The Koodankulam Atomic Power Station is ready for operation.
This is built with Advanced Technology and safety standards with Russian Know how and the design is functioning well in many parts of the world including Scandinavian countries.
The project, being established at a cost of Rs.16,000 Crores near Tuticoriin,Tamil Nadu has been under construction/commission for the past 10 years.
Now suddenly out of the blue a group comes out stating that the plant is not safe, quoting Fukushima Disaster,which was triggered by Tsunami in Japan.
Koodankulam has been secured with adequate and possible precaution to ward off any calamity of the nature Fukushima.
However, the hazards associated with any Nuclear plant exists.
On this ground one can not object to a nuclear plant.
The argument by one Udaya Kumar, who seems to have sprung up suddenly, does not contain any information for his misgivings on the safety of the Koodankulam plant excepting a vague statement that the Plant will be hit by a tsunami and that people will be affected by Nuclear radiation.
He is unable to lay any specific problem excepting to raise the voice and rhetoric.
Tamil Nadu political parties without knowing what the whole issue is about are supporting him.
Especially Weeping Vaiko, is raising temperature without any fact at his disposal and is appealing to Tamil sentiment.
After the entry of Dr.Abdul Kalam who has inspected the facility and his measured analysis of the Safety at the Nuclear Plant, there seems to be some semblance of sanity among the mob crying for shut down of the plant.
Note that after the intercession by the Church to its parishioners to keep away from the controversy, the tone of the protesters has become measured.
Also worth noting is the fact that Koodankulam is Russian designed and not by US/France.
An Inter-Governmental Agreement on the project was signed on November 20, 1988 by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. The project remained in limbo for 10 years due to political and economic upheaval in Russia after the post-1991 Soviet breakup, and also due to objections of the United States on the grounds that the agreement does not meet the 1992 terms of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG).
There are negotiations over the possible addition of a naval base at the site, both safeguarding the project and as a presence in the southern tip of the country. A small port became operational in Kudankulam on January 14, 2004. This port was established to receive barges carrying over sized light water reactor equipment from ships anchored at a distance of 1.5 kilometres (0.93 mi). Until 2004 materials had to be brought in via road from the port ofTuticorin, risking damage during transportation.
In 2008 negotiation on building four additional reactors at the site began. Though the capacity of these reactors has not been declared, it is expected that the capacity of each reactor will be 1000 MW or 1 GW. The new reactors would bring the total capacity of the power plant to 9200 MW or 9.2 GW.
In June 2011, Sergei Ryzhov, the chief designer of the light water VVER nuclear reactors used at this Nuclear Power Plant was killed in an airplane accident. The plane belonging to the Rus-Air airlines was flying from Moscow to the Karelian capital Petrozavodsk.
Technical description
Two 1 GW reactors of the VVER-1000 model are being constructed by the Nuclear Power corporation of India Limited (NPCIL) and Atomstroyexport. When completed they will become the largest nuclear power generation complex in India producing a cumulative 2 GW of electric power. Both units are water cooled water moderated power reactors.[11] The first was scheduled to start operation in December 2009 and the second one was scheduled for March 2010. Currently, the official projections put unit 1 into operation in June 2011, and unit 2 will go in March 2012.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koodankulam_Nuclear_Power_Plant
“Technologically, Kudankulam is the safest and most advanced nuclear power plant in the world”, said Mr Kadakin.
According to the Ambassador, it is surprising that while the Fukushima accident occurred last March, the protests against the scheduled launch of NPP Kudankulam whose organizers refer to the Fukushima tragedy, have begun only recently.
He also added that the Russian side closely watches further developments around Kudankulam.
On Friday the Prime Minister received the delegation of the anti-nuclear plant agitators, who submitted two memoranda reflecting local concerns about Kudankulam. The Prime Minister stated that he intended to send a governmental delegation to the power plant area in order to discuss the situation with the locals and examine the security issues on the spot.
On Wednesday, October 12, Dr Manmohan Singh in a second letter to Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa sought her continued support for the Kudankulam nuclear power plant. He also reiterated that the use of nuclear energy in the country meets the highest safety standards.
Last month South India witnessed mass protests against the Kudankulam start-up. The protesters claimed that they were against not Russian technologies in particular, but nuclear energy in general, as they considered it dangerous. However, shortly after the protests were suspended, as the authorities agreed to listen to the critics of nuclear energy.
At the IAEA General Conference held in Vienna on September 20 Mr Sergey Kirienko, Director of Rosatom, told journalists offstage that the first Kudankulam unit is planned to be made operational by the end of this year. He noted that Rosatom entered the final stage in preparing a contract with the Indian partners on construction of the Kudankulam third and fourth power units, while the launch of the second unit was scheduled for the first half-year of 2012.
Upon results of the tender, PROM Engineering (Russia) was awarded a contract for the manufacture and supply of an automated radiation monitoring system (ARMS) in the framework of constructing two power units of Kudankulam NPP with WWER-1000 reactors in India.
The Kudankulam NPP ARMS has a number of considerable advantages when compared to the existing systems at Russian nuclear plants today due to the great reliability provided by its system structure, the wide range of objectives that it can achieve, the use of state-of-the-art instrumentation with wide measurement ranges, software usability and equipment serviceability.
About ARMS
ARMS is the major system for control of radiation safety at the NPP. It allows damage to one or other of the protective barriers to be identified at an early stage and prevents the penetration of radionuclides into the environment. Information exchange between the Automatic Process Control System and ARMS enables continuous analysis of the NPP to be carried out and failures with the main process equipment to be predicted.
ARMS combines both continuous and periodical monitoring functions:
- monitoring of the radiation process
- monitoring of the radiation status in a power unit and at the site
- monitoring of gaseous and particle releases into the atmosphere
- monitoring of radionuclide releases into the open aquatic environment
- monitoring of the spread of radioactive contamination
- monitoring of collective and individual radiation doses received by personnel