The trauma being experienced by Sundar’s men in the control room of KKNPP-1 are not teething troubles of a new technology. There are enough evidence to show that the reactors at Kudankulam are made of counterfeit and sub-standard equipment and spares rendered surplus due to post-Chernobyl cancellation of two dozen VVER-1000 reactors in Eastern and Central Europe. As Gopalakrishnan said, “a very large amount of public funds have been spent on this reactor, with very little benefit accrued to the people in return. The reactor is known to have suffered continuous and unprecedented problems during the construction, erection and commissioning phases as well as during the present initial operation period till date.”
In the recent past, there have been instances of large scale corruptions involving politicians, administrators, industrialists and scientists and technologists, even frontier-science driven government enterprises like space research. In all these scams, all what happens is flow of public assets to private pockets. Not a single child is going to suffer from thyroid cancer or mental retardation and hence we tend to forget these the moment a new scam surfaces, which is a cyclic process in modern times. Nuclear corruption may end up in catastrophe of global level, and the impacts can be trans-generational. India and Russia have enough experts and wise women and men to understand that the dips in the graph above and events since its grid connection reported earlier are worthy of an independent investigation. Fortunately it is possible now as the decisions on Kudankulam are taken at the highest political level and the “Prime Minister Narendra Modi firmly believes that transparency and accountability are the two cornerstones of any pro-people government”