Tag Archives: Homi Bhabha

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.

In Search of a Nuclear Vision

09 Fri Oct 2015

Posted by in India, Nuclear, South Asia

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Few things are as confounding as watching India mismanage its nuclear energy policy. The Indo-US nuclear deal in 2008 raised hopes that the country might be on the verge of a nuclear renaissance but Delhi handled subsequent steps with about as much aplomb as a tapdancing platypus. The latest fallout of this ham-handed approach to nuclear policy has been General Electric’s announcement that it will not participate in the Indian nuclear market until the country’s nuclear liability laws meet international standards.

The Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act is but a symptom of a far greater malaise that has plagued Indian nuclear thinking for decades. In the early years after independence, India’s nuclear tsar, Homi Bhabha, had a close relationship with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Consequently, he could count on Nehru’s support in his ambitions for India’s nuclear programme. The prime minister himself was also a devotee of high technology for it signalled to him a way in which India might leapfrog several stages of development.

Bhabha used the fact that he had the prime minister’s ear to dream big: he formulated the three-stage programme which would eventually see the country powered by thorium reactors and free from external dependencies. To reach this goal, India would first have to build a fleet of pressurised heavy water reactors and fast breeder reactors that would produce the fuel for the third stage. The chutzpah is astonishing when one considers that India did not even have a single nuclear reactor then.

Post Nehru, Indian leaders have been distant of the nuclear programme. It was difficult, however, to disavow the programme entirely. This was partly because the energy programme was inextricably interwoven with a weapons programme and India’s principled opposition to international nuclear apartheid linked the political fortunes of both to each other. The closeness between Bhabha and Nehru, not to mention the latter’s childlike fascination and wonder at big science, created a dynamic that has not since been replicated.

One thing India’s political class has never been accused of is possessing in-house expertise and this shows in the way Delhi seems lost at sea when it comes to nuclear energy. The drastic adjustment of the growth target for nuclear energy in the country – from 63 GW to 27.5 GW – by 2032 betrays a worrying incompetence in the Indian bureaucracy, or at the very least a complete disconnect between scientists and policy makers. The plan had been to build 16 domestic and 40 foreign reactors but fumbling on nuclear liability, viewed only through a prism of political expediency rather than technical criteria, repelled desperately needed foreign investment in India’s nuclear energy sector. Even if foreign vendors were forthcoming, the cost of their products has also shot up due to the convoluted bypassing of nuclear liability via the suppliers’ insurance pool. In the seven years since the epochal nuclear deal, the only good news the nuclear establishment can boast of is the securing of uranium supplies for the next decade or so.

The nuclear liability quagmire aside, Indian nuclear energy is still in complete disarray. Only six reactors are under construction in the country presently, a 1,000 MW VVER at Kudankulam, two 700 MW pressurised heavy water reactors (PHWR) at Kakrapar, two more similar reactors at Rawatbhata, and the 500 MW prototype fast breeder reactor (FBR) at Kalpakkam. All have seen significant delays in construction – an inter-governmental agreement between India and the Soviet Union was signed in 1988 but construction only began in 2002; Kakrapar and Rawatbhata were approved in 2005 but construction started in 2010, and the PFBR is at least three years behind schedule. These are among the faster projects – the nuclear power project in Gorakhpur was sanctioned in 1984 but finally broke ground only in 2014!

Delays are rampant across the industry. Yet most are due to political or bureaucratic inefficiencies such as trouble with land acquisition, unforeseen hurdles in financing, and at times, protests and litigation. Once the reactors are built, however, the nuclear enclave seems to have done a splendid job in operating and maintaining them – in 2003, Kakrapar was recognised by the CANDU Owners Group of being the best performing PHWR. Similarly, an IAEA team that visited Rawatbhata in 2012 reported that the reactors they inspected were safe and impressive; in 2014, one of the reactors at the same plant set a world record for the longest continuous operation.

Admittedly, some delays do arise due to technical shortcomings. For example, the design and construction of the reactor pressure vessel (RPV) for the PFBR took Larsen & Toubro almost three years more than anticipated; any increase in the power rating of future FBRs will again require a similar timeframe to re-design the RPV. The reason Indian manufacturing lags behind nuclear industry needs, P. Chellapandi – Chairman & Managing Director of Bhavini – explained, is that there is little incentive to pre-empt demand given how small and infrequent it is. India has built some 21 reactors in the 70 years since independence; by contrast, France built 60 reactors in just 20 years from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s under the Messmer Plan; the United States built 100 reactors before the lull that set in under President Jimmy Carter; the European Union’s nuclear trade association, Foratom, has just called for 100 new reactors by 2050; China has 25 reactors under construction presently, has plans for 43 more, and is sitting on proposals for 136 more by 2030!

