India’s nuclear programme is facing its toughest challenge: how to dispose off its huge amount of radioactive wastes? There is no safe method to dispose off them permanently. Not a single country, including the five members of the elite nuclear club, has found a foolproof way to keep the deadly waste safely buried. Nuclear wastes have only been added to but have not been disposed off permanently. This poses a grave threat to human population and the environment. All radioactive wastes are now stored in heavily guarded temporary disposal sites.

India needs a permanent site to store the nuclear wastes generated by its nuclear establishment. India’s nuclear programme is growing fast and generating radioactive waste from its power plants and research reactors. The department of atomic energy has set the goal of producing 20,000 MW of electricity from nuclear energy-driven power plants by 2020. Besides, our ambitious weapons programme has to source plutonium for its estimated 65-100 warheads by converting uranium.

Due to the veil of secrecy that covers the nuclear establishment, there is no official disclosure about radioactive wastes in India. M V Ramana, Research Associate, Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, Princeton University, USA, estimates that India's high level waste from reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel produced so far is about 16,000 metric tones.

There are some major difficulties with nuclear waste-dumping sites. They have to be monitored for million of years to avoid human contamination by such sites. It is likely that radioactivity will leak from the canisters containing this waste. Besides, these sites have to be protected from natural calamities like earthquake and natural geological processes so that the radiation does not leak out. Jaipur-based Professor KB Garg, an internationally renowned physicist, explains that there are no safe methods to get rid of nuclear waste and there cannot be any. The highly radioactive components remain for centuries and no one could guarantee the changes the earth might undergo in that length of time. India has the technology to store immobilized radioactive wastes temporarily for 40 years.

Developed countries, knowing that there are no safe means of disposing off such wastes, have opted to dump them on poorer nations in return for heavy payments. It is a multi-billion dollar trade. Reportedly Russia is offering its land for disposal for millions of dollars. India cannot choose such a costly course of action; so it chooses to dump its wastes in its own territory.

India’s search for a permanent waste disposal site has been on since early 1980s, but has been marred by controversy as the nuclear establishment has been exploring such sites covertly. Anti-nuke lobbies have strongly opposed such attempts and are demanding open discussions before finalizing a site. Currently the DAE is exploring the Pokhran district in Rajasthan. But, anti-nuke activists publicized its drilling, undertaken under the guise of exploring granite, two years ago. Since then, the residents of Sanawada village, the site of this exploration, have opposed it and exploration has stopped. But sources at Bhabha Atomic Research Center admit this is the chosen site.

India does not have any other option. In August 1999, the government of India declared that the country's nuclear waste would be deposited in parts of Rajasthan and then undivided Madhya Pradesh's granite belts.  But Digvijay Singh, the chief minister of MP, refused give any land for this purpose. BARC then selected an abandoned gold mine in Karnataka's Kolar Gold Field, one of the deepest mines in the world. It even set up a laboratory to simulate the high temperature conditions that will be generated by the wastes. But, due to the presence of water, the site had to be abandoned. Ultimately, in 1995, BARC began the survey of 256 sq km in Pokhran.

The current protest against site exploration by people who never opposed the nuclear testing shows that the atomic establishment must bring transparency into its activities. Nuclear waste disposal is a civilian activity, which needs to be done after taking local communities into confidence as it involves their safety. India's nuclear establishment is governed by the Atomic Energy Act, which prohibits sharing of information on nuclear programmes. “But there must be a distinction between national interest and people’s interest,â€Â