Environmental group Poovulagin Nanbargal and Amma Makkal Munnetra Kazhagam general secretary T.T.V. Dhinakaran have sought the constitution of an expert committee to look into the multiple snags at the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KKNPP).
Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) chairman Kamlesh Nilkanth Vyas told a Tamil news channel at a nuclear conference in Moscow last week that the department was trying to address the problems at the KKNPP units.
Asked if there was something unusual with the multiple shutdown of the plants, Mr. Vyas said, “Yes, I do agree. We are trying to address [them]. You may realise that Kudankulam was the first 3+ generation plant, possibly in the world. There were initial problems. Even in Tarapur, there were similar problems initially. I feel definitely NPCIL is putting in tremendous amount of work and they will be able to overcome the difficulties,” he said.
In a reply to an RTI filed by G. Sundarrajan of Poovulagin Nanbargal in January this year, the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd detailed the number of times the plants had tripped since March 2016 and had to be shut down due to various reasons including for maintenance.
As per the RTI, unit-1 had tripped 11 times since March 2016 while unit 2 had stopped 19 times, including stoppages as part of commissioning test programme and planned and unplanned stoppages.
“The Kudankulam expansion plans must be stopped immediately and an expert committee must be formed to look into the multiple failures of the two plants. The government has accepted that there have been failures in the nuclear plants as per the RTI info The two units have stopped 66 times in the past 6 years,” Mr. Dhinakaran said in a series of tweets.
Mr. Dhinakaran also said in his tweets that the expert committee must comprise representatives from the local community at Kudankulam, and the Central government must takes adequate measures to prevent any disasters.
Mr. Sundarrajan, in a statement, said work on the two plants must be stopped till an independent expert committee conducts an audit and work on the new plants must be stopped forthwith till the issues in the two plants are addressed.