Women engineers at nuke-plant strongrooms break another barrier

Women have broke another glass ceiling without much fanfare when they entered the control room of nuclear power reactors that was exclusively a male domain till recently.

Full of complicated equipment and systems all around, control rooms are the nerve centres of nuclear reactors from where the engineers decide the rate of nuclear fission process that will generate electricity. Women engineers with proper training have entered the N-control rooms whose walls are covered with a series of complicated panels, monitors, switches, meters and other equipment to check the reactor’s health.

“As nuclear reactors run 24x7, there are three 8-hour shifts and we are picked up like our male colleagues. We have no problem working here,” Nilofar Khan, a young engineer working at the control room of 220 MWe fifth unit of the Rajasthan Atomic Power Station (RAPS-5) at Rawatbhatta, near here, told Deccan Herald.

Hailing from Ujjain, Khan joined RAPS-5 in 2008 after completing her engineering from a private college in her home city and training at Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited. She is part of the team ran RAPS-5 continuously for 765 days, creating a world record. Rajasthan Atomic power station has six nuclear power reactors, out of which five are functional, adding 1080 MWe to the grid.

Two more reactors, each with a capacity of 700 MWe, are under construction. “RAPS has about 200 engineers. Of them, about 20 are women. In the earlier days, there were very few girls in mechanical or electrical engineering. Also, engineering colleges were in the government sector, limiting our recruitment options,” said J R Deshpande, Chief Superintendent of RAPS – 5 and 6, which are two identical 220 MW nuclear power reactors.

The nuclear power company has 3,574 technical staff, mostly engineers, out of which 173 are women. Besides engineers, several reactor physicists, too, are counted among the scientific staff.

For instance, in RAPS, the senior-most female technical staff is a reactor physicist, who joined the NPCIL around 1998. Khan and her women colleagues like Rashmi Joshi (RAPS-3 and 4) and Nicky Vadhera (RAPS-5 and 6) were recently felicitated at the plant by the Atomic Energy Commission Ratan Kumar Sinha and NPCIL chairman K C Purohit.

Vadhera joined NPCIL 7 years ago and is part of the team that looks after the reactor’s health. She is from Jaipur and completed her engineering from Jaipur. The NPCIL has women in its administrative wings but women engineers who dared to enter the nuclear reactor's control room received special appreciation from the top brass.