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Nuclear Shutdown

Nuclear hawks in Delhi treat opponents of nuclear energy as enemies of the state. The farmers and fisherfolk in Koodankulam know it better than anybody else. Between September 2011, when anti-nuclear protests began gathering steam in Koodankulam, and June 2012, serious criminal charges have been slapped against more than 150,000 people, mostly unarmed villagers. And of these, at least 10,000 people are charged with sedition and waging war against the state. In truth the British-tailored sedition law has such a wide ambit that anybody can be picked up at anytime and framed with false charges.

‘Fukushima’ has not deterred Indian authorities to go ahead with the Indo-Russian joint venture of the controversial nuclear power project at Koodankulam, which will destroy livelihoods of thousands of people and degrade the environment of the locality for ever. This ‘Koodankulam’ when gets fully operative, it will pose problems even for the people of Sri Lanka because a nuclear accident does not obey political and geographical border as the millions across Europe are experiencing after the Chernobyl disaster which was generally recognised as the biggest nuclear accident in history.

‘Fukushima’ has triggered Germany’s exit from their nuclear power programme. It is to close down all 17 nuclear reactors and replace them with renewable energies, mostly wind and solar, and has invested 200 billion euros on 8 percent of the country’s GDP. May be, after India and China, Britain is chief among those countries with nuclear ambitions undaunted by the Fukushima catastrophe. It is determined to go ahead with the construction of at least 10 new reactors, despite plenty of counter-evidences available to it, which include evidence that an adequate supply of low carbon energy could be produced without it, to the point of misleading parliament by omission of the evidence in order to get the decision through and with a huge public subsidy. The reason is simple : the government in London has too cosy a relationship with the nuclear industry, which applies in other countries like France and India with close links to nuclear weaponry. Tragically enough, on June 16, 2012, Japanese premier ordered the restart of two nuclear reactors amid widespread protest, albeit new crisis-management plans drafted after the Fukushima disaster are still to be implemented.

Within days of the first explosion, Fukushima was reclassified by the International Atomic Energy Agency to the highest grade 7 with ‘‘widespread health and environmental effects’’—the same as Chernobyl. The Japanese government’s own measurements show widespread contamination, with levels of radioactivity outside the official evacuation zone so high that within a matter of weeks, people would have been exposed to 10-200 times the legal limit dose for a whole year.

As in Chernobyl, the government has withheld vital information from the people, the international regulators are down playing the health impacts, and to this day, the total radioactivity released from the stricken Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant is still unknown.

Unless anti-nuclear movements developing, somewhat spontaneously across the globe get united for a unified action plan, ‘nuclear shutdown’ won’t take place because vested interests won’t allow it to happen. If concerned people are to make a difference, they must decide now, it is now or never. Progressives in Japan are now talking about how they ‘have lost Japan’ by not protesting against nuclear power. And the days are not for when liberals and democrats in India would repent like the Japanese if the nuclear lobby goes ahead with their ‘blueprint of disaster in Koodankulam and elsewhere’.      [contributed]

Frontier
Vol. 45, No. 28, January 20-26, 2013

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