In the last couple of years, Areva, Toshiba, and Urenco have all looked for outside investors in their nuclear divisions. India has let the opportunities by without so much as a whimper. While India has secured nuclear fuel for the next decade, uranium prospecting or acquisition of mines abroad – especially when prices are so low – does not seem to have factored high on the Indian agenda.

In terms of technological cooperation too, India is nowhere on the international scene. China is the hot destination for nuclear vendors and startups – the size of Beijing’s orders has persuaded GE to share its AP1000 technology with Chinese firms, and Bill Gates’ TerraPower recently signed a deal with China National Nuclear Corporation to build the first of a new generation of reactors, the travelling wave reactor (TWR), a 1,150 MW liquid sodium-cooled fast reactor that uses depleted uranium as fuel. This type of reactor will generate less waste, be cheaper, and safer. In the meantime, India postponed the start of its PFBR again and the advanced heavy water reactor is nowhere in sight.

Like any large national project, say, for example, the highways or the railways, the utility and efficiency of nuclear power increases with scale. Furthermore, the high upfront cost of nuclear power demands a clear set of short and medium-term goals with a long-term vision. It is, therefore, essential that the government, either in partnership with the private sector or on its own, have a considered and clear-eyed policy for the industry. The urgency to meet deadlines, the impetus to remove roadblocks, must come from the top to galvanise the entire chain. Indian nuclear fingerprints appear nowhere in the various international nuclear ventures, from mining through construction to development.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has outlined an environmentally friendly trajectory for Indian development that is mindful of climate change, air quality, and other environmental concerns. It is unclear how he intends to meet these goals and grow the economy at eight per cent per annum at the same time without substantial help from nuclear power. Admittedly, plans for nuclear reactors at ten sites were announced in April 2015 but it is unlikely any of this will come to fruition in a timely manner without developing Indian manufacturing and bringing the CLNDA in line with international practices. Thankfully not ubiquitous, the attitude that the world needs India more than vice versa is far too common among Indian bureaucrats, planners, and citizens. They are in for a rude surprise. As former commerce secretary Rahul Khullar succinctly explained in a recent article, this attitude, combined with domestic calculations, narrow ministerial interests, a fundamental lack of understanding of negotiating give and take beset India’s negotiations with the outside world.

Even more helpful would be to rekindle the relationship between the prime minister’s office and the heads of the nuclear community to the same level as that between Bhabha and Nehru – after all, nuclear energy does fall under the PMO and not the Power or New and Renewable Energy ministries. Modi seems to be the point source for visions and thinking big in the ruling party and were senior nuclear scientists to have the prime minister’s ear, it may be just the sort of thing to accelerate growth in Indian nuclear energy. With their domain expertise and confidence of the prime minister’s support, an ambitious yet realistic nuclear expansion programme can be launched. To be clear, there is no Indian century without nuclear power – clean air, carbon emissions control, plentiful energy, employment, economic growth, energy security…in one industry can India find solutions to so many of its needs. We just need a little vision. Desperately.

This post appeared on FirstPost on October 29, 2015.

Nuclear in the Year of Modi

14 Thu May 2015

Posted by in India, Nuclear, South Asia

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It has been a year now since Narendra Modi took office as prime minister of India and by all accounts, it has been a good year. In many ways, Modi’s victory is reminiscent of Barack Obama’s rise to the presidency of the United States in 2008 – after eight years of what many saw as a misguided war in the Middle East and Central Asia, a significant number of Americans wanted change. Similarly, after ten years of anaemic Congress rule, Modi represented the hopes – perhaps unrealistically high – of millions of Indians.

For a candidate who had spoken at length about solar power during the election campaign, it was surprising to see Modi talk up nuclear energy once in office. In July 2014, Modi visited the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre and was full of praise for India’s nuclear community. Declaring that nuclear power would be an essential part of India’s energy security, he assured the Department of Atomic Energy of his full support in the implementation of their expansion plans. To be sure, it will take a brave prime minister to belittle the nuclear programme – India takes much pride in its high-tech endeavours such as spacefaring and nuclear technology, especially given the prejudicial international environment in which it was developed. Yet such pride has not necessarily translated into support in the past – some projects are decades overdue and there was never a concerted push towards nuclear power in India.

A few important developments in the nuclear arena have taken place during Modi’s first year in office, some of them entirely of his making and others not so much. For example, India signed agreements with Australia and Canada for the supply of uranium for its safeguarded reactors. These negotiations had been ongoing since the previous regime and would have been concluded no matter who resided at Race Course Road. Similarly, work on Kudankulam, Kalpakkam, and general nuclear research would have likely continued under bureaucratic inertia.

