'What is appalling is that the safety recommendations are yet to be attended to, even in September 2000'
Dr A Gopalakrishnan

Rediff: Do you think India's nuclear power plants are money guzzling? Is it not a fact that after spending so much money in the past three decades, the energy produced is just three per cent?

Dr Gopalakrishnan: 'Money guzzling' is a poor definition. If you mean, "Do you feel it is a waste of taxpayers' money to expand the nuclear power programme", that can be attempted to be answered.

My answer is that the nuclear programme needs to be much more tightly planned and controlled, under the careful financial and parliamentary scrutiny before large amounts of additional public funds are committed. It certainly should not be left to be run the way it is by the Department of Atomic Energy.

Now that India has declared itself a nuclear weapons power, it is high time that we separate our nuclear activities clearly into civilian and military components and let the civilian work be scrutinised and funded like any other power sector project in terms of investments and returns on investment, and more importantly, on the basis of per kilowatt-hour price for nuclear electricity and what it means to public safety.

In doing so, there should be transparency in the details of costing of all inputs for nuclear power. All subsidies coming indirectly into this programme will have to be included in the costs. Then only one can make a choice on how much of nuclear power to set up, as against how much coal-based power NTPC should be funded to set up, and how much hydropower NHPC can be funded to set up.

After all, the NTPC, the NHPC and the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited are all public sector power companies. The limited amount of taxpayers' money that is available for investment in power must go to these three organisations in proportion to their overall economic and environmental merits, and not with a step-motherly attitude to NTPC and NHPC alone, as it is today.

Rediff: Last year you had said that the threat of a serious nuclear accident at our nuclear plants is real. Can you elaborate?

Dr Gopalakrishnan: I was chairman of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board from 1993 to 1996. In 1995, the AERB under me brought out a comprehensive document on the safety of DAE installations. It was subsequently accepted by the Atomic Energy Commission and passed on to the DAE to take corrective steps. The contents of the report were all based on earlier analyses and committee findings of the DAE and their organisations, and not any new evidence generated by the AERB.

What this report brought out is the fact that many serious safety deficiencies in our early-stage installations were identified as far back as in 1979 and 1987 by the DAE. But these deficiencies had not been rectified even at the time of the report in 1995.

Rediff: Has the government or the DAE now implemented the safety suggestions?

Dr Gopalakrishnan: What is appalling is that the more crucial of the safety recommendations are yet to be attended to, even in September 2000. The deficiencies pointed out and prioritised in the 1995 AERB report have certainly placed the safety levels of some of our installations well below the norms that are internationally applied for deciding on the continued operation of nuclear facilities.

The DAE is postponing the repairs because of several reasons. In some cases, it will necessitate very long shutdown of a facility, for tackling some of the problems well enough. Then there are technologies that have not yet been indigenously developed. In certain instances spare parts and equipment are denied to India.

But certainly the government will provide the funds needed, if only the DAE will come forward with a plan to do the urgent rectification. Theunderlying reason for the current state of affairs is a scorn on the part of the DAE for any independent view from outside. The total lack of awareness on the part of the public, a lack of effective media interest and activism, as well as the newfound strength of the Indian nuclear establishment as the 'bomb-maker' and the consequential influence they have on the current government have made the DAE pretend that it knows everything.

Rediff: Can a Chernobyl-type accident take place in Indian nuclear power plants?

Dr Gopalakrishnan: I have said earlier also that a Chernobyl-type accident is very unlikely in Indian nuclear power stations. What is not realised is that away from all the sensationalism of Chernobyl, there are lesser accidents which could still release moderate amounts of radioactivity into the very crowded areas surrounding some of our less safe installations at Madras, Trombay or Tarapur, which could be devastating to a large number of people.

The Madras Atomic Power Plant reactors that are operated without effective emergency cooling systems are situated right outside Madras. The danger is that unlike other countries, we have nuclear weapons work and plutonium-producing reactors operating right next to crowded areas of Bombay.