India may opt for lifetime stock piling of uranium up to a quantity required to produce 40,000mw of nuclear power by 2020, according to Atomic Energy Commission chairman Anil Kakodkar.
Kakodkar said the uranium required to produce 40,000mw, for its multiplicity of energy value, can produce up to 4,00,000mw by 2050, thus bridging the energy requirement gap by then.
India is likely to require around 10,00,000mw by 2050 and by utilising all its resources at an optimum level and saving uranium and thorium, the country will face an energy deficit of around 40%. The country’s uranium imports have been planned in perspective of bridging the energy requirement gap by 2050.
To bridge this gap with thermal power, India may require importing 1.6 billion tonne of coal, Kakodkar said.
He said that India has acquired the legal right to pile lifetime stock of uranium, taking into account the life of its heavy water nuclear reactors. If India has to do so, cost of inventory would not be a major consideration. Unlike coal-fired power plants, nuclear power plants involve low inventory. For producing 200mw of nuclear power, the requirement of uranium would be 30 tonne, which as an inventory would attract very little cost.
Indian heavy-water reactors begin with a life of 30 years which are designed in such a way that its “in core components can be replaced”. So lifetime of an India-made heavy water nuclear reactor, which is marked as one of the world’s best by the World Association of Nuclear Operators, can be estimated to be over 60 years and even beyond. Hence, lifetime stock piling might be implied for that period.
India currently has an assured supply of uranium for producing 10,000mw with 15 reactors already installing around 4000mw and this, for the multiplicity of energy value, can produce up to 500,000mw by 2050. India’s third stage of nuclear power programme, utilising its huge thorium reserves, should ideally start after the energy value of raw uranium is optimally used.
To utilise the large reserves of thorium, a balanced three-stage programme has been designed under which the spent fuel, got from burning natural uranium in the first stage, is used in the fast-breed reactors in the second stage to get plutonium. The third stage involves using thorium by irradiating it in nuclear reactors and transforming it into uranium-233, which requires a blend of plutonium. The third stage can be launched only after sizeable amount of plutonium is made to support the thorium-based power generation.
However, Kakodkar said although the nuclear power would cost Rs 6.5 crore per mw at the present value of rupee, “the country’s growth economy will pay for it.”
“Though slow, there has been some progress in identifying and mining uranium reserves in the country and as found, Indian uranium are of low grade. But the country has the technology to carry out its nuclear power programme with low grade uranium,” Kakodkar added.