BANGALORE: Activists working against the use of nuclear technology have started to criticise the incident of tritium finding its way into a drinking water cooler at the Kaiga Nuclear Power Plant. Officially, the incident is being viewed as a sabotage, which could very well be an inside job.
Dr Surendra Gadekar, a Gandhian and anti-nuclear activist from Vedchhi, Surat, says that from the Kaiga incident, it is evident that no lessons have been learnt from previous mistakes.
An apparently similar `mischief ' occurred on July 27, 1991, at the heavy water plant run by the Department of Atomic Energy at Rawatbhata in Rajasthan. Drums of tritiated heavy water were stored in a room that needed a whitewash. Labourers hired from outside found that the taps were not working and mixed the lime with the water in the drums, did the whitewash, then cleaned their brushes and faces with the same water and left -- all without any supervision. Later when the radiation counters started screaming, the worthies surmised that their rooms had got the costliest white- wash ever! They instituted a search for the "er- rant" labourers, who decided to remain incognito and suffer injuries in silence.
"Since they were only labourers and the incident did not cause any ripples in the English lan- guage media, the nuclear establishment was able to laugh the matter off," says Gadekar, a PhD from IIT-Kanpur and post-doctoral fellow at the Iowa State University, US. He was later a faculty member of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.
He says that the highly radioactive tritium costs around $30,000 a gram in Canada and $100,000 in the US. Heavywater gets tritiated only after use in the reactor either as moderator or coolant. The fact that this heavy water was not inside the reactor indicates that it was stored on the premises after use, perhaps for purification or upgrading prior to reuse. "There is no need to use reactor premises as storage space for used heavy water," says Gadekar.