Kudankulam N-plant gets top court’s green signal

Agencies/New Delhi

“The plant has been set up for people’s welfare,” said the ruling on the Kudankulam plant.

“Necessary clearances have been taken by the government, and development of the nuclear power plant is important for India,” it added.

The Russian-built Kudankulam plant is the country’s biggest nuclear power project and is designed to help meet a surging demand for electricity in Asia’s third-largest economy where power blackouts are frequent.

Plans for the facility were first drawn up in 1988 and two of the reactors now are in place.

The plant was supposed to open in 2011 but large, often violent protests, by locals worried about radiation have delayed the startup.

Several petitions had been filed before the top court by anti-nuclear activists challenging the project on safety grounds.

“We have to strike a balance between larger interest and economic necessities,” judges K S Radhakrishnan and Dipak Mishra said in the ruling.

At the same time, the court ordered the government to submit a final report on the plant’s safety and waste disposal arrangements to deal with hazardous material.

Opponents of the plant say it is located in a seismically sensitive area and fear a Fukushima-style disaster could kill thousands of people in the coastal region.

Fishermen, who form the majority of the population in the plant’s vicinity, are also worried the plant will affect marine life.

“There are still several problems with the reactors that are in place. The court needs to ensure those issues are dealt with before giving a go-ahead,” Karuna Raina, Greenpeace anti-nuclear campaigner, said.

“Even if a small thing goes wrong, it can affect a huge number of people.”

Reacting to the judgment, M Pushparayan, a key leader in the People’s Movement Against Nuclear Energy (PMANE) said in Chennai: “It is a delayed and unjust judgment. It will not bind us and our protest against the project will continue.”

He said “it is discouraging that the court seems to have not considered important issues like the substandard equipment used in the reactor; Coastal Regulation Zone stipulations; spent fuel storage; conduct of proper mock drill for the locals while deciding on the case.”

“The KNPP will not even satisfy the power requirements of Tamil Nadu or even Kerala,” Pushparayan said.

With the court giving the approval, it is now for the regulatory board to give its sanction to operationalise the plant, an official said.

The ball is now in the court of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) to give its sanction to operationalise the first unit of KNPP, said the official of the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd (NPCIL).

“The apex court’s verdict is good news for us. Now everything is going in a positive direction. We have completed all the pre-commissioning tests for the first unit and reports have been submitted to the AERB,” the official said, preferring anonymity.

The nuclear plant has also been a growing source of tension between state and national authorities but Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has stood by the project and his government’s wider nuclear power development plans.

The plant is one of many India hopes to build as part of its aim of generating 63,000 megawatts of nuclear power by 2030 - part of a planned near 15-fold rise from current levels, according to the NPCIL.

Nuclear energy has been a priority for India since 2008 when then-US president George W Bush signed into law a deal with New Delhi that ended a decades-old ban on US civilian nuclear trade with the country.