June
7, 2006
Air
Pollution, Atomic Power and Nuclear Weapons--in India
Hosted by Warren Olney
Listen to the entire Broadcast from NPR.org
Summary
Since economic
liberalization in the 1990's, India has industrialized at record speed.
While growth of 7 or 8% a year has led to American-style consumerism
for those who can afford it, that's come at the price of massive pollution,
with health-consequences for all of India's people. Now, a new study
shows pollution by deadly chemicals--some at 32,000 times accepted levels.
India's "brown cloud" is a major contribution to worldwide
contamination and global warming. President Bush has offered technology
for atomic power, even though India could use it to develop more nuclear
weapons. Will the US Senate decide the nuclear package rewards India
for ignoring the non-proliferation treaty? We hear the results of the
extraordinary two-year study and find out what it means for the rest
of the world.
Excerpt
from the Interview
Warren
Olney: Explain to us, if you will, exactly how this nuclear package
would work in India. What are its components?
Selig
Harrison: Well, first of all, tying this into what you’ve
just heard, the problem that has led India to ask for civilian nuclear
cooperation with the U.S. as its main priority in relations with the
U.S. is precisely the fact that India has had to rely, up until now,
on coal and oil and fossil fuels for its energy needs and it isn’t
able to keep up with its energy needs.
So what
India is after and what the U.S. has agreed to do, is to provide U.S.
civilian nuclear technology, which would open the door to other foreign
nuclear technology as it’s all tied together in the non-proliferation
regime and would enable India to bring in a lot of nuclear power reactors
to add to its energy supply without adding to the pollution that is
resulting from all this CO2 from coal and oil. And that’s one
of the main reasons, one of the big attractions from the point of
view of the United States, was the global warming impact, the fact
that this would reduce India’s CO2 emissions.
If you
look ahead, projecting up to 2015, a three fold increase in India’s
nuclear capacity would reduce expected annual CO2 emissions by more
than 170 million tons, which is about the total current emissions
of the Netherlands. That improvement in air quality would grow as
the nuclear capacity grows.
At the
moment, India’s nuclear capacity is a very tiny proportion of
its energy program so I thought Mr. Raman’s comments were a
bit off the mark. In fact, the nuclear safety problems that he mentioned
would be assisted by the India-U.S. civilian nuclear cooperation agreement.
Up until now, the U.S. has not been able to help India with nuclear
safety at all. We haven’t been able to touch it, because we’ve
had a kind of taboo on cooperation in the nuclear field with India
resulting from the fact that India decided that it had to go nuclear,
facing China as it does, facing Pakistan as it does, facing a non-proliferation
treaty that it considered quite unequal, in which China was accepted
as a nuclear-weapons state and therefore had the right to get nuclear
reactors from the U.S.
So I
think that this India nuclear deal that the Bush administration is
trying to get through the Congress would have many advantages.
Guests
on the Show
NITYANAND
JAYRAMAN
Advisor to Community Environmental Monitoring, an organization engaged
in environmental and health-monitoring in villages in southern India
RUTH
GREENSPAN BELL
Director of the International Institutional Development and Environmental
Assistance Program at Resources for the Future in Washington, DC and
author of "What to do about Climate Change?" in the current
issue of Foreign Affairs
SELIG
HARRISON
Director of the Asia Program at the Center for International Policy,
he has specialized in South Asia for fifty years as a journalist and
scholar
DAN HIRSCH
President of the Committee to Bridge the Gap, a nonprofit nuclear-policy
organization focusing on issues of nuclear safety, proliferation and
disarmament
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