uranium
1 Dec 2011
India's Nuclear Horror Story
If ALP delegates look at how the nuclear industry in India currently works, they will find plenty of reasons to vote against expanding uranium sales. Seller beware, warns Greens Senator Scott Ludlam
Much of the debate around uranium sales to India — inside the ALP and in the broader community — will be viewed through the lens of the self-evident interest in maximising revenues from a commodity that Australia already sells to a dozen other nations.
I suspect most people, if they’re interested at all, will wonder what the fuss is about. We sell the stuff to a nuclear-armed Stalinist dictatorship and the organised crime syndicate formerly known as Russia. Why not sell it to the world’s largest democracy?
The real problem with this debate is that it will be conducted against a backdrop of almost total ignorance of the reality of the nuclear industry in India.
Almost nobody in Australia knows, or cares, about the history of the nuclear industry in India, about the long and honourable story of those who are resisting it — or about the unique way in which the nuclear weapons debate has taken shape there, in a highly educated and politically literate society perched for a decade or more on the edge of an atomic holocaust with Pakistan.
I have had the good fortune to visit a place called Jadugoda, a massive uranium mining complex a few hundred kilometres west of Calcutta in a state now called Jharkhand. All of the uranium for India’s nuclear weapons stockpile and civil power industry comes from there, and it is no exaggeration to describe it as one of the world’s true horrors.
In Australia, workers in underground uranium mines wear respirators and radiation dosimeters. Their occupational exposure is recorded and subject to occasional public debate on their risks of contracting cancer and passing on broken DNA and inherited disabilities to their children. Radioactive seepage from tailings waste attracts media attention and public outcry, and it’s rare for people to be jailed for voicing their dissent.
In India, it’s not like that.
Uranium Corporation of India Limited (UCIL) has established a world’s worst practice uranium complex in this lush valley, bulldozing villages aside and dismissing the health impacts of living and farming amid a vast carcinogenic waste stockpile.
Police and paramilitaries have been sent in multiple times to enforce the mine’s continued expansion, and the surrounding villages are now suffering an epidemic of deformed children in addition to the more immediate toll of skin and lung cancers among the workforce.
After the mining started, they told me, the first thing they noticed was the disruption to womens’ menstrual cycles, then the disappearance of smaller mammal and bird species, then the stillbirths and broken children, and then the early mortality of those working in the catacombs beneath.
Their determined, ongoing defiance is one of the more inspiring stories of the Indian anti-nuclear movement.
By this point, you might have formed the reasonable view that displacing this nightmare with uranium exports from well regulated Australian mines would be a blessing for everyone. But that would be to miss the real point of the story.
Having seen an Indian uranium mine first hand, ask yourself how you would feel about living next to an Indian nuclear power plant. While under construction, in 1994 unit 1 of the Kaiga plant high in the rainforests of the Western Ghats in Karnataka, suffered a collapse delicately described as a "delamination" by authorities at the time.
In 2009 its employees were subject to a macabre act of sabotage in which radioactive tritium was injected into drinking water.
In 1993, a fire in the turbine building of the Narora plant in Uttar Pradesh cut power to backup generators and pitched plant operators into one of the more serious meltdown scenarios of the nuclear age. For 17 hours, the workforce volunteered themselves for horrific radiation doses to prevent an Indian Chernobyl, climbing into the containment building, rigging temporary lighting and dumping borated water into the cauldron below them to prevent a fission explosion.
The fact of their success, and their sacrifice, is the reason you’ve never heard of Narora.
The Kakrapar plant, near Surat in Gugurat, has been the subject of long-running longitudinal health studies by volunteer health professionals called in by local communities distraught at the high rates of unexplained mutations and unknown congenital diseases in children conceived after the plant’s start-up. Nuclear plants, when running according to design, emit small quantities of radioactive tritium, noble gasses and other fission products with mutagenic properties.
This brief sketch barely does justice to the daunting history of accident, misadventure and incompetence that has characterised the Indian nuclear industry from the beginning. We are fortunate that the traditions of a raucous free press, nonviolent resistance and carefully argued academic analysis are alive and well in India, giving us a detailed picture of the situation, vastly more dynamic than the one we have of China.
Jadugoda is a single site. The uranium there is low grade and approaching depletion. For the Indian Government to scale up its expensive nuclear experiment while maintaining a credible threat for the annihilation of Pakistan, it will need external sources of supply.
That, of course, is where Australia comes in. To fulfill wildly unrealistic hopes of a major expansion of nuclear energy in India, officials have spelled out the role that should be played by countries like Australia.
K. Subrahmanyam, former head of the Indian National Security Advisory Board, puts it like this:
"Given India’s uranium ore crunch and the need to build up [India’s] nuclear deterrent arsenal as fast as possible, it is to India’s advantage to categorise as many power reactors as possible as civilian ones to be refuelled by imported uranium and conserve our native uranium fuel for weapons grade plutonium production."
