The impression was that apart from minor blips, in Delhi and Washington, the nuclear deal was all sewn up. But the debate has started again. An aspect largely underplayed, with all the concern over reprocessing and access to uranium-based fuel supplies and weaponisation, has been a point President Kalam made in his last days of tenure. India?s energy future, he said, depends on thorium-based nuclear power.
India?s energy requirements, as we argued in a study for the UN before Johannesburg, would go up around two-and-a-half times by 2020. The numbers in the recent Planning Commission study are slightly different, but not as much as to affect the argument. In the most optimistic sustainable energy scenario, energy based on renewables like wind power, photovoltaics and biomass can meet around 5% of the estimated demand. We are already a super wind power, and sites are getting more difficult to find. Energy based on the sun has more scope. Mini hydel has potential, as also large hydel projects, but they go only so far. Activists tend to stop good projects, and the bad ones with large environmental costs have to be stopped anyway. When we?re in a good mood, a little more credit can be taken for technological change and energy efficiency, but the horror of depending mostly on fossil fuel remains. We have plenty of power-grade coal, but it is an environmental nightmare, and any future scenario in which you burn two billion tonnes of bad coal is just not on. Our own lungs will give up, and the world won?t let us do it. I know the Chinese are doing it, but we would be doing it after Kyoto, and it will be stopped for sure.
A way out is better technology for the use of coal. We have done well, but the Americans are much better at it, for they can burn almost anything to produce electricity?and do it well. We should cooperate with them. As always, it is not just technology, but its organisation that makes a difference. When I was power minister at the Centre and the Americans would come wanting to invest in power, I would tell them that if they productionised fluid bed coal burning Indian technology experimentally available at a CSIR lab in Hyderabad, I would take on the development costs of the first boiler.
The high technology subgroup of our science & technology agreement with the US negotiated then should work on such projects.
Having said all this, it has to be underlined that thorium-based nuclear power is the only demonstrable way we have of completing the fuel cycle. We produced an experimental fast breeder reactor with thorium called Kamini, and it works at Rameswaram. But upgrading it to 500 mw is costly. Placid Rodrigues, the man who did it, once described the cost of such a first-of-a-kind (Foak) reactor. He made the point that we should be talking of the cost of a fast-breeder as we travel up the learning curve, and go into series production of a number of reactors.
He gave my example of how the cost of a steam generator for a pressurised heavy water reactor (PHWR) manufactured by Bhel was brought down in a dispute between Bhel and NPCIL. Bhel took 1,679 days to make the first PHWR steam generator, but the time taken for the eighth steam generator came down to 258 days, and this lowered costs. Rodrigues spoke of this aspect of cost reduction in his 1996 Brahm Prakash Memorial Lecture. If the capital cost of a Foak PFBR is Rs 100, a replica can be built for Rs 71.7. The cost comes down with series construction to Rs 64 for a reactor with two plants on one site and Rs 59.2 per reactor with four plants on one site, the decline plateauing somewhat at Rs 57.7 per reactor for 12 plants on three sites. It is this stabilised cost per reactor that one should be talking about, really, and not the cost of a Foak one, especially when we make cost comparisons with other mature technologies on offer now.
In R&D, one cannot expect 100% success, of course. One must be ready to accept some failures. But when a techno-commercial demonstration project such as the pressurised fast breeder reactor (PFBR) is taken up for implementation, it cannot be a gamble. We will have to negotiate with the Americans, and these costs will have to be minimised in public-private partnership (PPP) modes via ambitious programmes to ensure energy security.
We have already said over a decade ago that we will allow the private sector into these programmes, if they will, and also FDI. The scope for international cooperation is broader now.
The Canadians and the French will collaborate with us, as also the Japanese. But to get beyond the polite noises on strategic cooperation they are making, the entire Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) must come aboard. Strategic energy programmes will have to be followed with the steadfastness of Arjuna aiming his arrow at the fish.
?The author is a former union minister for power, planning and science, and was vice-chancellor of JNU. Write to alagh@icenet.net