By Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Former President of India*
&
Mr.
Srijan Pal Singh, Expert in Sustainable Development *
Every
single atom in the universe carries an unimaginably powerful battery within its
heart, called the nucleus. This form of energy, often called Type-1 fuel, is
hundreds of thousands of times more powerful than the conventional Type-0
fuels, which are basically dead plants and animals existing in the form of
coal, petroleum, natural gas and other forms of fossil fuel. Imagine a
kilometre-long train, with about 50 freight bogies, fully laden with about
10,000 tonnes of coal. The same amount of energy can be generated by 500 kg of
Type-1 fuel, naturally occurring Uranium, enough
to barely fill the boot of a small car. When the technology is fully realised, one can do even
better with naturally occurring Thorium, in which case the material required
would be much less, about 62.5 kg, or even less according to some estimates.
Energy and economy
Today,
India finds itself going through a phase of rapid ascent in economic
empowerment. Our focus for this decade will be on the development of key
infrastructure and the uplifting of the 600,000 villages where 750 million
people live. All this will need massive energy. It is predicted that the total
electricity demand will grow from the current 150,000 MW to at least over
950,000 MW by the year 2030.
International
scenario on nuclear energy
So,
will we allow an accident in Japan, in a 40-year-old reactor at Fukushima,
arising out of extreme natural stresses, to derail our dreams to be an
economically developed nation? When a few European countries,
particularly Germany, decide to phase out nuclear power that should not become
a blanket argument to take a view against our nuclear programme.
The
decision of Germany suits its current scenario. It is a relatively
power-sufficed nation— so it can afford to lose a few plants. More important,
Germany has completely exhausted its nuclear resources.
The
Indian population is misled when it is said that some Western nations have
ended their nuclear programme, or that Japan is reconsidering nuclear power
plant expansion. The study indicates that most of the prosperous nations are
extracting about 30-40 per cent of power from nuclear power. In India, we are
not generating even 5000 MW of nuclear power from the total of about 150 GW of
electricity generation, most of it coming from coal. What is needed for our
India, we Indians have to decide. Moreover, India is blessed with the rare, and
very important, nuclear fuel of the future – Thorium. We cannot afford to lose
the opportunity to emerge as the energy capital of the world. India has the
potential to be the first nation to realise the dream of a fossil fuel-free
nation, which will also relieve the nation of about $100 billion annually which
we spend in importing petroleum and coal.
The
greenest sources of power - solar and wind power are
not stable and are dependent excessively on weather and sunshine. Nuclear
power, on the other hand, provides a relatively clean, high-density source of
reliable energy. Today, there are 29 countries operating 441 nuclear power
plants, with a total capacity of about 375 GW(e). The
industry now has more than 14,000 reactor-years of experience. Sixty more
units, with a total target capacity of 58.6 GW, were under construction.
Much
of the destructive power of nuclear accidents is compared against the
benchmarks of the atomic bombing of Japan by the U.S. forces during the Second
World War. You cannot compare a nuclear bomb with a nuclear power plant.
Civilian nuclear applications in the form of a power plant are designed to
deliver small amounts of energy in a sustainable manner over a far larger time
frame.
Humankind’s ability to combat nuclear challenges
We
need to put the Fukushima-Daiichi events in the historic frame of nuclear
accidents and analyse them. While there was huge loss to property and
disruption of normal life, there was no direct loss of life due to the
accident. As a silver lining, the way the accident was handled — compared to
the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 — showed how much progress we have achieved in
nuclear emergency management. The Fukushima-Daiichi plant was almost five times
as big in terms of power generation and contained about nine times the nuclear
fuel. Yet, with better emergency management, the maximum radiation was less
than 0.4 per cent of that released during the Chernobyl disaster.
On 6th November 2011,
both of us visited the much talked about 2000
MW Kudankulum nuclear plant to understand the
plant’s safety features and how it is addressing the concerns of the people
which have inflated as an aftermath of the Fukushima Nuclear Event. We spent
the whole day there meeting scientists and experts, meeting the local people
and also studying the various facilities of the plant first hand. At the end we
were absolutely satisfied to understand that this plant is equipped with the
latest technologies when it comes to safety.
There
are four important aspects of safety in a nuclear power plant which have been
addressed in the plant.
1)
Structural
Integrity Safety: The structure of the plant has been
made with the highest safety standards which doubled containment and
hermetically sealed to be safe against earthquakes. To counter any risk from
Tsunami and cyclones, the plant is elevated, to a minimum height of 6 meter
(pump house) and the auxiliary diesel sets are at a height of 9.3 meter with
a redundancy of four times in the diesel
generators. In the case of Fukushima, one of the primary reasons for structural
collapse was the explosion in the hydrogen which got out of control. To counter
this, Kudankulum plant has installed 154 Hydrogen recombiners across the plant which can absorb any leaked
hydrogen and prevent any structural damage.
