[sacw] S A A N Post | 16 Aug. 00

Harsh Kapoor aiindex@mnet.fr
Wed, 16 Aug 2000 01:29:21 +0200


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South Asians Against Nukes Post
16 August 2000
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#1. Bangladesh: The Case against the Rooppur Nuclear power project
#2. India: 'government can't provide safe water, but it's busy building A.
bombs'
#3. India: APDR urgent action re: police brutality on anti-nuclear rally
in Calcutta

_____________________

#1.

Meghbarta (Bangladesh)
August 2000 issue
http://www.meghbarta.net/2000/august/techppl.html#case

The Case against the Rooppur Nuclear power project

by Sylvia Mortoza

Ambitious programmes drawn up during the 70s when the supplier
countries, represented by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
were promoting nuclear power as a cheap form of energy; a good vehicle
for technology transfer; and a symbol of development, have since been
abandoned for many reasons. This is why a high-pressure sales programme
has been undertaken by the U.S. and other countries and why the IAEA has
had to reduce its estimates of future installed nuclear capacity in
developing countries from 167,000MW to only 17,000 MW - slightly more
than 10 per cent of the original. Considering this, it is natural that
suppliers have targeted the Third World for without the opening up of
new markets, this is one industry that would have died a natural death.

Fortunately for the manufacturer/supplier, the persistent energy
shortages in the developing countries made them all an "easy mark" and
the initial response from these countries, particularly those in Asia,
was so positive the industry drew in a new breath and gained a new lease
on life. But of late, as the nuclear power plant manufacturers in
America have intensified efforts to sell to such countries, we should be
alarmed for can we really accept assurances they are safe when we all
now know there is an inherent danger from water-cooled nuclear reactor
technology?

Judging from recent events in Canada and Japan, the answer is a
resounding "NO" for it would seem that promoting a good nuclear safety
culture is beyond either. This view is reinforced by Japan's worst-ever
nuclear mishap which took place at Tokaimura on September 30, 1999.
Inspection of all these facilities found most of the violations were
related to inadequate checks on radiation exposure. The ministry has
since ordered those plants that failed inspection to improve their
safety measures forthwith - and told them it would be making more
frequent investigations in future. Furthermore a recent report by the
Japanese Labour Ministry states 15 out of Japan's 17 top nuclear
facilities have inadequate safety measures!

And Canada? "Ontario Hydro" owns 19 of Canada's 21 reactors. The company
is owned by the provincial government and has a mandate to generate,
supply and transmit all the electricity Ontario needs. But in 1994,
investigators found operators playing computer games in a control room
at Bruce and the following year workers carried out repairs on the wrong
generating unit. The company later admitted it had secretly leaked
tritium-laced heavy water - for 18 years. Not that Britain is any better
for it has been dumping nuclear waste in the Thames for much longer.

In an official report, Ontario Hydro's nuclear operations were described
as lacking a "strong safety culture" with an "excessive human error
rate." This was followed by the "lay-up" (nuke talk for temporary
closure, perhaps permanently) of seven of Ontario Hydro's 19 reactors -
and the resignation of the firm's boss. During the lay-up, the longest
in history - 4300 megawatts of power were lost - about a quarter of the
province's normal supply. Four units in the Pickering site which were
laid up in the 1980s for refits that took up to three years, are still
idle. Three at Bruce will not open till 2003, if at all - and this in an
"advanced" country. A report stated that Ontario Hydro's management was
"slipshod, complacent and unaccountable." It also criticised the firm's
maintenance and training. Overall the report assessed Ontario Hydro as
"minimally acceptable;" the lowest rating that allows it to stay in
business.

But, and here's the 'punch line" - Canada opened the last of its nuclear
reactors in 1992 and reckons it has all that it needs with the result
that the Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., owned by the federal government,
stepped up its efforts to sell its locally designed reactors abroad and
now has five under construction, two in South Korea, two in China and
one in Romania - more than any other single exporter. But future sales
could be in doubt for when a third of the country's reactors are being
idled well short of their 40-year life span - and after years of
deteriorating performance, sales team now have to work doubly hard to
persuade foreigners to buy.

Apart from this, the amount of secrecy surrounding mishaps is enough to
tell us there may be some we never hear about. The recent cover-up in
Japan is a case in point. Even those living within the vicinity of a
plant where a meltdown has occurred have not been told the extent of the
danger yet research into known incidents have shown that, apart from the
health problems exposure causes, there are many psychological and social
costs too. But as there are still many who recommend the use of nuclear
power in countries which are arguably technically backward, a crash
course on the after-effects of radiation should be mandatory.
Alternatively they should ask the women of Chernobyl why they are
choosing to abort their foetuses rather than give birth to deformed
infants. If this statement is in doubt, consult the statistics as the
birth rate at Chernobyl is lower than in any place in the whole of the
former USSR.

