The recently notified liability rules largely concerns the domestic suppliers and are not America-specific at all, a key member of the Indian nuclear establishment said today.
"Americans are not building reactors now. If that happens, it will happen in future. Not now," member of the Atomic Energy Commission MR Srinivasan told PTI in Bangalore.
"It's not America specific at all. We are talking about Indian suppliers," he said.
He was responding to criticism that the rules are aimed at meeting the concerns of American nuclear suppliers wary of being exposed to unlimited liability in the event of Fukushima-type accident involving any of their reactors.
According to the rules, recourse claims are limited to accidents in first five years.
Srinivasan, also former Secretary in the Department of Atomic Energy, underlined that the rules largely concern thousands of entities in India, who supply whole lot of equipment to India's nuclear programme.
"Naturally, if the supplier supplies Rs1 crore worth of equipment, for example, you cannot make him take a liability for 50 years...for unlimited thousands of crores of (rupees) of liability", Srinivasan said.
He said recourse claims being capped for first five years is "certainly alright", noting that operators keep on making various technological changes and should take all the responsibility for their acts. "Suppliers can only assure the product's integrity".
When it was pointed out that Fukushima accident happened some three decades after the initial reactor supply, Srinivasan said it's not the result of suppliers' indifference; it's because of the "bad decision" of the company to locate the plant at a "lower level" and not higher.
He termed the rules "reasonable, pragmatic and positive". "Neither one extreme, nor the other. It's fair to the operators, it's fair to the suppliers".
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