By IANS,
Bangalore: A police complaint has been filed on the radioactive contamination of drinking water at the Kaiga atomic power plant in Karnataka but no suspects have been named, police said Wednesday.
“The FIR (First Information Report) was filed late Tuesday,” Raman Gupta, superintendent of police of Uttara Kannada district, about 500 km from here where Kaiga plant is situated, told reporters Wednesday.
The Kaiga authorities have not named anyone in their complaint and hence the FIR also did not mention any name, he said.
Fifty five workers were found to have been affected by the contaminated water in a water cooler during their routine bioassay Nov 24. A check of the water cooler showed water had been contaminated with radioactive element (Tritium).
According to plant director J.P. Gupta, all those affected had returned to work. Only one had suffered contamination close to the permissible limit set by the nation’s Atomic Energy Regulatory Board.
Anil Kakodkar, who retired as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission Nov 30, S.K. Jain, head of the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd (NPCIL) that runs the Kaiga plant, and Minister of Science & Technology Prithviraj Chavan had said the Kaiga incident was an “insider job”.
Central and state intelligence are probing the incident. The Kaiga authorities have handed over to them the list of people who were present in the first reactor unit when the incident occurred.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has described the incident as “a small matter of contamination and is not linked to any leak”.
“There is nothing to worry. All our systems are intact and under control. An inquiry has been ordered,” he has said.