Koodankulam protest leads to Rs 3 crore loss a day

Chennai, Dec 18: M Kashinath Balaji, director of Koodankulam Nuclear Power Plant reacted on the loss incurring by Nuclear Power Corporation of India due to the ongoing agitation in Koodankulum area. The power plant is losing Rs 3 crore a day besides Rs 8 crore a month as establishment cost.

While addressing the plenary session of Conference on Disaster Management ‘Certainty the object- Uncertainty the Reality’, he said that if the protests were not held we would have generated 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.

Showing his wrath, Balaji claimed that NPCIL has spent nearly 90 per cent of Rs15,000 crore on the site. “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.”

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Saturday said that agitators are protesting to stall the Indo-Russia project but the nuclear power plant cannot be put idle as the nation has sunk an amount of Rs 14,000 crore on that project.

While, Balaji also pointed out that safety of the fuel is also maintained. “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.”

S Kalirajan, additional chief engineer of the plan asserted that there are adequate safeguards for any tsunami threat and the seiches won’t affect the reactor as it is 40 metre above and consists of 2.5 lakh tonnes of concrete structure.

OneIndia News