Considering the state of nuclear power programmes in advanced countries
like Canada and Japan, are we not right to oppose it for Bangladesh? In
fact it is more than time to question our presumed dependency on nuclear
power to solve our energy shortage, especially if we have to sacrifice
our safety to attain it for though INSAG has a comprehensive set of
Basic Safety Principles for Nuclear Power Plants which include the fact
that existing nuclear power plants should have a probability of a severe
accident not greater than one in 10,000 operating years - this is a goal
considered achievable only if the industry has a "good safety management
and safety culture." When we have had serious accidents at less
complicated facilitiies which have resulted in a loss of lives (at NGFF
in the 60s GFLL in the 70s) how do we have the courage to opt for a
complicated industry like nuclear power? But apart from our ability or
inability to operate a plant of this magnitude and dimension, we need to
be aware that the decline in the sale of nuclear power plants in the
west is not because they have all they need but because of the strong
political opposition they evoke.

These are the social and practical difficulties but what of the
technology? We know that nuclear power plants produce energy through a
process called nuclear fission in which atoms are bombarded with
neutrons, and this process releases the heat that can generate massive
amounts of electricity, the fact that it also produces waste that stays
radioactive for decades is of concern. It has as its essential
components, fissionable fuel, moderator, shielding, control rods, and a
coolant. During the process known as nuclear fission, atoms are
bombarded with neutrons which releases the heat that can generate
massive amounts of electricity. Fission itself means the splitting of a
heavy nucleus into two roughly equal parts (which are nuclei of lighter
elements), accompanied by the release of a relatively large amount of
energy in the form of kinetic energy of the two parts and in the form of
emission of neutrons and gamma rays. The nuclei formed by the fission of
heavy elements are of medium atomic weight and almost all are
radioactive. It is this factor that we fear and, although there is newer
technology that does not use the trans uranium element called plutonium,
known to be one of the deadliest substances found on earth and must be
treated with great care due to the health and security risks involved
because inhaling or swallowing even the smallest quantity causes cancer.
Radioactivity is the spontaneous decay of disintegration of an unstable
atomic nucleus accompanied by the emission of radiation. This is a
perennial problem for an owner/operator of a nuclear power plant for
there is still no solution to this problem and is still the foremost
technical challenge facing the industry.

Experts say nuclear power plants are NOT suitable for energy-hungry
economies short of cash and also warn that they require huge injections
of capital long before the generation of electricity can begin. If for
no other reason, taken from the point of view of cost, we should be wary
of taking on this burden as projects of this type almost inevitably
incur cost overruns. And the fact that the World Bank no longer gives
money for nuclear power projects on the grounds they are "both
uncompetitive and potentially unsafe" is a pointer. As we know there is
no nuclear plant that can be made 100 percent fail-safe - is it too
difficult for policy makers to understand the potential danger given the
poor infrastructure?

So before we are taken in by all the promises made by nuclear plant
manufacturers, governments should undertake a review of the nuclear
industry from top to bottom as the promise of providing a "clean" power
has never been fulfilled. Nor can it be substantiated that electricity
produced in nuclear power plants is cheaper than in conventional power
plants. Even if we disregard this, the fact that only those countries
with a well-developed industrial base and capable of developing their
own technology have been able to maintain their nuclear programmes
should serve as warning. And as projects of this kind almost always
incur cost overruns, the cost: benefit ratio may also not be to our
liking always assuming the supplier delivers on time. And as the cost of
generating electricity is "almost always higher than the costs of
generating electricity from other fuel sources - particularly coal and
hydro-power."

When it is clear the rest of the world, in particular the advanced world
which has experience of nuclear power are cutting back on plans for
building new nuclear power plants, it seems strange to hear people
expounding its virtues. If we stop to consider the technology used in
nuclear reactors for producing electrical energy is the same technology
that was once used to produce the first atom bombs, we might better
understand the need for caution for the U.S. Defense Department has
admitted that the fall out from nuclear tests conducted in the Nevada
Desert between 1951 and 1957 may have caused between 10,000 to 75,000
thyroid cancers - and that 70 per cent of them may not yet have been
diagnosed!

A Nuclear Review undertaken in 1994 by the British Government should be
made mandatory reading for it was this report that led the Government of
Great Britain to reject further nuclear industry construction. So those
who play down the potential danger are playing with the lives of our
people for apart from the costs in health, those who are exposed to
radiation will experience reproductive, psychological and social
difficulties. Recent revelations that people living in close proximity
to nuclear reactors have an increased incidence of death from breast
cancer.

With so many arguments against nuclear power a far wiser route would be
to take policy measures that stimulate energy conservation and encourage
a greater use of renewable energy technologies such as solar energy,
wind power and/or biogas.

