“No work’s happening now,” S.A. Bhardwaj, director of technical services, said in New Delhi yesterday. “Once the agitations are over, it’ll take us about two months to get contract workers back at the site. We can start generating power about four months after that.”
The first of two 1,000-megawatt reactors at Kudankulam, which state-owned Rosatom Corp. is helping to build, will start in a couple of weeks, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said in Moscow Dec. 16, after meeting Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.
The plant near the southern tip of India is part of 60,000 megawatts of nuclear capacity planned by Singh to battle a shortage of power in Asia’s second-fastest growing major economy. Residents of nearby villages intensified their protest in August, five months after an earthquake in Japan triggered the world’s worst nuclear disaster in 25 years.
The protesters have asked the government to shut the plant, demanding that more be done to ensure the safety, livelihood and security of the people.
Facing stiff resistance from people on the Kudankulam plant in Tamil Nadu and the Jaitapur nuclear power plant in Maharashtra, the NPCIL is planning to start a communication drive in the areas, reports SME Times.
"We did not realise that we keep talking about nuclear power plants and other technical things but never tried to allay fears among people about impacts of radiation," said S.A. Bhardwaj.
He said the government did not talk to people about benefits of nuclear power before starting the project and it is necessary to take people along.
"We have to tell them that nuclear power is the only solution to meet the growing power demands of the country. We recently realised that we have been projected as being very secretive at NPCIL," he said.
Bhardwaj said NPCIL did not get a chance to talk to people of Jaitapur and Kudankulam "directly".
"We wish to talk to people directly and are confident of allaying all their fears. We have started campaign in support of nuclear energy on FMs, TV and through other means," he said.
NPCIL is also planning to make public display of radiation figures from nuclear power plants and comparing them with radiation emanating from other things like mobile phones, X-rays and others at various places in the country.
The start of the first unit of the plant has been delayed to May from December and the second is scheduled to begin in February 2013, according to Nuclear Power Corp.’s website.
