English: Construction site of the Koodankulam ...

English: Construction site of the Koodankulam Nuclear Power Plant Deutsch: Baustelle des Kernkraftwerks Kudankulam (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Author: Express News Service, June 17,2012

Activists, some of them belonging to the People’s Movement Against Nuclear Energy (PMANE), on Saturday alleged that Russian firms were supplying substandard equipment for the Koodankulam Nuclear Power Plant, posing a serious threat to its safety.

Activists, some of them belonging to the People’s Movement Against Nuclear Energy (PMANE), on Saturday alleged that Russian firms were supplying substandard equipment for the Koodankulam Nuclear Power Plant, posing a serious threat to its safety.

Addressing a press conference here, they claimed that the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL) and the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) have accepted these low-quality equipment.

The activists sought to prove the charge by citing “two new documents that the PMANE had unearthed recently”.  According to them, the contract for the plant envisioned a Reactor Pressure Vessel (RPV), which houses the reactor core and the coolant system, without “welds”.However, when the PMANE perused two different documents, authored by the NPCIL scientists in 2005 and 2008 respectively, it came to light that the scientists, who, initially sought RPVs without welds, had taken supply of one with two “welds”.

R Ramesh, a scientist attached to PMANE, said that the RPV, which surrounds the core of the plant, is most impacted by neutron bombardment. Therefore, when there are welds in the RPV, they could become brittle due to corrosion and may force the RPV to break.

“This will result in a nuclear disaster of great proportions,” he warned. The activists said the 2008 document, which was produced by the AERB, cites safety issues that would arise from the welds.

“Curiously, the Core Damage Frequency (CDF) figures were also increased by 100 times when you compare the two documents, indicating that the AERB was fully aware of the implications,” they alleged. There was no information on the tests conducted to address this safety issue, they added.

Also, once the fuel rods are inserted, a stage that the first unit of the plant was now reaching, the activists said it would be close to impossible to conduct the tests.

“We demand that the government come out with entire information on the plant immediately and stop steps to insert fuel rods before the issues are sorted out,” they said.