No incident of radioactive leakage from any nuclear power plant in India in last 3 years: Govt

PTI, Dec 1, 2021, 7:43 PM IST

There have been no incidents of radioactive leakage to the environment from any nuclear power plant in the country in the last three years, the Atomic Energy Ministry said.

Responding to a question in the Lok Sabha, Minister of State in the Department of Space and Department of Atomic Energy Jitendra Singh said the safety of nuclear power plants is continuously monitored and reviewed by the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board.

”There have been no incidents of radioactive leakage to the environment from any nuclear power plant in the country in the last three years,” he said in a written reply.

Responding to another question, Singh said land measuring around 174 hectares in an L-shaped configuration (with each arm of the L being 4 km in length) has been acquired for the LIGO-India Project at Aundha in Maharashtra’s Hingoli district.

The government has committed Rs 79.85 crore for the pre-investment activities of Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO)-India Project.

”The project requires identification, acquisition and development of a seismically low noise site, followed by construction of the civil facility required for housing the 4 km arm length interferometer detector suitably designed to address all the vibration sources such as pumps, fans, HVAC etc,” he said.

The scope of work also involves fabrication and installation of large vacuum chambers, liquid nitrogen cryo-pumps etc, with the required quality control and contamination control to achieve ultra-high vacuum suitable for installation of the detector, the minister added.

This project aims to provide opportunities to scientists and engineers to dig deeper into the realm of gravitational waves.

A few years back, scientists had, for the first time, observed ripples in the fabric of space-time called gravitational waves, arriving at Earth from a cataclysmic event in the distant universe.

In 2016, the central government had given an ‘in-principle’ approval to the LIGO-India mega science proposal for research on gravitational waves.