Growth of population and industries have resulted in greater demand for
energy worldwide. Most of this energy is derived from fossil fuel (coal,
gas, oil and nuclear) will soon be depleted. In this context the need
for developing renewable sources of energy was taken on a greater sense
of urgency. Over the years significant technological advances have been
made in the area of renewable energies, especially in the field of solar
photovoltaics (PV), wind energy and bio-gas technology. In addition, for
remote rural areas where there exits no infrastructure for conventional
energy supply, these forms of decentralized alternative energy system
will be far more adaptable and well suited.

The shortage of electrical power in Bangladesh is revealed by the fact
that only 15% of the total population is served by the power generation
authorities. The chances of reaching conventional power to the remaining
85% of the people may not likely to happen in near future. In this
context, it would be of great benefit for the rural people to adopt the
renewable energy to bridge the gap of energy need of the 85% people with
clean, safe and environment friendly energy without depleting our
precious natural gas reserve resources. Renewable energy can also bring
considerable improvement in rural life through income generation and
thus alleviating poverty. In addition, it can bring multiple positive
results in terms of women's welfare, children's education, employment
and income generation, fertility reduction, and curbing the urban
migration.

______

#2.

The Asian Age
15 August 2000
Op-Ed.

THE WAY WE ARE

By Ved Mehta

'I doubt if people would voluntarily ever call a halt to technology or
invention.'
The Concorde in Paris might have been brought down by nothing more
extraordinary than pieces of its own tyre sucked into its engine.

Concorde, one of the greatest technological wonders of our age, may have
been an anachronistic, uneconomic bauble from the day it was launched -
it consumed more fuel, made more noise, carried fewer passengers than
other jets, cost ten or 20 times the ordinary fare, so that the rich
could cross the Atlantic in half the time of ordinary passengers - and
yet still could keep flying only with the subsidies of the British and
French governments.

Technology has been a great source of liberation for the human spirit.
It has liberated us from slavery, from constraints of time and space,
and made life immeasurably enjoyable for people who live in the
industrial societies. But, as far as we know, it cannot improve on human
beings whose wishes and fantasies seem to know no limits.

Indeed, the tragic conflagration of the Concorde in Paris should remind
us that the more advanced technology is, the more anachronistic it might
be, in the sense that it outstrips our current needs and means.

What with more and more people in the world wanting, as W.H. Auden put
it in 1940, "a phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire," can six,
eight, or however many billion people there may be by the middle of the
century, all have these necessities, to which we now also must add a
telephone, a television and a computer, and electricity, oil and water
to keep them, and us, running?

Since I left India, the country of my birth, some 50 years ago, the
population has more than tripled. The standard of living has soared;
there is more of everything for people who can afford it - more mobile
phones, more televisions and television channels, more cars (so many of
them in Delhi alone that it now has the distinction of being one of the
three most polluted cities in the world).

When I was growing up, there wasn't one town or village, with the
exception of Calcutta, where one couldn't turn on the tap and drink the
water. Now, I doubt if there is any part of India where one can drink
the water without filtering or boiling it. The government can't provide
safe water, but it's busy building atomic bombs.

After 50 years of Independence, at most only 15 per cent of the
population have lavatories; the rest must use streets, rivers, fields or
railway tracks, and women with modesty must wait until it gets dark to
relieve themselves. Our civilisation as a whole, in spite of all its
great technological triumphs, while providing Auden's "necessities" in
abundance, has failed to look to the most basic of amenities, like
sanitation, as if human dignity and human decency were below its
concern.

Mahatma Gandhi, the father of the nation, has all but been forgotten in
his own land in its headlong dash towards acquiring the latest symbols
of progress and modernity. Yet I wonder whether the path of progress for
a poor country will ultimately be lit more by the latest inventions like
Concorde than by what Gandhi called "the constructive programme," his
means for economic development and for a non-violent agrarian revolution
in a poor country like India.

Through it, Gandhi wanted to provide Indians - and, by extension, other
poor people in the world who were going naked and hungry - with food,
clothing and useful occupation, so that they could live modestly but
with dignity and decency.

He wanted people, instead of being a burden on society, to become
self-sufficient: spin their own cloth; raise their own cattle so that
they would have milk for nourishment, dung for fuel and bullocks for
ploughs; keep beehives for honey; make their own pottery for utensils;
make handmade paper for schoolbooks; promote universal elementary
education through local work-and-study groups; run their own affairs
through village assemblies; promote hygiene and sanitation by carrying a
spade to the field and burying their own excrement; and so on.

Gandhi has been dismissed everywhere as a Luddite and a romantic
visionary; but are we so sure that the Western way of life can be
sustained even in the West, based as it is on faster and faster
consumption of the Earth's resources, and the pollution of our
environment?

