Jadugoda: The disgusting underbelly of India's nuclear industry

Paid a visit yesterday to our planetary caretaker friends over at Intercontinental Cry and have since spent every possible online moment educating myself about India’s uranium and nuclear power industries. Crazed and wanton don’t even begin to cover it. Uranium mining is consistently written off as a necessary evil by nuclear energy advocates, including some among the ‘Stop Climate Change’ crowd, who are evidently willing to sacrifice anything in the interests of clean air and predictable weather patterns. Don’t get me wrong, i care about air quality, extreme weather, desertification, etc. as much as any environmentalist, but i don’t believe nuclear power is the solution, in large part because of the actual power source, which is not some monolithic, theoretically earthquake-proof reactor, but uranium ore, mined on a massive scale, generating a lethal legacy to which ‘long-term’ doesn’t do justice.

Jadugoda has been referred to as ‘India’s Navajo Nation’, which under any other circumstances would be considered a great compliment, given the incredible beauty of Navajo lands. Located in the eastern state of Jharkhand, it has a 40+ year history of uranium mining and levels of contamination and negative health effects that reflect this. While it may be true that Jharkhand is an ‘environmentally friendly state [that] has lots of tourism potential. Whether you like pristine nature or the thrill of adventure, whether you are on a religious introspection, or health rejuvenation, Jharkhand can enchant your senses,’ with an estimated 48,000 tonnes of uranium ore in its bedrock, it seems fair to say that enchantment will require some strategic touring, a lengthy list of areas to avoid.

The problems at Jadugoda detailed in a 2010 WISE-Uranium report include displaced persons, political repression of displaced persons, a long, on-going history of labor union strikes, repeated pipeline bursts and tailings spills, health crises and lack of responsible government oversight. Given that the Uranium Corporation of India Ltd. (UCIL) is a public sector holding of India’s Department of Atomic Energy (DEA), the level of government complicity in ignoring and/or denying the problems at all of the country’s uranium mines is hardly a shock. It’s important to note that UCIL not only operates 6 mines in Jharkhand, but also has ore processing plants there to leach the ore and then mill the uranium for use in nuclear reactors. A public hearing is being held today to discuss UCIL's plans to extend the life of the Jadugoda mine, and while one wants to hope said extension will be denied, the overall picture of India’s nuclear ambitions leads this writer to expect otherwise.

The Jharkhandi Organization Against Radiation (JOAR) has been staging protests locally and at UCIL hearings for many years now, in addition to conducting their own environmental and health monitoring activities. The film Buddha weeps in Jadugoda offers an in-depth look at what they have been faced with and is full of personal testimonies that certainly rival the horrific experiences of those still suffering from the Bhopal catastrophe. . In one segment of the film, a Deputy Manager of a mill is speaking to a group of local villagers and, after explaining how there will be little uranium left in the waste stream, he has the audacity to make the situation sound almost poetic:

yes, the harmful dust may fly over you

but it is as safe as the sand in the river

but do not worry

we are here to protect you

the energy rays that come out will not reach your homes

it will become gas and go up

without harming you in any way

i'm convinced people gets these kinds of managerial jobs not because they're good managers or engineers, but because they get high marks when it comes to treating others with arrogance, hubris and outright idiocy. Here is part 4 of the film, focusing on the health problems people have been facing. Indian Doctors For Peace And Development published a study in 2007, Black Magic of Uranium at Jadugoda, which documents these at several villages near mining sites. They found that 4.5% mothers reported congenital birth defects, while nearly 10% report death of infants due to congenital defects. Higher rates of sterility and cancers affect the indigenous people disproportionately.

Reading about situations like this always leads me to ask about motivation; in this case, what is driving India to produce so much uranium. i found a very informative slide show put together by UCIL, reflecting such bold ambitions for India’s nuclear power program that one can’t help but wonder if these folks have been drinking the contaminated village water. The country has a 3 stage nuke power program that includes Pressurized Heavy Water Reactors, Boiling Water Reactors, Faster Breeder Reactors and Thorium-based reactors; they are also planning to construct 2 VVERs (Russian designed). The projected power potentials (in megawatts) go from 10,000 MWe in Stage One (PHWRs), to 530,000 MWe in Stage Two (Fast Breeder Reactors), to POWER POTENTIAL IS VERY LARGE in Stage Three (Thorium Based Reactors). Surely and under the circumstances, ‘very large’ is an inadequate, fantasy caliber assessment for long-term energy output. If AREVA or TEPCO came out with that, you know the stockholders would just laugh them out of the boardroom. At any rate, India’s DEA has big plans for a so-called clean energy future, but like all grande national plans, ironies abound.

In addition to the irony of devastating environment and health with more and bigger uranium mines in order to ‘go clean’, the country will still need to import uranium and this they are having trouble doing because of their refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT). In 2008, Kevin Rudd got the Australian government to veto selling uranium to India until it signed the NPT, and since then, other countries have joined the ban against uranium sales to New Delhi. According to The Australian, ‘Depletion of its uranium reserves caused India's production of nuclear power to fall last decade. Its 19 nuclear plants produce only 4 per cent of its electricity, but that level is expected to doubled over the next 25 years as new plants are commissioned.’ The irony, of course, is that the purpose of the NPT was to promote ‘peaceful’ i.e. energy, applications of nuclear materials, yet even though India needs the energy more than it needs a few hundred nuclear warheads, they are sacrificing the former out of principle (i suppose) to possess the latter. Never fear, a solution is at hand. Bloomberg reported earlier this month that Nuclear Power Corp. of India is considering a venture with state-run UCIL to start buying mines overseas. Maybe they’ll move into Navajo country, wouldn’t that be ironic to the extreme?

There are few issues as pressing as energy in this century, because its ripple effects are so strong. JOAR and its peer organizations at uranium mines around the world may not have all the answers, though my guess is that they are probably more concerned than the rest of us when it comes to finding a way forward for energy and climate that incorporates values of environmental justice and sustainability into the broader equation. Uranium mining runs counter to those values, and no matter how clean and advantageous the nuclear power lobby makes those reactors look, there is no escaping what lies underneath them, no way around the damage inflicted by uranium mining. I, for one, do not want to see a group of congenitally damaged descendants who live atop tailing sites left carrying the ball after the last reactor is shut down, cracked apart or washed away in a tsunami.