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Durga’s fury

By Melody Kemp - posted Monday, 1 October 2007


Last week I was told that the US had promised it’s old adversary Vietnam, technical assistance to build nuclear power plants. To their embarrassment they found that the Vietnamese still held weapons grade uranium given to them by the Russians during the American War of the 1970’s. So now the Vietnamese are quietly going around saying “Pssst, want some great weapons grade uranium?” on the global market.

They could try India.

“India has been planning its nuclear program even before independence period of the 1950’s, after some Indian graduates from Berkeley ordered critical parts to build a cyclotron before they could return home” said Sreedhar Ramamurthi, whom I recently met in Hong Kong, at a gathering of labour groups from the greater Asian region. At the beginning of his career, Sreedhar was employed as a Scientific Officer with India’s Department of Atomic Energy.

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A highly qualified earth scientist, Sreedhar was in charge of India’s uranium exploration efforts for a couple of years until he resigned in protest at the lack of social responsibility.

“If you record surface levels of radiation, then it should be reported so that people can avoid those areas. You know how settlements expand. But I was sworn to secrecy.”

In 1948, India set up its own atomic energy commission to search for and extract uranium ore. The atomic energy commission then set up the Uranium Corporation of India Limited (UCIL) later that year as a public sector enterprise.

Under the administrative control of India's atomic energy commission UCIL began its first uranium operations in 1968 at Jaduguda, mining and processing 1,000 metric tones a day. Under the scumble of tailings the soil continues to radiate. The minority people, particularly the children, have been exhibiting terrible illnesses, their environment devastated. It is just the sort of situation that caused Sreedhar to resign. The evidence of neglect of its peoples, coupled with the serial denial of UCIL’s officials, is knocking the heads off statues being erected to safeguards and the value of international inspections.

It’s not Chernobyl. Instead, critics argue, children with skeletal distortions, partially formed skulls, swollen heads, missing eyes and ears, fused fingers, blood disorders, and brain damage are the result of constant exposure to very low toxic levels of emission. Contamination is now virtually everywhere around Jaduguda.

The Adivasis, two groups, the Ho and the Santhal, have lived here for hundreds - possibly thousands - of years. This should ring bells of comparability with the Australian Aboriginal peoples, whose land sits above uranium fields and who have been bullied and coerced by both the governments and the mining companies to hand over rights to mine. It is into this India, of low level sources and indignant denial, that Prime Minister Howard has decided to drop Australian uranium. The recent amendments to the 1975 Aboriginal Land Rights Act have enabled the Howard Government to become the Fuller Brush men of a nuclear future.

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Recently John Howard struck a deal to sell uranium to New Delhi in a telephone conversation with his Indian counterpart Manmohan Singh. Following US President George W. Bush, he noted earlier that sales to India would depend on the implementation of a landmark civilian nuclear deal between New Delhi and Washington. But as we know, shit happens.

"Australia has decided in principle to export uranium to India, subject to India agreeing to very stringent safeguards and conditions," Howard told reporters. Such as those in operation at Jaguduga one would suppose.

Howard went on. "Our officials will now enter into negotiations regarding the conditions. We want to be satisfied that the uranium will only be used for peaceful purposes." Such shallow depth of field.

“In the early days the government had big ideas.” Sreedhar continued. “But until now very little power has been generated. Of the 4,000 megawatts originally proposed, only 400 have in fact been generated by India’s reactors.”

“Instead India has spent its uranium on nuclear deterrence.” After all China and Pakistan make fractious neighbours.

As early as 1917, Rabindranath Tagore, the mystic poet and essayist, wrote about his doubts on the fortifying effects of military strength. If "in his eagerness for power", Tagore argued, a nation "multiplies his weapons at the cost of his soul, then it is he who is in much greater danger than his enemies". Indeed China is known to be alarmed at India’s nuclear promiscuity. But then Howard is talking up a deal with China, so escalation is inevitable.

