Outsiders barred from entering The Ratnagiri district administration, which has clamped prohibitory orders in the Jaitapur nuclear power project area, is preventing outsiders from entering the area even for public meetings, according to social activist Gopal Dukhande. Expressing solidarity He said that at a meeting to express solidarity with the people of Japan in Mithgavane village on March 25, the police were present in large numbers. “They harassed me and prevented me from entering...

Anti-nuclear campaigners in India see the earthquake that hit Japan last week, which threatens the meltdown of the Fukushima atomic power facility there, as a wakeup call for this country’s ambitious nuclear power programme. When India completed a nuclear power cooperation deal with the United States in October 2008, it threw open a 270 billion U.S. dollar market for nuclear reactors. Now members of the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers’ Group are queuing...

Despite Maharashtra Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan's assurance that the government would not go ahead with the Jaitapur nuclear power plant unless it was fully secure, the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL) has already sought tenders for building a concrete testing laboratory and a meteorological laboratory at Madhban, the proposed site of the plant. Long-term dangers cited As per the advertisement issued in a Marathi daily on Tuesday, the NPCIL called...

Union Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh has said that though India needs to learn appropriate lessons from the crisis at Japan's nuclear plants, the country cannot give up on nuclear energy. "What has happened in Japan is very serious. We will have to learn appropriate lessons and whatever additional safeguards, additional precautions are required we must take, but I don't believe India can abandon nuclear energy (programme)," Ramesh told mediapersons here yesterday. As...

The colossal hubris, ignorance and smugness of India’s nuclear czars take one’s breath away. The day Japan’s crisis took a decisive turn for the worse, with an explosion in a third Fukushima reactor and fresh radiation leaks, Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) secretary Sreekumar Banerjee declared that the nuclear crisis “was purely a chemical reaction and not a nuclear emergency as described by some section(s) of media”. Nuclear Power Corporation...