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Time to get some discussion into this forum! How about taking on the 'hottest' topic these days? The Jaitapur nuclear park!

A sseries of six nuclear plants to be set up by French company Areva, this will generate 10,000 MW of power and will get going by 2014, claims the government.

India with its 19 nuclear power plants is just about able to produce 4000 mw of power. In contrast to this, the proposed park will double the production of nuclear energy in next four years.

The cost will come to Rs 60,000 crore or about Rs 9 per unit of power.

First, there are the accusations that the park is to come up in a biodiversity hotspot like the Western Ghats. The environment ministry has called for certain safeguards but how much will be adhered to, has to be seen.

As the nation gets ready to go nuclear power shopping in a big way, what do you think? Is it a good idea?

We need power, yes. But is nuclear fission the best way to heat water and send the turbines rotating?

How clean is nuclear? It does not emit carbon dioxide. But what about the waste it generates? If we plan to increase generation in this route, how much waste can we handle?

How safe is it to transport nuclear material across the nation?

Join in with your thoughts.

Let's go Uranium shopping!

All the world loves to hear of abundant fuel sources. And when an institution like MIT promises there is more than plenty of Uranium to run more than ten times the present number of 400 nuclear plants, everyone will want to go nuclear. Right?

The report, which comes in the backdrop of the US administration deliberations on whether to go full-scale nuclear or not, finds that uranium resources are not likely to run out in the next century, even if the U.S. alone builds as many as 1,000 nuclear reactors. Therefore, either reprocessing or recycling spent nuclear fuel, as the French and Japanese do, is likely to be a waste of money better spent on improving the light-water reactors presently in use.

Light water reactors are what the report calls attention to, with regard to improvisation while arguing against complicating the fuel cycle in considering alternate fissile fuels such as thorium. The M.I.T. report predicts that even if the world's fleet of more than 400 nuclear power plants grew to be 4,000 such plants that then operated for a century, the cost of the electricity from those facilities would rise by a mere 1 percent as a result of the increased demand for uranium.

Regarding spent fuel reprocessing, the report suggests a cycle involving light-water reactors, reprocessing of the spent fuel, and disposal of small "packages" of highly radioactive nuclear waste in deep boreholes. And to tackle proliferation, a leasing program, in which countries with the capability to enrich uranium fuel supply it to other countries and then take back the spent fuel for disposal in one form or another at the end of its useful life.

Fuel reprocessing like the kind it suggests have proved cost prohibitive, and the leasing issue has its own problems. The central issue still remains the 'abundance' of uranium and waste disposal from 4000 plants!

Nuclear energy parks

India will set up five energy parks by 2032 to raise the generation of nuclear energy. The selected sites for the energy parks are Haripur in West Bengal, Mithi Virdi in Gujarat, Jaitapur in Maharashtra, Kovvada in Andhra Pradesh and Kudamkulam in Tamil Nadu, chairman of Atomic Energy Commission and secretary, Department of Atomic Energy, Srikumar Banerjee has indicated.

The country plans to have 35,000 MW of installed capacity by 2020 and 60,000 MW by 2032, Banerjee said. Out of this, 40,000 MW to 45,000 MW would come from energy parks and the balance from the other installations. The current generation level was around 4500 MW.

He said going by the present economics, nuclear power was more competitive than other sources of energy like thermal. But is price alone to be the deciding factor, as we have been asking? What about the waste? What about the long gestation time? How can the generation be raised over eight times in a decade? What about security concerns in transporting the fuel across the country? And the fuel imports required? According to Banerjee, India can generate at most 10,000 MW of nuclear energy from its assured uranium reserves.

Are the people willing to have nuclear plants dotting the countryside?

Star power

Fossil fuel was abundant once upon a time. Not anymore. The search is on for a new source of energy which is clean and abundant.

Some argue that nuclear power could be the answer. Nuclear is the best technology available, they say, for producing reliable, carbon-free electricity at base-load scale. Critics insist that nuclear power will indeed help us reduce CO2 emissions, but only at a high cost and to a very limited extent.

Leaving that argument aside, the next question is how abundant is the fuel, and what about the waste? Terrestrial Uranium found in the earth’s crust, if used at current rates will last for 100 years and if nuclear were the sole energy powering earthlings, it will last 15 years. But there exists an ‘inexhaustible’ supply in seawater which could eventually be tapped and provide energy for all for 1000s of years, claim some!

As to waste, all the waste generated to date will hardly fill a single football stadium, say the proponents. Anyway, advanced nuclear fuel recycling technologies are being developed which reduce the volume, heat and toxicity of used fuel and also recover the unused energy that remains in the fuel.

Now, the laser facility at Livermore lab in California is all set to begin its experiments with nuclear truth. Using very high laser energy, they plan to make hydrogen fuse in a reaction similar to what happens in stars. The small amount of hydrogen pellet will reach a temperature of 100 million °C and a density 100 times that of lead, which is enough to start a fusion reaction.

While the output is ten times greater than the energy of the lasers, the aim is to multiply it further so that the energy spent in creating the lasers is discounted. For this, the scientists are toying with the idea of fusing this experiment with fission (what happens in our nuclear reactors.) The stream of neutrons from the fusion can not only extract more energy out of the fission fuel (normally only 1 percent of its energy is used!) but also decrease the waste substantially.

Laser focus, containment process, sustainable fusion, etc are technical hurdles but the scientists are focused!

What do you think? Will star power be the future of energy?

Time to harvest nuke?

The Indian nuclear market is estimated to be about $100 billion with a rough generation capacity of 40,000 MW expected to come up by 2020. Going further, the government expects to increase the share of nuclear from the present 3 percent of the total installed capacity to 25 percent by 2050.

Big gameplan. Even as private players wait for the Atomic Energy Act to be revised to allow independent private players, there are many challenges too. The low capacities of existing nuclear power plants, the timescale of getting a plant operational, the costs, lack of technical skills, are serious problems. Then there is the big issue of fuel costs and waste disposal.

While the state-owned NPCIL plans to increase capacity from 4120 MW to 20,000 MW in five years, it plans to import ten light water reactors that can generate 1000 MW each and costing a total Rs 800 billion. Add to that the requirements of over 400 tonnes of uranium fuel annually for its reactors, and it becomes clear that this is no cakewalk.

The costs and timescales involved have been brought out in an article by Lester Brown of Earth Policy Institute. He speaks of ‘Over the last few years the nuclear industry has used concerns about climate change to argue for a nuclear revival. Although industry representatives may have convinced some political leaders that this is a good idea, there is little evidence of private capital investing in nuclear plants in competitive electricity markets. The reason is simple: nuclear power is uneconomical.’
The costs are not only for setting up plants but as much for decommissioning them after their lifetime, he explains.

China too is going nuclear in a big way, paving the way for more nuclear reactors. Should India lag behind?

But even if the arguments are proved wrong, do we have enough fuel to go nuclear in a big way?