•  bangalore
• Monday, November 21, 2011
• Inter Press Service

On August 26, Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan resigned, taking responsibility for the disastrous meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, which was caused by the March 2011 undersea earthquake and ensuing tsunami.

In India, on the other hand, the deliberate contamination of a drinking water tank with radioactive waste in the Kaiga nuclea r power plant in Western Ghats in the state of Karnataka has gone unpunished for two whole years.

Neither government nor corporate actors have yet taken responsibility for the incident.

The contamination of a drinking water cooler near the clothing crib of the power plant led to 86 employees showing higher than normal traces of tritium, a radioactive substance, in their routine urine discharge test on the night of Nov. 23, 2009.

A full 24 months later, not only has the incident gone unpunished but the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL) has also refused to identify or reprimand the culprits, while the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) continues to belittle the issue.

The NPCIL has claimed ever since that the incident was merely 'an act of mischief' and has failed to examine the attendance roster of the night shift employees for the night in question, to ascertain who might have caused the contamination.

'Without much cooperation from NPCIL the police are at their wits’ end,' Nagaraj, an investigating officer for the Karwar police department, the district in which the Kaiga power plant is located, told IPS.

He claimed that the perpetrators, including senior scientists 'have hoodwinked a policing system that lacks trained human resources and infrastructure for scientific investigations.'

'We have just recommended the case to the Corp of Detectives (an arm of the federal central bureau of investigations) for a thorough investigation,' Nagaraj added.

However, no concrete evidence has yet emerged from these investigations, nor have the employees been compensated for the many costly health complications arising as a result of the episode.

Given that tritium is a radioactive substance that greatly increases the risk of cancer, the apathy on the part of government officials is particularly noteworthy.

At the time of the incident, seven of the contaminated employees were admitted to the Primary Health Care facility managed by the NPCIL, rather than being taken to the local public hospital. A further 79 employees were given diuretics according to standard procedure.

According to the Indian national disaster management authority's guidelines, a disaster in a nuclear establishment is defined as a situation in which 'the dimension of an emergency situation grows to such an extent that the impact of the hazard is beyond the coping capability of the local community and/or the concerned local authority.'

However, the AERB did not deem the health risks to 86 workers to be an official ‘disaster’ and the incident remains shrouded in secrecy, leading many experts to believe that the regulatory body’s lack of autonomy from the nuclear establishment is a cause of grave concern.

'The incident does not portend serious health hazards as the traces of tritium are within the prescribed limits of the AERB,' stated the NPCIL response to a ‘right to information’ application filed by IPS.

'(Furthermore) the contaminated drinking water cooler was immediately sealed and put out of service; there was no radioactivity released into the environment,' it concluded.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service