One of the major concerns about nuclear power is who pays for accidents. Each country that uses nuclear power has its own laws about exactly who will pick up the cost of damage and recovery from a major nuclear accident. The U.S. has the Price-Anderson Act which caps the liability of nuclear power plant operators although there is a provision for Congressional action to assess further charges against responsible companies. India has been working on changing its strict liability laws for industrial accidents that would apply to a nuclear accident.
A gas leak in Bhopal that killed almost four thousand people in India in 1984 is considered to be the worst industrial accident in the world. Following the Bhopal industrial accident, India passed some of the most stringent industrial accident liability laws in the world. These laws have been an impediment for some companies seeking to build nuclear reactors in India and India has been working on changes to the laws and creating other mechanisms to make the supply of nuclear technology by foreign more attractive.
In most nuclear nations, liability for nuclear accidents is limited to the owners and operators of nuclear power plants. India was an exception because they also provided for the liability of suppliers of equipment to the power plant. In 2010, India passed the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act which gives the primary responsibility for accidents to the plant operators although it does leave the possibility of cost recovery from suppliers. That same year, India signed up to participate in the Convention on Supplementary Compensation for Nuclear Damage (CSC) under the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The CSC was established to create a fund from donations by signatories based on their installed nuclear capacity and a rate of assessment set by the United Nations. This fund will be available for damages caused by a nuclear accident beyond the borders of a country where the accident takes place. The CSC also established treaty relations between nations whether or not they are signatories to other nuclear liability conventions such as the 1968 Paris Convention on Third Party Liability in the Field of Nuclear Energy and the 1977 Vienna Convention on Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage. These conventions have been linked by a joint protocol in 1988.
The CSC was put forth in 1997 but required the ratification of five nuclear power states with a minimum of four hundred Gigawatts (thermal) of installed nuclear capacity before it could go into effect. (The electricity that is produced by a gigawatt of thermal energy is dependent on the efficiency of the conversion via steam turbine from heat to electricity. So a thirty percent efficiency which is commonly found at nuclear power plants would result in one hundred twenty gigawatts of electricity from four hundred gigawatts of thermal energy.)
In all, nineteen countries have signed the convention. The formal requirements for the CSC were satisfied in January 2015. Following the satisfaction of the requirements, the nations that have signed the convention must now formally ratify the convention. The convention will go into effect for India in May of 2016, ninety days after the formal submission of its ratification.
Participation in the CSC will quiet some of the international concern over supplying nuclear technology to India. The U.S. Secretary of Energy said, "I welcome India to the CSC and look forward to their deployment of civil nuclear energy technologies to help provide reliable, low-cost power to millions of Indians. These efforts will help spur a low-carbon economy to combat climate change. Additionally, we are eager to work with India, and all CSC member countries, to facilitate the use of advanced nuclear technologies developed in the United States."
India submits ratification of CSC to IAEA:
