Our Announcements
Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn't here.
Posted by Dr. Manzer Durrani in Defense on March 6th, 2012
In South Asia, an unprecedented nuclear build-up is underway and gaining momentum spurred by Pakistan’s break-neck effort to double its already sizable arsenal over the next decade (rising from 125 weapons today to 250-350 over the next 5-10 years). India is playing serious catch-up with new land-based rockets and a new strategic submarine in its mix of delivery systems after a decade of sluggish growth (its current small arsenal of 25 weapons will increase to 100 over the next 5-10 years).
Pakistan has the fastest growing nuclear weapons program in the world, according to U.S. officials cited by a leading American nuclear expert, David Albright. With 120-130 thousand people directly involved in its nuclear weapons production and nuclear-armed missile program, Pakistan is completing construction on two new plutonium reactors (less than 100 miles from the scene of fighting between the Army and the Taliban) and building other infrastructure.
Pakistan does not officially reveal the cost of its secret nuclear program. In 2009, a credible assessment by a investigative journalist with expertise in the subject provided information on which we can calculate the overall nuclear program budget (weapons and missile delivery systems) to be approximately $781 million — $300 million for the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission and $481 million for the strategic missile delivery system. This sum represents 10 percent of Pakistan’s annual defense budget ($7.9 billion). Independently, an American expert on the Pakistani nuclear program suggested that Pakistan spends up to 10 percent of its defense budget on nuclear forces. This report assumes that the current budget pressure on the Pakistani program is containing cost growth in 2011; core and full costs are estimated at $800 million and $2 billion, respectively. The health and environmental consequences of Pakistan’s recent expansion of its infrastructure constitute a significant cost which can be expected to grow rapidly as new plutonium factories come on line. Furthermore, core spending on the nuclear program is likely to grow significantly for the rest of the decade as Pakistan undertakes a rapid build-up, perhaps by two- or three-fold, of its arsenal.
India’s nuclear program is largely keyed to China’s and to a lesser extent to Pakistan’s, and both of India’s nuclear rivals are expanding their arsenals sufficiently to stimulate India’s program. India has always minimized the role of nuclear weapons in its national security strategy, and consequently was slow to acquire an arsenal and restrained in the size of the arsenal it built. The impetus to expand the arsenal is stronger today, however. India’s modernization program already has considerable momentum yielding as much as a four-fold increase in the Indian arsenal over the next decade.
India, like Pakistan, keeps its nuclear budget under wraps. Very few details are publicly known about the program, and its cost is rarely discussed in public. One published estimate contends that the Indian program, very conservatively estimated, costs 0.5 percent of annual GDP. Using $1.538 trillion dollars as the GDP of India, this would mean that India spends about $7.7 billion on nuclear weapons at purchasing power parity exchange rates. This would represent 22 percent of India’s overall defense budget, a proportion that exceeds Pakistan’s ratio of nuclear to overall spending by a factor of two, and China’s ratio by a factor of four.
This report assumes that India’s nuclear spending does not exceed 10 percent of its overall military spending, a fraction in line with current Pakistani allocations. India’s nuclear budget would thus be about $3.8 for core costs, which is about 60 percent of China’s nuclear budget. We estimate the full cost to be $4.9 billion.
Posted by Dr. Manzer Durrani in Education on March 5th, 2012
Commentary:
Literacy rate of Pakistan is very low. Government of Pakistan is responsible for this, as it allocates only 3% of budget for education.
How a feudal based political machine called PPP, killed Pakistan’s Education Systems through ghost schools, nepotism, educational scams. and sending children of party waderas abroad on international scholarships, with blatant disregard to merit or competitive ability. But, that is to be expected from a matriculate “Civilian Mediocre Dictator Zardari,” and his half-wit, and inarticulate dimwit side-kick or Chela “PM” Sancho Panza a.k.a Gilani.
Before, the advent of the Pakistan Peoples Party and the hydra headed PMLs, Pakistan’s education system was better than other semi-developed nations. During PPP’s chaotic rule, Pakistan’s education system has been decimated, if not completely destroyed.
