Safe

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So it's all OK in India:

Indian Express .com   Thursday 17th of March, 2011: The crisis in Japan need not be an occasion for panic or alarm, rather, it ought to be a trigger for further safety enhancements at all nuclear power stations, the top officer in India’s atomic energy establishment said today. Srikumar Banerjee, Secretary in the Department of Atomic Energy, maintained that India’s reactors were probably better prepared to handle a Japan-like situation. The two Boiling Water Reactors at Tarapur, which are almost exactly of the same type as the ones at the troubled Fukushima Daiichi complex, have been fitted with certain innovative safety features during successive technology upgrades, making them better equipped to deal with the problem of overheating, the initial cause of the problem in Japan, Banerjee said. In the case of the other 18 reactors — all indigenously designed Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors (PHWRs) — the safety situation was “even more comfortable”, Banerjee told The Indian Express Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta for NDTV 24x7’s Walk the Talk programme. “I can only say that we need to worry less on account of (possible accidents) in nuclear power stations than while walking or driving on the streets of Delhi,” Banerjee said, while acknowledging that the incident in Japan had come as a “shock” and was a “setback for the resurgence of nuclear power generation”. “There is no human activity in which we can say that we are totally free from any possibility of an accident. It is a question of judgement of what is the probability of an accident and what are the benefits,” he said, pointing out that in the 60-year history of nuclear power generation, only about 55 people had died in incidents involving radiation or nuclear accidents. In India, this figure is only one — the person who died in Mayapuri in Delhi from exposure to a cobalt-60 rod mistakenly sold as scrap. Banerjee said that even today in Japan, when most other systems have failed, much of the country is being fed with nuclear power. Banerjee met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh along with the chairman of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, S S Bajaj, today, to brief him on the safety systems of Indian reactors. Allaying concerns on the safety of Indian reactors, Banerjee said that the process of technology upgradation and safety enhancement was a continuous one, and it was during such exercises that innovative options like a thermo-siphon had been installed in the BWRs at the Tarapur plant. “This will keep on taking out the extra heat in a passive manner, without the requirement of a motor or a pump. So, through natural circulation, we will be able to manage the heat for a certain number of hours. Beyond that also, we can bring the heat down through a variety of other safety features. It is this multiplicity of barriers because of which we can say with confidence that we are much safer,” he said.

Buda-Koshelyovo, Belarus. Pavel Kuratov (4) has twice had eye cancer.

Vesnova. Vasily Lyskovets (14) born with a bone disease in the Mogilev region.

Kiev. Institute for Endocrinology. Elena Sergeevna Gurok (19),

from the Chernyhiv Region, was dagnosed with thyroid cancer

in 2002 and again in 2005.

Gomel. Children's hospital. Darya Zakhanchuk (6) has

a heart disorder. The hospital director says the number

of congenital diseases has more than quadrupled since

1985 and that there is an especially high incidence of

heart diseases, which were rarely diagnose with children

before Chernobyl.

Vesnova, Belarus. Natasha Popova (12) and Vadim Kuleshov (8).

Natasha was born with microcephaly; her head is too small.

Buda-Koshelyovo. Nastya Eremenko (9) when she was three years old she was

diagnosed with cancer of the uterus. Later on she also had metastasis in her lungs.

Nastya has had several block of chemotherapy.

Photos and captions from the book Certificate no. 000358/ (Nuclear devastation in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Belarus, the Urals and Siberia) by Robert Knoth (photography) Antoinette de Jong (text) (isbn 90 5330 506 8), published by Mets & Schilt, Amsterdam, with the financial support of Greenpeace International and Unicef Netherlands.