Even as investigations are on into the Kaiga nuclear plant radiation leakage, Anil Kakodkar, former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, said that the incident will not affect India’s international nuclear programme.
“It is a serious matter. This can happen anywhere, but there should be no complacency,” said Kakodkar. “We adhere to stringent procedures, but if there’s scope for any improvement, we must look into it. This has to be corrected to ensure such things don’t happen in the future.”
While S Jain, chairman and managing director of Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL), agreed that the incident will not impact the nuclear programme, he claimed that countries which are not happy with India being integrated in the global nuclear industry, may misuse the incident to “show us in a bad light”.
Jain alleged that the accident was an insider’s job as all NPCIL plants have a strong, multi-layered security system and only authorised people can work in the area.
“NPCIL follows strict procedures to verify employee credentials, including special security verification,” Jain said. “There are plans to install chemical sniffers . These are enclosures and they can detect from air samples if someone’s carrying any explosive. We’ve taken a policy decision to install them,” he added.
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