“The previous government initiated the deal with the US but of course the current Prime Minister Monmohan Singh is a World Bank and IMF protégé, so has their (the US’) interests as well as those of India at heart.” Sreedhar went on, “It is how they coincide that is interesting”, seeming in every phrase to contradict the weasel words of those doing deals.

“India’s uranium sources are of a low grade, so we have in mind fast breeder reactors”, Sreedhar added. For those who think fast breeders to be rabbits, they are neutron reactors that produce more fuel so that more reactors have to be built to use up the supply. Or one could simply build weapons. They have been spectacular failures in Europe and other locations.

“Yes that is true,” Sreedhar agreed. “But despite that, our Minister cannot be swayed. Fast breeders are still the focus of Indians nuclear program.”

In 2004 Anil Kakodkar, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and Secretary, Department of Atomic Energy told The Hindu newspaper that while nuclear power has many civilian applications, “We have also contributed towards nuclear weapons ability in the country. India today is a country with nuclear weapons to ensure its long-term security ...”

When asked if India’s fast breeders would be more successful than those of Europe, he responded:

Fast-breeder reactors are more important to India than to other countries which have capabilities in nuclear power technology. This is because of the nuclear resource profile we have in the country (sic). Our uranium reserves - what we have - as per the present state of exploration will be able to support 10,000 MWe generating capacity, which is not large. But it is the starting point for setting up fast reactors. When the same uranium, which will support 10,000 MWe generating capacity in the PHWRs, comes out as spent fuel and we process that spent fuel into plutonium and residual uranium, and use it in the fast reactors, we will be able to go to electricity capacity which will be as large 500,000 MWe. This is due to the breeding potential of the fast reactors, using the plutonium-uranium cycle. That is the importance of the fast-breeder reactors under Indian conditions, compared to other countries.

India has declared that it would divide its civilian and military nuclear programs, place safeguards on its civilian nuclear facilities, and allow international inspections. But India will have sole discretion over whether to classify any new reactors as military or civilian, a decision that will affect which ones are subject to international scrutiny. Already, eight nuclear reactors - and all future military reactors - will remain off-limits to inspections.

Howard and Bush may burble on about peaceful means and safeguards, but as I was halfway through this article Sreedhar emailed me from India with the news that a private company had bought rights to a huge uranium mine in Niger. One wonders: how accountable are private companies?

Taurian Resources Private Limited, Mumbai, has recently won a contract which gives it exclusive rights over 3000 sq. km. of the Sahara Desert known to be rich in deposits of uranium (The Hindu, August 19, 2007).

This also ups the ante in terms of the supplier calling the shots. I have written that Burma is also processing and selling yellow cake via intermediaries in Russia and possibly China. The issue may not be so much how we solve global warming, as how do we stop global nuclear irrationality?

But it appears that rather than greet with news with horror and knee-tightening concern, the applause from the bull pens in the stock markets has been deafening. India looks and feels like a stallion out of control, neither swerving or swaying from its tail streaming path.

Dump and run

India has no coherent plan for waste disposal. “You can see that at the moment we just dump it in the ponds at Jaduguda”, Sreedhar told me.

“The Pollution Control Board is badly understaffed so there is now way to keep an eye on what happens to waste even if we wanted to. They have been inefficient for 60 years. It is not likely that now the crush is on there are going to suddenly reform. India has this reputation for ineffective bureaucracy that is well deserved”, he laughed.

“Personally I think that nuclear power is hopelessly inefficient. It costs too much to build reactors and more to run them. We need to be looking at alternatives and conservation now. But India is fixated on nuclear and is determined to go ahead.”

All of the above issues are of concern in all neighbouring nations wanting to go nuclear.

“We have ten or 12 local sources such as in Andhra Pradesh where uranium has been found, but the population density of that area is 900 per square kilometre so it is not advisable. We have to buy the stuff to avoid social conflict. We can reassure the people that their land won’t be taken and the cost of keeping social peace is buying in uranium.”

