Whither nuclear power?
India was threatened by a nationwide power crisis just weeks ago, with coal stocks depleting precipitously at the 135 coal-fired power plants across the country that supply 52 per cent of the overall electrical power.
As authorities battled the emergency, it was found that the country’s renewable and nuclear energy capacities were woefully inadequate to bridge any such unforeseen thermal power shortfall.
Coal remains the core of India’s power calculus, accounting for 2,01,995 MW (or 51.9 per cent) of the total installed generation capacity of 3,88,849 MW, as on 30 September, according to the Ministry of Power website. Gas, at 24,900 MW, lignite, with 6,620 MW, and diesel, at 510 MW, added 8.2 per cent towards the total 2,34,024 MW installed capacity of fossil fuels. Wind, solar, and other renewable energy (RE) like biogas have a share of 26.1 per cent, with 1,01,533 MW installed capacities, and hydro-electric, a further 12 per cent, with 46,512 MW.
Nuclear energy’s share is marginal, its 6,780 MW accounting for only 1.74 per cent of India’s installed capacities. That also makes for a feeble contribution towards the 39.8 per cent (1,54,825 MW) share of non-fossil fuel power, alongside RE.
Dr Jitendra Singh, Minister of State for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, and Prime Minister’s Officer (PMO), informed Parliament in August that the latest of the 22 nuclear reactors operating nationwide was Gujarat’s Kakrapar Atomic Power Plant-3 (KAPP-3), which got connected to the grid on 10 January. This third unit of KAPP was India’s maiden 700 MW unit, and the largest indigenously developed variant of the home-produced 540 MW Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors (PHWRs), two of which have been deployed in Tarapur, Maharashtra. PHWRs, which use natural uranium as fuel and heavy water as moderator, are the mainstay of India’s nuclear reactor fleet. Construction of 2x1,000 MW Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plants, KKNPP 5 & 6, being set up in cooperation with Russia, has commenced with the first pour of concrete on 29 June.
The government has additionally accorded administrative approval and financial sanction for 10 indigenous 700 MW PHWRs to be set up in fleet mode, and expects that on their completion, total nuclear power capacity will reach 22,480 MW by 2031. It says it has planned for more nuclear power plants in future.
‘Progressing satisfactorily’
That India’s nuclear energy programme is decades late is evident from the fact that 20,000 MW of nuclear power was to have been produced by 2020, and 48,000 MW by 2030, the targets attained by a mix of PHWRs, Light Water Reactors (LWRs) and Fast Breeder Reactors (FBRs), followed by Advanced Heavy Water Reactors (AHWRs). In 2009, then Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) Chairman and Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) Secretary, Anil Kakodkar, had expressed confidence that the 20,000 MW target would be exceeded by 2020.
Addressing the 65th IAEA General Conference in Vienna in September, AEC Chairman and DAE Secretary, Dr. K.N. Vyas, pointed out that discussions with EDF (Électricité de France S.A.) of France for setting up 6x1,650 MW NPPs at Jaitapur, in Maharashtra, and with the US’s Westinghouse Electric Company for setting up 6x1,208 NPPs at Kovvada, in Andhra Pradesh, were “progressing satisfactorily”.
Therein lies the crunch. It was the US-India Civil Nuclear Agreement signed in 2008 that drew our country into an atomic snare.
Discounting the drastic delays, nuclear power is one area in which India has indigenised to the highest degree of self-reliance, and competences, having managed to standardise and improve upon the Canadian-designed 220 MW PHWRs and then scale this up to 540 and 700 MW reactor sizes. Capabilities have also been developed in front and back ends of the fuel cycle, from mining, fuel fabrication and storage of spent fuel, to reprocessing and waste management. Indeed, India is now capable of selling its 220 MW reactors, which are the best in their class, to developing countries that require compact, affordable and easily manageable plants.
The country has a record of 551 reactor-years of safe operation. Vyas mentioned that even during the pandemic, India’s NPPs have operated optimally, and have maintained a fleet capacity factor of around 85 per cent throughout the year.
