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The Hurdle to India’s Nuclear Renaissance

05 Wed Apr 2017

Posted by in India, Nuclear, South Asia

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Ambitious and well-intentioned as it may be, the department of atomic energy’s (DAE’s) recent proposal to build 12 nuclear reactors to boost power generation in the country needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. In recent decades, DAE has been long on promises and short on delivery—the proverbial white elephant.

Yet it was not always so. When India’s nuclear establishment got under way in 1944—theoretical research had been going on since the mid-1930s, in European labs as well as in India—Homi Bhabha charted out a road map for the country’s nuclear programme for the rest of the century. In a country with appalling literacy levels, unspeakable poverty and little by way modern infrastructure, nuclear power was a bold gamble. Over the next couple of decades, a pool of talent was created, expertise was developed, and collaboration with advanced states sought. Though progress was not breakneck, it was, nonetheless, impressive. Apsara, which went critical in 1956, was Asia’s first research reactor; India’s first power reactor, Tarapur, came online in 1969.

With the exception of an eight-year gap between 1972 and 1980, DAE has been commissioning a reactor every two or three years. However, the reactors were notorious for having a low plant load factor (PLF)—in other words, they were inefficient. The popular belief is that this is largely due to unreliable supplies of uranium fuel but wear and tear and system malfunctions are as much to blame.

Second, India’s pace of nuclear energy growth is dismally slow. When France and the US decided to embrace nuclear energy in the 1960s and 1970s, the former built approximately 60 reactors within two decades and the latter about 100 in a similar time span. China has, at present, as many reactors under construction as India has built since independence. After the end of India’s ostracism from international nuclear commerce, the government ambitiously announced an increase in India’s nuclear energy generation up to 63 GW by 2032; this was drastically revised downwards to 27.5 GW. Recent statements suggest that the target may have been lowered further.

The inordinate delays from conception to commission have been fatal for the sector. The nuclear project at Gorakhpur, for example, was sanctioned in 1984 but is yet to be built; the power project at Narora took 20 years from 1972-92 to complete; the first two units at Kaiga took 15 years. The fast breeder reactor project is also languishing, while DAE has been promising to begin construction on the advanced heavy water reactor next year since 2003.

Cost overruns have also been ingrained into the Indian nuclear process—the Narora plant was sanctioned for approximately Rs200 crore but ended up costing four times that amount; the first two units at Kakrapar saw a 350% increase in cost from conception to commission. Every Indian reactor has seen similar cost spikes.

Technology assimilation has also been a tough nut for DAE. India’s third commercial nuclear power reactor, the 220 MW pressurized heavy water reactor (PHWR) at Rawatbhata, was built with technology from Canada. Since then, Indian scientists have indigenized the design and scaled it up to 540 MW and 700 MW but haven’t been able to cross the 1,000 MW mark as Canada has long done. Today, India needs larger reactors for economies of scale but DAE is yet to deliver.

To be fair, not all of the blame can be placed at DAE’s door. The international nuclear industry, for example, has been in a depressed state for a while—Westinghouse’s financial woes and Areva’s problems with steel forging were self-inflicted disasters. DAE has also had to navigate around uninspired leaders who just could not see the transformative promise of nuclear power. That has resulted in budgetary restraints, poor policies and little encouragement.

However, the atomic energy establishment does not seem to have offered much resistance to the government’s apathy; ministries normally jostle for increased budgets, influence, limelight, a place in national strategy, or a seat at the table. In some ways, the apathy has suited DAE’s own lackadaisical work habits. And the shrivelled ambitions of its Nuclear Power Corp. of India Ltd, which is responsible for the construction and operation of nuclear power reactors, hasn’t helped matters either.

Notably, the atomic community was also divided over the India-US civil nuclear deal—despite the lack of indigenous achievement in the country. It also went soft on the stringent supplier liability laws introduced in 2010 that were not in keeping with international industry norms and effectively made the Indian nuclear market a no-go zone for both foreign and domestic suppliers. Furthermore, there has been strong opposition from the atomic community to privatization under the bogey of national security—a convenient shield—against calls for transparency.

Responsibility for DAE falls on the prime minister’s shoulders. It is no coincidence that DAE’s brightest years were under Jawaharlal Nehru and the agency has been languishing somewhat ever since. Curing this white elephant is an easy process—without even getting into long-term, sustainable goals such as privatization, clear regulation and transparency, closer scrutiny by the prime minister and an adoption of the sector as he has done with solar power would go a long way in revitalizing a moribund agency.

