INDIAN AUTHORITIES have begun investigating the radioactive contamination of a drinking water cooler at a nuclear power plant in southern Karnataka state that led to some 55 workers being treated for poisoning, senior government officials said yesterday.
Routine tests on Wednesday showed employees at the Kaiga plant, 450km northwest of Bangalore, had been exposed to increased levels of tritium, used in nuclear reactors, in the cooler.
Exposure to tritium – also known as Hydrogen-3 and used in research, fusion reactors and neutron generators – increases the risk of cancer.
The chairman of the overarching Atomic Energy Commission, Anil Kakodkar, speaking to the Headlines Today television network, blamed the incident on sabotage.
Mr Kakodkar claimed that an insider had “played mischief” by spiking the cooler with the radioactive material and attempted to allay fears of an attack on the facility.
Mr Kakodkar said security was “fool-proof”, and there was no chance of an outsider gaining access to the atomic plant.
The Nuclear Power Corporation of India, which operates the country’s civil nuclear facilities, said in a statement that preliminary enquiries revealed no radioactive leak or security breach.
“It is possibly an act of mischief,” the statement said. No one needed to be hospitalised after the incident and everyone tested returned to work, it declared, adding the incident had not affected public safety.
The operational and safety record of India’s highly secretive Department of Atomic Energy has been somewhat questionable.
In the late 1990s the country’s nuclear facilities recorded at least 134 mishaps, or what they termed “Safety Related Unusual Occurrences”.
In 1998 the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board claimed that 28 of these incidents occurred in nine nuclear power stations, but none were “serious”.
Five of these, however, including a fire, led to plant closures, and another in 1997 to the death of a scientist after exposure to poisonous gas at a heavy water plant in Andhra Pradesh state.
In 1992 a major radioactive leak from ill-maintained pipelines near the Cirus and Dhruva reactor complex at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre near Mumbai was found to have caused severe soil contamination, reportedly affecting people living nearby.
India also concluded a deal with Canada at the weekend for access to much-needed nuclear technology and uranium after a gap of 34 years.
Prime minister Manmohan Singh, who negotiated the deal with counterpart Stephen Harper on the sidelines of the Commonwealth heads of government summit in the Caribbean, said the development “augurs extremely well” for ties between the states.
Canada ended nuclear co-operation with India in 1974 after it used plutonium from a Canadian-supplied reactor for its first atomic bomb.
Last year the Nuclear Suppliers Group of countries agreed to lift the three decade-plus ban on civilian nuclear trade with India, even though New Delhi declined to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.