Atomic Energy Commission chief Sekhar Basu.

With serious allegations of leaky nuclear reactors and poor security levelled against India's nuclear programme, Atomic Energy Commission chief Sekhar Basu brushes aside these charges saying this is a "well designed agenda" to "stall or delay" the country's development.Journalist Adrian Levy, working for the Centre for Public Integrity in Washington, has levelled serious charges in a four-part investigative report against India's nuclear establishment.New chief of India's nuclear programme Sekhar Basu, also director of Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, counters the allegations.I do not consider these as charges; he has written a paper based on something somebody else has said elsewhere, which he has put into his account. It is not a scientific document, it is not a document based on facts, and it is based on comments of some people. I do not consider these as charges. It looks to us as a very well designed agenda for them whoever is funding him, to stall or delay the development of our country.Ok. Definitely, Indians will not stall the Indian programme, that I am confident. It will be somebody from a foreign country who thinks that India should remain poor and that India should remain poverty ridden, and that India should remain in darkness, so they are the people who are doing it.Whatever he has said is based on certain facts that earlier somebody has published. He must know that there was a suo moto case that was taken up by the judge and to that, we have given a reply. The details are available he can see the reply to see that if there is anything to be talked about.In summary, the judge had told us to form a committee, we had formed a committee and based on that committees conclusions it is very well established that nothing new has happened, there is no extra burden of diseases or no new types of diseases have come up or even that the number has not increased, nothing of that has happened.If you go there, I would request all other communities to go there and have a look if this is true or not. There children are moving around happily in their college and schools. This is an area where there is poverty, it is because of that, malnutrition or those type of problems that are there.Why should there be any leak, uranium is there in the soil, you are then taking the uranium out, at least part of it or most of it. If it was that much of concern we would have taken out even that uranium also.Why is it being told as a leak, it is not a leak from a reactor, or a re-processing plant? In a mine, what is the leak that is possible? Anyway, there is an issue of 'tailing pond', and this tailing pond is one of the safest in the world, it is surrounded by hills on all the sides, there is a good fencing so that people cannot enter.I would like to answer your question in two parts, Kudankulam is one of the best reactors in the world, one of the safest reactors in the world. Secondly, our operators are the best in the world, since people put jokes to us, saying you put PhD's as operators of nuclear reactors, it is that kind of a training that they have.Where is the question of a leak, we have never had any incident like that, in Japan at Fukushima, that kind of incident can never happen to us. Our things are taken care off, everybody who comes including the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) who came after the Fukushima incident he went, to see even the Tarapur reactor, he found that this is one of the safest reactors.See, saying that everything is wrong is not at all correct, just now as you say that the American's are writing our reactors are not safe, so the very fact that we are taking lot of time to re-start the reactor is because of the fact that we want it to be super safe.This is a new reactor started for the first time we had to show to the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) so that we had to open up everything, even the reactor fuel assemblies had to be removed to show the inside of the vessel to show that everything is fine, only after that they are giving clearance.This is for the first time and six months is not at all a big thing. Earlier reactors we have seen they have been shut down for two years also and then the same Tarapur reactor which was shut down for two years, today it gets shut down only for 20 days or a month.It is not something wrong with the parts, it is a normal procedure. Once you are boxing it up and it will be operational for one year continuously, you have to make sure that you inspect everything and where ever you have something or you suspect that [something] can go wrong or if some wearing has taken place, you replace it with a new one so that for the next one year you do not have any problems.I am very sure that next month Kudankulam reactor will be going critical and towards the end of the month [January 2016] we should be able to synchronize it with the grid.We expect it go critical somewhere in April 2016 and after another one-and-half months because it is again for the first time it will then be synchronized with the grid.Therefore, by next June you will see it is feeding power to the grid.As far as this secret bomb is concerned, I do not know what is this secret bomb? Is he aware what is required to make this secret bomb, yes uranium can be used theoretically to make bomb, but whether one should make bombs out of uranium is also something that I do not know.See we have to supply uranium to our plants so if we do not make anything to process this uranium, how can we say that we will not do anything and keep quiet. The whole exercise to me is looking like an effort to slow down our programme. These types of things do not carry any meaning.