Nuclear Energy

again revived the project some years ago, but once again, a powerful movement has put a spanner in
UCIL’s plans.
Part III: Nuclear Fuel Complex, Hyderabad
UCIL processes the uranium ore in its mills in Jharkhand and sends the yellow cake to the
Nuclear Fuel Complex (NFC) in Hyderabad. Here the uranium fuel rods are fabricated from the
yellow cake, and supplied to all nuclear plants in India.
The NFC churns out 50,000 tons of contaminated waste water per day. This huge quantity of
contaminated water, containing radioactive materials and chemical wastes, is discharged into a
waste storage pond located in the complex. Seepage from this pond has contaminated the
underground water, and with the NFC / DAE simply unconcerned, this radioactive contamination is
going to increase with time.
As a result, the situation in and around Hyderabad is becoming grave. Mysterious and
painful diseases have already visited residents in the vicinity of NFC. The DAE has prohibited
residents of Ashok Nagar near NFC from drinking water from underground wells in the area.
Eleven villages near the NFC also face the same problem. As the contamination spreads, it will
affect the underground water supply to the entire city of Hyderabad. The city has an acute shortage
of drinking water, and so many residential complexes install their own borewells. A day may come
when it will be highly dangerous to use the underground water and people may have to desert
Hyderabad as has happened in the area near Hanford works in the USA. d
Part IV: India's Nuclear Power Reactors
As discussed in Chapter 3, release of small or large quantities of radioactivity at nuclear
power plants (NPPs) occurs quite often, at every nuclear reactor around the world. These releases
can be planned, that is the nuclear plant authorities purposefully decide to vent radioactive gases
into the air or release radioactive water into nearby seas and rivers. Or they can be because of
human or mechanical error, which the nuclear industry euphemistically refers to as ‘incidents’, in
order to downplay the severity of the accident and mollify public concerns. Several of these
‘incidents’ have snowballed and have had catastrophic ramifications, the biggest of course being the
Three Mile Island and Chernobyl disasters. As discussed in Chapter 3, the technology of nuclear
reactors is complex and events can spin out of control in a very short time, all possible accident
modes cannot be predicted, all of which means that there is no way to ensure that reactors will not
have major accidents.
Thus, even though the nuclear industry claims it is emission-free, nuclear power plants
collectively release lakhs of curies of radiation into the atmosphere every year, with deathly
consequences for life on planet Earth, consequences which will be with us till the end of time, as
many of these radioactive materials released into the atmosphere have half-lives of up to half a
million years!
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