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...

The new bribery revelations, a rigged process to import reactors and safety-related concerns must lead to the long-blocked scrutiny of the nuclear deal by Parliament. The world's worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl raises troubling questions about India's plans for a huge expansion of its nuclear power programme through reactor imports. Given its low per-capita energy consumption, India must generate far more electricity to economically advance. So it needs more nuclear-generated power....

The ongoing nuclear incidents involving the Fukushima reactor in earthquake/tsunami affected Japan has posed serious questions already to the nuclear industry in India as well. Prabir Purkayastha writes. As I write these lines, it appears that Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant is moving towards a core meltdown as it has lost control of the cooling system. An explosion has blown the wall of one of the buildings there and radioactive iodine and...

The amounts of various radioactive releases into the environment are unknown, as are the winds and other factors that determine how radioactivity will disperse. The different radioactive materials reported at the nuclear accidents in Japan range from relatively benign to extremely worrisome. The central problem in assessing the degree of danger is that the amounts of various radioactive releases into the environment are now unknown, as are the winds and other...

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expressed deep sorrow today and offered the full support of the United Nations after a massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami struck Japan, killing dozens of people and destroying towns, villages and large swathes of infrastructure. UN agencies say they are on standby to assist in Japan and any other countries that may also be hit by tsunamis in the wake of the quake, which was one of the...