By Jim Riccio
Nuclear power is dangerous and meltdowns are expensive. Nuclear power is so dangerous that the corporations that build nuclear reactors would not do so unless they were protected from the liability of a nuclear accident. As the world has witnessed in Japan, the cost of a nuclear accident far outstrips the insurance coverage governments have jerry-rigged for the benefit of the nuclear industry. Ultimately, the public is left holding the radioactive bag and billions of dollars in accident clean-up costs.
Without an insurance scheme that shifts liability from the corporation to the public, the nuclear industry would never have split the first atom. After the Fukushima disaster, Vermont Law School Institute for energy and the environment researcher Mark Cooper stated that: "If the owners and operators of nuclear reactors had to face the full liability of a Fukushima-style nuclear accident or go head-to-head with alternatives in a truly competitive marketplace, unfettered by subsidies, no one would have built a nuclear reactor in the past, no one would build one today, and anyone who owns a reactor would exit the nuclear business as quickly as possible."
In 2010, India passed the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act. Since then, foreign corporations and the governments that represent them have pressured the Indian government to amend the Act. Unlike other liability regimes adopted by nuclear nations, the Indian law allows those corporations that supply nuclear reactors to be held accountable in the event of a meltdown. The Nuclear Liability Act provides the nuclear plant operator a 'right of recourse' and this has made foreign nuclear corporations nervous.
Nuclear salespersons and statesmen, from Areva's "Atomic Anne" Lauvergeon to US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, have lobbied India to amend its Act. And Russia has recently requested that India waive its Nuclear Liability Act for the two Russian reactors being built at the Kudankulam nuclear power plant. It seems American, French and Russian corporations want to sell India billions of dollars worth of new nuclear reactors; they just don't want to be held accountable for the damages their nuclear reactors can cause.
Rather than rewrite the Nuclear Liability Act, the rules implementing it have drastically diluted the liability of the reactor supplier. Fortunately, as the world's largest democracy, India is uniquely situated to defeat and deflect these attempts to water down the law. The parliamentary standing committee has identified inconsistencies between the Act and the rules implementing it and has asked the department of atomic energy to go back to the drawing board and establish rules that are consistent with the intent of the Nuclear Liability Act. This is a step in the right direction and will serve to better protect the lives and livelihoods of Indian citizens.
India's Nuclear Liability Act should not be altered or subverted to benefit Areva, General Electric Hitachi, Westinghouse or Rosatom. These corporations have been coddled by their own domestic and international regimes that channel legal and economic liability for a nuclear accident away from the nuclear supplier and to the owner of nuclear plant. In the Indian context, these are public companies and so the ultimate burden would fall on the tax payer.
But, as is evident after the accident at Fukushima, no nuclear plant owner can withstand the financial tsunami of a nuclear meltdown. TEPCO, the owner of the Fukushima nuclear plant is now bankrupt, virtually a ward of the state. General Electric, the corporation that designed the reactors that melted down and then blew up, turned a $5 billion profit in 2011. Even if the faulty GE designed reactors contributed to Fukushima disaster, Japanese law fails to hold the nuclear vendor accountable.
Fukushima has again shown that splitting atoms to generate electricity is inherently dangerous. If corporations want to sell nuclear reactors, they should be held accountable for the damage their reactor can cause. The Indian Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act corrects this glaring omission in international liability regimes. Nuclear power has proven to be more peril than promise and those who would profit from promoting it should be held accountable.