India’s deal with the US was driven less by technology requirements than by the need to be integrated into the global nuclear community that would gain it access to uranium imports that it was previously denied. Its concerted indigenisation of nuclear programme had been prompted by technology, and uranium, sanctions imposed by the Western world, led by the US, against its atomic tests of 1974 and of 1988. The country’s nuclear power generation was historically dependent on its poor grade endemic supplies that were among the lowest grades in the world, of 0.06 per cent.
The ongoing first stage of India’s three-stage nuclear power programme is based on indigenously available natural uranium. The subsequent stages, with manifold higher potential, do not need any additional uranium, but what India is looking at is the possibility of imported uranium as additionality, which comes within the contracts for foreign reactors.
Cost competitive
The approved cost of the first two 700 MW PHWRs, at Gorakhpur, in Haryana, was Rs20,594 crore, while that of units 5 and 6 at Kaiga, in Karnataka, was Rs22,000 crore. The earlier units 7 and 8 at Rawatbhatta in Rajasthan cost Rs12,320 crore, and units 3 and 4 at Kakrapar in Gujarat, Rs11,459 crore.
Indian reactors are hence highly cost competitive and suit Indian needs. An Indian-made two 700 MW-unit plant, that is, of 1,400 MW, is priced at below $4 billion.
Neither EDF nor Westinghouse has disclosed the capital costs of their NPPs for India, but it is clear they will extract huge investments, even though construction costs are lower in India than in the West. This will unquestionably affect the country’s hitherto moderate nuclear power tariff rates that range from Rs1.92/kWh for Tarapur 160 MW Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) units 1&2 to Rs3.92/kWh for Rawatbhatta 220 MW PHWR units 5&6, as per the tariff notified by the DAE for the period 1 April 2017 to 31 March 2022.
In comparison, the cost of the US’s first nuclear project in over three decades, the two 1,117 MW AP1000 units 3 and 4 of Westinghouse at the Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Georgia, had spiralled from $14 billion to $16.2 billion. In proportion, at 2,234 MW, Indian PHWRs would cost $5.59 billion, almost a third of the AP1000.
Having realised it has encountered little public resistance to its ruinous price increases of LPG, petrol and diesel, the government possibly believes the citizens will take any preposterous tariffs of nuclear power from the foreign-made NPPs too in their stride.
India’s three-stage nuclear energy programme
India’s limited uranium deposits, but vast thorium reserves had led the late renowned nuclear physicist Homi Bhabha to chart out a three-stage civilian nuclear power programme in the 1950s to secure the country’s long-term energy independence. India’s assured resources of 319,000 tonnes of thorium constitute 13 per cent of the world total.
Stage-I was to develop Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors (PHWRs) that use natural uranium as fuel. Stage-II aimed at developing Fast Breeder Reactors (FBRs) that use plutonium and depleted uranium fuel, while Stage-III would see the creation of Advanced Heavy Water Reactors (AHWRs) fuelled by thorium and Uranium-233.
While the PHWR programme has attained commercial maturity, with the 220 MW reactor design standardised and scaled up to 540 and now 700 MW, the long-term goal of India’s nuclear programme has been to develop an advanced heavy-water thorium cycle. The first stage of this employs the PHWRs fuelled by natural uranium, and light water reactors, which produce plutonium incidentally to their prime purpose of electricity generation.
Stage-2 uses fast neutron reactors burning the plutonium with the blanket round the core having uranium as well as thorium, so that further plutonium (ideally high-fissile Pu) is produced as well as U-233. Stage-3 would have Advanced Heavy Water Reactors (AHWRs) burn thorium-plutonium fuels in such a manner that breeds U-233, which can eventually be used as a self-sustaining fissile driver for a fleet of breeding AHWRs. An alternative Stage-3 is Molten Salt Breeder Reactors (MSBRs) that are firming up as an option for eventual largescale deployment.
The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) had envisaged its FBR programme to be 30 to 40 times bigger than the PHWR programme, with construction starting in 2002 on a 500 MW Prototype FBR (PFBR) in Kalpakkam, Tamil Nadu, by Bharatiya Nabhikiya Vidyut Nigam Ltd (BHAVINI). It was expected to be operating by 2011. Six more such 500 MW fast reactors were announced, four of them to be operationalised by 2020.