Zardari, who is a matriculate from Cadet College Petaro, most likely in third division, cannot be expected to pay any attention to the education system. But, this set-back is also an opportunity in disguise, that is, after this ‘ government of the inepts leaves,’ the next government can overhaul the whole education system from its foundation. Finland has the best education system in the globe. Pakistan seek Finland’s, educationists for help. Pakistani teachers should be sent to train in Finland and teachers exchange program can be set-up between the two countries. Finns are generous people, they will most likely be generous in their advice, even, if it requires tele and/or video conferencing, if they are too afraid to come to Pakistan. But, if they read,’Three Cups of Tea‘ by author Greg Mortenson, it would be apparent, how much of an “education famine,” Pakistan’s children and parents are suffering from and even small gestures in improving the literacy rate and primary education, would make a great dent in fighting the forces of darkness, choking Pakistan.
Rabbi Zidni Ilma – “and say: `My Lord! Increase me in knowledge” [Quran, 20:114]
Education in Finland starts with preschool at age 6. The preschool emphasis is on fun and THE IMPORTANCE OF LEARNING. Preschool is followed by nine years of compulsory basic education. From 9th or 10th grade one can go to the Upper Secondary school (like senior high school) or a 3 -year vocational school, but the curriculum is so heavy in either of these that one can cross from one to the other, or finish one and then go to the other for emphasis on trade skills. Either branch can lead to a university for a masters or PhD degree or to a Polytechnic College that focuses on trade skills with the possibility of a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree.
Although the great majority of Finns finish their education by age 25, later than most other nations, education is looked upon as a life-long process in any job. People are generally much more educated in any trade or professional jobs than they are in other countries. They do an excellent job in having the highest work force readiness of any nation.
Please review at least the top URL I am presenting from Finland in English. For more details, go to:
National testing, school ranking lists and inspection systems do not exist in Finland.
http://finland.fi/netcomm/news/showarticle.asp?intNWSAID=41557
http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB120425355065601997.html
Being a teacher in Finland, as in most industrialized countries, is the most highly respected position. Medical doctors come second. I do not think that this is a cultural difference. The education system is set up such that they earn people’s respect every day by the way they are centrally managed in the country to the highest standard in the world and by the level of authority that is given to the teachers. Teachers are also very well trained. Keeping both teacher competence and school quality the best is a national mandate in Finland.
The Finnish education system has the top university graduate students with a master’s degree volunteering for becoming a teacher, and to teach in the field in which they earned their degree. There are assistant teachers of course with lesser qualification under lower grades and in pre-school.
Could we get there? Absolutely, if there was a large enough incentive plan for teachers to get a masters degree and beyond.
All parents understand that education is very important for their children and would never second-guess a teacher’s decision in Finland. If the child did something bad in school, you can bet that both the teacher and the parent would be in total agreement for the punishment. Therefore it rarely happens, because parents and teachers are always in agreement, and the teachers have a very good relationship with the students.
Could we get there? Absolutely, if the kids came home with better math results, and if all of us parents realized how vital it is to back the teachers in front of our kids. Like it or not, their future depends on the teachers. We parents cannot teach our children all the courses they need.
In Finland, the children have enormous respect for teachers, but call them by their first names. Teachers and the children eat lunch together, which is free to all children. How about that? I think that this is also the result of parents and teachers working totally in harmony to educate the child.
In Finland the children are not graded before the fifth grade. The teachers decide how they are progressing. They are later tested, but their grades are not told the parents or the child during the following few years of education. This method appears to build high confidence and self esteem. The kids have a high graduation rate, scholastically achieving more than we do. So parents have no worries about how well the children will be taken care of by the teachers. There is no reason for it. Remember again that the teacher is a university graduate with a master’s degree. Only the teachers know how the child is doing. The teachers meet weekly to discuss what problems any of the children have and make decisions on the spot about what type of class and teacher could be the best for their advancement toward a high school diploma. This could be a specific special education class. This is a very interesting approach that obviously works very well. We could try it. Charter schools, here we go if public schools cannot do it.
Finland has a national education policy and national testing. Morals and ethics are in the curriculum. This is a big difference between their system and ours. The teachers make all decisions about how their class will be run, how the education material will be presented and what books are to be used. They keep up with the best worldwide. There are two official languages in Finland: Finnish and Swedish. People typically speak four languages in Finland. One is Finnish, then English, Swedish, and one of German, French or Russian at minimum. They have some ethnic problems with immigrants, gypsies and some northern Lapp tribes; but they keep those cultures and languages alive as well.
