What ails nuclear safety?
In-depth field studies in nuclear power plants worldwide have shown that they have common features that are essential for reliable operation. DAE's operations do not exhibit these characteristics. Instead, secrecy invoked in the name of national interest is the norm, leading to avoidable risks, writes Ashwin Kumar.
Accident theorists have suggested that the complexity of nuclear power plants makes it difficult to know beforehand everything that might go wrong to cause an accident, and furthermore that these accidents can spread quickly, making the attainment of safety difficult. However, there is a range of operational safety levels and some nuclear plants around the world have operated with relatively high levels of reliability. Organization theorists have studied what such high performing plants have in common, and during in-depth field studies in nuclear power plants they have found common features that they argue are essential for reliable operation.
Characteristics of high reliability operations
What they find is that in nuclear reactors operating at good levels of reliability political elites and organization leaders place a high priority on safety in design and operations and operators have confidence in this fact. Furthermore, there is an atmosphere of openness and responsibility in which all individuals feel responsible for every detail of operations that they can observe, and feel free to point out their observations without fear. There are reliable backups in technical operations and in management of personnel, and this often prevents failures from escalating. At the same time, there is always a belief that present levels of safety are not enough, so that the guard is never let down. This means that such organizations are always exploring what could go wrong, and learning not only from their mistakes but also from others’.
In India, the Department of Atomic Energy’s operations does not satisfy these characteristics. While detailed descriptions of what actually goes on inside India’s nuclear facilities are not possible because of lack of access, there is some evidence about DAE’s actions leading up to accidents and their response to them.
Lacking a culture of accountability
In 2003, there was an accident in the Kalpakkam Atomic Reprocessing Plant (KARP) that caused extremely high radiation exposures (280-420 mSv) to workers. The cause is said to be a valve failure, due to which highly radioactive waste entered a tank containing waste of lower radioactivity. At the time of the accident, about five years after the plant was commissioned, no monitors had been installed to check for radiation levels in that area. Neither were any mechanisms to detect the valve failure. Therefore workers had no way of knowing that the sample they went in to collect was actually emitting high levels of radiation. The accident was recognized only after a sample collected was taken to a different room and processed.
Workers do not have control over their immediate environments, and problems cannot be raised openly in DAE’s facilities.
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The response of the management reveals a low priority to worker safety. Workers were also blamed for not wearing their thermo-luminescent badges. This is misdirected: the badges wouldn’t have provided advance or immediate warning of radiation levels; rather they are meant to record total exposure over a period of time, to be calculated by another instrument. The absence of the badges reveals instead routine neglect of worker exposures. The management also blamed the workers for entering the room, despite the fact that workers were doing something that wouldn’t have attracted comment if the valve hadn’t failed. In addition, despite a safety committee’s recommendation that the plant be shut down, the upper management of Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), which oversees KARP, decided to continue operating the plant. Then the employees union wrote a letter to the director setting forth ten safety-related demands, including the appointment of full time safety officer. The letter also recounted two previous incidents where workers were exposed to high levels of radiation in the past two years, and how higher officials had cited emergency as a reason for not following safety procedures. Once again there was no response from the management.
Finally, some months later, when the union resorted to a strike the management transferred some of the key workers involved in the agitation and gave notice to others; this had the desired effect, and two days later all the striking workers joined back. The BARC Director’s response was that “If the place was not safe, they would not have joined back”.
Organization theorists point out that highly reliable operations are highly demanding and therefore precarious in systems that are structurally prone to accidents, because of the competing priorities and the difficulty of justifying efforts on safety whose direct outcomes are often unclear. But there is little effort on the part of the DAE, and there is low priority given to safety at the highest levels. Workers do not have control over their immediate environments, and problems cannot be raised openly in DAE’s facilities. It is also not clear if the important lessons are learnt by the concerned organizations. Even after the leak at KARP was made public, the DAE continued to deny the causes of the problems and instead blamed the workers for a situation over which they had no control.
