Nuclear Liability Bill Must Cover Nuclear Submarine Too
By Dr.A.Gopalakrishnan
19 August, 2010
New Indian Express
India launched its first indigenous nuclear submarine INS Arihant on July 26, 2009. Serious nuclear accidents have occurred in the past in submarines during vessel manoeuvres or when they were docked at ports. As is the case of any first-of-a kind development project, the design, fabrication, and operation of the Indian nuclear submarine reactor involved several technical complexities hitherto mastered by Indian engineers. A submarine’s operation and manoeuvring indeed impose severe performance requirements on its reactor, far beyond what a land-based power reactor will have to meet. This can indeed be discerned from the following reported statements of Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) officials, which are mostly quoted from the article ‘Nuclear Arm’ published in the Frontline (August 15-28, 2009) and from few issues of The Hindu.
“India’s building of an 80 MWe Pressurised Water Reactor (PWR) at Kalpakkam marks the beginning of its indigenous PWR capability,” Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) chairman Anil Kakodkar said. An identical PWR of the same capacity would propel the indigenous nuclear-powered submarine INS Arihant that was launched on July 26, 2009. The two PWRs were built by the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC). — The reactor (at Kalpakkam), built under a highly secretive project called Plutonium Recyling Project (PRP), has been operating from September 2006. — The land-based reactor and the PWR that has been packed into INS Arihant’s hull are on a 1:1 scale (The Hindu, August 3, 2009).”
S Banerjee, current secretary/DAE, said, “The first and foremost (challenge that designers faced) was that it should be compact enough to be packed into the cramped space inside the boat. Its weight should be minimal. Another requirement was that the power in the reactor in a submarine should rise fast — from 25 per cent to 100 per cent within a few minutes. It is this attribute that gives the submarine its capability of attaining full speed from its cruising speed within a short time. — A submarine is a moving platform. It is submerged in water too. It undergoes pitching and rolling and other motions. The boat also faces the danger of being ripped apart from depth-charges.— Against these odds, we have designed and developed this reactor.”
Banerjee continues , “— a submarine is operated in an isolated condition, without having any support from outside — There are novelties not only in its design but in its manufacturing. The steam generator, which produce super-heated steam to drive the turbine, is a novelty in itself. There are also novelties in the design and manufacture of heat exchangers, control rod mechanisms, pressurisers and so on.” Asked whether the Russians helped in designing and building the PWR, Kakodkar, Banerjee and Basu were emphatic that BARC developed it on its own. (Frontline, August 15-28, 2009).
From the above statements of the DAE, it can be understood that the technology is many-fold complex and absolutely new to the designers, containing several first-of-a kind ‘novelties’ which they have introduced, whose integrated performance is yet to be determined. The need for compactness in layout gives rise to sharp piping bends compared to land-based reactors, resulting in added stresses. This and the potential for thermal fatigue failure and severe shock and vibration design requirements take engineers to totally unknown design regimes. Swaying motions under sea currents and manoeuvrings actions could play havoc with control rod drives, the closing of small clearances, and fluid sloshing loads in the pressuriser and elsewhere, all of which are absent in any other reactor DAE has ever designed or operated on land.
In short, Parliament must recognise that the nuclear reactor installed in INS Arihant, represents a much higher potential risk for causing a major nuclear accident either at the port of docking or in India’s EEZ waters or in international waters. Normally, even after stabilising the design and operation, it is recognised world over that even the so-called ‘safe’ and ‘proven’ submarine reactors present a higher risk of a major nuclear accident, tens of times larger than the risk estimate for the best land-based power reactors. For these submarines, the time they are docked at a port is used for doing maintenance, inspection and testing, and fuelling work, some of which may be done while the reactor is kept operating at very low power. Several essential physics and safety checks are quietly conducted at the port of call. All such operations are prone to the grave risk of a potential nuclear accident/incident. If INS Arihant’s base port is Visakhapatnam, for example, the entire population of that city could be at a high risk of being exposed to radiation from an inadvertent nuclear accident, whenever this submarine is in port. Besides, there is the possibility that the entire port facilities and substantial areas of the coastline could also be irrecoverably contaminated by radioactivity in case of a reactor accident.
Under these circumstances, there should be absolutely no question of excluding nuclear submarine reactors from the purview of the nuclear liability Bill. To ensure the rights for justice and suitable compensation for the potential Indian victims who could suffer from an accident in such a reactor, legal protection under the liability Bill has to be provided to them by Parliament.
Section-2(i)(A) of the current liability Bill defines a nuclear installation as ‘any nuclear reactor other than one with which a means of transport is equipped for use as a source of power, whether for propulsion thereof or for any other purpose’. This definition is given with the specific aim of excluding the nuclear submarine(s) from the purview of the nuclear liability law. This should certainly NOT be accepted by Parliament, in view of the not so trivial potential for Indian nuclear submarine accidents at an Indian port city or in the Indian Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).
Section-2(i)(A) shall therefore be modified to define a nuclear installation under this Bill as ‘Any nuclear reactor whether operating, shut-down or decommissioned, irrespective of whether it is under IAEA Safeguards or not, whether it is situated on land or in a mobile or stationary platform such as a ship, submarine, or an off-shore platform, and irrespective of whether it is used for civilian research or for electric or thermal power production or used as a defense research or production facility/military installation’
(Dr.Gopalakrishnan is a Former Chairman of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board of the Government of India . He can be reached at [email protected] )
