Forty India nuclear plant workers contaminated
INDIA: More than 40 workers at a nuclear power station in northern
India have been exposed to tritium radiation in two separate leaks in
the past five weeks, company managers said on Tuesday.
The first accident occurred on June 23 when 38 people were exposed
during maintenance work on a coolant channel at the Rajasthan Atomic
Power Station in Rawatbhata, senior plant manager Vinod Kumar told AFP.
Two of them received radiation doses equivalent to the annual
permissible limit, he said, but all those involved have returned to
work.
In a second incident last Thursday, another four maintenance workers
at the plant were exposed to tritium radiation while they were repairing
a faulty seal on a pipe.
India is on a nuclear power drive, with a host of plants based on
Russian, Japanese, American and French technology under consideration or
construction.
The country's growing economy is currently heavily dependent on coal,
getting less than three percent of its energy from its existing atomic
plants, and the government hopes to raise the figure to 25 percent by
2050.
But environmental watchdogs have expressed concerns about safety in
India, where small-scale industrial accidents due to negligence or poor
maintenance are commonplace and regulatory bodies are often
under-staffed and under-funded.
The director of the Rajasthan power station, C.P. Jamb, confirmed the
second accident to AFP but said the radiation was within permissible
limits and posed no health threat.
"The workers were exposed to radiation from 10 to 25 per cent of the
annual limit," Jamb said. "Such minor leakages keep on happening but
they cause no harm." C.D. Rajput, director of the unit where the leak
happened, also said the radiation exposure "was well under the limits
and all the workers are working normally".
AFP
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