Michele Kearney's Nuclear Wire: An Indian wake-up call for the us nuclear industry Washington should see the N-liability law as New Delhi intended it: a graceful way to change focus to more important non-nuclear topics

Thursday, September 16, 2010

An Indian wake-up call for the us nuclear industry Washington should see the N-liability law as New Delhi intended it: a graceful way to change focus to more important non-nuclear topics

India’s Parliament last week gave the US nuclear industry the legal equivalent of a Bronx cheer: It passed a law that denied US firms legal immunity from being sued in the event of a nuclear accident. Besides upsetting executives at General Electric and Westinghouse, the law’s passage destroys one of the 2008 US-Indian nuclear deal’s key pitches— that it would energize the “world’s largest democracy” with up to $150 billion in US reactor sales.
The US is up in arms, so to speak, because private US firms can’t take on such risk—but their French, Russian and other state-backed competitors can. US diplomats preparing for President Barack Obama’s planned November visit to New Delhi are lobbying their counterparts furiously to “fix” the situation. It’s unclear if they’ll succeed. But for everyone’s sake, I hope they won’t.
Indians have little to gain from caving in to US pressure. Having suffered thousands of fatalities from the 1984 Bhopal incident and having received a pittance from Union Carbide in compensation, Indians are not just making an anti-imperialism point in protesting attempts to shield US firms from liability. They are protecting their population’s security.
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