In the Konkan, thousands of
families in the environmentally-rich and verdant Jaitapur area
are waging a non-violent battle
against the Department of Atomic
Energy’s plan to construct the
world’s biggest nuclear power
complex in the region. A report
of the struggle that has been met
with repression and a critique
of the proposed European
Pressurised Reactors which
are currently not operational
anywhere in the world and have
been criticised for their
design flaws.

The first thing that strikes the visitor
to Jaitapur-Madban in Maharashtra’s Ratnagiri district, about 400
km from Mumbai, is its sheer beauty, lush
with varying shades of green, and with a
spectacular view of mountains, valleys, plateaus, lagoons and creeks, besides orchards
and farmlands. You at once become aware
that this is a great treasure trove of nature,
exceptionally rich in plant diver sity, including cereals, grasses, roots, legumes, herbs
and flowering trees, including those bearing fruit (especially prime varieties of the
world’s best-known mango, the Alphonso).
This region receives 3,000 to 3,500 mm of
rain every year. There is hardly a square
foot of land here which is not green.

The second thing that strikes you is the
profusion of posters, banners and slogans
which say “Areva Go Back”, “No to Nuclear Power” and “Radiation Kills” in Marathi. These are the work of a grass root movement against the project of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), and
its subsidiary, Nuclear Power Corporation
of India Ltd (NPCIL), to locate six giant
(1,650 megawatts each) nuclear reactors
designed by the French-origin nuclear
company Areva.

This is planned to be the world’s largest
nuclear power station. The project will
occupy over 968 hectares in five villages
– Madban, Niveli, Karel, Mithgavane and
Varliwada. It will affect the livelihoods of
some 40,000 people, including farmers,
horticulturists, fisherfolk, agricultural
workers, loaders, transporters, traders,
street-vendors, and providers of many
other services.

NPCIL officials claim that two-thirds of
the land being acquired by the project is
“barren” and “unproductive”, and will dis-place no one. The Environmental Impact
Assessment (EIA) report prepared by
the National Environmental Engineering
Research Institute attests this claim. Nothing
could be farther from the truth observed
by one’s naked eyes.

No wonder people are angry at the
project, against which they have fought
for four years. They treat the state government’s offer of compensation for lands
with contempt. The original offer was
Rs 2.86 per square foot for barren land
and Rs 3.70 for cultivable land – equiva-lent to Rs 1.25 lakh to Rs 1.6 lakh an acre.
It was raised to Rs 4 lakh an acre. The latest offer, of January 2011, is a “package” of
Rs 10 lakh an acre plus one guaranteed job
per affected family. More than 95% of the
2,375 families in the area whose land has
been acquired, we were told, have refused
to accept the compensation offered; those
who did are absentee landowners living
in Mumbai.

 Livelihood Destruction

Scores of people we spoke to in Mith-
gavane, Madban, Nate and Niveli were
e mphatic that compensation is an irrele-
vant matter. The central issue is about livelihoods, which are deeply integrated into
the ecosystem and natural resources,
i ncluding fertile land, which produces an
abundance of paddy, millets, vegetables,
and, not least, fruit. The only assurance of
people’s s ur vival is that they do not lose
land and access to natural resources. The
project is incompatible with this.

The Maharashtra government declared
Ratnagiri a “horticulture district” in 2003.
Farmers have invested large amounts of
money in mango, cashew nut, coconut, kokum and betel nut cultivation. Ratnagiri
has 15,233 hectares under mango cultivation, with an estimated annual turnover of
Rs 2,200 crore. The mango crop is extremely sensitive to the minutest changes
in temperature and soil chemistry. People
apprehend that a good deal of mango
would be lost if the project comes up.

