-IANS   The CPI-M on Wednesday denounced the proposed Nuclear Safety Regulatory Authority Bill and asked the government to "set up a genuinely independent nuclear safety regulatory authority". "By bringing such a bill (in parliament), the government has shown its utter disdain for the people's genuine fears about safety in the nuclear sector," the Communist Party of India-Marxist said in a statement. "The CPI-M demands that the government scrap this bill and...

-The Hindu   “The sector has over 345 reactor years of safe operation” In the wake of the Fukushima nuclear accident, the emergency response and preparedness measures in India's nuclear facilities had been strengthened and several recommendations of the safety reviews mandated by the government of India had already been implemented, said Srikumar Banerjee, Chairman, Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), on Wednesday. A road map was being prepared for implementing the other recommendations. Addressing the...

The Nuclear Safety Regulatory Authority Bill is a first step towards granting functional autonomy to the country's nuclear regulator. THE true independence and functional autonomy of the existing Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) has been questioned for long. The issue gained further importance in recent months after it was raised in many quarters in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March in Japan. To allay public fears as...

An Army aerial survey on Wednesday showed that at least five villages in north Sikkim have been obliterated. More disturbingly, the survey failed to detect any people in or around the area, raising fears of the quake toll going up significantly. Authorities also said that 11 bodies were retrieved from the rubble at the hydel project near here where rescue teams fear that 40 workers are trapped in a flooded tunnel....

Nine villages with a combined population of 1,000 were out of the reach of the rescue effort in North Sikkim till this evening, injecting a fresh sense of urgency into a task force blasting past and working around boulders blocking roads in the region. The cut-off villages are located in Dzongu, the protected area of the Lepchas, the indigenous tribal community of Sikkim. The villages have been identified as Shipgyer, Bey,...