Nuclear doubts

Questions abound over India's nuclear power plans

The Union Cabinet’s approval of a plan to build 10 new pressurised heavy water reactors of 700 MWe (mega watt electric) each raises several questions that urgently need addressing to achieve this ambitious agenda. This proposal, which will be implemented under the aegis of the state-owned Nuclear Power Corporation, marks the biggest expansion of the country’s nuclear power capacity from the existing 6,780 MWe generated by 22 plants, which accounts for just 3 per cent of the electricity generated. Power Minister Piyush Goyal said the proposal could generate orders worth Rs 70,000 crore, create more than 30,000 jobs (direct and indirect), stoke the “Make in India” programme by opening opportunities for indigenous engineering companies, and deliver clean energy to meet India’s growing demands. All this sounds enticing on paper, and in a country where progress is frustratingly incremental it is worth pushing the envelope. After all, India’s energy consumption demand has more than doubled since 2000. According to the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook 2015, the country’s power sector needs to almost quadruple by 2040 to keep pace with electricity demand that, boosted by rising incomes and new connections to the grid, will increase at almost 5 per cent per year.

However, doubts over the fresh nuclear power plans persist on several counts. The principal one, which most commentators raise, is cost. Compared with solar power tariffs, for example, nuclear energy appears prohibitively expensive: Rs 2.62 per Mw (and steadily falling) for the former against Rs 6.30 to Rs 12 (depending on the supplier). True, solar power comes with heavy subsidies, but most of this is linked to fixed, not variable, costs. It is worth wondering why greater emphasis is not laid on meeting the challenging target for solar or wind power, which collectively account for 10 per cent of power generation, and working on the technical glitches like storage and downtimes that limit the expansion of these alternative clean energy sources. Indian nuclear power plants, on the other hand, are heavily dependent on uranium imports. Since 2008 – after the 2005 nuclear power deal – India has emerged as one of the largest uranium importers, buying over 5,500 tonnes from Russia, Kazakhstan, France, Canada and Australia. 

Two related points are worth noting. Owing to unstable uranium supply, nuclear power generation has fallen well short of target: in 2016, the fourth year of the 12th Five-Year Plan, India produced just 1,000 MWe from all its nuclear plants against a targeted 5,300 MWe. This raises the question why India does not hasten the transition to thorium, the globally recognised alternate fuel to uranium. India has the world’s largest thorium deposits – at 360,000 tonnes, these are five times the country’s natural uranium deposits – and a quarter of global reserves. A former Atomic Energy Commission chairman reckons that India’s thorium reserves can meet our energy requirements for the next century and beyond. After over a quarter century of research, however, India is yet to develop a workable mechanism through which thorium can be processed and made usable in a reactor. Now, it appears, the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre is in the final stages of developing a thorium-based advanced heavy water reactor. It would be useful to accelerate this process, turning the Make in India agenda into a reality and reducing fuel costs sharply, especially when our main suppliers involve a French company whose technology has flopped and a Japanese company that has filed for bankruptcy.