Should India Build a Beachfront Nuclear Power Plant?
Should India Build a Beachfront Nuclear Power Plant? -
Last week, somewhere between two and eight thousand people revived protests against a beachfront nuclear power station, scheduled to open over the next few weeks, in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The same area suffered vast destruction in the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. Opponents of the project worry the facility is vulnerable to the same risks that led to last year’s Fukushima nuclear disaster. The protest shows some signs of spreading. Police arrested 250 opponents of the project who were traveling to the scene from a neighboring state, in one recent case .
Anti-nuke protests are old hat and even eight thousand people isn’t many in a province of millions. The protesters, however, stopped the project from proceeding once already, a year ago. Shortly after the Fukushima disaster, protesters who worried about a similar event in India formed a ring around the Tamil Nadu plant’s construction site, delaying its opening by a year.
The latest demonstrations are a response to a decision a few weeks ago. India’s nuclear regulatory agency gave the Russian-built plant’s operators the OK to start loading nuclear fuel into one of two reactors, the final stage before bringing the plant on-line. That provoked opponents to gather on a beach and to wade into the water around the plant. Police broke up the demonstration with teargas, resulting in chaos, several injuries and one death, according to reports like this one.