Dangerous leap into privatised nuclear expansion: Tharoor slams govt over N-bill

New Delhi: Congress MP Shashi Tharoor on Wednesday described the government's nuclear energy bill as a "dangerous leap into privatised nuclear expansion" without adequate safeguards and asserted that the pursuit of capital cannot be allowed to override the requirements of public safety, environmental protection and victim justice.

Participating in a debate on the Sustainable Harnessing and Advancement of Nuclear Energy for Transforming India (SHANTI) Bill in the Lok Sabha, Tharoor claimed that the proposed legislation is ridden with exceptions, heavy on discretion and largely indifferent to public welfare.

"I am not sure whether it is a nuclear bill or an unclear bill," he said.

The former Union minister said the SHANTI Bill represents a "dangerous leap into privatised nuclear expansion" with inadequate safeguards.

"We cannot allow the pursuit of capital to override the non-negotiable requirements of public safety, environmental protection and victim justice," he asserted.

"The name SHANTI means peace and sustainability. Let us ensure that this name is not a cruel irony in the aftermath of a preventable disaster. The promise of transforming India ought not to conflate the risk of scarring India," the MP from Kerala's Thiruvananthapuram said.

Taking a swipe at the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Centre, he said the government speaks grandly about harnessing the immense energy released by splitting an atom, yet it seems to have failed to expend even a fraction of that energy in drafting a bill that is coherent, rigorous and not full of loopholes.

Tharoor said while India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, had laid the foundations for the country's nuclear programme, Manmohan Singh carried the 2008 Indo-US nuclear deal across the last mile, lifting India out of isolation and leading it into an era of strategic confidence in nuclear power.

"This bill now confronts us with a disappointing reversal, as a vision that once expanded horizons gives way to ambiguity and deepens uncertainty as to where India's nuclear framework is headed," he said.

"We have mastered nuclear fusion and fission but not, apparently, legislative precision. The SHANTI Bill is a milestone but for the wrong reasons," the Congress leader said.

The bill, in its current form, contains such fundamental structural flaws that it requires comprehensive reworking rather than cosmetic amendments, he argued and added that ideally, it should have been referred to a joint parliamentary committee.

"The very preamble of this bill characterises nuclear energy as 'a clean and abundant source for electricity and hydrogen production'. This language is dangerously misleading. It completely neglects the serious, massive and irreversible risks from radioactive leaks, long-lived nuclear waste and the potential for catastrophic accidents," Tharoor said.

Moreover, India's usable uranium reserves are finite and while it does possess significant Thorium-232 reserves, thorium-based reactors remain decades away from significant deployment, he pointed out.

"The full life cycle of nuclear fuel from mining to waste disposal is neither clean nor sustainable. We must be honest with the people of India about what we are asking them to accept. Section 3(1)(c) and (e) provide that any other company or any person expressly permitted by the central government is eligible to apply for a licence to set up and run nuclear facilities," the former diplomat said.

"This effectively amounts to a blanket opening up of the entire nuclear-energy sector -- from mining to waste management -- to a wide range of private actors with indeterminable qualification criteria," he added.

More troubling still, the bill allows for a single composite licence for multiple activities across the nuclear fuel cycle, Tharoor said.

"This means one entity could control mining, fuel fabrication, reactor operation and waste handling. Such concentration of control in a single operator or corporate group heightens systemic risk exponentially rather than containing that risk. When profit becomes the primary motive across the entire chain, safety checks could be compromised at every stage," he argued.

Such blanket opening up of the nuclear-energy sector is potentially dangerous, and giving the operational control of fissile and other highly-radioactive substances to private entities that are driven by quarterly earnings and the bottom line of profit significantly increases the possibility of nuclear incidents and accidents, the Congress leader asserted.

Beyond safety, fundamental questions arise about economic wisdom, he said.

Tharoor pointed out that the core of the liability reform caps total nuclear incident liability at approximately USD 460 million or Rs 3,910 crore.

"Let this sink in.... This cap has not changed in 15 years despite inflation, despite Fukushima, despite everything we have learnt," he said.

"For context, the Fukushima disaster cleanup cost has already exceeded USD 182 billion.... Chernobyl's total economic impact has exceeded USD 700 billion. Yet we propose to cap liability at less than half a billion dollars? This is grossly inadequate," the former Union minister said.

This is not a safety net, it is a trapdoor through which victims could fall into decades of legal battles and inadequate compensations, he said.

"Is bill ke har vaade ke peeche ek qeemat chupi hai Mr Minister, aur aksar ye qeemat wohi chukata hai, jiska faislon mein koi hissa nahi hota. Par un vaadon ki qeemat tum kya jano sarkar, yehi meri chinta hai (Behind every promise in this bill, there is a price to be paid and often that price has to be paid by the person who is not a stakeholder in decisions. You will not understand the value of the promises and that is my concern)," Tharoor said in a light-hearted swipe at the government.

He also said the most egregious provision of all is that the negligence of an operator or a person is recognised as a cognisable offence, but only someone duly authorised by the Centre or the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board can file a complaint.

"If a nuclear-facility operator is criminally negligent, affected communities cannot file a complaint. Civil society organisations cannot file a complaint. Even state governments cannot directly initiate criminal proceedings against the operator," the Congress leader said.