P K Sundaram | Tehelka
Manmohan Singh’s secret note to the Cabinet Committee on security brings out our worst fears: even the already weak provisions of nuclear liability are not acceptable to the international nuclear suppliers and the government is willing to forcibly remove the fetters on the way of its ill-conceived nuclear power dreams. Ahead of his last visit to the United States, the PM sought to ensure a clean waiver for American reactor builder Westinghouse and ink a working agreement with the company for a 6000 MW nuclear power park in Gujarat’s Mithi Virdi.
The nuclear liability legislation in India has been a hide-and-seek story between the nuclear suppliers and the country’s democratic system. The Bill’s initial draft made its way to FICCI even before it appeared before the public for discussion, exemplifying the government’s intent to prioritise the suppliers’ interest, which include both foreign and domestic corporates. But the draft saw substantial opposition within the arms of the government when secretaries of as many as eight ministries including health, forest and environmental affairs and finance said that their ministries are not prepared to deal with nuclear accidents in India. These significant objections were only to be overruled, of course. In the Standing Committee of the parliament, several independent experts and civil society groups registered strong protests. The government’s attempts to have an entirely toothless law also got scuttled by the Supreme Court’s verdict on Bhopal in 2010, which evoked legitimate concerns among the larger society and the media.
As a final result of this tug-of-war, the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act came into being in the December of 2010. Although the Act puts a ridiculous liability cap of Rs 1500 crore in the event of a nuclear accident for the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL), which is nothing compared to the estimated cost of clean-up in Fukushima (upto $250 billion), public pressure succeeded in having a small hook on the nuclear suppliers in the form of the operator NPCIL’s “right of recourse” against the suppliers. The nuclear suppliers – of US, France, Russia and also domestic – have been opposed to this provision since the beginning and have been demanding a liability-free playing field. The government has tried repeatedly to dilute the relevant Section 17(b) of the Act. First, it introduced the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Rules in 2011 under the Act, just on the eve of Hilary Clinton’s visit to New Delhi. These rules contradict the spirit of the Act and neutralise the supplier’s liability to a great extent by putting a liability period of just five years after the start-up of the reactors and limit the amount to the value of the component. Even this didn’t please the international corporates which are on a constant decline after Fukushima and are facing a fund crunch. Actually, unlike India and China which subsidies both nuclear energy projects and accidents from the public money and have hence become favourite destinations of these corporations, the nuclear corporations in the West have to mobilise funds from the open market, buy insurance cover and also have to let sub-suppliers that have even more limited capacity to absorb potential liability claims. Due to these reasons, nuclear giants like Areva of France, General Electric and Westinghouse of the US and Atomsroyexport of Russia have been pressing for a clean waiver from liability.
It is important to note that nuclear liability is not a largesse given to the affected people, it is an important tool to discipline the nuclear business and a mechanism to ensure that the companies adhere to best safety practices. The IAEA itself has underlined this role of nuclear liability. An important question that the people’s movement in Koodankulam asked in the face of Russia’s insistence on liability-free business and the repeated claims of absolute safety is instructive: if the nuclear promoters cannot risk their financial lives for their own product which they deem totally safe, how do they expect the common people to accept the risk to their lives and livelihoods?
Besides waiving off the liability, the PM’s note also seeks to finalise the agreement deal with Westinghouse for a reactor project which is yet to receive green clearance from the MoEF, yet to get technical safety clearance for its reactor design, and is facing stiff resistance by the local people, environmentalists and concerned citizens. This is a deal worth at least Rs 90,000 crores which the PM is trying to clinch with Westinghouse with a token amount of Rs 100 crores. The nuclear project in Gujarat is being set up very close to the Alang ship-breaking yard which has already caused immense damage to the local environment. The reactors would suck up the only source of fresh water from the lake that has ensured prosperity for the villagers on the coast of the Arabian Sea.
While the crisis in Fukushima has taken a turn for the worse over the last couple of months and Japan has been forced to take extreme steps like switching off the last two reactors out of its 54 reactors, India is pushing itself further into anachronistic nuclear expansion. Worse, in its pursuit of this discredited, expensive, unsafe, secrecy-ridden and undemocratic technology, it is bulldozing every democratic institution on the way. This includes the DAE’s demanding exemption from the RTI Act, brutally repressing peaceful grassroots movements and overriding the unanimous resolutions of numerous panchayats in Jaitapur, Koodankulam, Kovvada, Mithi Virdi and Chutka to implement the nuclear deal between the much-touted largest and oldest democracies of US and India.
The claims of the inevitability of the nuclear option for India’s electricity needs is a post-facto concoction, without any independent and holistic techno-economic analysis of the whole energy sector, peddled to justify the Indo-US nuclear deal which was actually about buying legitimacy for India’s nuclear weapons by offering to rehabilitate the Western nuclear lobbies. Waiving off liability for Westinghouse would mark a final succumbing to this dangerous nuclear obsession.
The author is a research consultant with the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace