KOCHI: A five-day cycle rally to spread awareness on the dangers of Koodankulam nuclear plant was flagged off at Gandhi Bhavan here on Saturday. The rally will pass along the coastal areas of Ernakulam, Alappuzha, Kollam and Thiruvananthapuram districts and conclude at Gandhi Park in Thiruvanathapuram on December 8. Forty permanent cyclists are part of the rally. Others will be part of the rally between various intermediate points. The participants include college students and social activists from several parts of the country including, Odisha, Rajasthan and Gujarat. In Ernakulam district the rally will go through Fort Kochi, Vypeen islands, Chellanam, Saudi and Kandalkadavu before it reaches Alappuzha. “In the last 30 years or so the USA has not built a single nuclear power plant. Countries like Germany are shutting down the existing nuclear plants. If nuclear energy is safe, why is this happening?” said Vimal Bhanot, a former professor of Electrical Engineering at Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) Pilani, who was here to take part in the cycle rally.“There are about 420 nuclear plants across the world and the total demand for uranium ore today is around 68 thousand tonnes annually. But the earth has only 6 million tonnes of uranium deposits. “This would mean that even with the existing nuclear plants, nuclear energy can be availed for a maximum period of 60-70 years. This makes it uneconomical. Meanwhile, the waste from the nuclear plants will take years to decompose. For half of the nuclear materials to get neutralised it takes 24,000 years and for the whole amount it will take 2,40,000 years. Till now there has been no model to successfully store or decompose this waste. How can one pursue with nuclear energy in such a scenario, Vimal Bhanot asked.
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