India's Uranium Nightmare

While major newspapers and television stations in India celebrated a major political victory by India as it covered the announcement of the Indo-U.S. deal, contrast this with an incident which happened Dec. 24.

Thousands of liters of radioactive waste spilled in a creek because of a pipe burst at a Uranium Corporation of India Limited (UCIL) facility at Jadugoda, India. It neither made newspaper headlines nor did UCIL come to know of the disastrous leak till alerted by the local villagers. Such are the realities of nuclear facilities in India.

The Dec. 24 accident is the latest example of UCIL’s callousness, which occurred in a small village inhabited largely by displaced families whose lands were acquired to construct two of the three storage dams, also known as tailings ponds. Based on the experience of similar accidents in other countries, the negative effects on human and environmental health will impact not just Jadugoda, but several communities living downstream, perhaps even hundreds of kilometers away.

UCIL had no alarm mechanism to alert the company in cases of such a disaster. Instead, the villagers who had arrived at the scene of the accident soon after the pipe burst informed the company of the toxic spill.

The toxic sludge spewed into a creek for nine hours before the flow of the radioactive waste was shut off. Consequently, a thick layer of toxic sludge on the surface of the creek killed scores of fish, frogs, and other riparian life. The waste from the leak also reached a creek that feeds into the Subarnarekha river, seriously contaminating the water resources of the communities living hundreds of kilometers along the way. This is not the first such accident. In 1986, a tailing dam had burst open and radioactive water flowed directly into the villages.

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