India’s nuclear liabilty Bill designed to protect Westinghouse and General Electric

“What Westinghouse and General Electric want is that even the limited liability that accrued to the Union Carbide in the case of Bhopal [$470 million as per the settlement approved by the Supreme Court] should not fall on them.”

Bill meant to safeguard U.S. firms, says Karat, The Hindu , 17 June 2010, NEW DELHI: The Manmohan Singh-led government is under pressure from Washington on the Civil Nuclear Liability Bill and the proposed legislation bears the handiwork of the U.S. nuclear industry lobby.

Hence it must be scrapped.This was stated by Communist Party of India (Marxist) general secretary Prakash Karat in the latest edition of the party organ, Peoples’ DemocracyHe said both the bill, which is being scrutinised by a parliamentary panel, and the Bhopal episode brought out some class truths and underscored need to draw lessons from the 1984 gas tragedy.“If there are lessons to be learnt from the tragic episode of Bhopal, it is that there should be strict laws, which will assign civil liability and ensure that criminal liability is also pinned down. There can be no compromise with the lives and safety of the Indian people to appease the commercial interests and profits of foreign and Indian big business. The first step towards ensuring this will be to scrap the Civil Nuclear Liability Bill,” he said…..

The bill, he said, was meant to safeguard the interests of the U.S. companies that would supply reactors to India. In the event of a nuclear accident, they were to be exempted from any liability to pay compensation for the damage caused.

“What Westinghouse and General Electric want is that even the limited liability that accrued to the Union Carbide in the case of Bhopal [$470 million as per the settlement approved by the Supreme Court] should not fall on them.” The Hindu : Front Page : Bill meant to safeguard U.S. firms, says Karat

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Energy efficiency – theme for July 2019

Energy efficiency represents the single largest potential contributor to global emissions reduction, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA 2017). It should be a key part of the global energy strategy, for several reasons:

It could reduce global electric demand by more than 20 per cent, based on current rates in the U.S. power sector, while maintaining high levels of services such as heating and lighting.
It avoids the need for increased energy, capacity and grid services, making it the least expensive way to decarbonise at scale.
It can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by billions of tonnes.

A dramatic example of the power of energy efficiency is lighting. In 2017 the United States passed the milestone of 1 billion LED and CFL lights installed, avoiding 142 million tonnes a year of carbon dioxide emissions, at a cost of about $7 per ton of avoided carbon dioxide. In contrast, the cumulative installed capacity of rooftop solar reached 8,000 MW in 2017, saving 8 million tonnes a year of carbon dioxide, at a cost of $360 per ton. Lighting efficiency thus yielded almost 18 times the avoided carbon dioxide, at about 2 per cent the cost per ton of rooftop solar.

Google provides another example of the power of energy efficiency. Its data centers now use 50 per cent less energy than the average data center, according to the company. Google also developed an improved chip, the TPU, which performs 83 times better than standard CPUs. The new chip allowed Google to reduce power consumption at its data centers by a factor of 30—far exceeding the effect on Google’s carbon footprint of all of the company’s renewable energy purchases. ” – John Woolard, Eco Business, 10 June 2019

nuclear-news

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