| June 26, 2005 | Sunday | Jumadi-ul-Awwal 18, 1426 |
Should we accept that KESC can’t deliver?
BUSHEHR: Along a long, dusty road south from this Persian Gulf port, past shops and green fields, rises an emblem of Iran’s differences with the United States: The nearly finished Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant. Nusrat Nasarullah
For the United States, as well as Europe, Iran’s nuclear programme ranks as perhaps the most important issue in the country’s presidential election runoff on Friday. With a small army of Russian contractors welding, painting, and fitting pipes inside its concrete dome and turbine building, the $800 million plant is 84 per cent complete, and poised to receive its first nuclear fuel rods from Russia within a few months, a senior Iranian atomic official confirmed on Wednesday. Iranian officials say the plant will be in commission next year.
Iran says its pursuit of nuclear power is for peaceful purposes and falls within its rights as a sovereign nation and signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Washington thinks Bushehr might be part of a wider programme ultimately aimed at giving the Islamic Republic means to build atomic weapons that could be fitted onto the short- and medium-range missiles it has been developing for decades.
The same basic process that produces low-level enriched uranium for civilian reactors can also be used with technical adjustments to produce highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons. Western officials fear that once Iran has acquired the technology and begins to make its own nuclear plant fuel, there is little to prevent it from taking the process further and making weapons. Much of their concern is about other facilities, located near Natanz and Esfahan in central Iran, that are linked to enrichment activities.
President Bush has said repeatedly that Iran should not be allowed to obtain nuclear weapons, but for now, the United States is backing European diplomacy. After sometimes tense negotiations with Britain, France and Germany in recent months, Iran announced it was suspending enrichment activities, although it has threatened resumption several times.
Late on Wednesday, seeking to back up its assertion that the world has nothing to fear from the Bushehr plant, the government afforded a group of foreign reporters a rare chance to tour the plant. The Bushehr plant was conceived in the 1970s, under the rule of the late shah. But work was suspended after the Islamic Revolution and throughout the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. It came back to life in the 1990s, when Iran and Russia, over US objections, signed an agreement to complete the project using a Russian design and technology.
Master engineer Ismael Ibrahim Zadeh took the reporters, photographers and camera operators around the separate turbine building, allowing them to record whatever they liked and proudly pointing out the massive green-painted turbine, its generator and the condensers, with huge yellow cranes overhead.
All around Russians in hard hats concentrated on their welding, or on rolling heavy components out to be lifted to their proper places in the maze of steel and tubing. Sea water, heated by proximity to a closed loop of water that in turn was heated by the nuclear reactor, will emerge as steam to run the turbine’s giant rotors and turn the generator for electricity.
The reactor itself is a short bus ride away. A rickety-feeling temporary outdoor elevator raised the media visitors in small groups to a platform at a height about five stories. From the top, the shoreline is visible a half-mile away, lined with guard towers facing out to sea. An open door leads into the steel-sheathed domed containment area itself. Walking over the stainless steel floor, it was possible to peer down into a cylindrical well about 20 feet deep at the top of the installed reactor, where the fuel rods are soon to be placed.
Although Iran has one of the world’s richest reserves of petroleum and natural gas, officials here argue that generating electricity by nuclear means will allow more of its natural resources to be exported for cash. At a news conference held in a reception area of the plant, Asadollah Saboury, vice president of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, said it would be commissioned by December 2006. He said it would operate under a safeguard regime of inspections and remote surveillance by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The IAEA is a frequent visitor, positioning and setting up systems for its round-the-clock cameras and for transmission of photographs to its headquarters in Vienna, Austria, he said.
Asked how the world could trust that Iran’s nuclear programme had no military goals, he focused on the Bushehr plant itself. “There was only one concern (voiced by the IAEA) with respect to Bushehr ... and that was the spent fuel, what’s going to happen to the spent fuel? Apart from this spent fuel, it is an industrial complex,” he said, switching between English and Persian.
“As far as the spent fuel, we have an agreement with the Russians that (it) will be sent back to Russia,” he said. “So there should not be any allegations against Bushehr, because everything is crystal clear about it.” Although the plant itself is a civilian installation, it is guarded by watchtowers and anti-aircraft guns, evidence of the tension that has surrounded this project, even though there are no nuclear materials yet inside. Few here forget that Israeli F-16 jets struck and destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor about to become operational in 1981. Neither the United States nor Israel has ruled out a similar operation against Iranian nuclear facilities if negotiations to curtail Iran’s programme fail, although experts have said it might be difficult or impossible to locate all elements of the alleged Iranian programme, which is presumed to be dispersed and hidden underground around the country. Saboury said the suspension his country has agreed to does not encompass all its nuclear activities. “What is not in the scope of suspension, like the Bushehr NPP, they are proceeding. ... There are a lot of activities, research activities, other projects, nuclear power plants, there is a long list of activities” not covered by the agreement, he said. Saboury expressed frustration with the suspension. “Iran likes to have the capability to make its own nuclear power plant fuel,” he said. “We are wasting our time now. We are losing the time.” If the suspension was lifted, he said, it would be “very few years” before Iran was capable of enriching its own uranium. Asked if he was frightened to be working in a facility that some people have speculated might one day be bombed, Zadeh simply shrugged. “I lived through the Iran-Iraq war, so for me this is nothing.”—Dawn/LAT-WP News Service
How has he managed this power shortage is something that most of us cannot follow, or practice. He declared somewhat philosophically that it was all a matter of attitude. Summarised, it goes like this: as he has been a keen follower of public utilities like the KESC for all his life, he argues that there is no point in expecting them to fare any better. KESC’s assault of public is a daily routine, and in summer, when the temperature is higher it is almost merciless. But this Karachiite explains (as if releasing a public service message) if you don’t expect KESC to do any better than this, it will become that much easier to understand.
