Will someone teach Modi the difference between M and B? For, his “breakthrough understanding” with Obama turns out to be India providing an additional $200 million in the event of nuclear disaster, whereas the Fukushima cleanup is projected to cost up to $200 billion. The Indian liability law recognises the virtually uncountable costs of a nuclear accident by allowing affected parties to sue both the operator and the supplier for adequate compensation. The Obama-Modi “understanding” does not cover even a fraction of the cost and leaves the supplier as vulnerable as before to the Indian law. To give Modi yet another Pyrrhic victory in foreign policy, Obama allowed him to get away with announcing a mysterious “breakthrough” but took the utmost care to ensure that none of this found its way into an actual formulation of words. We remain where we were: US suppliers can sell in India only on our terms. And if they don’t like it, well that’s their problem.
How likely is an accident to a nuclear power plant involving core damage? In the early days after World War II when the nuclear power industry was still in its infancy, there was a general untested belief that the risk was negligible, perhaps one in every 50,000 operating years―an operating year being the year for which a reactor is run multiplied by the number of reactors in the world. But as the number of reactors worldwide rose exponentially, the US government in 1974 appointed a committee under Prof Norman C. Rasmussen of MIT to take a closer look. The report estimated the risk at 1 in 20,000 reactor years. This was on the eve of the 1979 Three Mile Island partial core damage in the US that resulted in no additional reactors being installed in that country for the next four decades. The accident persuaded the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission to revise its problematic risk assessment to one accident in every 1,000 reactor years. Three Mile Island was followed by the accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima. The current assessment is: one accident every 45 calendar years. But there have been five accidents in the last 40 years. Hence, the problem of risk assessment is a real one, not some anarchist fantasy of a Jurassic Park NGO, as the protestors at Koodankulam are being portrayed. To quote Mitsuhei Murata, the Japanese anti-nuclear activist, “Nuclear reactors are no less dangerous than nuclear weapons.”
Illustration: Bhaskaran
Fukushima has also given rise to the real fear that contaminated water might contain the deadly compound, tritium. Japanese Nobel laureate Masatoshi Koshiba and his fellow-researcher Akira Hasegawa have estimated that in Fukushima’s contaminated water of 5, 90,000 tonnes, there may be traces of tritium, 2kg of which could kill 2 million people!
It is precisely because US suppliers like GE and Toshiba-Westinghouse know much better than our government does that nuclear plants are far from fail-safe that they balk at being made to bear the costs of an all-too-likely civil nuclear accident. Hence, the fuss over limiting supplier liability to a few hundred million dollars when even the cleanup of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which did not kill a single human being but wiped out many seals, has risen from $18 billion to about $42 billion now and is likely to go up to $58 billion. How can a country that has experienced the awful injustice of Union Carbide contemplate letting foreign suppliers off the hook for a tithe of what is being paid out for dead seals?
I recall Rajiv Gandhi mentioning to me that a kamikaze pilot could fly his plane into the Bhabha atomic reactor on the outskirts of Mumbai and cause as much damage as Hiroshima or worse. He added that we could do the same to the Candu reactor on the outskirts of Karachi. The Modi plan, following on the UPA plan, envisages dotting the country with such potential nuclear targets. How then can we spread nuclear power plants through the length and breadth of the nation while baring our teeth at both nuclear Pakistan and nuclear China?
Aiyar, a former Union minister, is an MP and social commentator.