Early one morning in March 1993, 'Narora' came close to joining Chernobyl and Fukushima in the annals of industrial civilisation. Two blades broke off the turbine at the nuclear reactor near this town in Uttar Pradesh, India. The destabilised machine began to shake, damaging nearby cooling pipes that released hydrogen gas, which then caught fire. At the same time, lubricant oil leaked and fed the flames, which spread through the turbine building, causing an electricity blackout in the entire power plant. The control room filled with smoke, so that operators had to shut down the reactor and leave the vicinity.
Even after shutdown, however, the reactor continued to generate heat because of radioactive elements in its core. In March 2011, similar heating occurred after an earthquake and tsunami disabled cooling systems at the Fukushima reactor in Japan, causing the core to melt and expelling massive quantities of radioactive material into the surroundings. Fortunately, operators in Narora averted a similar release by circulating water intended for firefighting to carry away excess heat from the core.
Yet another danger remained, however: the reactor could spontaneously become 'critical' because of neutrons emitted by the radioactive materials, which meant that at any moment it could again start generating immense quantities of heat. In that case, the core would suddenly melt and react with the coolant, resulting in an explosion. So some Narora operators grabbed flashlights and, risking their lives, climbed onto the top of the reactor building to manually open valves that released liquid boron into the core. Boron absorbs neutrons: the core could no longer turn critical, and this heroic action averted a potential catastrophe.
No one has ever named, let alone celebrated, these workers – perhaps because India's nuclear elite prefers to elide just how close a call Narora was. "You must remember that as far as nuclear reactor is concerned, there was no problem at Narora," the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), Chidambaram, said to an interviewer in 1993, "The reactor worked perfectly according to design." Such claims of total technical control leave no room for the heroism of the lowly saving the day. Some years later, Chidambaram asserted confidently: "there is no possibility of any nuclear accident in the near or distant future in India."