India waste management: A global hub for trade and commerce

India is growing at a rapid rate and it is developing to provide a better future to her citizen. Industrialization and growing social standards, has generated a huge demand for energy resources. Nuclear energy, as we all know has huge potential to map the road for resource management, but has also demonstrated major risks related to its effective waste disposal.

A number of large nuclear power plants are operational in India. However, India is still struggling with making efforts to balance the trade and power resource deployment. The Atomic Energy Establishment at Trombay, (later renamed as Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC)), was the first nuclear energy center in India, established back in 1957. Nuclear waste is generated after the production of nuclear fuel in a nuclear generator. This is highly radioactive and has numerous potential health threat associated with it. The radioactive wasted which are not high-level, generally fall under the category of low-level or intermediate-level. These have low isotope lifetime and can decay faster than the high-level radioactive wastes. The low-level wastes are buried underground, allowing it to decompose by time and transuranic waste almost requires more than 15 years to get decayed. The high-level wastes undergo fission fragments decay reactions to divide themselves into dissimilar stable elements, which requires about 1000 years causing emissions to innocuous levels of radioactivity.

The prevention of future accidents due to nuclear wastes has always been a priority and the strategies formulated by the international communities have substantially improved nuclear safety measures over the past several years. The dry cask storages are now being used to pool the total waste safely and facilitate permanent disposal or degradation.

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