This post appeared on LiveMint on April 05, 2017.

A 50 Quadrillion Dollar Discovery

01 Wed Jun 2016

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Sometimes, it is not easy to assess the importance of a discovery: JJ Thompson, the discoverer of the electron, is said to have once called his sub-atomic particle a most useless thing. Today, that same useless electron has gone on to drastically transform the world. Thorium shares an almost similar tale. Discovered in 1829 by Swedish chemist JJ Berzelius from samples of earth sent him by mineralogist Jens Esmark, the new element named after the Norse god of thunder, Thor, held only academic interest for the next half century.

In 1884, Auer von Welsbach invented the incandescent gas light mantle which used thorium oxide. However, when electricity replaced gas for lighting by the mid 1920s, thorium was again nearly forgotten. What saved the element was World War II and the quest for the atomic bomb.

It was the golden age of atomic science: in 1895, German physicist William Röntgen discovered x-rays, though their mechanism eluded him then. The following year, French physicist Henri Becquerel observed that uranium salts emitted rays similar to x-rays in their penetrating power but differing in that they seemed to arise internally in the uranium than be caused by any external excitation. Although credit for the 1898 discovery of radioactivity in thorium goes to the German chemist Gerhard Carl Schmidt, he believed that “thorium rays” were similar to “Röntgen rays”; an accurate understanding of the phenomenon had to await the work of Marie Curie and Ernest Rutherford.

Rutherford’s further experiments revealed basic atomic structure as well as a better understanding of radioactivity. Frederick Soddy, Rutherford’s colleague, saw the enormous potential of their discovery and wrote that here was a virtually inexhaustible source of energy that could, properly applied, “transform a desert continent, thaw the frozen poles, and make the whole earth one smiling Garden of Eden.”

The beginning of World War II put nuclear physics front and centre of the Allies’ agenda. Afraid that Germany might beat them to a horrendous new type of weapon – the German chemists, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, together with Austrian physicist Lise Meitner, had successfully created a small fission chain reaction in 1938, after all – the United States commenced the Manhattan Project, one of the most secretive, international, well-funded, and undemocratic technological initiative to date.

In this project, Glen Seaborg was tasked with assessing which would be the most suitable element to make a nuclear device. Due to wartime exigencies, no efforts were spared in rushing to an atomic bomb. Seaborg was allowed to experiment simultaneously on all tracks he thought worthy of yielding a working weapon – a very expensive proposition. As a result, research was conducted on uranium, plutonium, and thorium paths towards weaponisation. Thorium was found to be unsuitable for weaponisation and, again, the war came first: Seaborg spent most of the war years working with plutonium.

Seaborg’s work, however, had pointed to thorium’s eminent suitability as a fuel for peaceful purposes. Along with his research assistant John Gofman, Seaborg bombarded the thorium atom with neutrons from a cyclotron. They observed that thorium-232 transmuted to thorium-233 and then to protactinium-233. This was carefully extracted from the sample to avoid further transmutation to protactinium-234; after waiting for a couple of months, Gofman observed that the protactinium-233 had transmuted further, into uranium-233 as was later discovered. With the help of fellow researcher Raymond Stoughton, Gofman separated enough of the uranium-233 to test it for fissionability. As per his meticulous notes, it was on February 02, 1942, at 9:44 PM, that the uranium-233 first underwent fission via slow neutron absorption.

Seaborg had already noticed how abundant thorium was, far more than uranium, and when Gofman showed him the results of their labour, he is said to have exclaimed, “we have just made a $50,000,000,000,000,000 (fifty quadrillion) discovery!”

After the war, several of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project shifted their attention to peacetime applications of nuclear energy. Two of them, Alvin Weinberg and Forrest Murray, co-authored a paper on what would eventually evolve into the basic design for light water reactors. The authors were not remiss in noting the several drawbacks of their design, suggesting instead that a reactor operating on thorium would not face similar problems. In 1948, Weinberg became the director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and he kept the research on thorium reactors going. The Molten Salt Reactor Experiment was an experimental reactor that operated at ORNL from 1965 to 1969 and proved the viability of molten salt reactors.

Despite its success, the MSR programme was mothballed. The United States continued to work on the 50 quadrillion dollar discovery sporadically – such as with the experimental thorium-uranium-233 core inserted into a conventional pressurised water reactor at Shippingport in 1977 – but the results were not built upon. The reason for this, according to some such as Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia, is that Washington was not interested in energy but in the production of plutonium to expand its nuclear arsenal and thorium reactors are particularly useless at supporting a nuclear weapons programme. It is only in the last decade that interest in thorium reactors in the United States has again risen but this time more among private entrepreneurs than the government.

