Protesters at a rally in Idindhakarai, Tamil Nadu, against the nuclear plant. (PTI)

New Delhi, Nov. 11: The Kudankulam nuclear power station, beleaguered by recent protests from local communities, plans an additional layer of redundancy in its safety features through an extra water reservoir and mobile power units.

The Nuclear Power Corporation (NPC) has been hoping to commission the first of Kudankulam’s two 1,000MW reactors of Russian design in December this year, but local communities have in recent weeks staged protests against the plant, raising questions about safety and the environment.

The NPC had last month released a 20-page document outlining the multiple safety features at the station and asserted that the reactors, which are designed to withstand extreme natural events, do not pose any threat to the public or the environment.

But as part of a post-Fukushima review process, the station has decided to pencil a roadmap to create an additional reservoir of water and mobile power units as part of safety systems, a senior nuclear engineer at the station said.

“This is an additional layer of redundancy — the lack of these will not compromise safety in any manner whatsoever,” said M. Kasinath Balaji, station director at Kudankulam. “The reactor building already has 1,600 tonnes of water. This additional (external) reservoir of 8,000 tonnes will add redundancy.”

The tsunami-triggered events at the nuclear power station in Fukushima, Japan, earlier this year have strengthened campaigns against nuclear energy in many countries.

The Fukushima reactors shut down as expected, but the waves destroyed backup diesel generators, causing a station blackout.

The NPC has said the Kudankulam station is well-equipped to avoid station blackouts and, in the extreme event that such a blackout does occur, the reactors have a “passive heat removal system” that does not require any power. “We need only one diesel generator set, but we have four,” Balaji said.

“Yet in the roadmap that we’re preparing, we’ll plan for mobile power generation units.”

NPC officials have said the Kudankulam reactors have several advanced safety features, including a core catcher, a metallic vessel underneath the reactor to contain the molten material and radioactivity within the reactor even under the most severe meltdown accident.

Sections of the nuclear engineering community believe the Fukushima nuclear power station had ignored certain suggestions relating to safety that authorities had pointed out.

A US-based nuclear physicist of Indian origin said he has learnt from sources in the nuclear industry and regulatory authorities that the Fukushima station had not followed some suggestions made to them.

“They were warned twice over the past 15 years that diesel generator sets were not prepared for a large tsunami,” said Swadesh Mahajan, a senior research scientist at the Institute for Fusion Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.