"One of the core issues in India’s nuclear programme is the lack of fuel and the deep pockets necessary to fund such ambitions. India has precious little uranium and that’s how Bhabha formulated the famous three-stage programme (uranium in the first phase, then reprocessing the spent fuel to extract plutonium from a large number of breeder reactors and finally setting breeder reactors that would use uranium-233 and thorium of which India has abundant supplies) to bypass the problem. But this plan has a fatal flaw. Breeder reactors have not succeeded anywhere in the world and after decades DAE has little to show for all the money and time that it has been sunk in the project." "Some basic figures are important to understand what is at stake. In the six decades since India began producing nuclear energy with foreign technology, technical assistance and funding (but more of this later) it contributes less than three per cent of the total power generation. Current generation capacity despite the massive funding that has gone into the programme is just 4,780 MW, that is 2.25 per cent of the total 211,766 MW. Even renewable energy, the ill- favoured stepchild of the power ministry, accounts for over 12 per cent of the total."
Posted on: Mon, 19 Aug 2013 03:15:50 +0000
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