A nuclear expert on Monday said the civil nuclear liability law notified recently largely concerns the domestic suppliers and is not America-specific.
“It is not America specific. We are talking about Indian suppliers,” the Atomic Energy Commission member, Dr M.R. Srinivasan, told PTI here.
“Americans are not building reactors now. If that happens, it will happen in future. Not now,” he said.
Dr Srinivasan was responding to criticism that the rules are aimed at meeting the concerns of US nuclear suppliers wary of being exposed to unlimited liability in the event of Fukushima-type accident involving any of their reactors.
The notified rules relating to the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act provide the nuclear plant operator the right to recourse for the period for which the supplier of equipment has taken liability for patent or latent defects or sub-standard services under a contract. The recourse claims are limited to accidents in the first five years.
Dr Srinivasan, former Secretary in the Department of Atomic Energy, said the rules largely concern thousands of entities in India, who supply a whole lot of equipment to the country's nuclear programme.
“For example, if a supplier supplies Rs 1-crore worth equipment, you cannot make him take a liability for 50 years...for unlimited thousands of crores of (rupees) of liability,” he explained.
He said recourse claims being capped for first five years is “certainly alright”. “Suppliers can only assure the product's integrity,” he said.
On pointing out that Fukushima accident happened some three decades after the initial reactor supply, Dr Srinivasan said it was not the result of suppliers' indifference, but of the “bad decision” of the company to locate the plant at a “lower level” and not higher.