Besides farming and horticulture, the
Jaitapur-Madban area has a sizeable fishing
economy. Fisheries will be affected since
the plant will release 52,000 million litres
of hot water into the sea every day. Tight
security in the coastal r egion would also
severely restrict fishermen’s use of the
Jaitapur and Vijaydurg creeks, where they
get a draft of 20 fathoms, usually only
found at a distance of two to three nautical
miles. At least 15,000 people depend on
fishing in the area.

According to the Maharashtra Macchhimar Kruti Samiti, seven fishing villages –
Sakhari Nate, Tulsunde, Ambolgad, Sagwa,
Kathadi, Jambhali and Nana I ngalwadi –
will be threatened by the project. The
a nnual fish catch in Ratnagiri district is
1,25,000 tonnes. About 40,000 tonnes of
this comes from Sakhari Nate.

A sizeable amount of the catch is ex-
ported to Europe, Japan and other coun-
tries. Fish exports are likely to be affected
because they might fail the stringent
r equirements of European “catch certificates” which demand a declaration of the
location, depth, temperature, and time of
fishing. Consumers in the developed countries would resist eating produce grown in
the neighbourhood of nuclear reactors.
Mango consignments from Ratnagiri have
been rejected in Japan because traces of
pesticides were found in the packaging.
NPCIL and Maharashtra government
o fficials recently tried to tempt fisherfolk in
Nate, a prosperous, largely Muslim, fishing
village with 500 boats, with offers of alternative jobs. They retorted, “Will you give us
another Arabian Sea?” The fishe ries economy generates enough i ncome to pay unskilled workers a daily wage of Rs 300 to
Rs 400, a rarity in India and Maharashtra.

The area’s fisherfolk know through
people-to-people exchanges of the plight
of the original inhabitants of the villages
around Tarapur, the site of India’s first
two nuclear reactors, which is not far
away. Three fishing harbours there have
vani shed, the once-prosperous farmers
have b ecome paupers, and there has been
no rehabilitation worth the name.

A major complaint of Jaitapur’s people
is that state and NPCIL officials treat
them as ignoramuses and fools who can
be t aken for granted, misled or lied to.
Milind Desai of Mithgavane, a medical
doctor, said:

"They first refused to disclose why they conducted a feasibility study in 2003 and why
the state government signed a Memorandum of Understanding with NPCIL in 2006.
Then they said there would only be two
1,000 MW reactors. Now there are to be six,
bigger, reactors. They also told us that radiation is harmless. After all, it exists in nature.
But as a doctor, I know better."

Added Desai:

"Our people have seen films about the Jaduguda uranium mines and slide-shows on the
terrible health disorders that exist around
the Rajasthan Atomic Power Station. We
know what happened at Chernobyl. And
we know that Areva’s (nuclear power plant)
has not been approved for safety anywhere
in the world, including France where it
was designed."

The people of the Jaitapur region have
stoutly opposed the nuclear project right
since 2006. Initially, the opposition came
mainly from Madban (literally, a forest of
palm) and other directly affected villages.
But soon, fishing communities, mango
traders, transporters and civil society activists from the Ratnagiri district headquar-
ters, and activists and environmentalists
from Mumbai and other parts of India
joined in. The state government and NPCIL
have maligned the protests by attri buting
them to “outside elements”.

However, all the five gram panchayats
(democratically elected local governing
bodies) in the affected area have unanimously passed resolutions opposing the
project. During our visit, we could see
great indignation over the government’s
imposition of the project on the villagers.
The Maharashtra government is zealous
about implementing the project in blatant
disregard of its ecological, livelihood and
economic consequences. Chief Minister,
Prithviraj Chavan, was the u nion minister
of state for atomic energy until November
and is a dogmatic proponent of nuclear
power. He regards its critics as unin formed,
destructive, anti-development Luddites.