Could we delegate more authority to teachers? Absolutely, depending how their continuing education is progressing.
All areas in the school are decorated. There may be a fireplace where they eat or wait for classes to start. The focus is on what the students would like, to make the school a very pleasant place to be, for students as well as for teachers. Disrespectful or property damaging behavior is unimaginable in this environment. If it happens, I imagine it is dealt with lightning fast with repercussions at home as well, but I heard that teachers do not tell on the students to parents.
Children are actually given very little homework to do. Teachers work about 40% less class hours than US teachers do. Both of these surprised me, but it stands to reason that a happier, friendlier and more effective school environment that does the job well, with less teaching hours and less homework, makes for happier teachers and children. It is the principal that makes this happen.
The principal is more like a general manager although he/she comes from an educational background. He/she makes sure that his/her school is operating at its optimum, including all teachers and supporting services including medical, dental and special ed-related functions. It is noteworthy that special ed kids are diagnosed by any teacher, the case is discussed immediately in their weekly meeting, diagnosis is confirmed and the child is placed into the right classroom possibly not in the same school, with the most qualified teacher for his/her problem. The communication environment is completely open among students, teachers and principals. This area is very different from the US model, and more than 50 countries are studying how they accomplish the results they accomplish.
Could studying them help us? Absolutely. It would do us a lot of good I believe.
Very important: The Finns realize that when their teachers excel and are satisfied, and so are their students. Teachers in Finland are well paid. An elementary school teacher makes $45-50/hour. A high school teacher makes $75-80/hour. The typical per class load is 18-20 students.
The biggest difference I found between the USA and Finland is the average teaching hours spent per year per teacher. This figure is a little more than 1,100 hours for US teachers, and it is 570 hours for teachers in Finland, and just as a second example it is about the same for Japanese teachers as it is for Finnish teachers.
Posted by Dr. Manzer Durrani in India on March 3rd, 2012
The presence of US troops in India, is a clear and present danger to China. India is also cooperating with US and Israel in preparation for a possible attack on Iran.
US Pacific Command head Admiral Robert Willard announced today that US special forces have been deployed to India, along with Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Maldives, as an effort to fight the Lashkar-e Taiba (LeT), a militant faction mostly active in Kashmir.
Though Willard was very clear about there being teams deployed to India, the US Embassy and the Indian Defense Ministry later denied the claims, saying that there are no US troops of any type inside India.
The revelation is already causing political waves in India, with the opposition Communist Party demanding to know why parliament wasn’t consulted. The External Affairs Ministry’s statement that the US never sought nor had India approved any deployment seems difficult to believe.
Admiral Willard’s admission is particularly interesting because none of the five nations he mentioned was known to have ground troops in it. With the Yemen deployment coming out today, and that only because there happened to be an attack, it seems increasingly the US is making deployments which, if not actually a “secret” they are likewise not being made public in a timely fashion.
Posted by Dr. Manzer Durrani in India on March 3rd, 2012
What goes around, comes around. The Indian Army is using widespread torture on Kashmiris in Indian Occupied Kashmir. They have taken the act of torture to an art. In doing so they have ended up using these “creative torture,”techniques on their own officers and men. Here is a story, which appeared in the Indian Rediff on the Net. Read and weep at the acts of these Indian Army beastly brutes.
“They boasted of 36 methods of torture. My body was lacerated all over. My ears were disfigured. My left hand was paralysed following the insertion of needles under my fingernails; they tore my whiskers, hair by hair, and drove an iron rod up my arse. They would tie weights to my testicles and drag me on the floor by one leg, with one man sitting astride my back.”
— Captain R S Rathaur one of the prime accused in the Samba spy case about his interrogation by the Indian army.
“He (Havaldar Ram Swarup) was brought to the interrogation centre on September 24, 1978. The usual third degree methods were allegedly applied and he succumbed to his injuries on October 1. His body was thrown on a road in New Delhi cantonment. The postmortem revealed 44 injury marks including electric burns on the body.”
