AWARD winning international documentary film maker Pradeep Indulkar was in the Forest of Dean last week to show and talk about his latest films, High Power and Jaitapur Live.

The audience at the Watney Hall, Lydney, heard Pradeep introduce his two award winning films and explain how he came to make them, and were able to discuss the issues raised in the films with him afterwards.

Pradeep was a qualified nuclear engineer who was so alarmed by what he saw happening in the nuclear industry that he became an anti-nuclear activist.

In the film High Power he highlights the suffering of the people living near the Tarapur Nuclear Power Project, the largest nuclear power plant in India.

The reactors at Tarapur have been condemned as dangerous by nuclear watchdogs, being of the same type but older than the Fukushima reactors that failed in Japan in 2011.

In Jaitapur Live, Pradeep follows the protest movement against the building of what is planned to be the largest nuclear power plant in the world, at Jaitapur, further along the coast from Tarapur. Protestors say it will destroy the ecosystem in the coastal Konkan region of Maharashtra. It will also be a safety threat, being built, like Fukushima, in an earthquake zone and threatened by tsunamis.

The film showings were organised by STAND (Severnside Together Against Nuclear Development).

Barbara French of STAND said: “The films were harrowing, but brilliantly portrayed the very real dangers of nuclear power.

“The planned reactors shown in the film are to be of the new, and as yet untested, EPR type, built by the French state owned company Areva, that have run into construction problems, long delays and huge cost over-runs in Flamanville in France, and in Finland. This is the same type that Areva are to build at the new Hinkley nuclear power station in Somerset, so Pradeep’s film is very relevant to the nuclear controversy raging here in the UK.

“It is also relevant to The Forest of Dean and Chepstow area, as the large new nuclear power station at Oldbury on Severn, close to The Forest of Dean and Chepstow, proposed by a Japanese consortium, while of a different design, is still relatively untested.”