SEVERAL important concerns pertaining to use of nuclear energy in India need to be debated, the Times of India said in an editorial Thrusday, but the protests spearheaded by the Shiv Sena against the proposed nuclear power plant in Jaitapur appear to ignore all of these for petty political ends. Such tactics, the paper said, merely divert attention from the real stakes: both India's energy future and our collective safety. Excerpts: If the protesters were serious about fostering debate about the risks of nuclear energy, they would have adopted peaceful means to signal discontent. Instead they chose violence, targeting a police station and a hospital, which suggests that their ‘cause' has been hijacked by something other than the nuclear issue. Politics explains it, since it appears that former Shiv Sainik Narayan Rane's defection to the Congress has been neither forgotten nor forgiven by his erstwhile colleagues. Rane is the Congress's pointsman for the power plant that is to house six reactors. It is more than likely his involvement is the trigger for the Sena-led protests. If the protesters are misguided in their tactics, their call to cancel the Jaitapur project is an impractical knee-jerk reaction to Japan's Fukushima catastrophe. This suggests the need to educate the public about nuclear power, which will need to be part of India's energy mix. As the principal scientific advisor to the government notes, for India to become a developed country, power consumption has to increase by six to eight times. All of this can't come from polluting fossil fuels or renewables alone. Nonetheless, our nuclear establishment is in need of a dramatic overhaul. The nuclear watchdog, the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, cannot continue as part of the organization tasked with building plants, the Department of Atomic Energy. As for Jaitapur, its environmental clearances were granted within 80 days of the Nuclear Power Corporation of India submitting its impact assessment report. Now, the environment minister's call for ‘deeper thinking' about Jaitapur begs the question what dynamics guide policy-making vis-a-vis the complete life cycle of nuclear power plants. All of this remains cloaked by a web of secrecy. Greater transparency on the part of the authorities is a must to keep the public informed about decision-making processes. It would be disingenuous to disregard the public's questions about nuclear power or the BJP's call for discussion. Post-Fukushima, there's been unease the world over, voiced by several environmental groups. In India, managing these concerns requires clear and frank debate about our nuclear architecture and an insistence on its openness. With India planning to expand its nuclear power programme, clarity is called for on what is being done to strengthen the safety and disaster-preparedness of nuclear power installations. __