Many of my undergraduate friends and I at Oxford in the late Sixties
would have spurned the spiritual side of Gandhi's socialism, but we were
socialists of one stripe or another because we believed that governments
could follow rational policies; we even imagined that we could get along
without many worldly possessions ourselves. As we got jobs, got married,
had families and acquired houses, we inevitably accumulated possessions.

Whatever our politics, we settled into the life of privilege and raised
children as consumers with unlimited appetites. Along the way, we lost
our ideals and became good, middle class gents and ladies. Now we find
ourselves trapped, much as the world is trapped, by the accumulation of
wealth and technology.

Even Gandhi found it difficult to renounce the benefits of civilisation
- as one of his disciples, Sarojini Naidu, said, "It costs a great deal
of money to keep Gandhiji living in poverty." I doubt if people would
voluntarily ever call a halt to technology or invention. In doing so, we
might forestall the invention round the corner that might save us; but,
at the same time, we are not simply victims of blind market forces.

Surely governments can set priorities for things that are more
necessary, say Gandhi's spades, than for atomic bombs? If not, the pace
of technology will make them do it for us. Before the Paris crash,
Concordes were kept flying only to satisfy the pride of British and
French governments and the whims of a handful of the rich. Now, at
least, those governments will have to reset their priorities.

By arrangement with The Spectator

______

#3.

APDR URGENT ACTION
9 August 2000=20=20

Condemn the police brutality on anti-nuclear rally=20=20

On 9 August 2000, Nagasaki Day, an anti-nuclear rally in Calcutta was
attacked by the police. The rally was called jointly by about 100
organisations including the Association for Protection of Democratic
Rights (APDR) and People's Science Coordination Centre, West Bengal.
Rallies are held traditionally in Calcutta on the Hiroshima Day (6 August)
and the Nagasaki Day (9 August) against nuclear weapons. This year, in view
of the state government's move to set up a nuclear power plant in the
Sunderbans, the central slogan was `We don't want nuclear war, we don't
want nuclear power'. A colourful procession was taken out from Sealdah
railway station by activists of human rights, people's science, women's,
workers, agricultural labourers', students' and other mass organisations.
It also included a large number of children. Moving through main streets
of central Calcutta, it reached its scheduled destination at Esplanade
late in the afternoon, where a public meeting was to be held. Senior
scientists, economists and social workers, who walked in the procession,
were to address the meeting. As the march proceeded, police vans and trucks
began to encirle it and police officers behaved provocatively. In spite of
the police authorities and the home secretary having been informed in
writing about the programme several days in advance, the police refused to
allow the meeting. It was decided then that the procession would move on
slowly, and the the speakers address from two open trucks carrying
tableaux. In Calcutta, procession and street meetings are held regularly
by political parties. However, even the peaceful mobile campaigning by
anti-nuke activists was not tolerated. Police blocked their way near the
crossing of Lindsay Street and Jawaharlal Nehru Road (opposite YMCA) and
started abusing and beating them up. Banners and placards were torn and
the vehicles and microphones seized. Sticks, kicks and blows rained on
everybody. Sujato Bhadra, secretariat member of APDR, sustained a head
injury. Anuradha Talwar of Sramajibi Mahila Samiti was beaten up by four
policemen. The arrests were violent. Women were assaulted and arrested by
male police, violating the law. Altogether 41 persons were arrested. There
was no prohibitory order in force at the place. Even if the officer on
duty had used his powers to impose prohibition on the spot, it was not
announced on a public address system and the rallyists were not given any
time to disperse. That the arrests were grossly illegal was evident from
the subsequent action of the police. After being taken to the central
lock-up at Lalbazar, the city police headquarters, the detainees were
asked to sign a memo of arrest in which the actual time and spot of arrest
were not mentioned. The detainees refused to sign this illegal memo and
wanted to lodge a written complaint about this, which the officers present
refused to accept. The arrested persons were released on personal
recognition bonds late at night. Such uncivilised treatment of a totally
non-violent protest against the dangers of nuclear war and nuclear power
is unprecedented and unpardonable. It is a gross violation of human
rights. It is more shocking because it came from a Leftist regime. Whoever
indulges such practices paves the way for a nuclear police state. We
appeal to all those who value human rights and are opposed to nuclear war
and nuclear power to protest immediately. Please express your concern to 1.
Mr Jyoti Basu Chief Minister of West Bengal Writers' Buildings =
=20
Calcutta 700 001 India Fax: 91-33-221-5480 2. Buddhadeb
Bhattacharjee Minister of Home (Police), West Bengal Writers'
Buildings Calcutta 700 001=20=20=20=20
Fax: 91-33-221-5495

Sending a copy of your protest letter/message of solidarity to us will
strengthen our movement. In solidarity Association for Protection of
Democratic Rights 18 Madan Baral Lane Calcutta 700 012. Email:
ndutta@c...=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20