is not alone in the world to use the smokescreen of national security to cover up the damage caused to the people and environment by nuclear pollution,” says Buddhi Kota Subbarao, who argued for the People's Union in the Bombay High Court. Subarrao told me that “while in other countries there are laws to disallow the national security argument to block public scrutiny on these issues, there are no such laws” in India.
Subbarao feels that the court ignored the public right to life and health and gave undue weight to the secrecy clause on grounds of national security. Moreover, the department's argument that disclosing the regulatory board report would be tantamount to disclosing sensitive technical information about nuclear facilities is meaningless, because all the existing power plants in India are based on foreign designs and information about those designs is freely available in the open literature.
The regulatory board's present organizational structure is also central to the current dispute. The board is not effectively separated from the department it regulates, and it relies on the DAE for money, manpower, technical expertise, and material resources.
This organizational anomaly has crippled India's nuclear regulatory process in many ways. Interestingly, the Atomic Energy Commission chairman plays a dual role. As DAE secretary, he is the head of all the nuclear installations in the country and is answerable to the regulatory board chairman on safety issues. But he also sits in the judgment chair because the regulatory board chairman reports to the Atomic Energy Commission. “It's just like a slave judging its master,” Subbarao quipped.
Chidambaram, however, dismisses these allegations. “Even today,” he said in a 1998 press conference, if the regulatory board “asks us to shut down all the reactors for safety reasons, we have no other option but to comply with it.” But he was evasive when asked about the union petition and the regulatory board report. “I can't comment on this as the matter is now pending in the Supreme Court, and we have filed our affidavit explaining our point of view,” he said.
Where to go from here
DAE authorities take pride in the fact that India has never had a Three Mile Island or Chernobyl incident, but the numerous near accidents at India's nuclear facilities suggest that the department's “excellent safety record” has more to do with luck than with the competence of its scientists and engineers. “The fact [that a disaster] has not happened so far is not a guarantee that it will never happen. Any reactor that's going to cause havoc is not going to show itself as a limping reactor. The Chernobyl reactor was as good as a new one till the fateful day,” Gopalakrishnan said in a bbc radio interview last June.
For the past three years, the regulatory board has been nearly invisible in policing the nuclear establishment. It has not even carried out routine work, and an npc source said that for some strange reason the board's most recent annual reports have not been released. Board sources counter that the Atomic Energy Commission has sat on the annual report for a long time. Present Board Chairman P. Rama Rao would only say that the reports “will be published soon,” and refused to say why there was an unusual delay, or if the delay has anything to do with Gopalakrishnan's controversial exit.
Experts feel it's time to remove regulatory board operations from the purview of the Officials Secrets Act so that the regulatory mechanism will have public visibility and participation, as in the United States and European countries. The DAE, however, refuses to free the regulatory board from its clutches. The absence of any distinction between India's civil and military nuclear programs compounds the situation by allowing the DAE to use weapons-related activities to cover up its failures and pathetic performance on the civilian power and safety front. A recent survey in Nuclear Engineering International listed India's reactors in the lowest bracket in terms of efficiency and performance.
Subbarao said that during its evolution, the DAE “gathered a culture in which its top bosses believed that no one in the country was capable of questioning them in matters of nuclear technology.” The department feels comfortable remaining in a shell, while at the same time cultivating the press and politicians in power to see that there is no damage to its public image.
And why is the DAE adamant on this issue? According to Subbarao, “an independent regulatory board will expose the DAE's false claims and is bound to be a hindrance to them.”
The department has happily exploited the ignorance of India's judiciary and political establishment on nuclear issues. In the past, it has even used the Atomic Energy Act to prevent nuclear plant workers from accessing their own health records. While nuclear establishments everywhere have been notorious for suppressing information, nowhere is there an equivalent of India's Atomic Energy Act in operation. Over the years, in the comfort of secrecy, India's nuclear establishment has grown into a monolithic and autocratic entity that sets the nuclear agenda of the country and yet remains virtually unaccountable for its actions.