Nuclear Liability Law in India - Will you take your head outa your pants and sniff the fresh air for a moment will you!!???

In recent weeks the Nuclear Liability Law has been the eye of the cyclonic discussions that have taken over public debate in India. Somehow, a lot of miss-information is going around and many debaters are putting forward outrageous propositions and painting holocaust scenarios for India's nuclear power programme. I read the draft bill and I think there is a much more to the bill than simply compensation.

For one, I strongly think that the process of notifying an "incident" is very important to the entire nuclear liability bill. And so if an event is not correctly investigated and notified as an incident/mishap, then the liability bill would be an ineffective policy instrument that got made into law. Hence, the task of investigating an incident and notifying it must lie with an independent agency that has not had any role in the establishment process of the nuclear facility/ process/ equipment. Ideally, it looks like the Atomic Energy Regulator Board (AERB) would be doing this job. But if the AERB is already playing a role in the existing safety regime as a safety certification agency for plant sites, during construction of plants and during operational life of the plant. So if AERB itself were to be at fault (on account of improper certification, faulty instrumentation, erroneous measurments, human errors, or certifying something as safe when it was actually not safe to begin with), then there could be potential conflict of interest in its role as the one who assigns the responsibility (or the blame), i.e. as Incident Notifier. There is need for an independent ombudsman here. Who could be as qualified as AERB, capable and unbiased to carry this important task?

Another issue that bothers me is the question of limiting compensation to a specific amount in the bill for any member/actor in the nuclear sector. This is clearly very wrong when damage goes beyond such amounts in true economic sense. Usually, a large part of the claims would be recovered from the state itself where the incident has occured (which is largely the money of the people - tax and forex). This results in a bit of a contradiction as the claimant (in case they are all citizens of the state in question) will be actually paying for himself albeit indirectly, through his tax monies. This anomaly should be corrected in the bill and compensation should be sourced from proper channels. To begin with, all "actors" involved in an incident - i.e. equipment supplier, construction/civil contractors, safety agencies), operator, transport contractors (in case incident is pertaining to a substance/equipment in transit), external agencies/individuals (like when a public vehicle collides with a nuclear equipment transport vehicle, and after a detailed police investigation the fault has been attributed to the public vehicle), and finally the state. The most tricky part here is apportionment of compensation amounts to each of these actors who are part of the nuclear incident. The upper limits of each of these actors must be fixed in the liability bill after appropriate scientific calculations have been done for each other these players/actors. These limits will affect the project's economics by having a direct bearing on the insurance premiums the operator/transporter/constructor, etc. will have to set aside. And the actual amounts that each actor pay up (i.e. who pays up the most % of his liability limit) can be done after the detailed investigation has been carried out by the independent ombudsman to determine the exact cause of the incident thereby laying responsibility (or, the blame) on the appropriate actors in accordance with their involvment (a ranked list of all actors involved in the incident with maximum portion to be paid by the one directly involved in causing the incident).

Then again, a lot of these liability benchmarks (upper/lower limits for liability amount) could have been sorted out if India was a signatory to one of the international liability conventions (e.g. maybe the Paris Convention and its supplementaries; I'm not too sure about this though) especially when it comes to settling claims on foreign territory where the incident has occured as a result of the state's plant/equipment being used, or as a result of spill over of radioactive contamination across the sovereign boundaries of the state into neghbouring states.

Another issue I think liability draft bill doesn't talk about is clean-up and rad-waste management. In the event of a nuclear mishap, the state would be in need of a set of a guideline as to how to handle it and get it cleaned. The bill must not only prescibe the braod guidelines, but also appoint the agency under whose care the remediation/clean-up/decontamination etc. will be carried out (agencies like AERB, DAE, National Disaster Management Institute, etc.).

Also the bill goes overboard in the nitty-gritty of offices and posts that shall arise out of the committees and sub-committees set up from this bill to oversee and incident. Clearly, the ghost of the office-of-profit has not left the Indian parliamentarians. I strongly think that the Government should get out of their cocoon and open their eyes and look around in the neighborhood and elsewhere for examples of good healthy liability laws, rather than just running blind into the radioactive arms of Uncle USA. Open your eyes guys.... parliamentarians, MP's, you have to be more vigilant and objective. Look around you - best practices are ample if not obvious. Clearly, we need nuclear energy, and we need it soon. But by not engaging in a wholesome debate and getting as many intellectual viewpoints on this issue of liability will only lead to a haphazard(ous) bill, the consequences of which we might see (God forbid an incident ever happens) in decades to come.