— Ved Prakash, a member of the army general court martial that tried the Samba accused, in his book The Samba Spying Scandal.
They all remember exactly what they were doing when the telephone rang on the night of January 22, 1979. The signals officer had just finished celebrating his daughter’s birthday. The G-3 officer had just met his wife and son after a year-and-a-half and was making up for lost time. The commanding officer was just getting into bed after his usual nightcap.
And then the telephone interrupted them and they were asked to report to office immediately.
Surprised, but not unduly so, they put on their uniforms and left.
Next morning, wives of scores of officers were handed over their husbands’ caps and belts. And by way of information, a series of lies: “No ma’am, we don’t know why your husband has been arrested… we don’t know when he will be back, ma’am.”
For weeks no one knew what had happened. But when the news did break, finally, it took the whole country by storm. On the night intervening 22-23 January, 1979, the army had arrested at least 62 — some say close to a 100 — of its own men on charges of spying.
The scale was unprecedented and unimaginable. That the army had found so many spies in its own ranks shook the country. And in the furore that followed, the episode came to be called the Samba spy scandal — taking its name from the small town, 40 kilometres from Jammu, from where most of the men were arrested.
Many believed it was a wound that the Indian army would take a long time to heal.
Eighteen years later, that wound has been reopened.
After the initial plaudits for the army for breaking such a huge spy ring, doubts began to creep in.
Could so many men really have been working as spies? Most of them were posted at the 168 infantry brigade at Samba. If the charges were true, almost an entire brigade of the army had been working for Pakistan for five years. Was that plausible? Could an entire brigade have been corrupted?
Wives of arrested officers had held a dharna before the then defence minister Chaudhary Charan Singh’s house in Delhi, complaining their husbands had been victimised and were being tortured. But the army remained tight-lipped on grounds of national security, and more and more people began to find disturbing discrepancies in its actions.
Havaldar Ram Swarup’s tortured body, thrown on the Delhi streets, suddenly held new meaning. Was the army telling the truth?
This question may have never been answered. The army wasn’t saying anything, and for a long time, the judiciary had refused to intervene. Though several officers and their wives had appealed to the Delhi high court for a review, it had held such actions of the army lay outside its purview.
Some men were sentenced to long years in prison — seven to 14 — after an army general court martial found them guilty of spying. Others were dismissed from service under Section 18 of the Army Act which allows for dismissal “at the pleasure of the sovereign.”
Thus, despite numerous indicators that there had been a miscarriage of justice, the army would have got away without having to ever give an explanation. Had not Supreme Court Justice Sunanda Bhandare held in 1994 that Section 18 of the Act could be challenged if prime facie mala fide was established.
Here, fate intervened. According to one retired officer, in the Indian army’s reply to the plaint, an internal note had inadvertently slipped in. The note, from one officer to another, apparently said all attempts should be made to stop the trial because if the case did go to court, the army had no real defence to offer.
Though the note was later withdrawn, the damage had been done.
And so, on the 19th of this month, a series of hearings has begun to review the Indian army’s charges of spying against many of its men and officers.
Kind courtesy: Sunday magazine Ref:http://www.rediff.com/news/may/29samba.htm
Posted by Dr. Manzer Durrani in Environment on March 2nd, 2012
Jaitapur nuclear project in India:
The next Fukushima?
The French nuclear industry, supported by a group of European commercial banks1, is lining up to build two European Pressurised Reactors (EPRs) in India. Jaitapur in Maharastra state, the only part of the whole Indian coast officially classed as a ‘high risk’ earthquake zone2, has been chosen as the site.
The project has a planned second phase that would add four more reactors, becoming the largest nuclear power plant in the world.
Despite the EPR being celebrated by the nuclear industry as the safest reactor in the world, the only EPRs under construction reveal serious problems. The reactor design itself also has several alarming parallels to Fukushima nuclear power plant that continues to be a major disaster following the earthquake and subsequent tsunami of 11 March, 2011.
Not only is Jaitapur to be built on the coastline, in a high-risk earthquake area, but it is using the similar light water reactor technology that vitally depends on active cooling for weeks even after the reactor is stopped. Its design has apparent weaknesses that make it vulnerable to the same problems that caused the Fukushima accident. And, as proposed, the project would be a whole fleet of very large reactors that could lead to multiple failures and radiation releases.
