A fresh petition was filed on Friday in the Supreme Court against the environmental clearance given to the controversial Kudankulam nuclear power plant in Tamil Nadu.
A fresh petition was filed on Friday in the Supreme Court against the environmental clearance given to the controversial Kudankulam nuclear power plant in Tamil Nadu.
The plea by Chennai-based social activist G Sundarrajan has sought stay on the August 31 verdict of the Madras High Court, which had upheld the validity of the environment clearance given to the project by the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) in in 1989.
This is the third petition in the apex court against the commissioning of Kudankulam nuclear power plant, which has trigger large-scale protest.
The earlier petitions filed by civil societies Centre for Public Interest Litigation and Common Cause have sought a direction to the government to make it binding on the Russian firm involved in setting up of the Kudankulam nuclear power plant to pay damages in case of any accident.
It had been alleged that the Centre has exempted Russian firm from all liabilities in case of a mishap which is against the law.
Sundarrajan had also approached the apex court against the high court's decision, which had refused to impose any restraint on the plant.
The activist in his today's petition filed through advocates Prashant Bhushan and Pranav Sachdeva contended that the high court ignored the law that states that any expansion or modernisation requires a fresh clearance and that a clearance stands valid only for five years.
The petition said the high court has ignored that enormous changes have taken place in environmental norms since 1989 and that a nuclear plant has enormous environmental impact and must be judged and be governed by the law of the land as it exists today.
"At the time of the clearance, there were no Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) notification of 1991, no mandatory public hearing notification of 1994 and no Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) report," the petition added.
Further, enormous changes had been made in the original plan of 1988 (by signing a fresh agreement with Russia in 1998 and otherwise also) that had huge environmental implications, the petition said adding that the environmental clearance given in 1989 reads like a formality with no proper application of mind. "The conditions imposed are vague and merely amount to saying that necessary regulations need to be followed. There are no precise conditions, no real evaluation of the environmental impact of the plant and no proper mitigation strategies. The said clearance was made without any EIA study and at that time even the site of the plant had not been fixed," it said.
The petition said the environmental clearance granted in May 1989 is routine and general in nature with little thought given to specific aspects of the project.
The apex court had on September 13 refused to stay the loading of fuel for nuclear power plant at Kudankulam but had agreed to examine the risk associated with the project, saying safety of people living in its vicinity is of prime concern.
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