This is an article about the history of nuclear power in India, the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, and of the recent changes in international agreements about supplying companies with uranium where those countries were not signatories of the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty.
In the first decade of the 21st century delicate international negotiations proceeded with India, which offers a huge commercial market for uranium but has an interest in developing nuclear self-sufficiency based on its huge thorium reserves. India’s nuclear technology has developed independently due to being isolated through India’s having developed nuclear weapons too late (1974) for inclusion as an official Nuclear Weapons State under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
The NPT of 1970 accorded five countries: France, China, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States the exclusive official status of Nuclear Weapons States based on their having reached that status prior to 1970. Of those five countries, all but the USA reprocess spent nuclear fuel. As well as having been excluded from this club, India has enduring differences with the NPT’s strategies for lowering risk. Historically it has preferred to support a global policy of universal disarmament initiatives. It claims to be very uneasy about China’s capabilities and not to be reassured by Pakistan’s expressions of potential support for the NPT.
India has thus proceeded in comparative isolation with a civil nuclear power program, planned from the 1950s, receiving little or no fuel or technological assistance from other countries.
Up through the late 1990s India’s nuclear power plants performed poorly with only 60 per cent capacity.
The dot-com revolution of the 1990s saw a huge flow of Indian students and scientists into US universities, institutions and firms. With the dot-com crash many of them returned to India, bringing substantial technical knowledge with them. The scientific and technical community in India became very attractive for the global outsourcing of new scientific and technical developments. It is perhaps partly because of these social changes that capacity of its nuclear power plants improved markedly by 2001-02 to 85 per cent. [1]
As early as the 1950s India planned for a three-stage nuclear development program. Stage One was for U-238 to be used in pressurised heavy water reactors (PHWRs). In Stage Two the plutonium generated by these PHWRs was to be deployed to run FBRs. This has so far only been done in a 13 Megawatt experimental small FBR at Kalpakkam. The planned FBRs were to use the plutonium mixed in a 70 per cent oxide (MOX-fuel) in its core within a fertile ‘blanket’ [2] of U-233 and thorium-232 which would be there to make the fuel in the core sustain fission. In Stage Three it was intended that the FBRs use thorium-232 to produce U-233 as fuel for the third stage reactors. [3] India currently has 12 nuclear power plants. The Department of Atomic Energy has government clearance to set up a 500 MW prototype of the ‘next-generation’ FBW at Kalpakkam, with the intention of commercially exploiting thorium for its major fuel supply.
After Australia, India possesses the world’s largest reserves of thorium. Use of Indian thorium would make India independent of imported uranium including reprocessed spent uranium.
On 9 December 2006 US Congress passed the United States-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act, allowing shipments of nuclear fuel and technology to India for use in its civilian nuclear power program.[4] India had not yet ratified this agreement. A major point of difference was US insistence that used fuel from any US-supplied reactor must not be reprocessed.”[5] This would inhibit practices in India’s energy and weapons system, for both kinds of facility were, at the time of researching the first edition of this article (May 2007), still producing plutonium for reuse. The agreement would require complete separation of power facilities from weapons facilities, which were still exchanging reprocessed materials.
“The opposition to accepting safeguards on the grounds that it is difficult to separate civilian and military facilities, and that it compromises on national security, is, however, ill-founded. Demarcation of facilities as military should not be difficult but a detailed exercise of identifying these has to be carried out. The manner in which the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) declared the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) and a few other facilities out of bounds for AERB inspections with a single bureaucratic order in 2000, would suggest that the process should not pose any administrative problems either. In any case, the agreement is for a phased declaration. But there will be a substantial cost involved and that is the price one has to pay for failing to plan for long-term fuel needs properly.
