India, Australia's newest uranium export destination, is to dismantle its nuclear regulator, replacing the expert panel with a government-controlled body critics say will be a ''sham'' and ''no regulator at all''.

 

Legislation before the Indian parliament would replace the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, which has monitored the use, transfer and disposal of nuclear material in India for 28 years, with the Nuclear Safety Regulatory Authority.

 

The NSRA will be answerable to a clutch of government ministers who can direct the regulator, even sack its members, giving rise to allegations that the new body will be captive to government.

 

The controversial move comes as Australian officials prepare to begin negotiations with India about the sale of uranium to its civilian nuclear program.

 

This month the Labor Party overturned a long-standing ban on selling uranium to India because it refused to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

 

India remains steadfastly outside the treaty but has signed other international agreements and is now subject to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Nuclear Suppliers Group.

 

But nuclear experts say safety will be compromised under the new domestic regulator.

 

Adinarayan Gopalakrishnan, a former chairman of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, said the new authority was being formed to allow vested interests to control and profit from India's nuclear industry.

 

''The Nuclear Safety Regulatory Authority Bill will not lead to an independent or transparent regulator in this sector,'' Dr Gopalakrishnan told the Herald.

 

''The bill aims at a formal 'regulatory capture' of the nuclear sector so that a few top people in the executive branch, in collusion with some of the senior atomic scientists, bureaucrats and politicians, can help the Indian and foreign corporate sectors in importing foreign power reactors into India on their terms, irrespective of their relative safety or cost merits.''

 

Prabir Purkayastha, from the Delhi Science Forum, said a government embarrassed by a nuclear accident or faced with allegations of mismanaging its nuclear plants could keep regulators from investigating.

 

''The regulator may want to investigate an issue at a nuclear power plant but if the government of the day, for a political reason, says 'No, it is safe, you cannot inspect it,' it has the authority to tell the regulator what to do. You really have no regulator at all, because it's not independent,'' he said.

 

Serious safety lapses are not without precedent in India.

 

Last year an ageing lead-lined machine was taken from the rooms of a retired professor at Delhi University and sold as scrap. The device was a gamma irradiation machine used in experiments by chemistry students. It contained radioactive cobalt-60.

 

Pulled apart by an unwitting scrap metal dealer, it unleashed radiation that killed one person and sent six to hospital.

 

The accident was deeply embarrassing for the government but the incident was thoroughly investigated by the independent Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, which oversaw the search for other radioactive material inadvertently sold, and the clean-up of the affected area.

 

The university was issued a show-cause notice and ordered to suspend its work with radioactive materials.

 

In response, at least, regulation worked.

 

Now, with legislation to create the new regulatory body before parliament, the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, has been diligently selling the safety of the Indian industry.

 

''The safety track record of our nuclear power plants over the past 335 reactor-years of operation has been impeccable,'' he said. And he has defended the new regulator, saying it will be ''truly autonomous … of the highest and the best international standards''.

 

Australia, after years of practising, in Dr Singh's words, ''nuclear apartheid'' against India, is now backing India's nuclear industry.

 

The Herald understands negotiations over Australian uranium sales to India will start next year, but a spokeswoman for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said there were no set time frames for the talks.

 

''The government is aware of the proposal to replace the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board with a new body, the Nuclear Safety Regulatory Authority,'' she said. The Defence Minister, Stephen Smith, said this month that India had ''a very strong track record'' on non-proliferation.

 

But beyond issues of regulation, there are genuine concerns about the direction of India's industry.

 

The country's nuclear industry is growing quickly. There are currently 20 operating nuclear reactors, built, owned and run by the state-owned Nuclear Power Corporation, which provide about 3 per cent of the country's energy.

 

Only half of India's established plants run under international safeguards, and are therefore eligible to use imported uranium.

 

But 44 more reactors are either slated for construction or already being built.

 

Part of India's energy plan - this is a country where 400 million people still live without access to electricity - is the creation of five massive ''nuclear energy parks'', each with a peak power output of 10,000 megawatts, three times the power used by India's biggest city, Mumbai.

 

The country plans to treble its nuclear output by the end of the decade, and to get a quarter of its energy from nuclear sources by 2050. But, almost as quickly as plants are being approved, new concerns about India's burgeoning industry are emerging.

 

The nuclear parks, for which farmlands and villages would be seized in five states, have attracted the most widespread criticism. Land-holders have staged sit-ins, hunger-strikes and launched violent protests at the construction sites.

 

The fiercest opposition has been reserved for the plant under way at Jaitapur, on India's west coast, which is being built on a cliff top in an identified seismic zone. From 1985 to 2005, there were 92 earthquakes in the area, the largest being a 6.3-magnitude quake in 1993.

 

A research paper published last month by Roger Bilham, professor of geological sciences at the University of Colorado, said: ''If stress in the region is sufficiently mature to have brought an existing sub-surface fault close to failure, an earthquake may be imminent.''

 

Dr Bilham, along with Vinod Gaur from the Centre for Mathematical Modelling and Computer Simulation in Bangalore, wrote that a quake measuring above magnitude-6 could occur directly beneath the power plant. ''The probability of this earthquake occurring is low but it is nevertheless possible, and is an important consideration in the analysis of power plant safety,'' he said.

 

While farmers and villagers protested against the creation of nuclear parks, India's political class was angrier at the decision to limit the damages liability of nuclear plant operators and suppliers to just 15 billion rupees ($270 million).

 

India's low liability cap was seen as a capitulation by the government to the interests of US nuclear suppliers, who were refusing to enter the Indian market without assurances that their damages liability would be minimised should there be a nuclear accident.

 

Critics of Dr Singh say he yielded to pressure from the US President, Barack Obama.

 

''Effectively the people's right to access legal damages is reduced but, because in reality no government can walk away from a nuclear accident, it will become a matter of political pressure that is placed on the government of the day to give compensation to the people affected by an accident, rather than the companies being strictly liable,'' Mr Purkayastha said.

 

A group of eminent Indian citizens is challenging the new legislation in the Supreme Court, arguing a diminished and capped liability ''puts to grave and imminent risk the right to safety, health, environment and life of the people of India''.