In Indian scenario, as on today, the safety status in nuclear power plants apparently looks good. The Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, the regulator in India publishes detailed annual reports giving all the incidents occurred in the power plants and in other related facilities. Anyone can have access to these reports (www.aerb.gov.in).
However, the news papers keep on publishing insignificant and trivial occurrences, thus causing unnecessary doubts in the minds of a common man. For example: some depleted uranium pieces found with scrap dealer or tritium activity in water cooler at Kaiga, etc. etc. Depleted uranium is used as a shield material in industrial radiography cameras used for Non-Destructive Testing (NDT). Once scrapped, these high density spares are likely to find its way to the scrap dealers. The second incident of tritium must be a deliberate attempt by some staff member to create confusion in the plant. Tritium is the least toxic radioactive material and the limits on intake as tritiated water or as tritium gas are very high. These are some radiological incidents are NOT related to nuclear safety of the power plants and the safety record of the power plants continues to be very satisfactory.
May be, there is some need of enforcing the existing regulations strictly in the plants, and security provisions of the radioactive sources should be augmented in public domain since the sources in sealed form are used in industrial and medical therapy applications. Let us not ignore the immense benefit of radiation in comparison with small amount of risk of remotely possible incidents which are common, and much more in other industries.
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