Like the United States, most countries that were involved in thorium research gradually abandoned them. West Germany shut down the Lingen reactor in 1973, the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Versuchsreaktor in 1988, and the Thorium High Temperature Reactor in 1989; Britain’s Dragon reactor was switched off in 1976, and the Netherlands pulled the plug on their SUSPOP/KSTR in 1977. India was one of the handful of exceptions that continued to try and tame thorium for energy purposes. Homi Bhabha, the father of the Indian nuclear programme, had theorised along the same lines as Weinberg by 1954 that given the abundance of thorium and the scarcity of uranium in his country, they would be better served by a fleet of thorium reactors rather than what was appearing to be the conventional choice of uranium fuelled reactors. Indian scientists were keen on collaborating with as many of the advanced Western countries as possible, from the United States to France, West Germany, Poland, Hungary, and others in basic nuclear science.

The Atomic Energy Establishment Trombay started working on producing thorium nitrates and oxides in 1955; Indian Rare Earths had been extracting thorium from the beaches of southern India already since 1950, primarily for export to the United States in exchange for help setting up the nuclear programme. By the mid-1960s, India had started irradiating thorium in the Canadian-supplied CIRUS reactor and in September 1970, uranium-233 was first recovered from the process. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, scientists at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre conducted experiments on the properties of thorium, uranium-233, mixed oxide fuels, reprocessing, fabrication, and other aspects of the thorium fuel cycle. Progress was slow for multiple reasons: the technical requirements of handling highly radioactive substances are stringent and remote manipulation in glove boxes was time-consuming and tedious; India’s nuclear tests in 1974 resulted in technological sanctions against the country which disrupted academic networks and supply chains; as a developing country, India could not afford the lavish sums thrown at nuclear programmes in the United States, France, and elsewhere; finally, a lack of political vision and bureaucratic politics stifled the pace of development.

Nonetheless, by 1984, India had built Purnima II, the first reactor in the world that handled uranium-233, part of the thorium fuel cycle. Experiments were also conducted using thorium-based mixed oxide fuel bundles in the regular fleet of heavy water reactors. In 1996, KAMINI went critical, the only presently operating uranium-233 fuelled reactor operating in the world. India has also been working on several thorium reactor designs, each at different stages of completion: the Compact High Temperature Reactor, the Innovative High Temperature Reactor, the Indian Molten Salt Breeder Reactor, and most famously, the Advanced Heavy Water Reactor. Construction on the AHWR is supposed to break ground this year but that is a tale that has been repeated for the past 12 years.

In recent years, several private companies have also started entering the thorium reactor business. Flibe Energy has been marketing the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, while two doctoral students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technolgy started Transatomic Power on the strength of their Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor.

Despite much optimism and promise, the development of thorium energy has historically been hampered by politics, bureaucracy, and economics. For a species whose hallmarks are greed and violence, it is sometimes puzzling that a 50 quadrillion dollar discovery is lying around, waiting to be tapped even 70 years after the realisation of its terraforming potential.

This post appeared on FirstPost on June 04, 2016.

Thorium and the Return of Small Science

05 Sat Dec 2015

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The Narendra Modi government is set to introduce a bill in the Lok Sabha that would seek to amend the Atomic Energy Act, 1962. If passed, under the new and expanded scope of the law, public sector units that are not subsidiaries of the Department of Atomic Energy would be able to invest in the nuclear energy sector. This amendment comes shortly after the government had to turn down a Rs 12,000 crore investment proposal by the National Aluminium Company (Nalco) to become a silent partner with the Nuclear Power Corporation of India (NPCIL) in the construction and operation of one Pressurised Heavy Water Reactor (PHWR). The situation sounds asinine, that even the government cannot invest in itself, but is emblematic of the highly restrictive laws surrounding nuclear activity in India.

Around the beginning of the previous century, the world saw rapid advancements being made in the sciences. It also witnessed the birth of a new discipline, atomic physics, whose revolutionary potential was felt almost immediately. A satisfactory postulation of the atomic structure, the discovery of the electron and neutron, and the classification of the various types of radiation were all made in a short span of about 35 years. These discoveries would go on to spawn industries of their own, worth trillions of dollars, and radically alter human existence.

Around the same time, science also got bigger. Until then, most research was done in universities or was patronised by wealthy citizens. With the advent of the Age of Physics, the necessary equipment became more expensive and the manpower involved increased drastically. No longer could wealthy philanthropists and universities afford to support tinkerers and researchers, and the vastly deeper pockets of the state were required. Of course, the arrival of the state and taxpayer funds changed the very nature of scientific advancement; projects were now desired to have a specific purpose and give the state an advantage, either militarily or economically, over its rivals. This trend seemed irreversible until the end of World War II and the birth of the American military-industrial complex. Even then, nuclear research remained a taboo subject for private entities for a little longer and the few private players remained beholden to the state as their main and sometimes only client.

One of the lasting impacts of the state patronage of high technology has been the secrecy which surrounds most related activity. India, for example, still clings to an archaic notion of secrecy regarding its nuclear facilities that only dampens the entrepreneurial spirit of its citizens and hurts its own economy. Though the private sector is allowed to provide certain components for nuclear reactors, the scenario is by no means anything other than very bleak. Anything transgressing the boundaries of the purely theoretical is forbidden; more importantly, it is next to impossible to acquire any equipment to undertake such studies outside the confines of the behemoth government conclave. Forcing all talent in the country under a government umbrella has stifled the sort of explosive growth needed in clean and safe nuclear technology that India needs, resulting in fewer opportunities, little incentive, loss of innovation, elimination of competition, and poor academic support for the nuclear industry.

Internationally too, it is only in the last few years that nuclear technology has seen a rare entrepreneurial spirit from smaller private players seeking the next big breakthrough but this was more due to the perception that there were no economic incentives in the nuclear arena except for big players. The revival of this techno-optimism, perhaps not dissimilar from the early days of the nuclear age in the 1950s or the sentiment around the late 19th century during the height of the Second Industrial Revolution, has seen big money get behind startups that have little more than a clear idea. Most of these ideas, interestingly, were discarded by governments as impractical in the pursuit of Cold War goals – meaning weapons. Presently, there are some 55 nuclear startups with a total funding of approximately $2 billion, admittedly a drop in the nuclear bucket. However, what is of interest is where this money has come from – seasoned venture capitalists like Peter Thiel, Scott Nolan, Jeffrey Bezos, and Paul Allen who made their billions on their ability to take early calculated risks on how society would be a few years ahead. This alone should indicate the interest nuclear technology has generated.

Some startups are looking at nuclear fusion, the Holy Grail of energy research and considered by most to be a long shot for years to come. Nonetheless, General Fusion, a British Columbia based startup, has attracted the interest of Bezos through Bezos Expeditions, the firm that manages his venture capital investments and Canadian clean tech venture capital firm Chrysalix Partners. General Fusion intends to use shockwaves through a lead-lithium mixture to cause fusion in deuterium and tritium. Similarly, California-based Tri-Alpha Energy has won the backing of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and the Rockefeller family. Their approach involves adding boron to the hydrogen fuel, a technique the US government had experimented with earlier but given up on. A third fusion technology startup is Helion Energy out of Seattle, funded by Peter Thiel of PayPal fame via Mithril Capital Management. Helion is experimenting with crashing hydrogen atoms into each other at speeds approaching light to cause fusion. While fusion has eluded their collective grasp until now, these startups argue that they have been far more efficient than government projects.

Of immediate interest to the world and to India are the several private firms working on thorium or related technologies. Most of these ventures have technology that is ready to be deployed but face regulatory checks designed for a different era of nuclear technology. Kirk Sorensen’s Alabama-based Flibe Energy is perhaps the best known of these companies, owing to an aggressive internet and social media presence. Flibe’s product, the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, whose acronym, LFTR, is pronounced lifter, is an improved version of the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE) that was operated by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory between 1965 and 1969. The LFTR is not only significantly safer than conventional Heavy or Light Water Reactors but is also more proliferation resistant and generates much less waste. A similar design has also been put forward by Transatomic Power, a startup cofounded by two MIT doctoral students barely a week after the incident at Fukushima Daiichi. This reactor, called the Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor (WAMSR) or wham-ser, is also a modular Molten Salt reactor like the LFTR but instead of thorium, dissolves spent nuclear fuel from conventional reactors into molten salt. Transatomic Power’s concept is not too dissimilar from that of Seaborg Technologies’ Wasteburner reactor, designed to be a transitory bridge between conventional reactors and thorium-fuelled reactor. Scott Nolan of the Founders Fund has been interested in Transatomic Power’s design and made an initial investment of $2 million into the company followed by another $2.5 million earlier this year from Founders Fund, Acadia Woods Partners, and Daniel Aegerter of Armada Investment AG.

