‘Must explore fuel cycle options instead of reactor options to step up nuclear capacity, bring thorium into the mix early’: Anil Kakodkar

How India can side-step FBR deployment delays

A fast resolution to tide over this downside might lie in irradiating thorium — the radioactive metallic component named after the Norse god that has been an extended standing hope for India’s true vitality safety — together with a fuel variant referred to as excessive assay, low enriched uranium (HALEU) in the nation’s pressurised heavy-water reactors (PHWRs) at scale, Anil Kakodkar, former director of Bhabha Atomic Analysis Centre, instructed The Indian Categorical.

The used fuel from these PHWRs — the mainstay of India’s nuclear energy programme — can then be recycled to set up further energy technology capability, together with by the new-age molten salt reactors (MSRs) as half of the third stage of India’s three-stage nuclear energy growth programme.

HALEU is outlined as uranium enriched to better than 5 per cent and fewer than 20 per cent of the uranium-235 (U-235) isotope, which is completely different from the uranium fuel enriched up to 5 per cent U-235 that’s usually utilized in the present fleet of gentle water reactors deployed by most western nations.

Purposes for HALEU are at the moment restricted to analysis reactors and it’s not but broadly out there commercially. This additionally comes at a time when China is planning to construct a nuclear energy plant on the edge of the Gobi Desert that may be the first in the world to use molten salt as the fuel provider and coolant, and the first to use thorium as a fuel supply instead of the uranium historically utilized in nuclear reactors.

Kakodkar’s feedback are well timed, given the want for baseload nuclear capability and thermal capability that’s clearly being felt at the moment in India after a section of fast growth of renewables energy technology capability over the final decade. The absence of vitality storage techniques to counterbalance the renewable capability is now leading to rising instability in the nation’s electrical energy grid. Renewable vitality sources akin to photo voltaic and wind depend on particular atmospheric circumstances to generate energy, producing electrical energy solely when the solar is shining or the wind is blowing.

Whereas nuclear, alongside thermal, is being seen as an answer to ramping up base load capability, the gradual tempo of atomic energy capability addition is an enormous constraint.

How to enhance India’s nuclear energy output

In accordance to Kakodkar, whereas the authorities’s transfer to acknowledge the inevitable position of nuclear vitality in the realisation of its ‘Viksit Bharat’ objectives is constructive, the setting up of 100 GWe of nuclear capability by 2047 can be a problem.

“The one method to exponentially enhance the fee of nuclear energy output, given the provide constraints on uranium, is to begin recycling uranium and bringing in thorium into the (technology) mix as early as potential,” Kakodkar stated. Recycled nuclear fuel would then be essential to maintain the capability addition development fee. For that the FBR was seen as essential, however delays had dogged the large-scale deployment of these reactors.

As an improvisation, by utilizing thorium irradiated together with HALEU in the PHWRs at scale, the spent fuel produced can then be recycled to set up further energy technology capability, together with by the molten salt reactors.

Kakodkar stated that whereas recycling spent uranium fuel together with plutonium in quick reactors stays a superior possibility, given the delays in India’s FBR challenge, recycling the HALEU-thorium fuel is probably the subsequent greatest different. This may allow India’s civil atomic energy programme to develop so long as the irradiated fuel feed is out there, he stated.

Kakodkar stated that whereas the authorities’s plans to set up a quantity of Bharat Small Reactors in a public-private partnership mode make sense, there is no such thing as a hurt in India being open to all out there nuclear applied sciences, together with imported gentle water reactors. Whereas the 700 MWe PHWRs, at the moment being deployed in fleet mode, might be the most important foundation for capability addition, small reactors might “play a supporting position”.
HALEU-thorium fuel might be leveraged in each to allow the continuation of capability addition past the time uranium provide constraints, and the persevering with delays in the FBR programme.

Can the non-public sector lead India’s nuclear energy journey?

In accordance to Kakodkar, the non-public sector, whereas it wants to be mobilised to scale up the programme has, at greatest, “a secondary position”.

That’s an argument which is countered by different specialists, given the incapacity of the public sector to expedite nuclear capability addition. “The shortcoming to scale up is a administration concern, and never a expertise concern,” Kakodkar stated. He additionally stated that nuclear energy in the present day is aggressive with none subsidy, and so be given must-run standing, and must be backed up by a clear vitality fund, identical to for renewables.

The Division of Atomic Vitality’s three-stage energy programme envisages a pathway to utilising India’s considerable thorium reserves — present in coastal sands on the seashores of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Gujarat, and in the inland riverine sands of Jharkhand and West Bengal — to generate electrical energy.