Speaking to the media on March 20, Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said: "What has happened in Japan is very serious. We will have to learn appropriate lessons and whatever additional safeguards, additional precautions are required we must take, but I don't believe India can abandon nuclear energy (program)."
Ramesh was apparently responding to the increasing noises made by the anti-nuclear brigades, demanding abandonment of power generation through nuclear fission. The Wall Street Journal on March 18 cited experts saying one immediate impact will be the delay of projects and the escalation of costs in India. "How many more warnings do we need before we finally grasp that nuclear reactors are inherently hazardous?" Greenpeace said in a release from New Delhi earlier this week. "The nuclear industry always tells us that situation like this cannot happen with modern reactors, yet Japan is currently in the middle of a potentially devastating nuclear crisis. Nuclear power will always be vulnerable to the potentially deadly combination of human error, design failure and natural disaster," Greenpeace said.
India's Nuclear Power Corporation (NPC) Director, G. Nageshwar Rao, at a media briefing, pointed out on March 19 that, because of recurring power shortages in India, which causes power outages in some nuclear power plants, the Indian reactors were built with passive cooling systems, which do not depend much on instrumentation, unlike those in Japan. The engineered systems in these reactors operate passively. For instance, pressure relief valves function without operator control and despite any loss of auxiliary power. Rao also said the Indian reactors have adopted the third-generation safety design features, in terms of the various passive safety features backing up the active safety systems, ensuring that the core is always filled with water containing boron and the temperature of water would remain well below the limits.
It should be noted that the passive cooling system used in the Indian reactors is not an "inherently safe" system. The pebble bed reactor is an example of a reactor exhibiting an inherently safe process that is also capable of providing a passive safety component for all operational modes. As the temperature of the fuel rises in the pebble bed reactor, Doppler broadening increases the probability that neutrons are captured by U-238 atoms. This reduces the chance that the neutrons are captured by the fissile U-235 atoms and initiate fission, thus reducing the reactor's power output and placing an inherent upper limit on the temperature of the fuel.
