Can India Learn from Fukushima?

The tragedy in Japan has been truly heart-wrenching. The scale of the havoc wreaked by the earthquake and the resulting tsunami has overwhelmed even the extensive planning and disaster management for which the country is known. What have been unprecedented are the multiple nuclear accidents at the Fukushima-Daiichi plant and the continuing threat, at the time of writing, of widespread radioactive contamination.

Fukushima has come as a wake-up call to the world at large, where the passage of time has dulled the memory of the catastrophic accident at Chernobyl in 1986 and there has been much talk, if not action, in recent years of a “nuclear renaissance”. This tragic moment should be used to seriously reflect on the wisdom of using nuclear power to generate electricity. Unfortunately, even now, the nuclear industry and its attendant organisations in many different countries continue to make a case for nuclear power.