India Votes For New Standards For N-Waste Disposal

India has accepted a new international convention which requires countries with nuclear facilities to comply with high standards of radioactive waste management.

Pakistan, south Asias second major nuclear power nation, along with New Zealand voted against the convention, titled Joint Convention on Safety of Spent Fuel Management and on the Safety of Radioactive Waste Management. Russia and China abstained from the weekend vote.

When the treaty was put to vote in Vienna after a five-daydiplomatic conference, India, along with 61 other nations, voted for it.

At the conference hosted by the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), China had lobbied hard to curtail Taiwans rights to export its radioactive waste to North Korea.

Taking the cue from the 1994 Nuclear Safety Convention, the IAEA will hold periodic meetings where signatories will submit reports on waste management.

The convention will open for signature by countries at the annual general conference of the IAEA later this month. The treaty will come into force after it is ratified by 25 states, at least 15 of them with nuclear facilities. Indian officials said they were happy with the outcome even though their proposals could not be accepted.

The convention says that in principle, the nuclear waste generated in a country should be disposed off in the same country. India is already doing this, with its nuclear power plants disposing off most of the waste near their location. The convention obliges signatories to maintain high standards in storing and eventual disposal of wastes from nuclear activities such as power generation or medical use.

The convention realises the aim of bringing all aspects of civilian nuclear activities under international norms. The first step was the 1994 Nuclear Safety Convention, which took effect last October and obliges signatory countries to maintain high levels of safety in planning, design, construction, operation and emergency preparedness of civilian nuclear facilities. Both conventions exclude military nuclear establishments. The vote was preceded by some hard bargaining. Almost all efforts to change the wording of the draft convention, or introduce new issues, were thwarted as they did not receive the necessary two-thirds majority.

The title of the convention itself underlines the conflict. On the first day of the meeting, Yogesh Tiwari, head of the Indian delegation, complained that the experts group had drifted from its original brief of dealing only with waste. India had opposed the attempt to include spent nuclear fuel in the category of wastes because it considers this as a resource which can be reprocessed for reuse as fuel.

India was backed by countries like Britain, France and Japan which also reprocess a part of their spent fuel. The US, on the other hand, insisted that spent fuel should be considered waste.

However, it was decided to include both issues in the convention but under separate chapters, and each country has the right to decide on how it defines spent fuel as a waste or as a resource.

We would have liked the issue of spent fuel management discussed in a separate convention, but the opinion was that it will take many more years for such a convention to come into force, while here was an opportunity to do something about it, said an Indian official.

China had lobbied, without success, to include a paragraph declaring that a country may conduct transboundary shipping of nuclear waste to and from a non-state entity without prejudice to the sovereignty and safety of the state of that entity.

What China wanted was a clear role in Taiwans (the so-called non-state entity) efforts to ship nuclear wastes to North Korea or to any other country.

Beijing claimed that even though it had never interfered with any of Taiwans transboundary shipping, this was a special problem since it affected the safety and sovereignty of the mainland.

However, the US objected, arguing that Chinas motives were political, and the proposal did not have any economical or environmental aspect.

Unlike most Western nations, Cuba and most of the Asian countries, including India and Pakistan, backed the Chinese proposal. Japan voted against while Indonesia abstained.

The Western delegates declared that their negative vote did not mean that they were questioning the policy that Taiwan is a part of China.

A similar proposal by New Zealand and Turkey to include an assurance that transit countries should not only be informed of transboundary movement of radioactive waste, but also requested for permission for this, was also voted out. Although there is still not much nuclear traffic through either the Bosphorus (Turkey) or the South Pacific, both these nations fear this could happen in the future and want to ensure there are enough safeguards against accidents, a diplomat said.

Southeast Asian countries too are worried that the Straits of Malacca might be used for nuclear transport in the future.