Luckily for us, such people are in a hopeless minority. The KESC has failed to deliver, for all the help and support that it has received, believe most citizens.
In recent years, the organization has received support from the army as well, argue others. “Is there something fundamentally wrong with the management of the utility?” ask citizens who realize how much the failure of KESC is further ruining schedules, quality, work ethics. It is a long list were
one to draw up of how much this poor performance affects this city.
This summer it has been almost eight weeks of power shortage, and no amount of explanations from KESC management has been able to convince the public. And what makes it worse is not only that there is no good news for the summer that lies ahead, but nothing for the foreseeable future.
The Kanooz Al Watan group that had bid for the KESC has “disappeared” says a report in this daily. All the deadlines extended were in vain, and all efforts made by the relevant quarters to even get a plausible explanation yielded no results.
The Dawn report raised the following questions: Was Kanooz group put off due to the fact that 33.8 per cent of all electricity generated by the KESC goes missing in transmission and distribution (T&D) losses? Was the utility’s inefficiency due to theft of electricity by the use of “kundaas”? (KESC’s failure on this count is also reflective of how well the public has connived with the relevant staff) The report rightly expresses public curiosity when it says that “…what kind of due diligence did Kanooz group conduct for almost a year? And if it was dissatisfied and thought the utility unworthy of acquisition, why did it bother to go through the entire process to the final stage of making the bid?
Of course there are those cynical amongst us in town, who for their own intangible reasons never believed that the KESC would truly get privatized so soon. As one of them remarked “handling KESC means handling Karachi”. The Dawn report says, “Many theories are doing the round. But they are just theories. No one really knows why Kanooz suddenly thought it best to disappear.”
Indeed there have also been many theories and stories of how the KESC has been managed in the last three decades in particular. Not just in media, but in private conversations between citizens and consumers. They relate not only to theft of electricity, and how consumers can get away with it, but also to how inflated billing by careless and dishonest staff of the KESC has aggravated the problem. For all the size and role that the organization has in the city it has not been able to reach out, in heart and soul, to the people it deals with round-the-clock.
In passing one may cite the example of the PTCL, whose lineman is amongst its many symbols of inefficiency and corruption. Luckily, both for the PTCL and the citizen, came the technological breakthrough, and the cell phones and other options came along. Therefore, the common man’s dependence on the “landline” has declined apparently.
But as far as the KESC is concerned there is no such option, even though the use of generators, UPS batteries, rechargeable lights and torches has increased enormously.
The use of air conditioners and split ACs has also risen in a manner and scale that reflects the changing attitudes of people. They do not care if the city is short of power, and demonstrate that for seeking relief from the hell of summer and humidity in this city, they are not thinking in the larger interests of society, observes one housewife.
What lies ahead? From the look of things there is little or no good news. Newspapers carry details of how people are suffering at home and at work, and there is not the slightest doubt that the situation has progressively turned worse. A disturbing sign in Karachi is that protest about power failures is beginning to grow on the streets. Whatever be KESC’s considered explanation, the common man is unwilling to accept it. It is an outright rejection of all KESC’s promises. It is the time it delivered. The misfortune of all is that KESC cannot. It needs resources. Those are not available and Kanooz was a silver lining. That too is no more there. Has the kunda culture won?
While one does keep in mind that the second highest bidder, the Hasan Associates, has been asked to match the bid of the Kanooz group, I am certain that the common man is least bothered about what is promised. He has been waiting for in vain on many counts, let me add.
The KESC boss said recently that it was short of 100 to 150 megawatts daily even if all its plants were operational, and Wapda was supplying 500 to 550MWs daily. He hands out another promise that the generation shortage would be overcome by April 2006. It would be interesting to know whether the public believes such promises.
One would like to end this column on a note of optimism. It is always advised that one should try and see light at the end of the tunnel. I am trying to do that. Instead I am getting nostalgic and recalling those summer days in Karachi when power failures and breakdowns were rare. There were such summer days and nights in this very city. Perhaps a couple of short lived power failures in an entire summer!