Nuclear Law, Cracks in India's Nuclear Law

Pleasing neither supporters nor its critics, India this week enacted a Nuclear Liability Bill, opening up the country’s US$150 billion nuclear power economy to global equipment suppliers. The first to windfall may be American companies like General Electric and Westinghouse Electric, followed by French and Russian nuclear power supplies suppliers.

Although the new legal code paves the way for bringing India out of what Prime Minister Manmohan Singh describes as "nuclear apartheid", critics said it didn't do a sufficient amount of to address the safety concerns of its people.

For the time being, the bill may be a personal triumph for the prime minister. After signing the landmark 123 Agreement with



then United States President Gorge Bush in October 2008 to lift a three-decade long distant embargo on the transfer of nuclear fuel and technology to India, Manmohan has fought many battles to shoot the opposition in to permitting for foreign investors and suppliers enter the country's civilian nuclear programs.

"This legal code is a completion of a journey to end the nuclear apartheid, which the world had imposed on India in the year 1974," Manmohan said on August 25 while announcing the legislation in parliament. With it, Manmohan has also administered to score a geopolitical brownie point by demonstrating his resolve to push over a controversial deal in the future of President Barack Obama's visit in November.

By opening up the power sector to nuclear power plants, power deficits that own been a drag on the country’s economic growth for years could be narrow significantly. The bill also allows the India-US 123 Agreement to bear its first fruits as it paves the way for GE and Westinghouse to start work on construction reactors in at least two sites called for them. The two deals could be worth right about $10 billion, according to reports.

Still, the price the country may end up bringing in for not being a nuclear outcast may be too high. "For one, there are an adequate amount of loopholes in the bill so can entrap the operator [the electricity generator] to unlimited liabilities," claimed Lydia Powell, senior fellow at the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation, a bet reservoir on public policy formulation. "Besides, the bill has identified the operator as the easily source of liability, additonally others like equipment suppliers were not built responsible. And most importantly, the plan has failed to address the interests of the victims of a nuclear accident."

Others say the rules for liability argues and payments set at a low level by the bill in the event of a nuclear accident are skewed heavily in favor of resources suppliers who are liable just if ''the nuclear incident has resulted as a consequence of an act of supplier or his employee which includes submit of equipment or material in patent or latent defects or substandard services.''

Experts like Powell say that this clause essentially channels liability for accidents to door of the operators, giving them extremely limited rights of recourse against suppliers should an accident occur. It also sets aside usual tort law by disallowing fault-based claims by victims against operators or suppliers.

“By merely directing legal channeling of money owing rather as opposed to to reflect economical channeling of liability, the plan has clearly focused the interests of the nuclear industry in its place of the victims,” Powell said.

The bill has set a total arrears for the operator at $320 million, while the government has taken one more $220 million upon itself.

The new legislation ''leaves ample scope to channel liabilities to the suppliers,'' the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) lobby cluster said, putting in the the act therefore adequately strengthens safety norms for the operation of nuclear plants.

India’s new nuclear arrears laws are more comprehensive as opposed to most more and more nuclear powers, according to the CII. China, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, the UK and even the US all suffer similar laws that channel debt exclusively to operators and do not come up with a best to recourse against suppliers, the confederation said. India and South Korea are the only countries that provide right to recourse against the supplier, in the face of in South Korea the ideally to recourse can be excluded throughout a carefully crafted contract, the confederation said.

There are 19 nuclear power plants right now operational in India and the region is set to benefit from the 123 Agreement. With total capacity of 4.5 Giga Watts (4,500 MW), the plants suffer been hit by dwindling domestic uranium reserves and sanctions on fuel supplies. Nuclear power generation capacity is consequently down to 3% of total installed power creation capacity of the country. On the back of the agreement, India signed a $700 million deal with Russia in February last year for the supply of 2,000 lots of nuclear fuel.

Four more reactors under construction are impending to get cracking, on the condition that hopes for India to eventually boost nuclear power generation to about 35 GW by 2020.

The a greater role for nuclear energy would help India achieve 9% GDP value increase in the coming years, according to Citigroup analysts Rohini Malkani and Anushka Shah. The economy grew 8.8% from April to the end of June fiscal first, its best performance in two-and-a-half years, info released by the government's Central Statistical Organization showed yesterday.

According to Malkani and Shah, passage of the liability bill also heralds greater private sector participation. This will provide scope for several countries like France, United Kingdom, Canada, Namibia, Mongolia, Argentina and Kazakhstan to participate in India's still-nascent nuclear energy sector, properties wrote in a note to clients. "Current targets allow sufficient space for both international and domestic businesses to expand," properties said.

The bill, ratified by parliament on August 30, is a ''welcome development for not only the country but as well the global nuclear community as a whole,'' according to the Observer Research Foundation's Powell.

Powell alleges that the law would have been ''flawless'' had it paid enough attention to the interests of the survivors of nuclear accidents. ''The fear is, given the weak legal provision for the victims, the suppliers, who are normally a powerful group of people, could get away with next to nothing in India.''
Source:http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LI02Df04.html