Shiv Sena blows the bugle against Jaitapur project

Nuclear Power Corporation allays fear, says the project site is 25 metres above sea level.

The Shiv Sena today raised the ante against the 10,000-megawatt (Mw) Jaitapur nuclear power project in Maharashtra, saying it would not tolerate the imposition of such projects in the ecologically-sensitive Konkan region.

“Don’t even think of experimenting mega nuclear projects in the Konkan region, situated along the coastline. There is every danger of damage to the environment, horticulture and fishing,” Shiv Sena Executive President Uddhav Thackeray said during his maiden visit to the project site. He reminded the gathering that after the tsunami in Japan, there was massive radiation and extensive damage.

He gave a pledge that his party would lend all possible support to locals who are against the project. “Shiv Sena will be behind you with all its might to see that the project does not come up.”

Thackeray’s call comes at a time when Jairam Ramesh, the Union Minister of State for Environment and Forests, has appealed to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to look at the six nuclear parks, including the Jaitapur project, the government plans to develop, in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima disaster. Ramesh said a project of 10,000 Mw should not be developed at one location.

Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Anantrao Pawar, who holds the finance, planning and energy portfolios, told the state assembly yesterday that there was no need to press the panic button on the Jaitapur project due to the nuclear disaster in Japan. He said the Centre was taking all precautionary safety measures to avoid such incidents.

Thackeray came down heavily on the Congress-led government for alleged excesses on locals. He warned if such excesses continued, people would dump the Congress-led government.

Locals recalled similar protests by the Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) alliance in 1990s against the Dabhol project, now known as the Ratnagiri power project. The project was dumped during the Shiv Sena-BJP rule in 1995, but it was revived in 1996. The project started its operations in May 1999, but closed down in May 2001 on legal and operational issues. In April 2006, it again started its operations.

Meanwhile, Nuclear Power Corporation (NPC), which operates 20 plants in the country, clarified it was not accurate to compare the seismic risks of different countries, as they were not using the same scale and the same terminology to qualify the different seismic zones. It said each country established its own categorisation and it was broadly agreed that India, and Jaitapur in particular, was in a significantly lower seismic zone than Japan and Fukushima. An earthquake of the same magnitude was thus more than unlikely to happen here, it added.

NPC officials told Business Standard that the severest event ever observed at the closest fault located 64 km from the Jaitapur site was the 1967 Koyna earthquake, which reached a magnitude of 6.5 (3,000 times less powerful than the one that just occurred in Japan). Further, the average natural elevation of the Jaitapur site being at 25 meters above the mean sea level, the lowest site-point, after groundwork, was set to be at 10 meters above the MSL, they said. This positions the plant way above the safe grade elevation calculated for the site and, therefore, naturally protects the plant from the impact of a tsunami, according to them.