The absence of independent regulation
Regardless of the DAE’s claims that it operates under strict regulatory supervision, this is not so. The Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) reports to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which is headed by the secretary of the DAE. The Chairman of the Nuclear Power Corporation (NPC) is also a member of the AEC. Thus, both the DAE and the NPC exercise considerable administrative powers over the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board. In practice, this means that the AERB sometimes plays down the significance of accidents. For example, in March 1999, there was a leak of heavy water in the second unit of the MAPS reactor near Madras. The AERB dismissed the incident by saying that “the release to the environment is maintained well within the limits specified by the AERB.” However, an independent scientist estimated that the radioactivity released to the environment was several times the permitted 300 curies per day per reactor and perhaps even exceeding the discharge limit of 10 times the daily quota, much higher than the AERB claims.
Too much secrecy
The lack of independent regulation is compounded by the difficulty in obtaining information about a program whose details are often shrouded in secrecy. Information about the accident at KARP in 2003 only became public when employee association members leaked information to the media after several unsuccessful attempts to have safety problems addressed by the management. M R Srinivasan, a former head of the DAE, has called upon the organisation to “adopt an enlightened policy of keeping the public informed at all times about safety aspects of its installations”. But secrecy persists, and is often justified by the DAE using arguments such as national security.
Status of plants under construction
Thus, when the AERB in 1995 submitted a report to the DAE on safety problems in Indian reactors and public-interest organizations filed a petition to obtain access to it, the head of the DAE filed an affidavit arguing that it should be kept under wraps, saying: “I say that the aforesaid document, prepared by the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board in November, 1995 which, among others, is a subject matter of this petition, is a document classified as Secret as it pertains to the nuclear installations in the country which include several sensitive facilities, carrying out activities of a highly classified nature, under the enabling provisions of the Atomic Energy Act, 1962. I respectfully say and submit to this Hon’ble Court that if this document (which was submitted to the Atomic Energy Commission and is classified as SECRET) is required to be published, then it will cause irreparable injury to the interests of the State and will be prejudicial to national security.”
Such an argument doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The weapons potential of India’s reactors can be inferred from the design details and the operating records submitted to the IAEA, all of which are publicly available. However, making such information public could weaken the DAE’s own claims of safe operation and possibly fuel public concern about how its facilities are being operated.
Organization theorists often point to the importance of feedback and learning necessary to maintain high levels of reliability, especially in systems such as nuclear reactors where problems that can occur are not always known in advance. Openness therefore has instrumental benefits for the attainment of safety, and is also required if safe operations are to be demonstrated. On the contrary, the practice of secrecy in India makes it likely that problems are often kept under wraps until a mishap brings them to light. It also violates the right of affected communities to informed participation in the choices that, instead, are made on their behalf.
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Cite this article
Ashwin Kumar (2007) ‘What ails nuclear safety?’, India Together, 14 April 2007. https://indiatogether.org/nukesafe-environment--2/
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Sriram · 1 April 2007
Our government's track record in scientific innovation is debatable, at the very best. Nuclear safety is paramount at a point when our energy security policy is tilting towards more reliance on this method of power generation. An independent(read, non-governmental) system of checks and monitoring has to be put in place to ensure the safety of people working and living in and around nuclear reactor complexes. Doesn't something like that exist already?