The government has repeatedly stooped
low in maligning the project’s critics.
The state government has unleashed
savage repression on the local people for
opposing the project. It routinely arrests
and serves externment notices upon peaceful protesters, and promulgates p rohibitory
orders under Section 144 of the Criminal
Procedure Code and the tough Section 37
of the colonial Bombay Police Act.
Activists have had false charges framed
against them, including attempt to murder.
The higher judiciary, apparently afraid to
question the Holy Cow of nuclear technology, tends to refuse anticipatory bail to
them. An instance of such repression is a
frail 70-year-old diabetic, Shriram Dhondo
Paranjape, who was falsely charged with
pelting stones at the police – when he could
not have lifted a pebble. He was detained
for 15 days.

Eminent citizens who wanted to visit Jaitapur to demonstrate their solidarity with
the protesters were banned. They include
Communist Party of India general secretary
A B Bardhan, former chief of the Naval Staff
Admiral L Ramdas, former Supreme Court
judge and Press Council of India chairman
P B Sawant, Pune-based social scientist Sulabha Brahme, and eco logist Madhav
Gadgil, chairman of the Western Ghats Ecology Experts’ Panel e stablished by the ministry of environment and forests (MoEF).
In December, former Bombay High
Court judge B G Kolse Patil was detained
for five days and not even produced before
a magistrate within 24 hours, as mandated by law. Since then, Praveen Gavankar,
a key activist of the Janahit Seva Samiti
from Madban, has been detained under
trumped-up charges.

Maharashtra’s industries minister (and
former chief minister) Narayan Rane,
himself from Konkan, has repeatedly threatened protesting activists and warned
that “outsiders” who visit the area to help
them “will not come out (alive)”. The
repression is unprecedented in the Konkan
belt and resembles the police raj in Maharashtra’s Naxalite-affected areas.

 Threat to a Unique Ecosystem

The Konkan has been called the “Kashmir
of Maharashtra” because of its stunning
beauty. The Konkan ecology contains virgin
rainforests and an immense diversity of
plant, animal and marine life. Botanists
say it is India’s richest area for endemic
plant species. It is one of the world’s 10
“Hottest Biodiversity Hotspots”.

The Sahyadri mountains in the western
ghats are home to over 5,000 species of
flowering plants, 139 mammal species and
508 bird and 179 amphibian species,
i ncluding 325 globally threatened ones.
Two great peninsular rivers (the Krishna
and the Godavari) originate there. The region’s ecology is so unique that one would
need a diabolically destructive mind to
want to wreck it by building a nuclear
power plant in it.

Jaitapur is located in a seismically sensitive region. It comes under Zone IV in the
earthquake hazard zoning map of India,
ranging from I to V in growing seismic
intensity. This zone is called the High Damage Risk Zone. It is far from clear if
the project authorities have evolved the necessary construction parameters such as special reinforcements needed for “earth-
quake-proofing” the stru cture to a reasonable degree.

The Konkan region’s rich natural resources are already under severe threat on
account of several “development” projects
along the western ghats – from Panvel in
Raigad district, across Madban in Ratnagiri, to Sawantwadi in Sindhudurg.
These include 15 coal-based power projects totalling nearly 25,000 MW, 40 medium and small ports, nearly 40 medium
and mega special economic zones, major
mining projects, and “chemical hubs”. The
environment minister himself has admitted that the total power generating capa-
city proposed on a narrow strip of coastal
land 50 to 90 km wide and 200 km long is
around 33,000 MW.

The gigantic Jaitapur nuclear project
will damage this ecosystem irreparably.
As the Bombay Natural History Society
(BNHS) notes, “the true impact of a project
of this scale will never be known” without
a comprehensive biodiversity assessment.
This has not been done.

The Jaitapur nuclear project presents
other problems too. Water discharged from
the plant into the sea will be 5°C hotter than
the ambient sea temperature. But “even a
0.5°C of continual thermal stress will lead
to mortality of marine species”, says a BNHS
report. The society has mapped 407 hectares of mangrove v ege tation in a 10 km radius around the n uclear plant.

