Bangalore : Whoever spiked the water cooler in the Kaiga atomic plant with radioactive tritium on November 24 has not been original.
A simple Google search will reveal that the incident is a replay of what happened in 1990 at the Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station in Canada.
Reports then said that an employee at the Canadian station obtained about half a cup of heavy water from the primary heat transport loop of the nuclear reactor and loaded it into a drink dispenser in the employee canteen.
Eight workers drank the contaminated water. The incident was discovered when they began leaving bioassay urine samples with elevated tritium levels. The media then reported that the episode was intended to be a "practical joke" whereby the affected employees would be required to give urine samples daily for several days.
The Canadian incident was dismissed as a prank and forgotten because it happened prior to 9/11 and 26/11.
Only an ongoing inquiry will tell if the Kaiga incident is the handiwork of a prankster or a "malevolent" act as described by Prithviraj Chavan, Indian science minister — or just a plain mistake that has been blown out of proportion.
Nataraja Sarma, retired nuclear physicist and author of the book Nuclear Power in India says it could be just a human error — not uncommon at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC). He points out that in the 1980s a vast area in the BARC campus got contaminated by radioactive effluents accidentally discharged from the plutonium plant and the soil had to be decontaminated.
In another incident, scrap metal in Mumbai's "chor" (thieves) bazaar that was found to be radioactive was traced to the plutonium plant at BARC. A worker had sold some discarded plant parts.
K.S. Parthasarathy, former secretary of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, said he is aware of a case when a worker actually drank some heavy water containing tritium, in the hope he would get a few days off from work. "He was crazy."
Tritium is the radioactive isotope of hydrogen but the beta radiation emitted by it is of such low energy it cannot even penetrate the human skin.
Extent of damage
In other words tritium can cause harm only if it enters the body but its intake must be in large amounts to pose a significant health risk.
A retired director of one of the nuclear stations, who does not want to be named, said: "Security today means checking handbags and inspecting vehicles and vigilance is all about who takes [a] bribe ... Our security at this level is good but is unprepared to deal with potential threats from scientific staff."