Vir Narain · 11 July 2007
Problems With Nuclear Energy Early in 1995 a seminar on 'Nuclear Energy and Public Safety' was held in Delhi, co-sponsored by the India International Centre and some other organisations. A book, titled Nuclear Energy and Public Safety, edited by Dr Vinod Gaur (incidentally one of the earliest members of the Indian Humanist Union) was published after the seminar, with contributions from about twenty eminent scientists, academicians and others. The picture that emerges from this is disturbing, as summed up in the Preface. Talking of "sloppy technology and management practices" it says: "The devastating fire at Narora, the major flooding of Kakrapara, and the collapse of the containment dome at Kaiga are recent examples of failures, details of which remain unavailable to the public, causing deep concern about the hazard potential of our nuclear installations. This situation supports a lax technological culture through immunity from public exposure at the expense of public anxiety , and clearly underlines the wisdom of creating public transparency of plans and designs and of hazards and failure analyses reports of large and crucial public utilities, as practiced by most democratic nations." When the Report was published, the situation in nuclear-power generation was largely static worldwide. A number of accidents and incidents had led to widespread concerns regarding the hazards of nuclear power generation, and a slowdown if not stoppage in the building of new reactors. The Chernobyl disaster, the incidents at Three Mile Island and Windscale raised serious doubts about the viability of fission-based power generation. In the USA , "The accident was a watershed event for the US nuclear industry. Seventy-four plants under construction at the time of the accident have since been cancelled. Thirteen plants that were operating when the accident occurred have been permanently closed by their owners. Only fifty-three plants then under construction were completed and placed into service. No nuclear power plants have been ordered since the accident." The Bush administration has changed all that and is heralding the Renaissance of Nuclear Power. Efforts are being made to develop safer and more efficient reactor designs. An international task force has agreed on six nuclear reactor technologies for deployment between 2010 and 2030. All six are expected to yield advances in terms of sustainability, economics, reliability and safety. All these aspects involve highly complex as well as controversial technical considerations, and it would be presumptuous on my part to try to touch on these. Here I shall try to confine myself to safety and security. In this context I believe it is important to make a distinction between safety and security; although the close relationship between the two must be borne in mind. Safety Safety concerns safeguards against breakdowns, accidents arising out of negligence or mismanagement; and minimising the damage caused by natural disasters. In the case of nuclear energy the major areas of safety concerns are: mining, processing, reactor operations, spent fuel, waste management and decommissioning. Whether adequate safety can be ensured (in theory as well as in practice) in each of these areas has always been debated; but the issues are so highly technical that they are best left to the experts. It is probably true that for every expert there is an equal and opposite expert. This, of course, greatly helps in selective quotation. On the subject of mining: "From the mining of uranium to the manufacturing of weapons and nuclear power, workers are faced with the risk of exposure to radiation. According to reports by the International Commission for Radiological Protection (ICRP), work-related deaths in uranium mines are estimated at between 5,500 deaths (for radiation workers @ 3 mSv) to 37, 500 deaths (for radiation workers @ 20 mSv) per million workers a year. This compared with deaths in the manufacturing industry (estimated at 110 deaths per year per million workers) and the construction industry (estimated at 164 deaths per million workers per year)". On reactor safety: "Nuclear power plants are and will always be vulnerable to accidents resulting in meltdown or other large radiation releases due to human error and worn out or defective parts. Even without an accident or attack, nuclear power plants threaten public health by routinely releasing radiation into the air, soil and water. Moreover, U.S. nuclear power plants have a concerning record of violating safety regulations while regulators delay, deny, and defer to the financial interests of nuclear plant owners and operators. These failures increase the risk that nuclear reactors pose to the public." On waste management, "No technically or economically feasible methods have been proven for the ultimate disposal of radioactive waste; a grim legacy from the nuclear power program for future generations. Several proposals for dealing with the wastes exist and one or more of these approaches may eventually be shown to be satisfactory, but important questions remain unanswered today about all of them. Security Security relates to protection from deliberately hostile actions such as sabotage, terrorist attack or attacks by missiles or bombs. Even if it is conceded that adequate safeguards can be instituted to prevent any catastrophic outcome in case of accident, negligence, mismanagement or natural disaster, vulnerability to enemy action still has to be taken into account - particularly for states like India, which live in a troubled neighbourhood. A successful attack on a nuclear plant can be incalculably catastrophic. In his landmark book on the subject: Nuclear Plants as Weapons for the Enemy: An Unrecognized Military Peril, Bennett Ramberg points out that any country that possesses nuclear energy facilities gives its adversaries a quasi- nuclear capability to use against it. A US Admiral is candid about this. "Once a war starts, the value system changes and anything you can do to hurt the adversary and cause him