As India prepares to build the world’s largest nuclear power plant, the plan has come under scrutiny in the wake of the disaster in Japan
The fishing trawler’s groaning engine is abruptly shut down a couple of nautical miles off the coast of Sakhri Nate, a seaside hamlet fringed with palm trees and mango groves. Sakshil Kotawadekar, 25, stands on the deck under the broiling sun, surrounded by a group of men untangling a spidery web of fishing nets and sorting their catch. “Look, that thing there,” he says, pointing at a lighthouse perched atop a barren cliff along the jagged coastline. “It threatens to rob us of our lands, our livelihoods, our way of life. It will imperil our very existence.”
Kotawadekar isn’t describing a haunted lighthouse. Adjacent to it is the site for the proposed 9,900 MW nuclear power plant to be built by the French state-owned company Areva. In all, six 1,650 MWe (megawatt electrical) European Pressurised Reactors (EPR) will be installed by Areva in phases within the next 15 to 18 years, with the first two reactors expected to come into operation by 2018-19. At full capacity, this plant at Jaitapur in Maharashtra’s Ratnagiri district will trump Japan’s 8,200 MW Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant to become the world’s largest nuclear power project.
Local fishermen like Kotawadekar, who owns two trawlers and whose family has been in the trade for generations, fear that the project could cause irreparable damage to the region’s environment and marine ecology. The plant is expected to guzzle 52 billion litres of sea water every day — 15 times Mumbai’s daily water supply — and disgorge the same volume five degrees warmer back into the sea. Environmentalists say that would push away marine life along the coast into deeper waters, depleting the catch and forcing local fishermen to go further out into the sea.
In a statement to Forbes India, C.B. Jain clarified that NPCIL plans to initially store the spent fuel in an underwater storage facility adjoining the reactor building inside the plant premises. “The storage facility for spent fuel is adequate to store the spent fuel during 10 to 12 years of operation of the units,” he says. “Whenever government of India decides to establish a reprocessing facility in any location in India, the above spent fuel will be transported to such a facility in a safe manner.”
As the EPR is untested elsewhere, there are also concerns about hidden costs. There are currently four EPR reactors being set up globally, currently in various stages of construction — one in Finland, one in France and two in China. At least one of them — the EPR project in Finland — has witnessed a long delay in completion for undisclosed reasons and its costs have jumped from 3 billion euros to 7 billion euros. Areva did not respond to requests for comment on this issue.
(This story appears in the 08 April, 2011 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)