By: Olivia Sherman, News Writer
Content warning: mentions of police brutality.
According to India’s minister of state, Jitendra Singh, “nuclear power plants are likely to generate about 9% of the country’s electricity by 2047.” This year will also mark 100 years of independence from Britain’s colonial occupation of India. Nuclear power will help India achieve an emission rate of “Net-Zero by 2070.”
However, Dr. Ajmal Khan A.T., author, environmental scholar, and postdoctoral fellow of Harvard University, explained that things aren’t as idyllic as they seem. In his most recent lecture, hosted by SFU and the David Lam Centre, Khan presented a dialogue on India’s climate crisis and anti-nuclear activists from across the nation.
Power plants are costly to build, both in terms of economics and in the amount of land they require. “In most of these locations, normally uranium is being mined,” Khan said, which is damaging to the environment and the people living in its vicinity. Despite promises of better jobs and ways of living, many residents of India haven’t seen improvement. Figures from India’s department of atomic energy calculate that nuclear power plants generate only about 2% of India’s total electricity.
Khan quoted S. P. Udayakumar, an anti-nuclear activist: “If India was getting half or a third of its energy from nuclear plants, then maybe there would be an argument for it [ . . . ] But after all this, after years of crushing the peoples’ protest at Idinthakarai, is it really worth it?”
Khan focused his conversation on two nuclear power plants in India: the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KKNPP) in Tamil Nadu, in the south of India, and the Jaitapur Nuclear Power Plant (JNPP), Maharashtra, on the west coast. Both these power plants are ripe with controversy, he explained, and resistance from the people living in the surrounding areas have created a lasting legacy. “The movements in India are substantially different from the movements in Europe, North America, and any place outside South Asia. They have a different history,” Khan said.
In 1988, then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and Soviet head of state Mikhail Gorbachev signed an inter-government agreement to build two nuclear reactors. Construction of the KKNPP then began in 2002. From its beginnings, the KKNPP was deemed controversial: the reactors were set up without the publication of the Environmental Impacts Assessment Report or the Safety Analysis Report. Over one-million people live within 25 kilometres of the power plant, exceeding the recommendations from the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board. Its location is also in violation of the Coastal Regulation Zone, as it’s built just 500 metres from high tide. This location has been proven to be a concern for local fishers.
There were also concerns about its safety, as the agreement between Gorbachev and Gandhi was made only two years after the infamous Chernobyl disaster in 1986. After the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan, these concerns turned to dissent. Protests broke out in India, and police fired back with violence and tear gas. At least two were killed in these protests in 2012, while several thousand were arrested for sedition, or “waging war against the state.”
While the KKNPP was created with the help of Russia, the JNPP was in collaboration with a French nuclear company called Areva. The location along India’s west coast proved to be lush and fertile, with unique wildlife. Clearance was given for six nuclear reactors to be built on top of this land, destroying crops and grazing land, and contaminating fishing waters. Public hearings were one-sided, concerns were dismissed, and the clearance to construct the plant were proven to be fabricated. Protests spanning from 2010 to 2018 were once again met with violence. These reactors proved not only detrimental to the environment, but also to “life, lands, livelihoods.”
Khan explained how the series of protests shaped protestors into a community of grassroots activists. “It can even be said that, over the course of the movement [ . . . ] farmers and fishers [ . . . ] became a group to challenge the powerful Indian establishment.”
These anti-nuclear protests are covered in a series of essays edited by Khan. The book, People Against Nuclear Energy: Anti-nuclear Movements in India, can be accessed online through the SFU Library.
