The extraordinary patience India has shown in the commissioning and working of the Kudankulam nuclear power project’s first unit in Tamil Nadu has borne fruit: it is considered to be functioning satis
The extraordinary patience India has shown in the commissioning and working of the Kudankulam nuclear power project’s first unit in Tamil Nadu has borne fruit: it is considered to be functioning satisfactorily enough to be formally commissioned by videoconference. The significance of the project, with potentially six reactors at one site generating six gigawatts of “clean” power, can be gauged from the participation of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Tamil Nadu CM J. Jayalalithaa. We must now see if the first reactor, equipped with most modern safety features to withstand even a Fukushima-type double whammy of earthquake and tsunami, will live up to its billing.
Judging by the start-stop, problem-ridden run of Unit-1 since October 2013, and Unit-2’s teething troubles, it isn’t easy to be totally sanguine about the smooth functioning of the reactors 365 days of the year. So much has already been sacrificed, including by local residents hounded with thousands of sedition cases over their sustained protests, that engineers of both nations must do everything to make it a success. So much is at stake. It may be fashionable nowadays, amid the hunt for green energy, to shun nuclear power, but the only way to go about locating nuclear plant sites as an option for generating power is to zero in on non-seismic or least-seismic zones and stack up reactors at one place. Taking the local population into confidence on all questions, including nuclear accident liability, is the best route forward, but then Kudankulam had become a byword for the opaque ways of government.
