POWER May 2014 - 11

on equipment defects.
The law has stalled the implementation of deals for new reactors
that India signed with the U.S., Russia, and France in 2008,
when the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) allowed India to import
nuclear fuel technology without being a member of the multinational
body concerned with reducing nuclear proliferation. India
said the breakthrough deal with Russia reached this April after
four years of negotiations takes into account the liability law
when pricing four more Russian reactors meant for India's Kundankulam
plant in Tamil Nadu (each of which is valued at $2.5
billion) as well as four or six other VVER-1200 units planned for
Haripur, West Bengal. The deal essentially calls for India's public
sector General Insurance Co. to evaluate each component of the
Russian reactors and prescribe a 20-year insurance premium it
will charge to cover Russia's liability for an accident.
Russia's state-owned nuclear firm Rosatom reportedly has
indemnity from any liability arising from an accident at the
VVER-1000s at Kundankulam Unit 1 (Figure 2), which attained
criticality in July 2013 and is expected to come online later
this year, and Unit 2, expected to be operational in October
2014. Observers note that contracts for those plants were
signed in 1998, before India's domestic liability legislation had
even been contemplated.
Before Indian legislation on civil nuclear liability-The Civil
Liability for Nuclear Damage Bill-finally passed both houses of
parliament in August 2010, exempting suppliers from all liability
had been India's typical practice, starting in 1962, when India
signed its first nuclear cooperation agreement with the U.S. to
allow General Electric to supply two 200-MW reactors to India's
Tarapur site. The practice of liability exemption was modeled on
America's own 1957-passed nuclear liability law, the Price Anderson
Act, and went on to extend indemnity protection to Atomic
Energy of Canada Ltd. for two reactors in Rajasthan in 1965, and
later to Russia.
2. The early bird and India's nuclear worm. The first of
two VVER-1000 reactors at the Kundankulam nuclear power plant in
the Indian state of Tamil Nadu attained criticality in July 2013 and is
expected to come online later this year, more than a decade after construction
began within implementation of an intergovernmental agreement
between Russia and India signed in 1988 and supplemented
in 1998. A memorandum of mutual understanding between the two
countries calls for at least two more units at the Kundankulam site and
the construction of at least 16 nuclear power plants of Russian design
in India. Courtesy: Rosatom
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