A recent environmental study of Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg districts by the chair
of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel, the renowned environmentalist Mad-
hav Gadgil, sharply criticises the government for violations of environmental laws
and norms in the Konkan. Gadgil’s interim
report questions the very logic of setting
up a number of power projects in an
ecologically invaluable yet fragile region.
Instead, the report argues for m icro- and
mini-hydel projects.

The current energy requirement of these
districts is 180 MW, while their current production is 4,543 MW, so the area is pro-
ducing vastly more than its own needs. The
report holds that the EIAs conducted in the
region by the government are flawed “almost without exception”.
The report says it is important “not to
rush into environmentally damaging options if there is evidence that much less
damaging options are likely to become
available in the near future”. One of these
is tapping the area’s mini- and microhydroelectricity potential, estimated by
former Maharashtra irrigation secretary
D R Pendse to be as high as 2,000 MW
using only 30% of the total water available
in Konkan for hydel development.
Gadgil also laments the disrespect
shown by the state agencies for civil rights
in pushing these “development” projects.

In fact, his own field trip and consultations with the people in the area had to be
cut short because the district collector had
imposed Section 37(1)(3) of the Bombay
P olice Act, 1951 prohibiting gatherings of
more than five people. Such prohibitions
were in effect for 191 days between August
2007 and October 2009. None of these environmental concerns
highlighted by Gadgil figures in the 1,600
page EIA report prepared by the National Environmental Engineering I nsti tute (NEERI).

The EIA report wholly ignores the serious
safety problems posed by nuclear power,
including potentially catastrophic accidents
and radioactivity exposure through routine
effluents and emissions. Nor does it take
into account the cumulative environmental
impact of n ume rous projects under way, or
the local ecosystem’s carrying capacity.

By its own admission, NEERI lacks the
technical competence to assess the specific
radiation-related hazards of nuclear reactors. Its EIA report does not even mention
the issue of radioactive waste and ways of
storing it for long periods of time. The EIA
was conducted for two reactors; the NPCIL
wants to build six European Pressurised
Reactors (EPRs) in Jaitapur.

Yet, Union Minister of State for Envi-
ronment and Forests Jairam Ramesh ac-
cepted the EIA report and granted environmental clearance to the Jaitapur project with 35 conditions and safeguards on
28 November 2010 – just six days before
French President Nicolas Sarkozy began
his r ecent India visit on 4 December last,
of which the EPR sale agreement was the
main highlight.

Some of these conditions pertain to
studies that should have been conducted
much earlier, and to safeguards that
should have been designed well in
a dvance. Many conditions are vague. Together, they fail to address the real
flaws and deficiencies of the project. Some
of them convert valid objections to the
project – which constitute strong grounds
for r ejecting it – into “conditions”. In any
case, given the MoEF’s past record, it is
extre mely unlikely that compliance with
the conditions will be monitored.

The environmental clearance was granted to NPCIL just 80 days after it submitted
its EIA report, a process that normally
takes six months or longer. The mandatory
public hearing on the EIA, held in May
2010 under police intimidation was a
farce: three of the four notified villages
did not receive a copy on the report in
Marathi a month in advance, as required;
the fourth got it four days earlier.

Ramesh has said he is not competent to
pass a judgment on matters related to the
need for, and the economics or safety of,
nuclear power plants. He reportedly told
activists: “I can’t stop the project. It is
g oing to come up because it is not just
about energy but also about strategic and
foreign policy.”

 Untested Reactor Design

There are serious and genuine concerns
about the safety and viability of Areva’s
EPRs which are to be imported for the
Jaitapur nuclear power “park”. Nowhere
in the world has an EPR been fully built or
commissioned so far. Two EPRs are al-
ready beset by s erious safety and financial
p roblems and delays.

Areva itself has been going through a
devastating financial crisis. In 2009, it
sought $4 billion in a short-term bailout
from French taxpayers. Its shares plunged
by over 60%.

