India's Thorium Advantage

Essay - futuronomics from the edge of the cow belt


Extracts from U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman and representative of Indiana in the US Senate since 1976 Richard G. Lugar’s address to the Brookings Institution on “U.S. Energy Security – A New Realism,” March 13, 2006.

“. . . energy is the albatross of U.S. national security.”

“. . . there is not a full appreciation of our economic vulnerability or the competition that is already occurring throughout the world.”

“. . . oil will become an even stronger magnet for conflict and threats of military action, than it already is.”

“Geology and politics have created petro-superpowers that nearly monopolize the world’s oil supply. According to PFC Energy, foreign governments control up to 77 percent of the world’s oil reserves through their national oil companies. These governments set prices through their investment and production decisions, and they have wide latitude to shut off the taps for political reasons.”

“Americans paid 17 percent more for energy in 2005 than in the previous year. That increase accounted for 40 percent of the rise in the consumer price index. Last November, we spent more than $24 billion on oil imports, accounting for more than a third of our trade deficit.”

Read the full speech
Visit Lugar's energy page

“The oilman in the Oval Office is the ideal advocate for alternative energy.”

US Senator Richard G Lugar, in BusinessWeek, “Thinking Outside The Barrel,” 27th March 2006.

… And the Gautama Buddha alternative:-

“If we can convince ourselves to want what we already have, we can dramatically enhance our happiness without any change in our circumstances.”

From “On Desire” by William B Irvine, Professor of Philosophy, Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio



India’s Thorium Advantage

On August 25th, 2005, just a month after the highly publicised July 2005 in-principle accord on civil nuclear cooperation reached between India and the US, a little noticed but very significant development took place. In hindsight, it comes as no surprise that India chose to reveal, in front of the global nuclear scientific community, just how advanced a nuclear contender it really was. Also that India’s current state-of-play in nuclear R&D had distinctly unshackling strategic implications. To many in the know, in Washington, in Paris, in London, in Tel Aviv, Canberra, elsewhere: it also implied that if they wanted to help India in the civil nuclear arena, now was the time.

At present, after the signing of the carefully nuanced civil nuclear cooperation agreement earlier this month in New Delhi, the US, Europe, Israel and Australia, indeed all those who see their strategic and commercial interests served to a lesser or greater extent by a stronger and strategically better perched India, can still ease various nuclear processes: they can provide technology, software, super computers, components, turn-key reactors, uranium based fuel. They can help us rapidly upgrade, summarily scrap obsolete installations, put in state-of-the-art safety measures: modernise and vastly expand capacity. And all this, as the far-sighted, if underestimated, President George W Bush is saying over and over, in a spirit of enlightened self-interest, not patronage.

Thanks to his vigorous prodding, the West can, and will, in all probability, help to speed up India’s inexorable progress in these areas. Alternatively, should it choose to refuse, because of prejudice, or myopia, or a yearning for the status quo, or a clinging to cold war attitudes, India, with her non-proliferation credentials held up over her head for protection, will trundle through all this by herself, as usual. This will be, unlikely as it now seems in the new prism through which America has forced the world to view us, a historical geo-political blunder, that will paradoxically serve to weaken the West more than us: in the sense that if you don’t help a friend, you end up strengthening an enemy.

After all, it must be remembered, that, like RK Laxman’s beloved “Common Man”, we have come thus far, from ever since we began our nuclear programme in the fifties under the guidance of Dr. Homi Bhabha. We have forged ahead, inch by inch at times, despite a series of broken agreements, disrupted nuclear fuel supplies and difficult sanctions. Things got tougher after Pokharan I, in 1974, and grew even more intense after the dissolution of our “non-aligned” but steadfast ally, the USSR, followed by Pokharan II in 1998.

Still, I dare say, we will go the rest of the distance on our own, if need be, particularly after all the progress we have already made. We must remember, on our part, that the US, alone among the 5 declared nuclear powers, did all their nuclear research entirely on their own. So, likewise, can India, particularly when its ethnic ambassadors are able to contribute so much to America’s technological progress, in NASA, in Silicon Valley, in industry, on Wall Street.

But, in all probability, there is no need for such post-colonial defensiveness. Happy days are indeed here now. The world appreciates India for her second fastest growing economy after China, and we are not likely to be thrust down that kind of hard road anymore. Amongst the many persuasive arguments that can be advanced on our behalf is the fact that there is an impressive amount of money to be made in the process, and thousands of jobs for folk involved in filling India’s civil nuclear programme orders alone.

