Nuclear safety claims rejected
INDIAN nuclear analysts have dismissed official assurances that thousands of villagers living near the Tarapur nuclear power plant in western India will be unaffected by the recent leak of radioactive waste into their water supply.
And medical experts yesterday rejected official claims that nuclear waste containing the harmful caesium-137 isotope has not seeped into the wells and ponds of nearby Ghivali village.
They said the effects of drinking the contaminated water could not be immediately ascertained and would only surface later.
'The consequences can affect pregnant women, leading to stillbirths, miscarriages and deformities in new-born babies,' said Dr Sanghamitra Gadekar, an expert on the problems caused by nuclear power plants.
Leukaemia and other forms of cancer show up after several years, she said.
Radioactive waste from Tarapur's Waste Immobilisation plant leaked for at least 45 days, seeping into the subsoil drinking water supply of about 3,000 residents of Ghivali, about a kilometre from the power station.
Though the plant shut down after the fault was discovered on April 15, nuclear experts fear the leak, due to defective pipes, may have been going on for much longer. Ghivali residents say about 20 animals have died after they drank water from ponds.
According to reports from Bombay, the villagers are also alarmed by the sudden rise in the water level in one of the wells adjoining a drain which carried waste from the plant. They say the inflow is not rainwater as three other wells in the village are nearly empty.
Nuclear officials in Bombay, however, said extensive monitoring had confirmed all wells and ponds in Ghivali village were free of contamination and precautions had been taken to prevent a recurrence of the leak. They also claimed to have scooped out more than three tonnes of affected soil around the plant.
They conceded 'low-level contamination' did exist after the discharge of contaminated steam into the localdrainage system from the heating coils in the waste immobilisation unit but dismissed it as harmless.
India's nuclear establishment has also come under attack by experts and the media for keeping the leak a closely guarded secret and for wanting to reopen the Tarapur plant by July 15.
'That a new plant, which has barely treated 15 batches of liquid [nuclear] waste totalling up to 3,000 litres and which has a working life of about 15 years, should have developed a leak is a damaging indictment of the quality of the equipment and its maintenance,' said the Times of India in an editorial yesterday.
India, which demonstrated its nuclear bomb capabilities with an underground test in 1974, has 10 power plants, four research reactors, six heavy-water plants and several related facilities.
