Should Nuclear Power be the Future - A complete Analysis

Atomic Energy has a tremendous number of uses, which very few people know about. It also has the unpleasant use as a weapon. I will try to bring all the points together.

The purpose of this article is to show how India cannot do without atomic energy and how it can be made use of, as a plentiful source of energy. The fuel used in it - is for all other purposes, quite useless. Now this is quite a remarkable situation that you have a substance from which you can extract energy but that fuel unlike other fuels like oil and coal - is useless for any other purposes.

Current Conventional Energy Scenario in India

India is very short of electric powerits hydro resources are almost exhausted; accept for some power on the Himalayan Earthquake regions and the isolated Bhramaputra river, which comes down from Tibet to Assam. I mentioned Geography, because it is difficult to exploit power in that region. The coal resources of the country are of very low quality. They mostly have an ash content of 30 to 40%. Millions of tons of coal is transported from one part of the country to the other part of the country and half of it is just useless ash. And you can imagine what a load it is for our Railway system to simply tow unwanted ash. The location of the coalmines is in restricted areas. So coal has to be moved a long distance to reach the coal fire stations in the concerned areas. There is also a well establish factthat of environmental pollution - the burning of coal has deep implications on health of the population and above all, influences the weather cycle.

Non-Conventional Energy Scenario

Non-conventional energy sources such as windmills, solar radiation and ocean waves have been under development for a long time. But this means being dependent on weak sources. The solar energy is quite weak when you come to think of it, per unit area. It is also not reliable because half the time it is night and half the time it is day and sometimes the clouds come and cut off the sun. This is not as big a problem as the storage of the power from solar energy. It is quite expensive to maintain batteries and keep the power available to you. It is a different technological problem and expensive too. But I don't say it should not be developed it should be developed for domestic users because that is all we can get out from the non-conventional sources.

Atomic Energy: Problem Areas

Atomic energy has been decried on the grounds of capital costs and our considerations of safety including those involving explosions. The biggest problem comes from the disposal of waste products, which contain very long-lived radioactive material called isotopes. Operating nuclear reactors generate by themselves the isotope -plutonium, which is the material from which weapons of mass destruction can be made. It is this that leads to the issue of proliferation and all the politics connected with it. We counter all this from the experience extending more than 50 years from operating sources of other countries as well as our own country.

Homage to Founder of Atomic Energy

I'd like to pay my respects to the founder of atomic energy because of the tendency to forget the great things that were done just about 30-40-50 years ago. Also forgotten are people, who were able to think what was good for the country and under very adverse circumstances, were able to create things from which we can enjoy benefits. I refer to the name of Dr. Homi Jahangir Bhabha who was born in 1909 . Many people perhaps don't know that he died in a plane accident in 1966 when he was going to a meeting of international atomic energy agency in Vienna.

India's "Atomic" Independence


Nuclear energy has been successfully applied for power production in fact in those days people never used the word nuclear energy, or the word power production in say a couple of decades from now, India will not have look abroad for its experts, but find them ready at hand. This is the philosophy with which we developed atomic energy that we could develop with this kind of force behind us to be quite independent of other countries. That is paying off now that we did not depend on all the advance countries through much of discoveries at that time. This independence has given us many dividends. But we must know how to use this thing carefully. Another effect that people don't realize about atomic energy is its multi- use capabilities.

Multiple Usage Capabilities

Atomic Energy is used for electricity, in industry. It is very necessary in the use of Isotopes in the development of technology many a technology developed in nuclear energy are now available to our factories. It is a fluid substituteit can produce water from the sea because it can produce large quantities of energy for desalinationFood can be preserved by means of small amount of radiations. The shelf life of onions can be shifted from say a few weeks to several months. Isotopes have been used in health in cancer treatment for a long time in the Tata Memorial Hospital in Bombay and now everywhere else.

Why more power?

India's per capita electricity consumption is now very low. The first is the worldIndia is there next and China is only slightly bigger than us. USA eats up all the energy in the world, because they use it for many many things, which we wouldn't use it for, but then that is the measure of the development of a country. But India is still low and therefore I make a case that we need more powerwhatever sort of power it is.

Impact on Environment

Now about environment, I would like to make a few comments straight away because many of the other sources of power spoil the environment in many ways. If you see near the surface temperature around the globe and over the ocean surface, temperature has increased by point 3 to point 6 degree centigrade since the 19th century. This means that the water in the sea is getting warmer. Because of the melting of the ice in the Arctic and the Antarctic, the global sea level has risen by 10 -25 centimetersthis is statistically over a long period of timeNow if the emissions continue at today's rate, the average global temperature will increase by 2 degree centigrade by end of this century. The sea level over this period is expected to rise to 50 centimeters more. That would be devastating to the low lying islands and seriously damaging to the coasts, wetlands and many coastal communities. The rearrangement of climatic zones will result in changes in the climate pattern, vegetation pattern, and crop pattern in different parts of the world. This would also have wide ranging adverse effects on human health, industries, infrastructure, economy and social life. So we have to prepare for it. It is not enough to simply know that the sea is rising all the time and many parts of land are submerging.

The amount of green house gases like Carbon Di Oxide and things like that are on the rise, which increase the heat of the earth. Whereas you take natural gas, oil they produce all sorts of gases plus quite a large quantity of gases which lead to what is known as Green House Effect. So even from the general considerations, nuclear energy has an advantage.

