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The current thinking of having multiple reactors at one site, based on perceived economies of scale and other conveniences, needs to be re-examined, say top disaster management experts.
These plants also need to be located a minimum of 10-15 km away from the coast line, say Gen N. C. Vij and Mr N. V. C. Menon, both founder-members of the National Disaster Management Authority.
As a nation we may also like to take a well-considered call on the usefulness of nuclear energy, they said in a strategy review note brought out in the backdrop of the quake-tsunami disaster in Japan.
The Atomic Energy Regulatory Board should be given a leg-up in terms of total autonomy, manpower resources, and finances.
Emergency response centres need to be revamped and a large number of police stations would have to be equipped with dosimeters in cities a population of two million and more.
Nuclear plants are constructed with many layers of inbuilt safety against Earthquakes of the Magnitude of 7.5 or 8 (should now be raised to 9), it is impossible for them to withstand a double onslaught of earthquake and tsunami.
Despite all the inbuilt redundancies, failure of one single system like power back up in this case can become most difficult to handle.
There is no gainsaying that the country is much behind others in our levels of preparedness to meet the challenges of grave disasters, especially earthquakes.
While the enactment of the Disaster Management Act 2005 was a much laudable pioneering step by the Government, the follow-up needs to be far more vigorous.
We are aware of the path forward and are ready with a strategy, but we need to shift to top gear to attend to preparedness deficits on ‘crash priority.'
Experts world over are generally agreed that a major earthquake in the Himalayan belt is a ‘live' possibility in the not too distant future.
At least 229 districts (more than a third of the geography) fall under zones IV and V on the scale of severity of a disaster.
Major cities like Guwahati and Srinagar are in class-topping Zone V, Delhi and Chandigarh in Zone IV and Kolkata, Chennai and Bombay in Zone III.
The studies have shown that in case of a quake of magnitude 7.5 to 8 on the Richter Scale in a city like Delhi, tens of thousands of buildings would collapse and hundreds of thousands would face serious structural damages
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