Lies, damned lies and nuclear salesmen

In recent times the US and India have agreed again to work collaboratively and openly on nuclear programs ending, some say, years of hypocrisy. But the truth of what is known, or agreed to, is one of the most fungible and secretive areas of foreign and defence policy - the usual repositories of born liars. The US recently reclassified newly unclassified documents which referred to the deployment and number of nuclear missiles during the Cold War. It is highly unlikely that a nation that is so cute with the truth of many years past, would come clean about exactly what it holds and where now. Which makes the Nuclear Non Proliferation treaty look as viable as a Lands Rights claim in Australia.
 
In early September this year, the US admitted to flying nuclear weapons across the country, under the wings of a B-52, despite supposedly infallible command and control systems. Anyone who had seen the chillingly serious Fail Safe with G. Clooney as a doomed pilot aiming to drop a nuke on Moscow, may now conclude that the script might not be at all fanciful.

Dr Abdul Kalam, the gentle philanthropist who drove India’s detonation in Pokhran on the edge of Rajasthan in 1998, was known to have whooped “I have heard the earth thundering below our feet and rising ahead of us in terror. It was a beautiful sight.” This was the second explosion in Pokhran. The first, shrouded in secrecy, was given the nod by Mrs Gandhi in defiance of her namesake and the will of the people. She was, like Tagore predicted, moved to ensuring India’s nuclear capability by China’s own weapons build up.

Sreedhar said that the Indian-Pakistani stand off in the 1970s and 1990s could easily have turned to war. But it’s happening all over again according to Sreedhar who concludes that the government is ready to go if provoked. They are just fine tuning the computer simulations, to fine tune the event.

The Big Bang: bang bangs

Those living comfortable middle class lives in the western world, who console themselves that mining or uranium shares will solve global poverty or warming problems are worthy of drugs for delusions. The reality is the poor suffer for the imperial intentions of the rich. Years ago I suggested to asbestos activists frustrated by inaction that they monitor the airborne asbestos levels outside the expensive private schools. It worked. But how to bring the outcome of all this uranium profligacy to the rich? The best idea will be awarded a Geiger counter, and a trip to a distant sinking Pacific island.

Uranium sources are finite. Some experts argue that they may last at present rates of consumption for another 30 years. Asia is approaching nuclear power like bowls of noodles, to be gulped down. To have a nuke is like having ones own national airline: a symbol of modernity and muscle-flexing nationalism.

If the rate of consumption doubles, the source will be exhausted all the sooner. A competent and safe nuclear plant costs the earth and takes about nine to 15 years to build. If global use continues to expand, then many power plants will be completed after the supply of high quality uranium has been exhausted. The Cambridge Research group report that the energy required to process low grade ore exceeds the energy output, which may not dissuade the most ardent nukeaholic.

India is merely an exemplar of what is a very alarming trend, one which Prime Minister John Howard is eager to reward. If one takes into account Amartya Sen’s reflections about the addiction of war and weapons that the Veda’s warn us about, then the Prime Minister can be likened to a pusher, selling an addictive substance to those who have a craving for nihilistic growth.

The silent movie farce of Vietnam has exposed the game. Growth is a chimera which keeps us running over the desert in a feverish attempt to catch the image of happiness and inviolability. It is a way to death, to anomie and biospherical catastrophe. Already global cancer rates are heaving skywards, while doctors try assiduously to attribute them to lifestyle factors.

Durga the demon Goddess walks through the malls and factories of development. The Prime Minister wants to keep the fetish alive, and divert attention away from the alternatives and conservation. The drug of choice is yellow-caked and cooked.

Radiation measurements outside the Methodist Ladies College anyone?

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About the Author

Melody Kemp is a freelance writer in Asia who worked in labour and development for many years and is a member of the Society for Environmental Journalism (US). She now lives in South-East Asia. You can contact Melody by email at musi@ecoasia.biz.

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