JOIN US "Varum aanaa varadhu" (Will come but will not come) is a popular line in a Tamil movie featuring comedian Vadivelu which has come into common usage. And that is what some used to describe the first unit of the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project (KNPP) in Tamil Nadu as it took years to begin operations.
The Nuclear Power Corp of India Ltd. (NPCIL) had the habit of announcing its commissioning date and postponing it in the past many years. The unit, at Kundankulam in Tirunelveli district, 650 km from here, was supposed to begin operation in 2007.
Now the first reactor at KNPP and India's 21st that started nuclear fission Saturday night seems set to start feeding power to the energy hungry southern grid in around 45 days.
The run-up to this is interesting. The nuclear power establishment does not want to admit openly about the secrecy prior to the reactor attaining criticality.
First, all the top officials were not available for comments for queries about KNPP.
"There were a lot of non-technical issues surrounding the project and we did not deem it worthwhile to respond," an official not wanting to be identified told IANS.
The atomic energy establishment also handled the legal situation in a deft manner without giving agitators a chance to stall the progress inside the court or on the streets.
The July 11 Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) clearance to KNPP to take the reactor towards criticality took the People's Movement Against Nuclear Energy (PMANE and others opposed to the project, by surprise.
The union environment ministry in a letter dated June 27 and an AERB letter dated July 1 informed S.P.Udayakumar, co-ordinator of PMANE, that they had not filed their reports in the Supreme Court as on the referred dates.
Only the TNPCB filed its KNPP report in the apex court and its counsel shared a copy with counsel for G.Sundarrajan, who had filed the case against KNPP.
"On Friday, we checked with the apex court and found to our surprise that AERB, NPCIL and MoEF had filed their reports in a sealed envelope with the court registry. Only with the permission of the court, we will be able get a copy of those reports. It will happen only on Monday," Sundarrajan told
IANS.
"It is not like the police taking a person into custody on Friday evening preventing him from getting bail till Monday. It just happened that every report about the reactor was found fine as on Thursday and we issued the clearance," a senior AERB official told IANS.
Speaking to IANS, a Supreme Court advocate declining to be named said: "Filing reports with the court registry in a sealed cover is normal practice if a litigating party does not want the opposite party to see it."
However, before that could happen the reactor went critical and NPCIL won this round.