Centre plans N-regulatory authority

“There is no pause on Jaitapur. The first two reactors will come up in 2019,” Maharashtra Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan said here after a review meeting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Tuesday.

Union Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said “there is no difference of opinion inside the government on the utilisation of nuclear power.” Till last week, Ramesh had spoken publicly about the need to have a “pause” in the nuclear programme to review the safety issue. On Tuesday, he was completely on board with all decisions which the prime minister took at the meeting.

The Centre has also readied an additional compensation package for those local people whose land was acquired at Jaitapur. Chavan said the state government and the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd (NPCIL) have worked out an additional compensation package for people whose land had been acquired. The package will be announced soon.
The new package will be over and above the financial package announced by the state government under its Land Acquisition Act.

The NRAI will subsume the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB). “The government will introduce a bill in the next session of Parliament to create the NRAI,” V Narayanswami, Minister of State in the Prime Minister's Office, said after a detailed review of nuclear issues by Manmohan Singh.

Transparency package
The NRAI is a part of a transparency package that the government announced on Tuesday with the objective of weathering the high-intensity storm of anti-nuclear activism at Jaitapur, which was compounded by the Fukushima disaster in Japan.

Lack of transparency in the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) remains a major source of concern. In its present structure the AERB reports to the secretary, DAE. There are questions on the level of actual autonomy that the AERB enjoys, with many critics describing it as a mere rubber stamp. DAE officials, however, maintain that the AERB had the power to overturn DAE prop­o­sals.

“The NRAI will be a st­atutory independent authority like the nuclear safety authorities in the West,” said Prithviraj Chavan, Narayanswami's predecessor in the PMO.
For the first time, India has opened its door to UN safety inspectors.

The Centre will invite the operational safety review team (OSART) of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to assist in India's own safety review and audit. Incidentally, the DAE in the past had rejected the need to carry out OSART inspection of Indian reactors.

India plans to install six 1,650 MW evolutionary power reactor (EPR) made by the French company Areva under the Jaitapur Nuclear Park project. Currently, price negotiations between the NPCIL and Areva are going on for the first two reactors with active support from New Delhi and Paris.

“Nuclear power currently contributes about 3 per cent of our total electricity production, which should go up to 6 per cent by 2020 and 13 per cent by 2030,” Jairam Ramesh said.
Ramesh and Chavan said they were open to discussions with everybody but could never convince those who “are ideological crusaders and oppose nuclear energy all the time.” Otherwise, all efforts will be made to engage local communities and address their fears and concerns in a credible manner.

To address safety concerns associated with the Jaitapur project, the government has decided that each reactor in Jaitapur will have a stand-alone safety and operation system.

Fishermen’s welfare
The government has also agreed that the livelihood of local fishermen and their families must continue to get the highest priority by the state and the NPCIL.
Countering the campaigns related to loss of livelihood for fishermen due to the discharge of hot water from the power plants to the sea, Atomic Energy Commission chairman Srikumar Banerjee said even at the peak of summer, the temperature at the discharge point would increase only by 4.5 degrees Celsius and there would be no temperature change at 2.5 km distance.

A four-member expert team from the DAE had visited Finland recently where a similar reactor is being installed. The panel's opinion was that EPR was not an untested reactor but a logical extension of similar type of reactor in operation in Germany and France, he said.

To make the nuclear power programme more transparent, the government has decided to put the initial results of six safety review committee which inspected Indian nuclear power plants in the public domain.

Action taken on previous safety reviews will also be put in the public domain. Three reviews had been conducted in the past — in 1979 after the Three Mile Island incident; in 1986 after Chernobyl; and another review done by the AERB in 1995.