Since the research reactors Dhruva and Cirus are the chief sources of weapons-grade plutonium, and it makes no sense to use reactor-grade plutonium for weapons, one can easily demarcate all the power plants as civilian. It would seem that the main costs would pertain to replicating reprocessing plants specifically for weapon purposes because one cannot declare the existing plants - which currently reprocess spent fuel from power reactors as well as research reactors to yield plutonium for the breeder programme and weapons respectively - as military.
It is obvious that one-way traffic of nuclear material from military to civilian reactors does not pose any problem; it is only when there is a two-way traffic, as in a reprocessing plant, a dedicated facility for each objective becomes necessary because of safeguards on the material that comes in and goes out. There could be other costs involved in duplicating personnel and equipment required in this as well as other operations where people and equipment double up for the twin objectives at present.” [6]
Exception made for India in 2008
On August 1, 2008, the IAEA approved the India Safeguards Agreement and on September 6, 2008, India was granted the waiver at the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) meeting held in Vienna, Austria. The consensus was arrived after overcoming misgivings expressed by Austria, Ireland and New Zealand and is an unprecedented step in giving exemption to a country, which has not signed the NPT and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) While India could commence nuclear trade with other willing countries. The U.S. Congress approved this agreement and the President signed it on 8 October 2008.
[7]
Since the UK and France, both countries which reprocess fuel, had also shown interest in the huge commercial market which India could represent, it seemed likely that the pressure on the USA to relent on its anti-reprocessing stance would grow. Given the profit issues and that the corporate forces have an interest in this stance changing, resistance was difficult.
In addition, however, to purchase uranium from the 45 member Nuclear Suppliers Group required India to sign the NPT, which India continued to refuse to sign. It may be that the very factors which proponents of FBRs cite as discouraging their research and production in countries like the US are positives for FBR research and production in India. In this case, India is probably the place where FBR technology and production may break through first if it is going to.
Predictably a way has been found around the obstacles to commercial trade in nuclear products with such a large market as India.
Update 2011
"On August 1, 2008, the IAEA approved the India Safeguards Agreement and on September 6, 2008, India was granted the waiver at the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) meeting held in Vienna, Austria. The consensus was arrived after overcoming misgivings expressed by Austria, Ireland and New Zealand and is an unprecedented step in giving exemption to a country, which has not signed the NPT and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). While India could commence nuclear trade with other willing countries. The U.S. Congress approved this agreement and the President signed it on 8 October 2008."
“As of January 2011, Australia, a top three producer and home to worlds largest known reserves, has continued their refusal to export Uranium to India because it has not signed the NPT despite diplomatic pressure on their part. In November 2011 the Australian Prime Minister announced a desire to allow exports to India, a policy change which she hoped would be authorized by her party's national conference in December.”[8]
NOTES
This article updated November 2011 from part of Sheila Newman,“Nuclear Fission Power Options,” in Sheila Newman (Ed.), The Final Energy Crisis, (Second Edition), Pluto Press, UK, 2008. Originally under the sub-heading of "Some Political and Commercial Complications: India as the new FBR lab."
[1] Source: http://www.uic.com.au/nip45.htm
[2] The core is the central part of a nuclear reactor containing the fuel elements and any moderator. A fast neutron reactor is configured to produce more fissile material than it consumes, using fertile material such as depleted uranium in a blanket around the core. Source of definition material: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf51.htm
[3] Frontline, Volume 22 - Issue 16, Jul 30- Aug 12, 2005, http://tinyurl.com/362kjb
[4] “Nuclear Technology Milestones 1942 to Present,” Nuclear Energy Institute, Washington, http://www.nei.org/index.asp?catnum=3&catid=265
[5] R. Ramachandran, “Behind the bargain”, Frontline, Volume 22 - Issue 16, Jul 30- Aug 12, 2005, http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl2216/stories/20050812005700700.htm
[6] R. Ramachandran, “Behind the bargain”, Frontline , Volume 22 - Issue 16, Jul 30- Aug 12, 2005, http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl2216/stories/20050812005700700.htm
[7] and [8] Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Non-Proliferation
Add comment