Legacy as lasting nightmare
Professor at the Centre for Policy Research Bharat Karnad says certain nuclear aspects of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster in Japan have a
bearing on the fanciful power generation schemes that have been taken
up by the Manmohan govt.
The near 9-Richter earthquake, tsunami, disrupted coolant systems, the consequent partial core meltdown in the nuclear reactors, and spreading radioactivity around the Fukushima Daiichi complex constitute the perfect disaster, and could not have been foreseen. But certain nuclear aspects of these inter-connected events have a bearing on the fanciful power generation schemes the Manmohan Singh-led Congress Party coalition government has embarked upon and which it hopes will piggyback on the controversial civilian nuclear deal with the United States.
The Japanese reactors are of the same low enriched uranium fuelled light water (LWR) type as the French Areva EPR (Evolving Pressurised-water Reactor), the Russian VVER 1000, and the US-Japanese Westinghouse-Toshiba AP 1000 India is on the point of buying. Except, technology-wise, we may be digging ourselves into a hole. Dr Anil Kakodkar, former chairman of Atomic Energy Commission, says the EPR incorporates the best processes and technologies the French have developed over many decades.
This seems akin to cobbling together an aircraft from an assortment of high-value parts taken from different planes. Not reassuring. Without a prototype reactor to prove how such technology integration works, the odds are that the EPR will amount to less than the sum of its parts.
The basic VVER design, safety-augmented in the wake of the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe, is coming up in Kudankulam without the modified design having proved its druthers elsewhere first. The new American reactor (AP 1000) is, likewise, unproven, having been rejected by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission on safety grounds. Undeterred, the Indian government has fast-tracked its purchase.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, obsessed as much with sustaining 8 per cent growth as by an energy quick-fix offered by importing LWRs, has compounded the problem by approving the concept of "energy parks" - a host of nuclear reactors bunched together to achieve production efficiencies of scale. He is apparently unmindful of the dangers of "nuclear fratricide" triggered by reactors in physical proximity incapacitated by an accident in one of them, as happened in Fukushima. Other than India's manifest inability to cope with the cascading nuclear effects of several reactors simultaneously facing different types of breakdown, consider the opportunity cost to Indian industry and services sector of a whole energy park - 10,000 MW-plus from the single Jaitapur complex - suddenly going missing. That, however, is the lesser problem.
Because LWRs use low enriched uranium fuel packages on a "once through" basis before being discarded, huge amounts of spent fuel end up stacked in cold water storage pools to dissipate the heat and constitute, as Fukushima shows, a potentially grave health and safety hazard. Indeed, we have 40 years of experience of being saddled with spent fuel outputted by the two US-built LWRs in Tarapur. Given its radioactivity, Washington is unwilling to take back the stored Tarapur spent fuel and the Indian government is not prepared to up the ante by issuing an ultimatum, followed by reprocessing the fuel for use in Indian designed plants as a way of reducing our risk. The issue of what to do with the imported spent fuel, in the event, remains unresolved. In a nuclear mishap in an energy park, the mass of stored spent fuel could spread of radioactivity in the Indian countryside.
Then there's the complex issue of the level of earthquake-tolerance to be engineered into reactor construction without completely skewing the cost-calculus. In Jaitapur, as in other quake-prone locations, based on careful seismic analysis certain levels of protection are introduced into reactor construction. There's no guarantee, however, as the Fukushima reactors, perhaps, built to withstand 3-4 Richter shock indicated, that Nature will be accommodating enough to restrict the earthquake to the engineered levels. There, moreover, being no such thing as an absolutely quake-proof reactor, safety levels will be dictated by cost considerations, especially as every little accretion in quake tolerance adds significantly to the total cost.
Whatever the initial figures being bandied about ($11 billion), after factoring in predictable cost escalations and only minimal quake protection, Jaitapur, for instance, may actually end up costing the Indian taxpayer $15 billion to $20 billion, depending on the number of reactors, $3 billion to $6 billion a unit. This may result in electricity costing around Rs 30 crore to Rs 35 crore per megawatt compared to the Rs 2 crore to Rs 3 crore per MW cost of power produced by reactors featuring home-grown technology. Even this cost for Indian reactors, hydro- and coal-sourced energy is cheaper. For an economist to maintain otherwise, as Dr Manmohan Singh has done, is to upend the logic of viability.
In the late forties and fifties, the dawning nuclear era encouraged dreams of cheap electricity. But the dis-economics of nuclear power are such that a nuclear energy programme today makes little sense if it is not mainly national security-driven.