Nuclear energy is not only the most controversial and hazardous form of energy generation, it is also one of the most expensive. To raise the many billions of euros needed to build even a single nuclear reactor, utility companies rely heavily on banks and other financial market players.
If the deal goes ahead, India will be left with spiralling costs and an energy option that won’t meet its energy needs. It will seriously increase nuclear hazards, including contaminating the environment and the danger of deadly nuclear waste that has no safe solution.
The nuclear industry has spent the past decade trying to convince the public and decision makers that, despite its downsides, it will help tackle the climate crisis. But what it offers in reality is an industry that delivers too little, too late, is too expensive and – as we see in Japan these days – is too vulnerable and too dangerous.
1
2
In October 2009 NPCIL announced it was in talks with a group of French banks on a loan of $3.2 bn US dollars. The group consists of: BNP Paribas France; Calyon, part of Crédit Agricole France; HSBC Bank United Kingdom; Natixis France; and Société Générale France. Hindu Business Line, “Jaitapur nuclear plant will cost Rs 1-lakh cr”, Hindu Business Line, 15 October 2009. Geologic Survey of India, letter, 5 January, 2009, http://rahat.up.nic.in/images/seismic.jpg
The Jaitapur project comprises two 1,650 MW nuclear reactors (with the possibility of increasing it with an additional four reactors, which would make it the world’s largest nuclear power plant with combined installed capacity of 9,900MW 3). The Generation III class EPR has been designed and developed by the French company AREVA, which is notorious for its poor track record on quality control – as seen from the EPRs being built in France (Flamanville 3) and Finland (Olkiluoto 3), which are suffering safety problems, construction delays and skyrocketing costs4.
These projects are riddled with a range of problems, including such fundamental design fault hazards as having the operating system joined with the safety system, meaning that, in an emergency, if the operating system malfunctions it can take the safety system with it. It is also questionable whether they could withstand having an aircraft crash into them.
As the disaster in Fukushima revealed, a major accident with impacts comparable to Chernobyl can also happen at western reactors of different design. The EPR uses light water reactor technology that, similarly to Fukushima, needs active cooling even long after the reactor is stopped to avoid meltdown and major releases of radiation.
It also has some design weaknesses that make it vulnerable to similar accident scenarios, such as the location of back-up diesel generators that provide the vital power supply for cooling close to the ground, making them susceptible to flooding; risk of hydrogen explosion from melted fuel; the location of the control room too close to the reactor, making it inaccessible in the case of serious radiation leakage; or spent fuel ponds being located outside the containment area making them vulnerable to damage and a potential additional source of major radiation release directly into the environment.
Apart from blueprint weaknesses, the actual construction has been very problematic. The Finnish safety agency STUK recorded over 3,000 safety and quality problems with the construction5 of Olkiluoto 3, stating these problems occurred for a number of reasons, including attempts to reduce costs leading the company to select cheap, incompetent subcontractors and overlook safety-related problems6. In France, there are similar problems7.
In addition, EPR reactors are inherently harder to build and control because of their complexity, larger size and the fact that they are designed to use high fuel burn-up, which places higher requirements and stricter standards on the quality of their construction. In contrast, most Indian reactors built to date have been units up to eight times smaller (220 MW), with just two coming close to even one-third (540 MW) of the size of an EPR (1,650 MW).
India has a total of 20 operating reactors: 18 of 220 MW or smaller, and only two 540 MW reactors. It has a long record of safety and technical problems; one of the most extreme examples is the collapse of a reactor containment, which is designed to protect the reactor, in Kaiga8.
Hardly any nuclear power station has been built on time, and despite AREVA’s promises in Europe – and now India – to date it has failed to deliver on schedule, leaving its projects years behind schedule and billions of euros over budget.
Earthquake hazards
The proposed site for the reactors, and the realities of nuclear waste, pose serious dangers for the local community.