problems, you find justification for doing." He recalls hearing someone say, "You don't have to take the bang to the enemy; the bang is already there when you take out his nuclear plants." He was talking about the reported attack by the US on the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center reactor in Iraq, just ten kilometers southeast of Baghdad. It was a small Russian-built research reactor. Nuclear plants, static and prominently visible, are ideal military targets. The world has more than 300 research reactors and almost 500 large nuclear power plants all sitting ducks. Every nuclear plant is, in effect, a potential nuclear bomb embedded in our territory. It would be unrealistic to count on our nuclear facilities not being attacked in a warlike situation, or in terrorist operations. As Matin Zuberi says, "The core of a typical nuclear plant contains about 1,000 times the radioactivity released by the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. A high explosive bomb used against it would acquire the attributes of a nuclear weapon without its blast effect. According to an environmental impact statement of the U.S Nuclear Regulatory Commission a large truck bomb used against a nuclear reactor in a highly populated area could produce 130,000 deaths. An ordinary conventional explosive could thus be turned into a large radiological weapon. Within a nuclear power plant perhaps the most vulnerable part is the spent fuel pool. Spent fuel pools for boiling water reactors are located above ground. This can make these reactors even more vulnerable. Conventional explosives, by causing a breach in the pool water connections can cause a fire worse than even a reactor meltdown. As one report says, "If a fire were to break out at the Millstone Reactor Unit 3 spent fuel pond in Connecticut, it would result a three-fold increase in background exposures. This level triggers the NRC evacuation requirement and could render 29,000 square miles of land uninhabitable." The nuclear power industry, with the support of the Bush administration, is pushing for a revival of nuclear energy. The industry is aggressively seeking to license and build the first new nuclear reactors in a generation. Toward this end, nuclear companies have sought public approval by disingenuously presenting the energy source as clean, renewable, and necessary to deal with global warming, environmental degradation, and dwindling petroleum resources. But nuclear energy is neither clean nor green. While nuclear reactors do release a smaller amount of greenhouse gases than their coal and natural gas counterparts, they create a significant amount of dangerous radioactive waste that remains toxic for hundreds of thousands of years. Beyond the health, safety, and security risks posed by nuclear generation of electricity-as well as its extremely high costs-this waste is a shameful legacy of our environmental exploitation that will beset generations to come. That the impediments in the way of India exercising the option to develop nuclear power-generation facilities are likely to be removed is certainly a cause for celebration, and represents the triumph of Indian diplomacy. That India is technologically ready to exercise this option does immense credit to Indias scientific establishment. But there seems to be a disquieting complacency, and surprising evasiveness or silence, on the issues of security and safety. Faced with the prospects of an energy famine, even environmentalists have changed sides. The stakes are incredibly high, permitting almost nil margin for error
M K NEMALIKANTI · 21 August 2008
The major set back is due to inadequate Hazard Identification & Risk Assessment Process. Inadequate resources to conduct audits, inspection and training for the stake holders. Nuclear plants should go for HAZOP software to protect the facility and the people from loss and injury. They should allocate adequate budget to comply with rules regulations. Only compliance will save the industry from loss.
Sankaranarayanan Dr · 30 September 2008
Having no job availability other than the nuclear establishment the DAE employees have been yearning that private sector will be ready to give a break for them from the personality oriented management practices of DAE establishment. It is rather pathetic in this country that Institutions like HOMI BHABHA NATIONAL INSTITUTE are propped up by the central government. This Institute of Higher(?) learning has more professors and associate professors than students. This closes down the only opportunity the DAE employees have to earn a decent research degree from reputed institutions like the IIT Mumbai or the Mumbai University. Disadvantaged at every stage the DAE employees are mostly forced to toe the line of that department or become spiritual accepting their fate. DAE recruits always good manpower from the universities. But many get nowhere and it a sad story - an equivalent of intellectual genocide. "Are we in a democracy or some kind of autocracy?" is the question everybody knowledgeable in the nuclear field is asking. Once inside D A E most of the employees are in a fix ... not able to decide "to be or not to be scientific?" That is the real state of affairs.
chintan · 20 March 2011
IAEA should not only supervise but also expand and take over operation on all nuclear plant and maintain their stringent standards if we want to avoid future nuclear accidents. If such a step is taken than not only nuclear safety can be ensured but also the laundering of nuclear technologies by nations like pakistan, china, korea and iran can be avoided. So it's time for the international community to come together and if any country wants to run or even establish a new nuclear plant it has to be done through IAEA. Only such a step can ensure safe nuclear operations all around the word and since only one body will be in-charge the economies of scale can be archived and nuclear power will become affordable. While there will be no bias in selecting the location and no compromise on the safe operation of the nuclear plants.