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Chaturanga

~ statecraft, strategy, society, and Σοφíα

Chaturanga

Tag Archives: PWR

Aspects of India’s Nuclear Renaissance

22 Fri Aug 2014

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in India, Nuclear, South Asia

≈ Comments Off on Aspects of India’s Nuclear Renaissance

Tags

ACR-1000, BARC, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Bharatiya Nabhikiya Vidyut Nigam Limited, Bhavini, Canada, CANDU, EC6, EPR, India, Kudankulam, LWR, MOX fuel, NPCIL, nuclear power, Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited, PHWR, PWR, Russia, Tarapur, thorium, United States

India’s prime minister Narendra Modi is famous for his commitment to solar power. In the past month, however, Modi has praised nuclear energy and declared that it will form a vital part of India’s energy mix. In July 2014, the prime minister visited the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, praising the country’s scientists and challenging them to strive for even greater achievements. Within ten days of Modi’s BARC visit, it was announced that India would be setting up 22 nuclear power projects with Russian assistance. In addition to the six nuclear reactors planned for Chhaya Mithi Virdhi from Westinghouse, another six reactors for Kovvada from General Electric, and six more from Areva for Jaitapur, India is in talks to import 40 reactors – almost 200% of its present number and over 700% of its installed nuclear capacity.

However, it must be remembered that the time for celebration in India is post delivery, not post announcement; bureaucracy can frustratingly distort timelines and projections. There is reason for nuclear power enthusiasts to be cautiously elated with the development but beyond India’s labyrinthine bureaucracy, there are some issues arising from India’s massive nuclear expansion that require some careful thought.

The first concern is that the 40 reactors India is looking at are all light water reactors (LWRs) with which India has little experience. Barring the original two reactors at Tarapur, India’s nuclear fraternity operates a fleet of pressurised heavy water reactors (PHWRs). After the initial purchase of a 220 MW CANDU reactor from Canada for Rajasthan Atomic Power Station (RAPS) I (a second purchase was interrupted by the post-Pokhran sanctions), Indian scientists modified and improved the technology to produce CANDU-derivatives known as INDU. The two boiling water reactors (BWRs) at Tarapur were purchased to prove to a sceptical Lok Sabha that Indians could indeed operate nuclear power plants safely on their own and the sector receive full support.

Kudankulam is India’s first LWR, and as such, Indian knowledge about operating the reactor is only bookish. To master the technology and be able to come up with improvements and indigenous designs will require time, training, and large transfers of technology. One of the benefits of the tens of billions of dollars of nuclear imports ought to be that India learn to at least replicate if not design the reactors indigenously. Training engineers to operate the LWRs is fairly easy and quick but with 40 more reactors added to the mix, the autonomous Nuclear Power Corporation of India (NPCIL) will be busy with plant management to do additional research and experimentation on LWR designs. As it is, some 90% of NPCIL’s budget goes towards operations and management, leaving only crumbs for research & development and nothing for expansion.

Corporations and governments do not engage in technology transfer without extracting a steep price. However, even if India were able to secure a painless technology transfer from its nuclear vendors, to whom would the transfer be made? Due to the clause in the Indo-US nuclear deal that stipulates the separation of India’s nuclear facilities, only those designated for exclusive civilian use can be the beneficiaries of such transfers. Otherwise, the military facility receiving the transfer will lose its status and come under international safeguards. With BARC disqualified and NPCIL incapable, only the fledgling BHAVINI is left whose main purpose is the development and operation of fast breeder reactors. In effect, there is presently no agency in India capable of conducting in-depth studies of other reactor designs or doing extensive research on new and promising reactor designs such as the molten salt reactor; even India’s thorium reactor programme is proceeding at a snail’s pace.

However, why is India suddenly interested in LWRs? The primary reason India chose HWRs over LWRs and BWRs in the 1950s was that the former did not require the large investment in the development of enrichment technology. Furthermore, the technology to make the heavy water needed for PHWRs was easily available and only had to be mass-produced. A further advantage of HWRs is its ability to achieve criticality at lower concentrations of fissile isotopes than in LWRs. This makes it ideal for the use of thorium or MOX fuel without much redesigning, something India has been interested in for a long time due to the paucity of domestic uranium.

