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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.

India Falters on Nuclear Growth

30 Mon Nov 2015

Posted by in India, Nuclear, South Asia

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As the United Nations Conference on Climate Change gets underway in Le Bourget, a commune in the northeastern suburbs of Paris, thousands of state officials, academics, activists, journalists, and ordinary people await the outcome of the extraordinarily ambitious agenda of the summit. Delegates from 195 countries are expected to gather in Paris and cobble together a legally binding agreement to reduce greenhouse gas and carbon emissions. Over 145 heads of state have also arrived in Paris at the beginning of the summit, a significant departure from United Nations custom, and many have spoken on the first day.

The protagonist (or antagonist) of the conference is Prime Minister Narendra Modi. As the leader of a rapidly growing economy with over 1.25 billion people, Modi’s decision on the burden India will assume in fighting climate change bears substantial consequences on his country as well as the planet. On the opening day, the prime minister spoke at the plenary session, the Innovation Summit, and the launch of the Solar Alliance. It was disconcerting to note that at no event did Modi mention nuclear power, especially since his party had included that, particularly thorium technology, in its election manifesto for the 2014 general elections.

By now, it has become apparent that the Bharatiya Janata Party, while in Opposition, slammed the door on India’s nuclear renaissance. In concert with the Communist Party of India, they pushed for a liability law that was at odds with international norms and has chased international nuclear vendors out of the Indian market. The only firm that still maintains a presence in India is the Russian Rosatom, which has renegotiated its contract and sharply increased the cost of its reactors – the cost of the first two reactors at Kudankulam was approximately Rs 17,300 crores while the third and fourth are expected to cost about Rs 39,400 crore. Meanwhile, the government has shown little interest in the Indian nuclear establishment ramping up nuclear power either. The sector has not undergone the necessary reforms to make it a competitive industry nor have there been announcements of a series of new projects. During the first 18 months in office, all that Modi Sarkar has achieved in the nuclear arena is the purchase of uranium ore from overseas – something that the previous government would have been able to do anyway since the Indo-US nuclear deal in 2008.

It is unrealistic to expect the BJP to be pro patria before pro politica and walk back its errors on civil nuclear liability. Thankfully, there is another option that allows India to circumvent the nuclear liability logjam altogether – thorium. Considered the next generation of the nuclear era, thorium-fuelled reactors are proliferation resistant, safer, cheaper, and more efficient than most reactors in service presently. Thorium is plentiful in India, and more crucially, all thorium technology, from mining to reprocessing, has been indigenously developed. In every aspect, India can be completely self-sufficient with the deployment of thorium reactors.

Although the Advanced Heavy Water Reactor (AHWR) is presently the mainstay of Indian thorium reactor technology, thorium reactor design is not constrained to this one model. Indian scientists at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) and the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research (IGCAR) are also studying the Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) for future deployment. These reactors contain passive safety features in their design that make them, according to one director at the Nuclear Power Corporation of India (NPCIL), suitable for construction without an exclusion zone or even in the middle of a city. The MSR, for example, is a low pressure reactor that does not have fuel elements in zircaloy cladding. This reduces chances of any mishap due to excess pressure from steam or buildup of hydrogen. Furthermore, like most newer designs even in conventional reactors, thorium reactors come with a core catcher that prevents any radiation leak even in case of total core rupture.

Thorium reactors are also cheaper than conventional reactors. One reason is that unlike uranium, it does not require expensive isotope separation during fuel fabrication. Furthermore, the higher burnup of fuel envisaged in such reactors makes them far more efficient. Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia approximates that a tonne of thorium could produce as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium or four million tonnes of coal. Consequently, far less nuclear waste is generated. More importantly, no isotopes with a half-life of beyond 35 years are present in the waste from thorium reactors which reduces storage time by over an order of magnitude.

What makes thorium politically expedient for the BJP is the favourable actuarial numbers on thorium reactors. Substantially lower than on conventional reactors, liability, and hence insurance pools, can afford to be much smaller and affordable. This would not necessitate that the party back down on its earlier stipulations for a nuclear liability law, though it would still be inefficient but less so.

Powering India’s growth by thorium opens the door to several new economic opportunities: an abundance of cheap electricity may well encourage a shift from gas, petrol, and diesel for cooking and transportation. This will not happen overnight but even a small shift can reduce India’s hydrocarbon import bill. Nuclear energy can also release Railways capacity from the burden of transporting millions of tonnes of coal, reducing the need to expand services. It has almost become an article of faith that India cannot grow without coal. This might be true in the short term but there is no need to accept this in the medium term. A substantial shift from coal over the next 30 years is possible if the government creates and follows a concerted and aggressive plan to expand nuclear and hydro power.

The key obstacle to mass deployment of thorium is the lack of fissile material. Under the auspices of the Conference on Climate Change, Modi could have lobbied the international community to allow India to acquire plutonium and spent nuclear fuel, under safeguards, of course, from the global market for use in its fast breeder and thorium reactors. Modi ought to have also used the opportunity to pitch for developed states to provide soft loans for the expansion of nuclear and thorium power. Unfortunately, the moment was squandered chasing after solar unicorns.

At the summit, Modi has announced an ambitious programme of solar power growth. This is not reliable enough to fulfill India’s growing demand. All solutions to the demerits of solar power are posited in the future – China will export sufficient rare earths, we will be able to manufacture enough panels, efficiency will increase, we will solve storage within a decade. That much hope can certainly keep the casinos of Las Vegas in business but will not provide a solution to India’s energy shortage. Nuclear power and thorium technology is a proven solution that is ready to be deployed now. It is a shame that Modi Sarkar has not realised that yet.

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.