Modi’s leadership has expedited other nuclear developments, principally the civil liability for nuclear suppliers. However clumsy the solution to the train wreck that is India’s nuclear civil liability law may be, a suppliers’ insurance pool removed a major obstacle before nuclear vendors – foreign and domestic – investing in the Indian nuclear market. Another project that saw some movement in the past year due to Modi’s involvement was Jaitapur. The Indian prime minister raised the issue of Jaitapur with Areva during his visit to Paris in April 2015 and saw the French nuclear concern sign a pre-engineering agreement (PEA) with Larsen & Toubro. The agreement is significant, perhaps more so than one realises, because it involves the transfer of forging technology to L&T to enable it to manufacture reactor vessels for the French EPR reactor in India. Not only will this obviate the need for European and American nuclear vendors to depend upon Japanese companies to provide crucial reactor components, but it will also allow India to support its indigenous nuclear industry and eventually enter the export market.

As remarkable as these two achievements are, the shortcomings of Modi Sarkar are equally baffling. Despite a close relationship with Shinzo Abe since his days as the chief minister of Gujarat, Modi was not able to nudge an Indo-Japanese civil nuclear cooperation agreement closer to the finish line. This was a disappointing setback as both Tokyo and Delhi try to surreptitiously bolster defence and strategic cooperation. Similarly, India failed to capitalise on the Russian offer made during Vladimir Putin’s visit in December 2014 to build 20 reactors in the country. Part of the problem was perhaps that the Indian nuclear establishment was not ready to absorb such an investment and had no sites or plans ready to deploy so many reactors. Furthermore, domestic opposition to nuclear power would make quick movement on new sites difficult.

As always, there have been rumblings about Hitachi and Toshiba setting up nuclear power complexes at Srikakulam and Mithi Virdi but there has been little movement on the ground despite the persistence of such rumours for almost a decade. Similarly, Rosatom’s project at Haripur has been stalled for years without any conclusion in sight. The foundation stone to Gorakhpur, an indigenous nuclear project, was laid by then prime minister Manmohan Singh in January 2014 but the project had been planned since 1984 and there is little news of it since the foundation ceremony either. Such chronic delays need to be addressed if India is to ever pursue nuclear power seriously – in an era where financing is the largest component of the cost of a nuclear power plant, delays can mean the death knell for nuclear energy.

Despite some good progress on the nuclear front during Modi’s first year as prime minister, some fundamental reforms of huge import remain to be accomplished. One is in the arena of transparency. Pace the claims by the nuclear conclave, reliable and consistent information about the nuclear programme is elusive. The introduction of the Right To Information Act has shifted the onus of uncovering data onto activists rather than keep it on the department in question. Furthermore, national security or the public interest is used as an excuse to cloak even the quotidian operations of the Department of Atomic Energy. For example, in November 2014, the Minister of State for Department of Atomic Energy, Jitendra Singh, informed the Lok Sabha that “it is not in the public interest to disclose the quantity of production of uranium” in response to a question on the average annual production from uranium mines and the quality of the ore!

Another reform that should be considered over the next four years is to transfer the control over nuclear energy to the Ministry of Power. This would allow the minister responsible to take a comprehensive view of the power requirements of the country and the options available before deciding on India’s energy mix. Though secrecy may have been important to India’s nuclear programme in its dual-use incarnation, the separation of civilian and military nuclear facilities as stipulated by the Indo-US nuclear deal has obviated the need for such levels of confidentiality. Defence reactors would obviously be retained by the PMO or perhaps transferred to the Ministry of Defence, but those facilities involved in non-military activities can be put under the purview of the minister of power.

What Modi and the Indian nuclear programme sorely needs is a visionary. When Homi Bhabha envisioned a three-stage nuclear programme for India in November 1954, there was not a single commercially operating nuclear reactor in the world; India did not yet have an operational reactor of any type. The world’s first commercial power reactor went critical in December 1957 in Shippingport, United States, and India’s first reactor, Apsara, came online in August 1956 for research purposes; India’s first commercial reactor, Tarapur Unit I, went critical only in October 1969. Bhabha’s ability to think decades ahead was a boon for India’s nuclear programme but it came at a point when the commercial uranium reactors were still a theory and thorium reactors were a distant dream. Bhabha himself was a competent scientist but by no means technically brilliant. However, his audacious dream transformed India .

It is difficult to predict what a visionary might advocate but a few things that might receive consideration are new technologies such as Molten Salt Reactors, Integral Fast Reactors, and thorium reactors such as the Advanced Heavy Water Reactor. A second consideration would be a ramp up in the number of reactors by an order of magnitude – if we want clean air, plentiful energy, and growth simultaneously, perhaps it is time someone talked about a thousand reactors over the next half century rather than twenty, fifty, or even a hundred. Modi has shown himself to be an able administrator so far but now he needs a domain expert with chutzpah. As the good Book teaches us, where there is no vision, the people perish (Míshlê 29:18).

This post appeared on Daily News & Analysis on May 18, 2015.