The environmental impact assessment process for nuclear facilities: An examination of the Indian experience

India plans to construct numerous nuclear plants and uranium mines across the country, which could have significant environmental, health, and social impacts. The national Environmental Impact Assessment process is supposed to regulate these impacts. This paper examines how effective this process has been, and the extent to which public inputs have been taken into account. In addition to generic problems associated with the EIA process for all kinds of projects in India, there are concerns that are specific to nuclear facilities. One is that some nuclear facilities are exempt from the environmental clearance process. The second is that data regarding radiation baseline levels and future releases, which is the principle environmental concern with respect to nuclear facilities, is controlled entirely by the nuclear establishment. The third is that members of the nuclear establishment take part in almost every level of the environmental clearance procedure. For these reasons and others, the EIA process with regard to nuclear projects in India is of dubious quality. We make a number of recommendations that could address these lacunae, and more generally the imbalance of power between the nuclear establishment on the one hand, and civil society and the regulatory agencies on the other.