Nuclear Energy

final stages of construction. Such an accident is unprecedented in the annals of nuclear energy
history. Had the collapse taken place during the operation of the nuclear reactor, it would probably
have led to a nuclear core meltdown. It led to a delay in its commissioning by as much as four
years. The collapse of the dome occurred due to faulty design: AERB had ordered the DAE to carry
out certain tests on the containment dome, which were not done. dxxvi
vi) KAPS
Kakrapar Atomic Power Station in Gujarat also has two 220 MW PHW reactors of Canadian
design. Unit-I went critical in 1992 and Unit-II in 1995.
There was a near-disastrous fire accident in 1991 at the KAPS plant. In June 1994, flood
waters entered the plant because sealing arrangements were not provided to prevent water ingress,
causing extensive damage. This despite the fact that similar flooding had occurred twice at RAPS
in 1976 and 1982, owing to the very same construction errors! In 2004, an unexplained power surge
at KAPS-1 forced the NPC to shut down the reactor. dxxvii
The Emergency Core Cooling System (ECCS) installed in KAPS (and NAPS), was not
tested initially, and it was only after the media blew up the issue that the testing was done in KAPS-
2. The system failed the test! Some design and procedural changes had to be made to make the
system perform satisfactorily. But whether these changes have also been carried out in KAPS-1 and
the two NAPS reactors is not known. dxxviii
The KAPS reactors house the first indigenously-developed microprocessor-based control
system. However, they have not been tested thoroughly for their reliability; no appropriate facility
for such testing exists with the DAE. There have been instances of dangerous and erratic behaviour,
such as a shutdown rod coming out when signalled to go into the reactor! dxxix
vii) BARC
For all the hype about BARC, this premier nuclear research institution is in an even poorer
state than India’s nuclear reactors. There have been numerous ‘incidents’ at these research reactors,
some of which nearly led to a major disaster. There was an instance of a reactor being started up
with an operator inadvertently locked inside a room below. In 1991 Dhruva, a 100 MW research
reactor at BARC, operated for almost a month with a malfunctioning emergency cooling system, in
complete violation of all safety norms. dxxx
Aside from these near catastrophes, there is the more insidious problem of leakage of
underground pipes carrying radioactive water at the CIRUS and Dhruva sites at BARC. An even
bigger disaster is the two million tonnes of liquid nuclear waste stored in tanks at the BARC site.
These tanks are leaking due to aging, corrosion and faulty welds. The result of these leakages is that
radioactivity in the form of hundreds of curies of Cesium-137 is reported to be present in the soil,
water and vegetation on the BARC sites and the Trombay coast. Considering the long half-life of
Cs-137 (over 30 years), this contamination will persist as a threat to the safety of the people and the
environment for a long time to come.
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