The past few months has witnessed a lot of angst among political parties in India over the proposed nuclear deal with the United States. The actors have ranged themselves into three distinct camps – the ayes, the nays and the vacillators. The Congress party leads the ayes camp with the entire jamboree of Left parties making up the nays camp. UPA allies currently occupy the vacillators camp with the BJP waiting in the wings to either crumple or resurrect the deal.
The common populace is nowhere on the scene due to the absence any form of public debate or discussion and most of us are largely unaware of the need for and the ramifications of the deal.
The Prime Minister has been insisting that the deal is essential to help us meet India’s future energy needs. On the energy front India, to-date, relies heavily on fossil fuel. The energy break-up stands somewhat like this:
- Coal and Coal Products: 58%
- Crude Oil, Natural Gas Liquids and Natural Gas: 37%
- Nuclear Energy: 1.3%
- Hydro Electric: 2.6%
The data is a couple of years old but except for minor deviations remain more or less same. You would notice that we have an overwhelming reliance on fossil fuels and coal is among the most dirty carbon fuels, with our reserves promising to last another 20 – 30 years at the current rate of consumption. On the nuclear energy front, unlike what is being touted by the Congress, the picture too is bleak. In 1954, India’s Atomic Energy Commission declared that nuclear plants would provide 8,000 megawatts of electricity by 1980-81. Yet, by 1970, only 420 megawatts were being generated. In 1971, Vikram Sarabhai, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Committee, scaled back projections, saying that by 1980-81, India would be producing 2,700 megawatts of electricity. Almost thirty years later our nuclear plants are now producing roughly 2,700 megawatts of electricity. But the Indian mandarins are undaunted and proclaim, for all who can hear, that we will produce 10,000 megawatts of nuclear power by 2010 and 20,000 megawatts of electricity from nuclear plants by the year 2020. If that’s not wishful thinking what is…and we have still not touched the cost of producing nuclear driven power. What the Prime Minister has incidentally forgotten to tell us (Ashwathma eti gaja) is that the Indian uranium reserves - about 0.8% of the world, falls woefully short and we are running out of fuel for the nation’s existing nuclear plants and let alone building and operating new plants.
That’s where the nuclear deal steps in, promising us permission to import nuclear fuel for our plants which we are currently unable to do so because of nonproliferation rules. There are more grander plans on the way...Our scientists feel that with a planned nuclear energy programme, the available Uranium can be used to harness the energy contained in non-fissile thorium, of which India possesses about 32% of the world's reserves. To get to use thorium powered energy we need to go through a three a staged development process:
1st Stage: Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors using Natural Uranium as fuel and producing Plutonium which is recovered in reprocessing plants for initiating the 2nd Stage.
2nd Stage: Fast Breeder Reactors using Plutonium as fuel and breeding Plutonium and uranium-233.
3rd Stage: Thorium and uranium-233 based reactors.
With our current capabilities of generating nuclear power, the move to Uranium based power to Thorium based power seems a distant pipe-dream.
In part II of the post we shall investigate US interests in pushing the deal through