Just sit with that for a moment. India needs Australia to get over its squeamishness and provide it with fuel for civil nuclear energy, so that the intergenerational misery of Jadogoda can be exploited to produce plutonium weapons targeted for the erasure of Islamabad and Karachi, population 1.8 million and 18 million respectively.
In exchange, Pakistan targets the booming metropolises of Mumbai, Delhi, Calcutta and Bangalore for push-button incineration.
It is no more or less insane than the Cold War suicide pact that saw US and Soviet military planners exchanging New York and Detroit for Moscow and Kiev in their war games.
The major difference is that in 2011, the Australian Government seems to have forgotten that the common element linking Fukushima and Hiroshima is uranium. Try as we might to reduce the debate in Australia to infantile caricatures, the real world still hangs on a nuclear hair trigger.
For the benefit of anyone here who believes this is an open-and-shut case of the ALP growing up and selling a legal commodity to anyone who will sign up to a safeguards agreement, seller beware.
Julia Gillard has followed her illiterate resources and energy minister into a warped subcontinental variation of Mutually Assured Destruction, even as Japanese authorities admit that the smouldering ruins of Fukushima Units 1-4 may be undergoing spontaneous criticality events, putting off the illusion of cold shutdown for another century or so.
The nuclear industry, in Australia, India, Japan, Russia and everywhere else, deserves nothing more than phased, premeditated and permanent closure. From Jabiluka to Jadugoda, that is what the Australian Greens and the extended global anti-nuclear family are about.
I wish the ALP well in their debate tomorrow — in the hope that sanity prevails. Seller beware.
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Posted Thursday, 01 December 11 at 3:05PM
Bill Laing
Thanks Scott for some important information on the nuclear situation in India. I am an international consultant geologist with a 42 year career. I have been a staunch and vocal anti-nuclear campaigner for most of that career, and remain so.
The secret anti-community practices you describe in India are an inherent component of an industry which is characterised by (1) invisible mortal danger to multi-generations, (2) economic unsustainability (when the cost of pulling the reactors to bits becomes factored into their viability they have always been uneconomic), and (3) indisputable linkage between civilian use and nuclear war.
Fukushima is showing us the reality of (1) and (2). Mr Subrahmanyam’s statement unequivocally proves (3). While possibly unintentional, his statement is a breath of “fresh” air over a very unclean, very ungreen form of energy.
Posted Thursday, 01 December 11 at 4:10PM
The Wollongong Anti-Nuclear Group
Media release 30 November 2011
The Wollongong Anti-Nuclear Group (TWANG) has called on delegates to the Australian Labor Party conference to exercise extreme caution considering a proposed change of ALP policy on the sale of Australian uranium to India, and to vote against the change.
Delegates to the ALP Conference will be meeting in Sydney this weekend. The Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, has announced that she supports a change to the present ALP policy.
The call for delegates to exercise extreme caution was made after a TWANG public meeting in Wollongong (Wednesday 30 November) which was addressed by the Hon Stephen Jones, Member for Throsby.
Mr Jones outlined his concerns regarding the sale of uranium to any country. He urged extreme caution on the question of selling Australian uranium to States which, like India, are not signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. “We have to draw a line somewhere.” Mr Jones told the Wollongong meeting.
“We applaud the real leadership shown on this hard issue by Stephen Jones.” said TWANG spokesperson Bruce Reyburn. “Australia’s real challenge is to encourage and assist India to find those clean, non-nuclear sources of energy which are compatible with sustainable ways of life in the 21st century,”
“An Indian nuclear accident like Fukashima or Chernobyl may carry radioactive materials into the southern hemisphere,” he said. “There is also the great risk of nuclear warfare in that highly unstable part of the world, and a real risk of suitcase bombs resulting from theft of nuclear weapon materials.”
“The sale of Australian uranium to India is a matter which must be decided by all of Australia’s peoples and not by a small section of any political party.”
TWANG also repeated its call for Minister Martin Ferguson to meet with all the Warlmanpa traditional Aboriginal owners of Muckaty Station in the Northern Territory, regarding the Commonwealth’s intention to use their country as a radioactive waste facility for centuries to come.
TWANG media contact – Bruce Reyburn reyburn@songlines.org.au
Posted Thursday, 01 December 11 at 4:14PM
Scott,
Be prepared to be flamed by Indian nationalists who will accuse you of being a racist.
It’s their go-to tactic when someone expresses the slightest doubts about giving their nuclear program a blank cheque. I’ve copped it numerous times.
And I just love the folks who talk about selling uranium to all and sundry as ‘mature’.
I guess maturity is the stage just before death…
Posted Thursday, 01 December 11 at 5:35PM
Hey Geofferoo, I was just writing about “maturity” and radioactive materials today - along these lines:
We need a new dream.
