The real questions from Kudankulam
India’s scientific academies may prefer to be silent on most issues of importance, but individual Indian scientists are an outspoken lot — they have contributed to the public debate on a variety of issues, ranging from nuclear weapons in the late 1990s to genetically modified crops more recently. If there were a genuine debate to be had on the safety or desirability of nuclear power, I would expect Indian scientists to actively participate in it. And in fact there is a genuine debate to be had, but it is not an abstract debate about the safety or desirability of nuclear power. It is a concrete debate about the mechanisms for ensuring safety and transparency. Unfortunately, in all the noise about Kudankulam, this issue has received comparatively little attention in the media.
Since the Fukushima earthquake, worries about nuclear power have been widespread around the world. One person whose mind was changed was the environmental activist George Monbiot: writing in the British newspaper The Guardian on March 21, 2011, he declared: “As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology.” His reason was that despite the magnitude of the disaster, the age of the plant, and the inadequate safety features, which led to a meltdown, nobody, as far as we know, had yet received a lethal dose of radiation. This convinced him that well-maintained plants built to modern safety standards pose little threat to the public. Meanwhile, we are facing unprecedented demands for energy, and global warming, driven by accelerating use of fossil fuels and resulting in rising sea levels and extreme weather, presents the biggest environmental threat to the world — especially, one should note, to poor coastal fishing communities such as the one at Kudankulam.
A little before Monbiot’s article, Randall Munroe, creator of the XKCD web comic, published a comparison of various forms of ionising radiation, measured in microsieverts, drawn from public sources (see http://xkcd.com/radiation). This widely circulated chart (also cited by Monbiot) suggested that the annual radiation exposure from living within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant is about the same as that from eating a single banana (each being 0.1 microsieverts); the extra dose that Tokyo residents received following Fukushima (about 40 microsieverts) was about a tenth of the yearly dose from natural radioactive potassium in the body (about 390 microsieverts); and the maximum external dose from the Three Mile Island accident (about 1,000 microsieverts) is about a quarter of the normal yearly background dose (4,000 microsieverts, of which about 85 per cent is from natural sources and most of the rest from medical scans).
This is not to minimise the effects of disasters when they do occur. The radiation dose from spending one hour in Chernobyl, in 2010, is much more than the normal yearly “background” dose, and more than the maximum monthly dose permitted for radiation workers in the United States. We need to prevent a Chernobyl-type disaster from ever happening again, anywhere in the world. To quote Monbiot again: “I’m not proposing complacency here. I am proposing perspective.”
Read more: http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/article3893610.ece?homepage=true
Read more: http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/article3893610.ece?homepage=true
