In the roughly 60 years since nuclear power plants have been
planned and developed world wide, there have been seven accidents at such
plants, beginning in 1957. In the fall of that year there was a fire
and meltdown at a power plant in the U.K., in the county of Cumbria (Windscale
Number 1). Other “disasters” at nuclear power plants include:
Sodium Reactor Experiment, Los
Angeles, California, U.S., 1959
SL-1 Boiling Water Reactor, Idaho
Falls, Idaho, U.S., 1959
Enrico Fermi Unit 1, Frenchtown
Charter Township, Michigan, U.S., 1966
Three Mile Island Reactor,
Middletown, Pennsylvania, U.S., 1978
Chernobyl, Ukraine, 1986
Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power
Plant, Fukushima, Japan 2011
The first nuclear disaster in the U.K. was apparently a call
to action among the nations of Europe, as a convention and protocol for the
establishment of a tribunal to deal with claims arising from such disasters
were adopted in December, 1957 by a group of European nations. The Convention
on the Establishment of a Security Control in the Field of Nuclear Energy, and
the Protocol on the Tribunal established by the Convention were adopted in
December, 1957 and came into force in July, 1959. One reason for the creation of the tribunal was
to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons (“hearing cases
involving the violation of the European regional nuclear safeguards”). This
original reason was suspended in
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1970 in deference to the jurisdiction of other
international nuclear agencies.
The Tribunal now is devoted to hearing cases “concerning
liability over nuclear accidents.” If a case is presented where the country
concerned is not represented on the panel, the government of that country may
appoint an additional judge to sit in that case. To date there have been no
case filings for the Tribunal to consider.
According to the Legal Affairs Office of the Tribunal, it
has its own rules of procedure. The applicable law is the provisions of the
Security Control Convention and a subsequent convention, the Paris Convention
on Third Party Liability in the Field of Nuclear Energy adopted in July, 1960.
The nations that subscribed to the Security Control Convention
are Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the
Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and the
United Kingdom. Austria is a party to the Security Control Convention but not
the Paris Convention. Slovenia is a part to the latter Convention but not the
former one.
Seven judges are appointed by the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD) to the tribunal for terms of five years
according to a system of rotation among the member states. The current panel of
judges, appointed for terms beginning January 1, 2015, are from Austria,
Denmark, France, Greece, Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland. The current President
of the Tribunal is Dr. Peter Baumann of Austria.
There is a Registrar for the Tribunal (currently Head of the
Office of Legal Counsel of the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency). Tribunal offices
are located in Paris, France at the OECD headquarters.
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