I do not think it is correct to say that, we, as a species are not mature enough to handle radioactive materials in a responsible way. We, after all, can be as amazing as the properties of uranium.
What is correct is that we, with our present forms of social arrangements, are not mature enough to handle radioactive materials in a responsible way.
There is a world of difference between the two conditions. There are examples of Ways of Being which truly qualify as mature. These are not the ones which have been empowered during the last couple of thousand years.
These are not the Ways of the present fantasy known as the American Dream.
We need a mature understanding of who we are – as part of life – before we can responsibly handle radioactive materials.
The world is presently dominated by an immature form of thinking – which fails to understand that we are the opponents who will be destroyed in a nuclear attack, that we are the life forms in the present who are poisoned by nuclear accidents, that we are the forms of life yet to come who will be exposed to the radioactive toxins resulting from the cheap thrills of a long gone generation. We are life.
Until we regain our understanding of who we are – as part of life – we cannot afford to have dangerous radioactive materials in the hands of those whose sense of identity is completely unearthed and out of touch with their real surroundings.
Posted Thursday, 01 December 11 at 6:29PM
Thanks for this article Scott. May it be read widely.
Indian documentary filmmaker Anand Partwardhan made an excellent film about the development of the nuclear industries in both Pakistan and India, called ‘War and Peace’ in 2002 (http://patwardhan.com/films/warpeace.htm).
This film, like your article, examines “the plight of residents living near the nuclear test site (and) the horrendous effects of uranium mining on local indigenous populations”. If more Australians knew these realities they would surely oppose the sale of uranium to India - and they would also oppose the expansion of uranium mining in Australia.
“In “War and Peace,” the always-provocative director explored nuclear testing in the Indian subcontinent, global militarism and war, religious fundamentalism, the aggressive posturing of the United States as a superpower role model and the murder of Mahatma Gandhi”.
Interview: Anand Patwardhan http://www.cnngo.com/mumbai/play/anand-patwardhan-258893#ixzz1fGX2pjmJ
Youtube clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2l8PivlsDU
For copies of ‘War and Peace’ contact: anandpat@gmail.com
Jeni Thornley
documentary filmmaker
http://www.jenithornley.com
Posted Thursday, 01 December 11 at 9:53PM
Great article Scott, thank you!
You mentioned China’s secrecy. I was wondering what percentage of their energy resources both China and India get from nuclear power?
Posted Thursday, 01 December 11 at 10:09PM
Disturbing information. Surely the Government won’t pander to such a poorly regulated industry in India by selling Australian Uranium there. Recall Pigiron Bob - Menzies approving iron to be sold to Japan effectively for munitions to be used against us. The quick sale simply doesn’t serve our or the world’s longterm interests.
Think also of threats to indigenous communities here where the stuff is mined.
Take a look at the accidents and intents. Just leave it in the ground, will ya?
Posted Thursday, 01 December 11 at 10:45PM
So a reason why we shouldn’t export uranium to India is conditions in a mine there.
Think about that for a moment.
Ludlam’s second reason - an incident 18 years ago. Obviously, according to Ludlam, Indians aren’t capable of learning anything in 18 years.
As for the third reason - if India or anyone else really wants nuclear weapons, it will get them, even if they have to extract the uranium from seawater. U simply isn’t that rare, and as such the whole export=proliferation thing is a red herring. The sole practical upshot of an Australian export ban will be to make U somewhat more expensive, retard reliable electricity provision and extend coal generation for India.
An alternative perspective: http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/06/18/greenpeaces-plan-for-india/
Posted Friday, 02 December 11 at 4:06PM
duffer
- extracting Uranium from seawater - what are you on about? From where do you gather your facts?
Building standards, worker safety standards, corruption norms and political instability are of a different league in many other countries -India included. This, combined with longterm catastrophic potential from such a concentrated source of power as enriched Uranium and Plutonium. A good idea? I don’t think so.
Posted Saturday, 03 December 11 at 9:37AM
The lunatics in charge of the asylum? Where to next?
Posted Sunday, 04 December 11 at 10:35PM
Labor decided- “Now for our next act of political suicide…”
Posted Tuesday, 06 December 11 at 9:07AM
Duffer, Scott Ludlam refers to unsafe practices and environmental problems now - not just one nuclear accident in 1993.
Moreover, as long as a nuclear power industry exists, so too will a nuclear weapons industry. I disregard politicians who blab on about safeguards.
If you want a nuclear arms race in the Subcontinent then selling uranium to India is a good way of going about that.
Posted Thursday, 08 December 11 at 11:59AM
Where to next?
Well, one action is to sign a petition to stop the sale of uranium to India and to hold a referendum on the issue so all of Australia’s peoples can decide this issue of global significance.
See http://www.change.org/petitions/the-australian-parliament-1-stop-the-sal…