3
4 5 6
7
8
http://netindian.in/news/2010/11/28/0008841/jaitapur-nuclear-power-project-maharashtra-gets-environmental- clearance http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/publications/reports/epr-the-french-reactor/ http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,655409,00.html
Management of safety requirements in subcontracting during the Olkiluoto 3 nuclear power plant construction phase, Investigation report 1/06, STUK (Finland’s Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority), 10 July 2006 Management of safety requirements in subcontracting during the Olkiluoto 3 nuclear power plant construction phase, Investigation report 1/06, STUK (Finland’s Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority), 10 July 2006; ASN letter from Flamanville-3 inspection, dated 25 January, 2008 http://princeton.academia.edu/MVRamana/Papers/264401/Safety_First_Kaiga_and_Other_Nuclear_Stories
Jaitapur is in the only high-earthquake-risk zones on India’s coast. The area is classed as being in Zone IV, meaning it is prone to strong earthquakes with the possibility of one reaching 7 points on the Richter scale, which can cause buildings to collapse.
Over the past 20 years alone, there have been three earthquakes in Jaitapur exceeding 5 points on the Richter scale. In 1993, the region experienced one reaching 6.3, leaving 9,000 people dead.9 And last year, an earthquake caused the bridge to Jaitapur town to collapse. None of this was taken into account when the site was chosen.
Japan was given as an example of a country that managed to build reactors safely on earthquake prone locations. However, as the ongoing Fukushima disaster shows, even with the best technology and most experience in dealing with natural disasters, Japan was not ready to cope with a major earthquake and tsunami that hit a number of reactors built on coastline.
Although the reactors safely stopped at the quake, their cooling system failed to work, which lead to serious damage to several reactors as well as spent fuel stored in the ponds. A series of hydrogen explosions caused multiple major releases of radiation that so far amount to some 20% of release from Chernobyl accident. Despite that most of the contamination was driven to the sea with prevailing winds, there are towns up to 100km away that are contaminated to alarmingly high levels and require long-term evacuation. The economic impacts are yet to be seen, but the damages to the local economy, farmers and fisheries are already estimated to the order of a hundred billion dollars over the next two years.
Nuclear waste – no solution
AREVA claims that one of the EPR’s advantages is that it will produce less waste than other reactors. But while the promise is that the volume of waste will be reduced by 15%, the waste it produces will be disproportionately more dangerous because it will contain more readily released radioactive substances.
With regard to radioactivity, the EPR will not be a step forward: improved fuel combustion rates simply lead to more dangerous waste. In addition, by being able to function with 100% MOX fuel (a mixture of uranium and plutonium oxides) the EPR will be a major link in the nuclear reprocessing scheme that is highly contaminating.
Furthermore, there is still no permanent or safe solution for storing hazardous nuclear waste, which remains lethal for millennia. For Jaitapur, there is no plan or fund for long-term waste management. Hazardous, nuclear waste will be an additional burden – both financially and with regard to safety – for the Indian people.
Weak regulation
India lacks an independent nuclear safety regulator. The current Atomic Energy Regulatory Board has members with potential conflicts of interests, and it reports directly to the Department of Atomic Energy that is not only promoting nuclear power, but is also the owner of the NPCIL utility that wants to build and operate Jaitapur.
Relenting to pressure by thousands of people and many experts, the government finally admitted that the regulator in India is not independent and thus a threat to the safety of the reactors. The government of India, after a high-level meeting on 26 April 2011, announced that:
“The government will introduce a Bill in the next session of Parliament to create an independent and autonomous Nuclear Regulatory Authority of India that will subsume the existing Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB).”10
However, the government still continues in the approvals and preparation to build Jaitapur reactors.
9 10 http://pmindia.nic.in/lprel.asp?id=1250
Jain, S.K. et al 1994: The M6.4 Killari, Maharashtra Earthquake in Central India. EERI Newsletter, Vol. 28, No. 1. http://www.nicee.org/eqe-iitk/uploads/EQR_Killari.pdf
Costs
The two Jaitapur EPR units are officially estimated to cost 32,000 crore (€5.4 bn). This is less than half of the cost estimates of building the reactors in Europe or Canada.
Combined with weaker regulation, the pressure to keep costs low in India could cause even larger problems with cutting safety corners and poor quality of construction than we have seen in France and Finland, which are two and four years behind schedule respectively, with cost overruns close to €3 bn euros each. India’s nuclear power programme has a history of similarly massive cost overruns, with reactors costing on average three times as much to build than originally estimated.