Cost Factor

There was a time when nuclear power was very expensive because the capital cost of nuclear energy had to be taken into account, as the safety. There were no industries. Now the nuclear industry is large in countries like France. About 80 % of the power France produces is from nuclear. There are restrictions in other countries which we will discuss later but you notice, hydrous at one time in 1998 was 640 current cost US cents per kilo watt to 2-8 small ones are 4-10 and future costs are 2-8. Most of these are very expensive. If you go through marine tidal wave and all that, they are still very experimental and you don't know what the costs will be. The Atomic Energy Commission has collected these numbers from data all over.

India's energy resource positions

If you look at the coal resources, we have a potential corresponding to 41 thousand Giga Watts of power a year. It comes to very little oilwe know very little oil is the very dangerous situation. Natural gas- 250 which is very small Hydro 84 Giga Watts at 60% utilization, than Uranium it goes to 420 for one type of reactor. If you use a breeder a type of reactor, 54,000 so you see compare 54,000 with 41,000 of coals we get many more resources. But we have lot of thorium in the country, which we are trying to utilize. It is a little difficult but 380, 58,000 is a very large number and common sense would say that we should concentrate on using thorium. There are difficulties and the Americans will always point out to difficulties but I am glad to say that several of our difficulties have been solved on the tableon the experimental bench and now it has to be demonstrated on the industrial levels. I think going from uranium to thorium is our future hope unless suddenly somebody discovers oil, which doesn't look likely in this county. Even if you have oil, you are still in trouble like in Iraq and other places so may be after all oil is not a very good thing. Of course I would love to have it in the country but politics of the world is a strange one.

Nuclear Waste Vs Coal Waste

There is a comparison between the nuclear waste and coal waste at stations. In thermal power stations we are using coal, 320000 Tonnes of gas, 65 million Tonnes of CO2, 44,000 Tons of SO2 and 22, 000 of NO2all the things are shown in your pollution chart on the T.V. and you can judge for your self how noxious these fumes are that we have to deal with. Now nuclear power plants with the high level of about 27 tonnes of spent fuel about 3 Cubic meters after reprocessing and (bitrufication) with glass so that it does not diffuse out at intermediate level and the low level activities for 60 tonnes. From million and thousands of tones it comes to a few hundreds of tonnes. But they have to be treated after reprocessing and glassification.

Status of Indian Nuclear Plants

From 90s onwards the total electricity generated is very high and we are making money. So we are getting to be a rich organization, provided the buyers pay off the loans. We have 14 reactors at 6 sites of our corporation and we don't expect to have more sites and one more site of Kudam Kulam where there is a big reactor of 2000 Mega watts. The continuous increase in added generation more than 100 billion units electricity has been produced so far.
Now these are the reactors under construction with Kudam Kulam in the south, which is short of power. I have always advocated that it is not shortness of power and lack of coal, which decides what kind of electricity we should have from sources. It is important that you must have all types of power in the national grid and even semi national grid. Because if suppose you have a strike in the coal plants the industry must still run. So it is important that you must have many inputs. Therefore in Bengal when they say that we have got a lot of coal, that is not good enough a reason to not have nuclear stations.

Future plants will give out 10,000 Mega Watts electricity which is about 10% of the total power that been generated. At the moment we are about 2 or 3%, which is very low, and some are under construction. Kudam Kulam 1000 Mega Watts power units and in Rab and all. Previously they used to use 200 MW reactors. Now they are bringing up a 500 Mega Watts reactor for using Thorium eventually.

Safety Issues

People abroad say nuclear reactors are not safe because the reactor Rasha exploded and the place where it exploded was called Chernobyl. It broke down because they were using the reactor both to produce weapons as well as power and if you mix demands you can get in to regions, which are unstable, and that reactor had that instability. Now they have stopped all that. You can't mix the two things; if you mix two things you will not know how to face a catastrophe.

They have various units to check radiological safety. Tarapore reactor, the Math reactor had a small accident. Even when you are just standing here you get natural radiation that comes from the sky, from the ground. There is a regulatory board called AER, a separate board that controls the amount of radiation the people should receive.

At the international level they have now become very careful. You have 7 types of accidents, 7 is the worst which is the Chernobyl accident, there was one accident in America but all this because the operators did the wrong things and it had a double use there were accidents at no.2 and mostly they were called the electricity accidents that means there is a little fire in the transmission. That is also considered a nuclear event and this is how you classify the safety.

Nuclear Fuel

Now this the beginning of nuclear Uranium exploration because you need a lot of Uranium so you spoil some of your forests but fortunately we've been honing Uranium from the Jadu Goda Manch for a long time and it wont be there forever, but thorium if you go to find it any where in Kerala you just pick it with your hand. You see pumps throw a lot of thorium on to the shore and that's why we say it's a fuel without limits. Thus uranium milk is converted into Uranium from the ore. Heavy water is needed for all these reactors. The nucleus of Hydrogen is a proton but the nucleus of heavy hydrogen is a neutron and a proton, which makes it heavy but it is neutral so it follows any path. Heavy water is a by-product of the fertilizer industry so that is why it comes to us cheap. In getting the fertilizer out, you are constantly increasing the heavy water content. Uranium products go on long sticks and there are reprocessing plants to extract plutonium out. Plutonium can be used in a reactor and can also be used as a weapon.

Radiation is a part of life

Now there are other aspects. People think that radiation is something very bad but it is my intention is to show that you have to live with radiation. Now when you take an over all look at a amount of radiation that you are receiving, natural background is 67% and 30.7% is due to x-ray machines, and Isotopes and fall out from other things is so small compared to the releases from the nuclear industries, which is only 0.15%.

The last use of nuclear energy is its explosive capacity. Our country has decided to call itself a nuclear weapon country as you all know. Now it's a matter of question how you want to use it. This leads to the problem of why people don't want to develop atomic energy and why nuclear explosions are something that must be politically avoided.

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