Tata Centre to set up cancer registries in all nuclear plants

Door-to-door surveys will be undertaken; one of the registries will be at Kaiga

In the wake of heightened concerns on nuclear safety following the Fukushima accident, India’s topmost cancer hospital plans to set up a series of cancer registries around nuclear power plants, first of which will come up in Kaiga.

The cancer registry will undertake door-to-door surveys outside the exclusion zone of nuclear power plants to check if there are any unusual increase in the number of cancer cases. In case a spike is found, doctors of Tata Memorial Centre (TMC) will check if it is linked to radiation.

Though existing scientific evidence shows no link between increase in cancer prevalence and nuclear radiation anywhere around the 435 nuclear power plants in the world, the TMC’s effort is the first one of Indian origin to establish an independent database.

“The first three registries will come up in Kaiga, Kakrapar (Gujarat) and Rawatbhatta (Rajasthan). We have submitted a proposal to the Planning Commission,” K M Mohandas who heads the Centre for Cancer Epidemiology at TMC told Deccan Herald.

The proposal worth more than Rs 100 crore envisages the recruitment of 120 technical staff and 30 scientists at the TMC to manage all the registries. In case of deaths, verbal autopsies will  be conducted to find out its cause and check any radiation linkage.

The registries, Mohandas said, were meant for only data collection and would not offer any health care service.

Operational nuclear power plants are in Tarapur, Rawatbhatta, Narora, Kakrapar,Chennai and Kaiga while the two 1000 MW units at Kudankulam are stuck due to public agitation. Studies carried out in other locations suggest that cancer rates have not increased in people living around nuclear power plants.

A senior official from Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd admitted over the years that NPCIL did very little to ally people’s fear on nuclear safety. “Our presentations used to have only one slide on nuclear safety as a passing reference whereas the rest would be on growth,” said S A Bhardwaj, director (technical) NPCIL.

People friendly step

Smarting from the debacle at Kudankulam and Jaitapur, the nuclear establishment is about to take yet another people-friendly step in which 120 of its environment safety laboratories will release the  background radiation level of major cities and localities – similar to roadside weather boards – to convey to the public that radiation is always present in nature and there is nothing unusual or scary about it.

“We have asked the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre to make the radiation information available to the public in the next few months,” Bhardwaj said.

NPCIL talks to restart

The stalled negotiation between India and France on the purchase of first two 1650 MW reactors for Jaitapur is set to restart soon with the French nuclear regulatory authority certifying the EPR reactor to be installed in Jaitapur on the Maharashtra coast, reports DHNS from New Delhi.

Following Fukushima nuclear accident in March, the commercial talks between NPCIL and French energy major Areva came to a standstill.