The Hindu
July 22, 2005
Swallowing some pride to win the nuclear game
K. Venugopal
In bartering away the country's independence in nuclear policy-making, the trade-off Dr. Singh has attempted to secure is the prospect of a dramatic scaling up of nuclear power capacity.
BELYING HIS sedate and conservative visage, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has cut a deal with the United States on the nuclear issue that none of his predecessors dared, or perhaps wished to, do. Bartering away the country's independence in nuclear policy-making has invariably meant courting domestic political strife; and, as a Congress leader, he would have thought but a hundred times before overturning a policy that was crafted by none other than Indira Gandhi, that lady of steel, who in 1974 stunned the world with nuclear tests at Pokhran, and incurred sanctions from the western world led by the U.S. So why would Dr. Singh have committed himself to opening up for international inspection all the civilian nuclear facilities, and limiting the country's military options?
What everyone has known for some time now is that the old Tarapur power station is running out of fuel. Built with U.S. assistance in the early 1960s, the 400 MWe plant is well past what was initially thought to be its lifespan. But it has been adjudged hale enough to trudge along, albeit at the lower capacity of 320 MWe, for some more years. Its diet of enriched uranium fuel has always come from overseas, but lately supplies have been uncertain with the U.S. and its friends in the Nuclear Suppliers Group unhappy with India's independent nuclear ambitions especially after the country tested five nuclear devices in 1998 and trumpeted its entry into the club of nuclear weapons powers.
What is less well known is that even the set of indigenous nuclear power stations is running short of fuel. Unlike the plant at Tarapur, these home-grown nuclear power stations use natural uranium, procured from the Jaduguda mines in Jharkhand. It was more than 20 years ago that Indira Gandhi switched on the first of these built on the sands of Kalpakkam, 60 km south of Chennai. If the Kalpakkam plant took more than a decade to build, rather than the four years granted these days, it was because of what she had ordered done at Pokhran and the consequent severance of technological cooperation from the U.S. and Canada. The ring-fenced Indian programme took time to find its feet, develop and fine tune the technology, and procure the uranium fuel and materials such as heavy water from local sources.
The penalty was not limited to a time over-run on debut. With pride swelled by the indigenous accomplishment at Kalpakkam, the Department of Atomic Energy had then announced that it would build up a capacity of 10,000 MWe by the year 2000. Setting stretch targets is a well-known management strategy, but this one proved to be excessively optimistic. Virtually every one of the stations set up did suffer delays in commissioning, and for varied reasons. Now five years into the new millennium, the power generating capacity achieved is just 3,310 MWe, and even this, it seems, is not being serviced fully by the Jaduguda mine. The Planning Commission noted last month in its Mid-Term Appraisal of the Tenth Plan that the load factor achieved by the nuclear power plants had come down "primarily due to the availability of nuclear fuel because the development of domestic mines has not kept pace with addition of generating capacity."
Pipeline running thin
It is perhaps the first official acknowledgement that the pipeline is running thin and may not be adequate to feed the existing power plants let alone new ones. It is true efforts were made over the past few years to open new mines. The atomic minerals division of the Uranium Corporation of India spotted a mine in Nalgonda district of Andhra Pradesh, from where it believed it could recover about 1,250 tonnes of uranium ore a day for the next 20 years. A couple of years ago, it announced plans to start mining over 400 hectares and to set up a uranium ore processing plant. The trouble was the mine was located close to reserve forests, and the processing plant just 6 km from a tiger reserve. Environmentalists and other vested interests quickly latched on to the sensitivity of the location; and the project is fighting grimly to win official clearance from the State's environment authorities. Without access to the mine, the atomic energy establishment will find it hard to service the 1,430 MWe of capacity that is due to be commissioned over the next two years and a half.
Such were the poor, unpromising cards that Dr. Singh took with him to the negotiating table. Dr. Singh must have realised that without gaining a benevolent gesture from the U.S., slim were his chances of any other credible supplier stepping in to keep the Tarapur station churning. Again, he must have realised that abandoning the ambitious indigenous nuclear programme to its limitations was something the Government could not do, especially given the dramatic rise in global petroleum energy prices, and the sympathetic effect displayed by coal. On the contrary, there was a strong case actually to ramp up the capacity. While nuclear energy, that has remained insulated from these price shocks, supplies almost half the world's electricity — the share is over 70 per cent in many countries — it contributes less than three per cent to India's.
It is an irony that wind power capacity has overtaken the nuclear this year. Built with surprising zeal by private investors, wind farms have sprung up in many States adding up to a capacity of about 3,595 MWe. While it must be said that many of these farms generate their rated energy only for part of the year when wind speeds are high, and that in terms of total electricity spun out, nuclear energy is still ahead of wind power, the fact to acknowledge is that nuclear power has been paled, and has much to catch up with.
Was the U.S. promise of international help to secure continued supplies of enriched uranium fuel for the U.S.-built Tarapur plant and to ramp up the country's nuclear electricity programme the tipping point for Dr. Singh? What had he to give up in return? By keeping the wraps on the civilian nuclear plants all these years, India had the option to divert some of the spent uranium fuel for reprocessing into weapons-grade plutonium. The option was a qualified one though, for if a reactor at a power plant were to extract the full energy from a uranium bundle, it would leave the fuel unsuitable for the defence requirement. Once these plants were thrown open to international inspection, the capacity to produce weapons-grade plutonium would be restricted to the research reactors. That might crimp the pipeline that supplies material for nuclear deterrence. For the many that have had but a dim view of the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons, it would indeed be a virtuous turn of events.
The trade-off that Dr. Singh has attempted to secure is the prospect of a dramatic scaling up of nuclear power capacity. The Planning Commission believes that nuclear energy remains an important tool for "de-carbonising the Indian energy sector." As indigenous uranium resources are limited, it says India must seek at least about 20,000 MWe of additional nuclear capacity on a turnkey basis, based on a competitive power tariff. That implies putting out a global tender.
The global nuclear power equipment industry has not exactly been busy in recent years. No new nuclear reactor has, for instance, been commissioned in the U.S. since 1996, and only last month President George W. Bush was urging Americans to start building nuclear power reactors again in a bid to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. For these companies, investing in India should be an attractive business opportunity, and the Indian Government will do well to seize the initiative once the regulatory and political hurdles are cleared in the U.S. and elsewhere. Invitations can go out not just to suppliers of natural uranium fuel for the stations set up and run by the Nuclear Power Corporation, but also to utility companies to build and operate plants that run on enriched uranium fuel. It would be preferable to let the investors know that they shall bear the risks of their business, whether political, technical or monetary. Finding fuel for a nuclear power plant should never again be the Government's problem.
Dr. Singh has raised the political stakes, preferred the economic advantages over the military, and even sold a bit of national pride. The question is whether he can deliver on the economics.