The contrast could not have been starker. On one side is an English teacher leading fishermen and villagers, using his unbridled oratory to spew propaganda against Kudankulam’s ready-to-start nuclear plant that will produce 1,000MW. Arraigned against him is a group of engineers who have devoted their lives to building nuclear power plants. Affable, soft-spoken and hurt that the world’s “safest” nuclear plant that they have built has not been allowed to...

The “power-hungry” India needs clean energy and the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant in Tamil Nadu is waiting to add 2,000 MW to the grid, the former President, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, said on Monday. “As an individual, I went to the [Kudankulam] plant. Really it is a modern plant, and there is 2,000 MW ready to be pumped into the grid,” he told journalists on the sidelines of a programme at the...

Mock drill was trigger, official insensitivity drives resentment against the nuclear power project St. Lourdes Church at Idinthakarai, a fishing village located about 80 km south of the Tirunelveli town, is an important place of worship for the local people. Of late, the Church, which is over 100 years old, is in the news for a different reason: it serves as the focal point for the protests against the Kudankulam Nuclear...

As the local people determinedly continue to resist the commissioning of the Kudankulam reactors, the statements of the nuclear establishment have acquired a desperate edge. The chief of the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL) claimed that a “foreign hand” was behind the protests. The former President, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, while assuring the locals that the reactors were “100% safe,” also wrote an article in The Hindu (“Special Essay,”...

-The Hindu   Allays apprehensions about Kudankulam nuclear plant If the great Chola emperor Raja Raja Chola I had believed for a moment that his monumental structure will be brought down in an earthquake, would we have got the magnificent Brihadeeswara Temple? Or, if Homi Bhabha had decided that radiation is too harmful for citizens, will the country be running a safe and successful atomic power programme for the last 40 years, producing 4,700...