India's report on nuclear power plant safety lauded in Vienna
30 Apr 2008
The chairman of Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) S K Sharma today said that India's first national report on nuclear power plant safety had been very well received and appreciated at the fourth review meeting of the Convention on Nuclear Safety (CNS) in Vienna.
Sharma, who led the 17 member high-level Indian delegation, said that India's strong nuclear programme with comprehensive capability for the entire nuclear fuel cycle and the strong technical support from Bhabha Atomic Research Centre and Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research were highly appreciated and the audience for India's presentation turned out to be higher than the International Atomic Energy Agency's secretariat at the convention had expected.
India had presented its 206-page report for the first time that included the effective regulatory mechanism for its 17 operating nuclear plants and six plants under construction.
The convention appreciated India's work on probabilistic safety assessment which demonstrates that the probability of any untoward incident is less than 0.000001 per year.
It also lauded the fact that Nuclear Power Corporation and Indian regulatory body have mechanisms use Indian and global operating experience feedback, to improve safety effectively.
"Our human resource quality was very well acknowledged as operators in Indian power plants are graduate engineers with extensive training, which is not the case in most countries," Sharma who led some of the top officials of BARC and Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd to CNS, said.