Estimates suggest 35,000 MW from imported reactors will account for only 5 per cent-plus of the total energy produced in the country in 2050, a small increase from 2.4 per cent in 2010. It is a policy geared, it seems, to enriching foreign nuclear suppliers and the commission-seeking political class at home and, in the process, to bequeathing India future Fukushimas.
The writer is professor at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, and author of most recently of India's Nuclear Policy
The Japanese reactors are of the same low enriched uranium fuelled light water (LWR) type as the French Areva EPR (Evolving Pressurised-water Reactor), the Russian VVER 1000, and the US-Japanese Westinghouse-Toshiba AP 1000 India is on the point of buying. Except, technology-wise, we may be digging ourselves into a hole. Dr Anil Kakodkar, former chairman of Atomic Energy Commission, says the EPR incorporates the best processes and technologies the French have developed over many decades.
Bharat Karnad, Professor at the Centre for Policy Research
The basic VVER design, safety-augmented in the wake of the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe, is coming up in Kudankulam without the modified design having proved its druthers elsewhere first. The new American reactor (AP 1000) is, likewise, unproven, having been rejected by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission on safety grounds. Undeterred, the Indian government has fast-tracked its purchase.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, obsessed as much with sustaining 8 per cent growth as by an energy quick-fix offered by importing LWRs, has compounded the problem by approving the concept of "energy parks" - a host of nuclear reactors bunched together to achieve production efficiencies of scale. He is apparently unmindful of the dangers of "nuclear fratricide" triggered by reactors in physical proximity incapacitated by an accident in one of them, as happened in Fukushima. Other than India's manifest inability to cope with the cascading nuclear effects of several reactors simultaneously facing different types of breakdown, consider the opportunity cost to Indian industry and services sector of a whole energy park - 10,000 MW-plus from the single Jaitapur complex - suddenly going missing. That, however, is the lesser problem.
Because LWRs use low enriched uranium fuel packages on a "once through" basis before being discarded, huge amounts of spent fuel end up stacked in cold water storage pools to dissipate the heat and constitute, as Fukushima shows, a potentially grave health and safety hazard. Indeed, we have 40 years of experience of being saddled with spent fuel outputted by the two US-built LWRs in Tarapur. Given its radioactivity, Washington is unwilling to take back the stored Tarapur spent fuel and the Indian government is not prepared to up the ante by issuing an ultimatum, followed by reprocessing the fuel for use in Indian designed plants as a way of reducing our risk. The issue of what to do with the imported spent fuel, in the event, remains unresolved. In a nuclear mishap in an energy park, the mass of stored spent fuel could spread of radioactivity in the Indian countryside.
Then there's the complex issue of the level of earthquake-tolerance to be engineered into reactor construction without completely skewing the cost-calculus. In Jaitapur, as in other quake-prone locations, based on careful seismic analysis certain levels of protection are introduced into reactor construction. There's no guarantee, however, as the Fukushima reactors, perhaps, built to withstand 3-4 Richter shock indicated, that Nature will be accommodating enough to restrict the earthquake to the engineered levels. There, moreover, being no such thing as an absolutely quake-proof reactor, safety levels will be dictated by cost considerations, especially as every little accretion in quake tolerance adds significantly to the total cost.
Whatever the initial figures being bandied about ($11 billion), after factoring in predictable cost escalations and only minimal quake protection, Jaitapur, for instance, may actually end up costing the Indian taxpayer $15 billion to $20 billion, depending on the number of reactors, $3 billion to $6 billion a unit. This may result in electricity costing around Rs 30 crore to Rs 35 crore per megawatt compared to the Rs 2 crore to Rs 3 crore per MW cost of power produced by reactors featuring home-grown technology. Even this cost for Indian reactors, hydro- and coal-sourced energy is cheaper. For an economist to maintain otherwise, as Dr Manmohan Singh has done, is to upend the logic of viability.
In the late forties and fifties, the dawning nuclear era encouraged dreams of cheap electricity. But the dis-economics of nuclear power are such that a nuclear energy programme today makes little sense if it is not mainly national security-driven.
Estimates suggest 35,000 MW from imported reactors will account for only 5 per cent-plus of the total energy produced in the country in 2050, a small increase from 2.4 per cent in 2010. It is a policy geared, it seems, to enriching foreign nuclear suppliers and the commission-seeking political class at home and, in the process, to bequeathing India future Fukushimas.
The writer is professor at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, and author of most recently of India's Nuclear Policy