It is puzzling why India has not reached out to Canada to help with its nuclear renaissance. Delhi has a history with Ottawa, albeit complicated, and Indian scientists are familiar with the basic CANDU design. Since 1974, when Canada imposed sanctions on India, Atomic Energy of Canada (AECL) has significantly enhanced its designs to the CANDU-6, the Enhanced Candu 6 (EC6), the Advanced CANDU Reactor (ACR), and others. These reactors retain the advantages of tolerance to multiple kinds of fuel – including thorium – and have better safety mechanisms installed, a perfect fit for India’s nuclear needs.

In the long run, India should think about emerging as a nuclear vendor, from reactors and components to services. This can hardly be done with a research establishment trapped in the civil-military divide; the role of NPCIL and/or Bhavini must be expanded while simultaneously encouraging private players to participate in the nuclear market. This can be hastened only with more training, experience, and research, for which the choice of India’s partners will be important. Contrary to public perception, the United States and Canada were far more forthcoming with Tarapur and RAPS I & II than the Russians are with Kudankulam.

Decades of neglect has brought the Indian nuclear power sector to a point where it is forced to make sub-optimal choices for the near-term. Forty years of sanctions forced indigenous development, which has been a success story with mixed results. However, the country’s power crisis is so acute that like Tarapur in 1962, a few LWRs are needed to provide momentum to a moribund industry. Thankfully, India is a large country with a growing population, medium industrialisation, and a massive power deficit. These disadvantages can work in India’s favour now over the purchase of LWRs – if the government can sustain growth, by 2050, India may well need up to 200 new reactors and 40 or even 80 LWRs with a 40-year lifespan will appear a notable but not subversive trend in Indian nuclear development. However, the government should be aware of the history of India’s nuclear development and the trajectory it has plotted for itself before making any major purchases or decisions.

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The Price of Failure

27 Wed Mar 2013

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in India, Nuclear, Pakistan, South Asia

≈ Comments Off on The Price of Failure

Tags

BARC, CANDU, Chashma, China, FBR, HTGR, India, LFTR, LWR, Non-Proliferation Treaty, NPT, NSG, nuclear, Nuclear Suppliers Group, Pakistan, plutonium, PWR, thorium, uranium

Early this week, news broke that China would provide Pakistan with Chashma-5, a 1000-MW Pressurised Water Reactor. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei, not surprisingly, rejected the notion that Beijing stood in violation of several Nuclear Suppliers Group and International Atomic Energy Agency norms, claiming that Sino-Pakistani nuclear cooperation was only for peaceful purposes. The Chashma Nuclear Power Complex in Pakistani Punjab already contains two 300 MW reactors (online in 2000 and 2011) built by China and has two more 340 MW reactors under construction (expected criticality 2016 and 2017). Experts are not sure whether the fifth reactor is an upgrade to the third one or a new reactor altogether.

China joined the NSG in 2004, and that should have been the end of clandestine Chinese nuclear cooperation with Pakistan. However, Beijing insisted that the third and fourth reactors at Chashma were part of the original deal struck before China joined the international nuclear controls body (2000) and grandfathered them in. The fifth reactor, however, or further upgrades to the existing reactors, is not part of any known clause in the Sino-Pakistani nuclear agreement on Chashma.

Interestingly, Beijing may not have violated any international commitment in their nuclear trade with Pakistan – while strong evidence suggests that the China National Nuclear Corporation assisted Pakistan in manufacturing weapons in the late 1980s, China had not acceded to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty until 1992; the NPT only makes it incumbent upon non-nuclear states party to the treaty to submit to IAEA inspections and is quiet on the matter of verification of such inspections by nuclear states. China’s membership of the NSG came in 2004, and though the group’s guidelines clearly prohibit the transfer of a whole array of nuclear material, they are neither law nor are they backed up by enforcement provisions beyond international opprobrium.

China has continually peddled the view that its 1985 nuclear agreement with Pakistan allows it to grandfather in the sale of nuclear reactors and other related material. The United States has always rejected this interpretation but mutedly, for lack of the power to enforce and its own geostrategic calculus. Furthermore, China argues that the NSG’s guidelines are biased: Russia was allowed to go through with selling India nuclear fuel in 2001 when 32 of 34 members of the NSG opposed the sale. NSG rules state that members should report any approach for nuclear trade so that the group can act uniformly, and states are expected to refrain from making exports denied by other members. Ultimately, the regime’s voluntary nature means that members may violate guidelines for their own political gains. China is also unhappy with the waiver India received from the group in 2008.