The argument about cheap labour in India cannot explain such a massive price discrepancy, as most of the price comes from engineering equipment and heavy components, and AREVA has already done its best to outsource work to low-cost countries and suppliers.
India has huge potential for energy, including from wind power, solar collectors, biomass/biogas and geothermal energy. With pressure to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions significantly by 2020 and help tackle climate change, these options are more affordable and safer11. They are also faster to build, providing energy in just one to two years from the planning stage, rather than waiting decades, as is the case with nuclear, as costs spiral.
Environmental and human cost
The site is on productive, agricultural land, which will deprive some 1,000 families of their farming land and 6,000 people who depend on fisheries will also be affected. Between December 2009 and January 2010, Nuclear Power Corporation of India officials seized 938 hectares of land from local villagers, offering as little as 3 INR (5 euro cents) per square metre, which villagers unanimously rejected.
An impact assessment by the extremely reputable ‘Tata Institute of Social Sciences’ came to the conclusion that the Jaitapur Nuclear Project will have a “huge negative impact on social and environmental development”. Studies by the Bombay Natural History Society show that the project will also cause extensive environmental damage, for example to threatened mangrove ecosystems on which local fisher folk depend.
The environmental licensing process for Jaitapur has violated both Indian law and the Equator Principles by denying affected communities access to the Environmental Impact Assessment Report and beginning forced acquisition of land without prior community hearings.
Accordingly, the project has already led to massive social conflicts as over 1,000 families will lose their farms and many more will lose their fishing grounds. In the past months, the local opposition to the project – which has been peacefully protesting against the project for the last four years – has grown massively and now includes numerous academics, unions, social justice and environmental groups, political parties, workers’ associations and former government, High Court judges and military officials.
As recently as April 2011, one person has been killed by the police and more than 1,500 people have been detained during protests against Jaitapur. Human rights activists, including the former High Court judge B.G. Kolse-Patil, have criticised the government for using violence and false criminal charges against peaceful protestors.
BBC, 27 April 2011: Praveen Gavhankar, a farmer and fruit transporter, said he and thousands of villagers in
western Maharashtra, had become totally frustrated over the government’s determination to allow the
construction of six large reactors at Jaitapur, in an active earthquake zone.
“And so,” said Mr. Gavhankar, “the people have decided that, rather than letting a Fukushima happen in
Jaitapur 15 years later, it’s better to die today and stop the plant.”
Why India should not embark on nuclear expansion
Most decision makers and investors talk about sustainability and corporate social responsibility, yet the entire nuclear cycle blatantly contradicts this. Radioactive contamination routinely occurs throughout the fuel chain, from uranium mining to processing, reactor operation to the management of nuclear waste.
A severe accident of a typical pressurised water nuclear reactor, due to technical or human failure, could affect many millions of people, causing tens of thousands of victims and forcing the evacuation of areas as large as Belgium.
The nuclear industry has spent the past decade trying to convince the public and decision makers that, despite its downsides, nuclear power is needed to tackle the climate crisis. The industry promised to have learned from past disasters, and that it would offer a clean, safe, cheap and reliable source of energy. None of these claims is true.
The 2010 International Energy Agency (IEA) energy scenario clearly shows that, even if the world were to build 1,300 new reactors and quadruple nuclear power generation by 2050, greenhouse gas emissions would be reduced by less than 4%. Given the long planning and construction schedules required, this would come far too late to meet the imperative to significantly decline greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 and thus prevent climate chaos.
In addition, implementing the IEA scenario would require $10 trillion US dollars for reactor construction, massively increase the amount of nuclear waste that we and future generations will have to deal with, and create enormous proliferation hazards. A single reactor typically produces several hundred kilograms of plutonium every year – an amount sufficient for dozens of nuclear of nuclear weapons.
Contacts:
Jan Beránek, Greenpeace International Nuclear Campaigner Tel: +31 6 51109558
Alexandra Dawe, Greenpeace International Communications Tel: +31 6 46177533
For more information, contact: [email protected]
Greenpeace International Ottho Heldringstraat 5 1066 AZ Amsterdam The Netherlands
Tel: +31 20 7182000
© 2024, All Rights Reserved by Pakistan Think Tank.
