nuclear-news

Apart from the Fukushima accident, the terminal crisis of the global nuclear industry has also been precipitated by the unprecedented growth in the efficiency and competitiveness of renewable energy sources. Even in India, solar and wind have far outpaced nuclear and are more suitable to the decentralised needs of energy in the country.

Additionally, certain other India-specific factors have stalled the nuclear power projects which corporations in the US, France and Russia have been eyeing in order to resurrect themselves.

Nuclear liability tops the list here – foreign vendors have been wary of the 2010 liability law enacted by the Indian parliament, which they view as overly restrictive, even as civil society activists and safety experts consider the legislation extremely weak.

The nuclear industry lobbies have found this provision to be an anathema and the US government has taken the lead in pressuring successive Indian governments to do away with it.

Governments of India under Modi and Manmohan Singh made every possible effort to undermine the country’s domestic law to facilitate the entry of foreign and private players – giving assurances that in case of an accident India’s government-owned operator would not sue the suppliers, setting up a liability insurance pool to channel compensation back to the Indian exchequer, and introducing outlandish rules under the Act that restrict liability to ‘latent and patent defects’ within a limited period.

Despite his party’s vociferous criticism of such moves by the earlier Singh-led government when in opposition, Modi’s unabashed dalliance with the US has barely remained under wraps – he and Obama jointly declared in 2015 that India would actively take steps to limit liability in the case of a nuclear accident.

However, Modi didn’t stop at that. Not only did his government ensure that the liability rules were dubbed ‘ultra vires’ and against the spirit of the law by former Solicitor-General Soli Sorabjee, entered into force in 2016, it also went on to ratify the Convention on Supplementary Compensation (CSC) – an international template promoted by the nuclear lobbies to ensure a liability-free market, thereby deliberately creating a contradiction between India’s domestic law and its international commitments.

If the recent utterances of senior officials from the US Department of Energy offer any clues, the American nuclear vendors do not want to settle for anything short of amending the original Nuclear Liability Act – “to be clear, there are still open issues around the liability issue,” the US DoE Assistant Secretary is reported to have said in a Reuters report published last week.

As the street protests by indignant survivors of Bhopal’s gas accident during Trump’s recent visit suggest, Indian citizens have had an agonising experience due to the apathy of governments and judicial processes, with the most vulnerable sections having been denied both compensation and justice in the case of the world’s worst industrial disaster.

Neither the routine exhortations of India-US summits being spaces for a rendezvous between two democracies, nor Modi’s much celebrated cleanliness drive, have translated into an open dialogue with the victims of the Bhopal disaster, or the detoxification of the accident site even three decades after the horrific chemical industrial accident.

For his part Donald Trump has been pushing for a massive expansion of nuclear power within and outside the US, with his administration fixated on diluting and even scrapping the regulatory and financial restraints put in place after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, which in effect placed a cap on any nuclear developments for the next three decades.

Trump’s domestic energy policy and budget allocations disproportionately favour the nuclear industry, and exporting American nuclear reactors to developing countries is also a key part of this policy shift. The US under Trump has concluded nuclear deals with the UAE despite massive proliferation concerns……….

Not long ago, Modi’s own home state of Gujarat had rejected a US-imported nuclear project labeling it unacceptably risk-prone, especially in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima accident. This leaves the Modi government with no moral right to impose the US reactors on people in other parts of the country.