Areva sold its first EPR to Finland. This
is western Europe’s first nuclear reactor
contract since Chernobyl (1986). The reac-
tor has been under construction in Olkiluoto (OL-3) since 2005 and was to be completed by 2009. Several safety, design and
construction problems have pushed its
start-up to the second half of 2013 – a
d elay of 42 months, with a cost escalation
of 90%. The OL-3 fiasco has led to the
walkout of the German engineering com-
pany Siemens from the project and entan-
gled Areva and the Finnish operator in
b itter litigation.

France decided to set up the second EPR
at home, in Flamanville. Issues similar to
those at OL-3 have led to a 50% cost increase and a delay in commissioning to
2014. Several problems in the EPR design
were noted by the French nuclear safety
agency. France has also witnessed fierce
protests against the EPR in the cities of
Rennes, Lyon, Toulouse, Lille and Stras-
bourg, as well as in Flamanville.

Over 3,000 safety and quality problems
were recorded with the construction of
Olkiluoto-3 by the Finnish safety agency
STUK, the French nuclear safety agency
Autorité de Sûreté Nucléaire, and the UK’s
Nuclear Installations I nspectorate. In
2009, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) de-
clined Franco-American bids for EPRs
which were in an advanced stage of negotiation and awarded the r eactor contract
to a South Korean group.

Citing deficiencies in EPR’s sump design, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commis-
sion (NRC) has delayed its design certifica-
tion to the EPR from June 2012 to February
2013. The sump is part of the reactor’s
vital emergency core-cooling system. The
NRC has also pointed to problems with the
EPR’s digital instrumentation and control
design, as well as with Areva’s seismic and
structural modelling analysis.

If the issue of assigning responsibility
for the loss caused by the 90% cost
e scalation at Olkiluoto in Finland is not
resolved soon, the project could well be
abandoned, probably sounding the deathknell for nuclear power in the west.
The EPR is the largest-ever nuclear reactor designed in the world and has a much
higher density of fission-causing neutrons
and fuel burn-up than do normal reactors
(of 500-1,000 MW capacity). The EPR’s
high fuel-combustion rate will lead to
greater production of harmful radionuclides, including seven times higher production than normal of iodine-129, with
dangerous implications for radioactivity
releases, damage to the fuel cladding, and
waste generation.

India’s DAE has a long history of poor or
non-existent regulation, persistent below-par performance, and accidents. Moreover,
it has no experience of running huge reac-
tors like EPRs. Most existing Indian reactors
are up to eight times smaller (220 MW), the
biggest ones being one-third (540 MW) the
size of an EPR (1,650 MW).

 EPR’s Gold-Plated Power

Serious questions have been raised about
the economic costs of the Jaitapur project
based on the extremely expensive EPRs.
Each of the six 1,650 MW reactors would
cost around $7 billion assuming the c apital
cost of the EPR being built at Olkiluoto
does not escalate beyond the latest
estimate of 5.7 billion euros. This works
out to Rs 21 crore per MW of capacity.
This cost estimate, however, does not
include other cost components – storage
of nuclear waste; the cost of reactor decommissioning which could amount to
one-third to one-half of the total construction cost; the extensive additional physi-
cal security costs, including anti-aircraft
batteries and the extra coast guard deployment. Of course, environmental costs,
and health costs imposed on miners, plant
workers, and the public living close to
nuclear installations, and the associated
medical expenses, are ignored altogether.

Comparing the likely cost of electricity
generation in Jaitapur, based only on the
capital cost, with other available options
leads to alarming conclusions. According
to the current Finnish estimate, itself conservative, the EPR’s capital costs (Rs 21
crore per MW) are far more expensive
than those of the indigenous CANDU reactors installed at the Rajasthan, Madras,
Narora and Kaiga power stations, which
are about Rs 8-9 crore per MW. They are
even higher than the capital costs of su-
percritical coal-fired thermal power stations (Rs 5 crore per MW).

