NPCIL losing Rs 3 crore a day due to Koodankulam protests

C Shivakumar

Chennai:

Nuclear Power Corporation of India is losing more than Rs 3 crore a day as revenue loss besides Rs 8 crore a month as establishment cost due to the Koodankulam protests, according to site director of Koodankulam Nuclear Power Plant M Kashinath Balaji.

Talking to reporters after participating in a plenary session of Conference on Disaster Management ‘Certainty the object – Uncertainty the Reality’ organized by Confederation of Indian Industry here on Saturday, he said if the protests were not held we could have gone into full commercial production by December and would have been generating 20 million units per day. “Now we are losing Rs 3 crore a day as revenue loss besides incurring a loss of another Rs 8 crore as establishment cost,” said Balaji.

“The hot run was over in August and we were in the process of inspection. Even the emergency exercise training was conducted as a parallel requirement when the protest started on October 13,” he said, adding that NPCIL has spent nearly 90 per cent of Rs 15,000 crore on the site.

“After the protest, no work is being carried out as we don’t want to create law and order problem and is going under the direction of district administration. Although we have more than thousand employees in the township only 50 technical people are going inside the site to do the surveillance work so that the equipment does not get deteriorated,” he said, adding that the safety of the fuel is being maintained.

He said now it will take another five to six months to make the plant go critical. To a query on IAEA data on volcanoes present in the Indian Ocean or the prevalence of seismic seiches, S Kalirajan, additional chief engineer of the plan said there are adequate safeguards for any tsunami threat. He said the seiches won’t affect the reactor as it is 40 metre above and consists of 2.5 lakh tonnes of concrete structure.

Tamil Nadu is expected to get 925 MW of power from the two reactors while neighbouring Karnataka will get 442 MW, Kerala 266 MW, Pondycherry 67 MW and another 300 MW is unallocated, said Kalirajan.