An AEC update in September 2020 mentioned that the PFBR “is expected to get commissioned by October 2022”.
IAEA on COP26
In the run up to the forthcoming 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP26, in Glasgow, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has underscored the need to reduce dependence on coal “if the world is to hit its climate targets and bring emissions to ‘net zero’ ”. It affirmed that nuclear power was “well-suited” to replace coal, adding that proposed projects in China, India as well as Poland, Czech Republic or the Slovak Republic will displace coal.
A 41-page report released by the Vienna-headquartered Agency, which will be participating actively in COP26, draws attention to the role of nuclear energy in climate change mitigation. “Nuclear techniques offer a tangible way to respond to this challenge,” said IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi, who is attending the conference.
Disputing contentions from certain quarters to keep the IAEA away from COP26 because nuclear power was no solution to the climate crisis as it endangered health and environment, the Agency stressed, “Nuclear energy does not do more harm to human health or to the environment than other electricity production technologies.” It claimed that climate objectives will be met with nuclear power in about 30 countries where nuclear power currently supplies over 40 per cent of low carbon electricity needs, and helps stabilise power grids, thus favouring the integration of solar and wind energy.
At COP26, world leaders will review their commitment to the Paris Agreement in 2015 for preparing nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to control GHG emissions and limit the increase of global mean surface temperature by the end of the century to below 2°C (scaled down since to 1.5°C) above pre-industrial levels.
To realise this, CO2 emissions from electricity generation must fall to nearly zero by the middle of this century, even as electricity needs worldwide continue to grow and expand in end-uses such as transportation, heating and industrial energy use.
The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) indicates that though unlike fossil fuel-fired power plants, operative nuclear reactors do not pollute the air or emit CO2, the processes for mining and refining uranium ore and making reactor fuel require immense energy. Nuclear power plants are also built of metal and concrete that require massive energy to produce. These processes require fossil fuels, emissions from which can be associated with the electricity that nuclear power plants generate.
Nuclear power also generates radioactive wastes, such as uranium mill tailings, spent, or used, reactor fuel, and other radioactive wastes, which can remain radioactive and dangerous to human health for millennia. Radioactive wastes are subject to special regulations that govern their handling, transportation, storage, and disposal to protect human health and the environment.
They are classified as low-level or high-level waste, their resultant radioactivity ranging from a little higher than natural background levels, such as for uranium mill tailings, to the much higher radioactivity of spent reactor fuel and parts of nuclear reactors.
By volume, most of the waste related to the nuclear power industry has a relatively low level of radioactivity. Uranium mill tailings contain the radioactive element radium, which decays to produce the radioactive gas radon. Most uranium mill tailings are placed near the processing facility, or mill, where they come from.
Uranium mill tailings are covered with a sealing barrier of material such as clay to prevent radon from escaping into the atmosphere. The sealing barrier is covered by a layer of soil, rocks, or other materials to prevent erosion of the sealing barrier.
High-level radioactive waste comprises irradiated, or spent, nuclear reactor fuel that is no longer useful for producing electricity. This fuel is in solid form, consisting of small fuel pellets in long metal tubes called rods. Spent reactor fuel assemblies are highly radioactive and must initially be stored in specially designed pools of water that cool the fuel and act as a radiation shield.
Spent reactor fuel assemblies can also be stored in specially designed dry storage containers. An increasing number of reactor operators now store their older spent fuel in dry storage facilities using special outdoor concrete or steel containers with air cooling. Most nuclear-powered countries lack a permanent disposal facility for high-level nuclear waste.
Moreover, the costs of renewables have been falling steadily, while major nuclear projects have encountered huge cost and time overruns. Some countries, most notably China, are building new reactors, while others are shuttering old ones. The EIA notes that 5.5 GW (gigawatts) of nuclear capacities were installed worldwide in 2019, while 9.4 GW were permanently closed. While Germany decided to phase out nuclear power after Fukushima, countries such as Poland and the Czech Republic see it as a way to reduce dependence on coal.