Neutrino project: no clearance from villagers

As dusk falls in Chinna Pottipuram village and people return home after grazing cattle, elderly women in the village assemble at the oor manthai and begin prayers invoking Ambarappar, the eponymous deity of the Ambarappar Hill in Theni district, where the India-based Neutrino Observatory is proposed to be set up. “The Tamil Nadu State Environmental Impact Assessment Agency cites clear reasons, including the risks in the tunnelling, for why the project cannot be assessed under Category B of Section 8 - ‘Buildings and Construction projects’. He cites articles about the Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment, which intended to study neutrino beams sent from Fermilab through the earth to many detectors including INO, and the possibility of setting up a detector for ‘dark matter.’ “I am not saying these collaborations are bad. With neutrino factories, based on muon colliders, that can produce highly collimated neutrino beams with energy levels in 10s of Giga-electron-volt remaining only in conceptual stage across the world, Ms. Indumathi said a rough calculation, as discussed in science papers, would show that a person has to stand for 10 crore years in front of such a beam to get the same radiation dose as one would get from natural background radioactivity in a year. Stating that the INO team was even willing to give it in writing that the rights of the local people to the land outside the fenced area will not be taken away, Dr. Indumathi says, “If the situation gets so vitiated that deployment of paramilitary forces becomes necessary to ensure the safety of those working in the observatory, we would rather prefer not to pursue research.” Fears and facts Typical fear no.