Put another way, the six EPRs at Jaitapur
will together cost the Indian public about
Rs 2,00,000 crore, even more than the upper limit of the loss caused to the exche-
quer by the 2G telecom scam, estimated by
the Comptroller and Auditor General of
India at Rs 1,76,000 crore.

The latest EPR cost estimate based on
the Olkiluoto reactor may not be the last
word on the issue. Several figures have
been quoted in different countries for the
EPR’s capital costs per MW, ranging from
Rs 21 crore in Finland and the UAE, to
Rs 27 crore in the US and South Africa, to
an astronomical Rs 59 crore in Canada.

 No Nuclear Renaissance

India’s super-ambitious nuclear expansion
plans are based on the rosy assumption
that a global “nuclear renaissance” is under way and that nuclear power is the best
solution both to the climate change crisis
and to the national energy security
question. But there is no nuclear renais-
sance. Nuclear power is in decline world-wide. Nuclear power generation peaked
in 2006 and is now annually falling by
2%. The number of operating reactors has
d eclined from 444 in 2002 to 438 in 2009.
A major reason for this is that nuclear
power is u npopular and reactors are seen
as bad neighbours.

Nuclear power generation is ineluctably
fraught with ionising radiation, an invisible,
intangible and insidious poison, which is unsafe in all doses, however small. R adiation
causes cancers and genetic damage, for
which there is no cure, antidote or remedy.

Nuclear plants expose not just occupational
workers, but also the general public, to radioactive hazards in numerous ways.
Radioactive wastes of different intensity or level are produced in all stages of the
so-called nuclear fuel cycle. An average
reactor generates 20 to 30 tonnes of high-level nuclear waste every year. Human-
kind has found no way of safely storing or
disposing of nuclear waste. It remains
dangerously radioactive and hazardous
literally for thousands of years. For instance, the half-life of plutonium-239, a
particularly lethal component of nuclear
reactor waste, is 24,000 years. The half-life of uranium 235, the fissile isotope of
uranium, is 710 million years!

Nuclear power generation is the only
form of energy production which can produce a catastrophic accident like
Chernobyl, where an estimated 65,000 to
1,05,000 people were killed. All existing
reactor types in the world are vulnerable
to a core meltdown like Chernobyl, leading to the release of large quantities
of r adioactivity into the environment.
There have been at least 22 major and
thousands of minor a ccidents before and
after Chernobyl.
Even during the normal operation of nuclear plants, large quantities of radio active
tions (Rs 5 crore per MW).

Put another way, the six EPRs at Jaitapur
will together cost the Indian public about
Rs 2,00,000 crore, even more than the up-
per limit of the loss caused to the exchequer by the 2G telecom scam, estimated by
the Comptroller and Auditor General of
India at Rs 1,76,000 crore.

The latest EPR cost estimate based on
the Olkiluoto reactor may not be the last
word on the issue. Several figures have
been quoted in different countries for the
EPR’s capital costs per MW, ranging from
Rs 21 crore in Finland and the UAE, to
materials are routinely discharged into
water and air. Transportation of n uclear
material and wastes is also vulnerable to
accidents or sabotage.

Because nuclear technology is strategically “sensitive” in nature, large-scale and
centralised energy generation through
nuclear power demands and encourages
secrecy, and generates vested interests in
the form of an unaccountable, undemo-
cratic technocratic elite.

The mystique that surrounds nuclear
technology, and arguments about nationalism and developmental urgency atta-
ched to it, are used to silence, discredit
and sideline any opposition. This is evident in India in the undermining of demo-
cratic institutions – from panchayats in
the case of Jaitapur, to Parliament itself in
the case of the Indo-US nuclear deal and
the Nuclear Liability Bill.

The Jaitapur project can only be implemented if all rational judgment is sus-
pended, environmental considerations
are trampled upon, local democracy is vetoed, and the people’s resistance is
crushed by brutal means.

Praful Bidwai

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