Kamal Ghorui
India joined a high-tech club of two this week. It is now the only other country, besides Russia, to have an operational fast breeder reactor (FBR) – a nuclear reactor that makes more fuel than it consumes. Best part is, the prototype FBR at Kalpakkam, Tamil Nadu, has been designed and built indigenously. FBRs have been part of India’s nuclear energy plans for decades. They are crucial because India has little uranium of its own to fuel conventional nuclear plants. What it does have is roughly a quarter of world’s thorium, which can potentially be turned into nuclear fuel in FBRs. We aren’t there yet, but it’s a leap we need to make, for energy security. By some estimates, India’s thorium reserves can generate 500GW electricity – twice the peak power demand of 2024-25 – every year, for the next 400 years.
As world’s fastest growing major economy, India will need a lot more energy than it generates now. For a rough idea, China’s peak demand last July was six times India’s. That’s why we need every energy type – coal, gas, solar, wind, nuclear – in the mix. Although nuclear plants produce hazardous waste, they have a negligible carbon footprint. And by using waste from conventional nuclear plants as fuel, FBRs make nuclear energy even cleaner. India’s goal of increasing nuclear power capacity, from 9GW in 2025 to 100GW by 2047, shows will. And last year’s Shanti Act, which makes the nuclear power sector attractive to private firms, leaves no doubt about intent.
Other nations are also scaling up nuclear energy plans. Over 60 new reactors are under construction around the world. Where net nuclear capacity shrank last decade, it has expanded in the 2020s, and will continue doing so through the 2030s. Amid this boom, attacks on Iran’s Bushehr nuclear plant, and before that on Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia plant, raise concerns about safety. Although nuclear plants have many built-in safeguards against accidents, they can’t withstand deliberate ballistic strikes. And 40 years ago, Chernobyl showed that a damaged nuclear plant, is as bad as a bomb. Even now, a 30km zone around the damaged plant remains uninhabitable. So, while we go about adding nuclear capacity, we must demand strict enforcement of the old red lines of nuclear safety.
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