On August 25th, 2005 then, at a week-long international conference on emerging nuclear energy systems in Brussels, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) scientists V Jagannathan and Usha Pal stated that BARC had designed the “world's safest nuclear reactor,” after some seven years of effort. The scientists unveiled a path-breaking design for A Thorium Breeder Reactor (ATBR), that can produce 600 MW of electricity for two years “with no refuelling and practically no control manoeuvres.”

This prototype ATBR does need about 2.2 tonnes of Plutonium as “seed”, consuming 880 kg of the Plutonium annually to ignite and generate energy from the reactor core to convert 1,100 kg of Thorium into fissionable Uranium 233. This differential gain in fissile formation makes the ATBR a kind of Thorium Breeder that enables an almost perfect balance between fissile depletion and production by causing in-bred U-233 to take part in energy generation. This extends the core life to two full years. This longevity is greater than any present day power reactors because fissile depletion in other systems takes place much faster than production of new fissile material.

Plutonium being hard to come by in India, the successors of this ATBR prototype are expected to run entirely on Thorium and fissile Uranium-233 bred inside the ATBR reactor itself or obtained locally by converting fertile Thorium into fissile Uranium-233 by a process called “neutron bombardment”.

To cap it all, this Indian ATBR, the two BARC scientists said, is safer and more economical to run than any other type of nuclear power reactor extant worldwide. This is very relevant, in its place, because of the antipathy towards nuclear reactors in the US (particularly after the accident at Three Mile Island and at Chernobyl in the USSR), that has kept electrical power generated by a clutch of ageing US nuclear reactors to a relatively low 23%. We might manage to send coals back to Newcastle someday via BARC.

But focussing firmly on the home front for now, the key fact, strategically speaking, is that the ATBR runs entirely on Thorium, except for that seed Plutonium in the prototype to kick start things. Thorium is plentiful in India. We have the 2nd largest deposits in the world: some 32% of global reserves.

This is, of course, is in utter and joyful contrast to the woefully meagre between 0.57% and 0.8% of the world’s uranium reserves we possess. This lack of domestic uranium combined with strict checks on its importation, is the historical reason why India’s atomic power programme has languished. We have produced a paltry 2,000 MW p.a. of nuclear energy over 34 years of effort. Indeed, till material progress on Thorium came along, it made the Indian Planning Commission target of 20,000 MW of nuclear power, per annum, even by distant 2020, seem like the wet dream of some Stalinist statistician.

So, with faster growth has come growing dependence on petroleum. We seemed doomed to endless middle eastern diplomacy consisting chiefly of genufluctuations provoked by Grand Canyon size deficits in energy. This would have put paid to our development plans in one because unlike the US, we just don’t have the Stealth Bombers to conquer up all the world’s oil reserves in the name of “democracy”.

However, with the bountiful reserves of Thorium as the fuel of India’s future, the above trifling Planning Commission electricity generation target is eminently achievable. But with international cooperation, to put some jaldi into our efforts, prompted, most convincingly, by George Dubya, we might rightly see several 100,000 MW being produced by nuclear means by 2020.

India has had a long standing road map in place called the "Three-stage Nuclear Programme". In the first stage, Plutonium was to be created in its pressurized heavy water reactors (PHWRs) and extracted by reprocessing. In the second stage, Fast Breeder Reactors (FBRs) were to use this Plutonium to breed Uranium-233 in a Thorium blanket around the core. In the final stage, the FBR's were to use Thorium-232 and produce Uranium-233 for other reactors. The first stage has been realized, with India's 10 existing nuclear power plants. The second stage has been proved by a small experimental fast breeder reactor (13 MW), at Kalpakkam in Kerala. And the third stage is now on the anvil.

Tedious and tortuous as all this may seem, it is definitely the shape of the future. Consider this: one tonne of natural uranium can produce 40 million kilowatt-hours of electricity. This is what 16,000 tonnes of coal would produce or 80,000 barrels of oil. Thorium turned into Uranium 233 can do the same for us and for the US as well.

World Thorium resources (economically extractable):
Country
Reserves (tonnes)
Australia
300 000
India
290 000
Norway
170 000
USA
160 000
Canada
100 000
South Africa
35 000
Brazil
16 000
Other countries
95 000
World total
1 200 000
source: US Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity Summaries, January 1999

(1,735 words)

Thursday, 23rd March, 2006
By Ghatotkach

This and all original essays on GHATOTKACHSERIES are copyright 2005-2006 by Gautam Mukherjee. All Rights Reserved.