E-Paper
Nuclear power still locked in
The completion of the civil nuclear cooperation agreement with the United States opened the external gates to an atomic revival in India.
The completion of the civil nuclear cooperation agreement with the United States opened the external gates to an atomic revival in India. However, the recent statements by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the future of India’s civilian nuclear programme indicates that the domestic locks holding back such a renaissance remain in place. The official mindset remains firmly mired in the combination of suspicion and vision that became the mainstay of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) following decades of foreign sanctions. At the heart of this mindset lies a fear that any change in the present nuclear system will endanger the three-stage thorium reactor programme that has become the DAE’s presiding theology. This fear has led to a reluctance to allow the private corporate sector to enter into the business of building and running reactors. If the latter proves too successful, the DAE seems to believe, interest in the thorium programme will fade.
Dr Singh spoke of the thorium cycle, still at an early stage of development, providing potentially 470,000 megawatts of electricity by 2050. In comparison, the Kirit Parikh committee report on energy policy gave 275,000 MW as its most optimistic projection for nuclear power production by that year — and it also assumed a completed thorium cycle. The impression is of a speech designed to talk up a programme whose completion still invites plenty of scepticism and downplay the immediate need to allow private capital to scale up existing, proven nuclear power technology. If this is the state of present official thinking about nuclear power in India, then the “global nuclear renaissance” that Dr Singh spoke of may miss his own country.
The danger is that the country’s nuclear future will depend on a wing, a prayer and a very delayed timeline. Even if the thorium cycle is mastered, not even the DAE believes it will be ready before 2020. But India’s power needs are immediate. The first Singh government added little to India’s already inadequate power generation capacity. While a handful of new nuclear reactors are expected soon, these reactors will empty the coffers of the only company at present allowed to finance them: the Nuclear Power Corporation of India. This is why a private sector role is not a choice but a necessity. And it is this role that should be at the heart of a forward-looking Indian nuclear power policy.
