The carrot dangling at the bottom of the Indo-US nuclear deal is nuclear power. Signing the deal, say its proponents, will give India unbridled access to the latest in civilian nuclear technology, which will go a long way in ending the country’s growing energy woes.
While the Left parties, playing the bad cop, continue to oppose the deal for the stranglehold it fears America will gain, West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, playing the good cop, has said that while the cost of nuclear plants and cost of power can be debated, the country cannot avoid nuclear power.
On the other hand, Non-Resident Indian industrialist Swraj Paul has sounded a note of caution on an altogether different front. How much of the country’s energy needs be really be met by nuclear reactors, without making them becoming an attractive target for terrorists, he asks.
Questions: Is nuclear energy the only way forward for India? Can the lax security situation or the terrorism threat be used as an excuse to keep India in darkness, living from power cut to power cut? Is nuclear fuel going to be an inexpensive option in the long run? What are the other options for India to meet its energy needs? Has India explored all those options or is it blindly putting all its eggs in the nuclear basket?
The whole “nuclear-plant-terrorist-threat-attack” thing has been greatly overplayed. For one.. you can’t just drive into a nuclear plant, and even if you crash into a nuclear plant, it won’t necessarily cause a nuclear explosion or a Chernobyl type meltdown, and there are easier targets to pick off if terrorists wanted to kill lots of people (mosques, chat houses, theaters, stock exchanges, markets….).
Of our other options, coal is cheap and dirty (ask the Chinese). hydro-power means we will have to endure another long and annoying series of articles from Arundhati Roy and her ilk, not to mention very real earthquake and flooding issues. Solar Power, while clean, is very expensive and not yet “cloud-proof”. Simply put, your fine power plant becomes useless during cloudy days, or during say, sandstorms. Wind power, again, expensive and not sufficiently large scale.
Gas fired plants, in this scenario are a good option, but considering the ongoing battles over price and supply (starting with Cogentrix, Dabhol, Iran, and now RIL), it has its own problems, which need to be sorted out. Plus gas is only ‘cleaner’ than coal, and not entirely “carbon-free”. Which leaves us with Nuclear Fusion: i.e., fat chance in the next 70 years.
Nuclear power, I feel, has suffered extra-ordinary bad press because of Hiroshima and Chernobyl. In that way, broken dams and smog and acid rain from coal plants have killed far more, but for some reason, ppl over-react when they hear they word nuclear, to their own and others’ detriment. In another context, the craze over Iran’s and NK’s nuclear weapons has diverted attention from the booming and un-regulated trade in illegal small arms in Africa and Latin America that have slaughtered millions over a couple of decades. The rulers of both countries know that they can simply not afford to use their ‘acquisitions’ unless they fancy being turned into tiny atoms… along with most of the populations of their respective countries. I suppose there are ppl being maimed and killed by an AK-47 or an RPG-7 even as I write this…
But to come back to the point, nuclear power technology has moved a long way since the leaks at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, and has been used quite successfully on a large scale by France and Japan, to name two countries. We have, so far, managed to run nuclear plants without major mishaps (minor ones being covered up by that famously transparent body, the DAE), and I see no reason why we shouldn’t go ahead and expand our nuclear power production.
I am afraid much of the time debate on nuclear-fuel based electrical power generation for India goes on without even a mention of the original thinking concerning the strategic role (in the economic sphere) of the nuclear source in the Indian context. The basic strategy conceived during the early 1950’s was aimed at (a) indigenously developing technology – with import of the same from abroad until detailed, viable and sound technologies suiting India’s nuclear fuel resources were developed, and (b) setting up a substantial capacity through the nuclear route so that this source could contribute a substantial share (like 20 or 30 per cent) of the total power generation (remaining 70% being on account of hydel and coal-based thermal plants). Priority was to be accorded, in the matter of nuclear generation, to the Western and Southern regions of the country which are farther from the Northern and Eastern coalfields, which means (even today) straining the already over-stressed transportation network for bringing coal to these regions. What has been happening during the past five decades or so since then has been nothing to write home about. Indigenous technology development under BARC (Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, which is organically linked to the DAE, the Department of Atomic Energy) has been far from exciting in terms of results. Even the sparse and half-hearted budgetary allocations for R&D produced only negligible results. This apart from bad financial policies and politicians’ ignorance or stupidity leading to step-motherly treatment to nuclear R&D, and also unimaginative, procedure-oriented management of R&D, typical of Indian bureaucracy, without any links for private sector’s contribution, , let alone publicity grossly exaggerating what was actually going on on this front. Add to this, the lack of commitment in the entire nuclear sector, with high decibel pseudo-expert opinions and views galore based on occasional nuclear plant disasters like Chernobyl, and so on, our society’s and governments’ short-sighted approach to this sector has been a stark reflection of our capabilities as a nation, when we note that during this period, several Western countries and Japan made spectacular strides in nuclear genertation, so much so that it forms, roughly, between 20 and 50 percent of total power generated. The other sources though developed (which can be measured as several hundred or thousand per cent of initial capacity in existence at the time of Independence, depending on the exact year you take for the calculation), have not kept with the sharp increases in demand from an uncontrolled growth of population as well as of industrialization in the country. The black-outs even in the capital cities, unconscionable powercuts seriously affecting economic growth in all sectors, and hence effectively affecting the quality of life in an increasingly congested and polluted environment coupled are very much a constant and current phenomenon of life in the country, never becoming ‘a thing of the past’. Slow growth of infrastructure and POLITICAL AND ADMINISTRTIVE CORRUPTION are contnuing to keep just a small fraction of tax money going effectively for the people’s benefit under the various Plan and non-Plan schemes. The current free-for-all, unhealthy short-sightesd and uninformed debate among the scientists, the coalition supporters from Kerla and West Bengal, does not augur any change in our thinking or acting in this vitally important sector. Needless to add that I am glad to express ful agreement with the commentator’s views.