Several other companies such as Martingale, Inc, based out of Florida, Terrestrial Energy from Ontario, and Moltex Energy of London are also working to have their first reactors out early in the next decade. The ThorCon project, Integral Molten Salt Reactor (IMSR), and Sustainable Salt Reactor (SSR) respectively, are all advanced nuclear designs that have been recovered from the dustbins of the Cold War plutonium production factories and improved upon. As such, these technologies have been proven and are ready to be deployed if an investor is willing to foot the bill. Martingale found an investor in Indonesia just this month and will be looking to constructing its first reactor by 2025.

Yet other companies, like NuScale Power out of Oregon and UPower from Boston, have optimised on other aspects of nuclear technology. NuScale works on modularity and has designed small modules of up to 50 MW each that can easily be manufactured. The mass manufacture of modules will create economies in construction that can compensate for economies in power generation capacity. These modules can be combined to create facilities of up to 600 MW per location. UPower goes one step further and has conceived of micro-reactors rated as low as 3 MW for rural and sparsely populated regions. These reactors can be manufactured, loaded on to the back of a truck, and deployed near a community with ease. Hyperion Power Generation, headquartered in Santa Fe, have a similar idea – the 30 MW self-moderated uranium hydride reactor that also promises great economies via mass manufacture.

Given India’s numerous rural communities, SMRs may be useful to expand nuclear energy beyond the populous urban and industrial concentrations. Even India’s unintentionally low-rated reactors like the early PHWRs that are now operating at 160 MW could be too big for many regions. The modularity and size of some of the international projects make them ideal for agricultural communities.

Another young company, though hardly a fragile startup, is Bill Gates’ TerraPower, a spin-off from the Nathan Myhrvold founded think tank, Intellectual Ventures. Gates has played philanthropist for a while in the medical arena but since 2008, the billionaire has started to invest in clean technology as well. TerraPower’s primary product is the depleted-uranium-fuelled Travelling Wave Reactor (TWR), which was in the news this September as the company signed a deal with China to develop a 600 MW prototype by 2022 and commercial 1,150 MW reactors by the end of that decade. TerraPower has also been dabbling in MSRs, including thorium-fuelled variants though they believe that their fast reactors will obviate the need for thorium in the medium term.

Admittedly, India has its own thorium reactor design, the Advanced Heavy Water Reactor (AHWR). However, India is also looking at MSRs as a more efficient design and stands to benefit from plugging into international research efforts. There is, of course, also a lot of development going on in other aspects of thorium technology that Indian researchers might find of interest. Steenkampskraal Thorium (STL) of South Africa and Thor Energy from Norway, for example, have spent more effort on thorium fuel research than on reactors. Both companies have studied the use of thorium in various fuel configurations in different types of reactors. Thor, for example, has worked on thorium-MOX fuel that can even be used in conventional LWRs; they have emphasised better utilisation and longer cycle length, therefore less waste generation. STL’s research has focused on pebble bed reactors with thorium-uranium tristructural-isotropic fuel but has also touched upon better thorium extraction, refining, and fuel fabrication.

Luckily for India, it still has the opportunity to benefit from nuclear entrepreneurship despite being late to the game. An important step it can take is to further amend the Atomic Energy Act to allow private sector participation in all aspects of nuclear energy but something less shocking to the ossified establishment is seeking active collaboration with some of these nuclear startups. India is still seen as one of the leaders of the thorium revolution – though China is fast closing the gap – and there is tremendous international interest in working with India from foreign governments as well as companies. At the recent Thorium Energy Conference, ThEC15, organised by the International Thorium Energy Organisation (IThEO) and held at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), delegates from almost 20 countries presented their research and showed interest in the work of their Indian counterparts. Given the importance climate change has assumed on the Indian agenda, it would be foolhardy not to find synergies between Indian interests and the several promising international private ventures. Collaboration on various research projects can improve upon India’s existing technology, save time developing proficiency in some aspects, and hasten the launch of India’s thorium reactor fleet.

An interesting tidbit many might have missed is that Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries purchased a minority stake in Bill Gates’ TerraPower in late 2011 and the Indian business baron sits on the company’s board. Clearly, there is interest among Indian industry leaders to enter into a new and challenging sector that holds a lot of opportunities. With appropriate regulatory framework, private participation in nuclear energy can stimulate competition and harness large pools of capital in service of national development goals. The first step, however, would be to stop the step-motherly treatment of private players in the nuclear sector.

This post appeared on FirstPost on December 11, 2015.