nuclear-news

6 Nuclear Power Reactors For Andhra? Deal Iffy, Says Foreign Media NDTV  All India | Steven Mufson, The Washington Post  June 08, 2016 “…….On the nuclear power front, Westinghouse Electric (now owned by Toshiba) has been negotiating with India in the hopes of selling it six AP-1000 nuclear power reactors. The project site was recently moved to the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, where site preparation is underway. Local opposition prevented the multi billion-dollar project from moving ahead in Modi’s home state of Gujarat.

Nisha Desai Biswal, assistant secretary of State for South Asian affairs, told a Senate committee on May 24 that a commercial deal was “quite close.”

The stumbling block, however, has been one article in a 2010 piece of Indian legislation that would make Westinghouse — and its suppliers — potentially vulnerable to crippling litigation under local Indian laws in the event of an accident. India has offered to establish insurance pools, but companies have not accepted that plan. There was no indication Tuesday that this issue had been resolved.

“They’ve painted themselves into a corner,” Omer F. Brown, a lawyer and nuclear liability expert, said of the Indian government. “I don’t know how they get out of it given that they wrote the law the way they did.”

Westinghouse and General Electric’s nuclear arm have been striving to reach a deal with India for more than a decade, and in 2008 Congress approved an agreement to promote nuclear cooperation with India, which critics said undermined half a century of U.S. nonproliferation efforts.

Energy and climate issues have overshadowed other aspects of U.S.-India relations. Non-proliferation groups have raised questions about the Obama administration’s current efforts to persuade the Nuclear Supplier Group, which deals with the export of nuclear materials and equipment, to accept India as a member. So far, membership in the NSG has required that a state be a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But India chose not to sign the treaty in 1968, and later built its own nuclear weapons, which it tested in 1974 and again in May 1998.

Daryl Kimball, director of the Arms Control Association, said the U.S. push for India’s membership in the NSG “would compound the damage in my view of Bush administration’s exemption” for India. He and 16 other non-proliferation experts, including from the Obama administration, have written a letter urging the administration to drop its support for India’s membership……..http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/6-nuclear-power-reactors-for-andhra-deal-on-but-foreign-media-1416685