China’s position is obviously strategically motivated – it would require some impressive intellectual gymnastics to equate Pakistan’s nuclear black marketeering with India’s behaviour on nuclear exports. The international community’s silence on China’s repeated transgressions in spirit if not law ought to underscore for India what it should already know – hard power is a persuasive diplomat.

Nonetheless, India need not worry too much about the latest Chinese transgression; the Chashma-5 reactor is likely to be far safer than its predecessors (a real concern with Chashma-1), and being a PWR (a kind of Light Water Reactor), far less suitable for military appropriation than a Heavy Water Reactor. However, the principle of nuclear cooperation, licit or otherwise, between India’s two rivals ought to concern India. It is a pity that India’s government is content with mere protests and statements of concern while India’s strategic analysts only rail about the nuclear control regime’s double standards – the convenient memory lapse for incidents favouring India is perhaps because the general impression in the country is that India has been a more responsible nuclear power and has been the beneficiary of far less largesse than its neighbour.

India must consider the situation it finds itself in as punishment for its unwarranted moralising about nuclear weapons and romanticism regarding international affairs, not just under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru but to this day. Barring a few exceptions that prove the rule, Raisina Hill has been unable to think strategically or decisively over a myriad of issues, not the least of which relate to defence, foreign policy, or science & technology.

India has failed to realise its nuclear dream – not only is the country decades away from commercial deployment of thorium reactors, India is yet to start its Fast Breeder Reactor programme; furthermore, India’s stocks of fissile material is unbelievably low, and though it has modified the Canadian CANDU reactor for domestic use, it has been unable to create and export any completely Indian IPR product. Unfortunately, Indian manufacturing lacks the capability to make some of the components of nuclear reactors to satisfactorily high quality. India’s underdeveloped uranium mining and even worse uranium prospecting has forced it to seek the assistance of an international nuclear deal, the whole need for which was to be obviated by Homi Bhabha’s three-stage nuclear programme.

The nuclear establishment cannot blame its failure on the civilian front on an aggressive effort on the military front – India has conducted only six tests until date, a number most experts consider too small for Indian scientists to be able to do any simulations. In addition, there are rumours that most of the tests generated lower yields than expected and that the thermonuclear device in the 1998 tests failed to achieve fusion. As a result, India’s nuclear arsenal remains small, unreliable, and bulky.

Rather than bemoan its state, New Delhi must work to negate the stranglehold the nuclear exports control regime has on it. India needs to focus on its thorium reactor research and initiate its stage-II FBRs with priority. It would behoove India’s nuclear establishment to inquire about other nuclear reactor designs such as the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor or the High Temperature Graphite Reactor – while not commercially active, both have been tested, are proliferation-resistant, and use thorium (something India has plenty of) as fuel. The Bhabha Atomic Research Centre must be tasked with improving and creating new and better reactor designs with 100% Indian IPR content; Indian industry must be able to manufacture and export nuclear material, from fuel, reactors and components, to heavy water. In essence, India should be able to run a parallel NSG if it so wishes.

Clearly, all this will be a 20-year programme at the very least. Yet India did not find itself at this juncture because of one policy decision; undoing over six decades of lackadaisical planning by bloviating officials in a third the time is no mean feat. The impotence India feels now simply the wages of sins past. Ironically, India would do well to take a page from former Chinese Premier, Deng Xiaoping’s book, namely: (1) lengjing guancha — observe and analyze [developments] calmly; (2) chenzhuo yingfu — deal [with changes] patiently and confidently; (3) wenzhu zhenjiao — secure [our own] position; (4) taoguang yanghui — conceal [our] capabilities and avoid the limelight; (5) shanyu shouzhuo — be good at keeping a low profile; (6) juebu dangtou — never become a leader; (7) yousuo zuowei — strive to make achievements.

Wise words from a man and a people who know how to quietly build their capabilities and await their turn at global leadership.


This post appeared on Tehelka Blogs on March 28, 2013.

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