2)
Thermal
Hydraulic Safety: The most advanced safety feature in the
Kudankulum plant is the installation of the Passive
Heat Removal System (PHRS) which is latest in technology to ensure rapid
cooling of the reactor in the event of a reactor problem. The PHRS is a unique
steam recirculating system which can continue to cool
the plant in the event of the failure of AC power and even when the worst
possible scenario of coolant malfunction has occurred, without leaking any
radiation in the atmosphere. There is also mechanism to rapidly cool the
reactor in emergency situation using an elaborate system of showers which are
installed in redundancy across the plant.
3)
Neutronic Safety: In any nuclear plant the
most important cause of failure can be the loss of ability to control the
neutrons being generated which is done by a system called control rods. Besides
the control rods, the Kundankulum Plant has uniquely
implemented the latest technology in this domain – The Core Catcher. This is
basically an underlying structure with Gadolium oxide
which would “catch the neutrons” in the event of a highly unlikely meltdown.
The core catcher is the ultimate defense which would, without any human
intervention, or need of external power supply, cool down the fuel and reactor.
4) Waste Management: A
popular myth is that nuclear waste is dumped into the oceans which kills marine
life and contaminates water. This is completely false. Yes, many decades ago,
some of the nations used to dump nuclear waste in deep oceans away from habitat
but that practice is over now. With the closed loop cycle the waste generated
per year from 1000 MW plant is less than 3% and that, after vitrification
would not occupy a space of about 6 cubic meters.
Another
argument is that the nuclear accidents and the radiation fallout would not only
harm the exposed generation but also continue to impact generations to come.
Post the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing in 1945, the U.S. government
established the Atomic Bombing Casualty Commission (ABCC) in 1946 which in 1974
was reconstituted as a joint venture between the U.S. and Japan as the
Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF). The ABCC and the RERF have
extensively studied the long-term impact of radiation and nuclear disaster
across generations for over six decades. Contrary to popular
belief, the findings clearly state that the effect of such exposure is limited
only to the exposed generation.
In
the wake of the recent natural disaster impacting the Daiichi plant in
Fukushima, two concerns are prominent. The first is that of safety against the
plant's disaster, and the second relates to the environmental impact and the
nuclear waste which the plant generates.
Let
us consider the second issue first.
Opportunity
cost of nuclear energy
a)
Abstinence from nuclear power is an incomplete response without the logical
alternative. Some part of the future need, although only a small fraction,
would come from solar and wind sources, with great unpredictability. A part
would be offset by hydro-power too. But in all probability we will continue to
increase our reliance on fossil-based fuel power generation methods.
Every
year, human activities are adding about 30 billion tonnes of CO2
into the atmosphere. The IPCC estimates that 26 per cent of this emission
(about 7.6 billion tonnes) is a direct consequence of electricity generation
requirements. The WHO estimates that about 1.3 million people lose their lives
as a result of urban outdoor air pollution alone, and about 140,000 are
causalities to adaptation challenges of climate change. Thus, the pollution caused by power
generation activities, and the associated climate change are directly or
indirectly responsible for about 481,000 deaths every year. Comparatively, in
the case of the worst civilian nuclear disaster ever at Chernobyl, the United
Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic radiation (UNSCEAR)
predicted up to 4,000 cancer cases (often curable) due to the accident, besides
57 direct causalities.
Safety
issues of nuclear power
b)
Throughout the history of nuclear power generation there have been four major
incidents of plant failure — the Kyshtym accident in
fuel reprocessing in 1957, the relatively smaller Three Mile Island meltdown
(United States), the much bigger Chernobyl accident (USSR, 1986) and the recent
Japanese incident at Fukushima. The first accident was purely due to
underdeveloped technology, and much of the blame for the next two disasters is
attributed to human error. Even in the case of the Fukushima disaster of 2011,
there were extraordinary natural forces in action — the rare occurrence of the
tremendous stress load of an earthquake coupled with the unprecedented shear
load of a tsunami. The occurrence of four failures in six decades cannot be
made out as a case for completely disbanding the technology.
Let
us take a few examples. In 1903, the Wright brothers translated into reality
the remarkable dream of controlled human flight. In 1908, the first flight
disaster occurred, which severely injured Orville Wright and killed his
co-passenger. Today air accidents kill more than 1,500 people every year. Imagine
whether we would be flying between distant cities, across oceans and
continents, if the incident of 1908, or the ones later, were used as a reason
to disband human flight?
The
Indian space programme, which is now ranked among the best in the world,
started with a failure in 1979 when our first rocket, instead of putting the
satellite into a near-earth orbit, went into the Bay of Bengal. I was the
Mission Director of the launch, and we were accused of putting a few crores of rupees into the sea. We did not wind up our
dreams. The mission continued and the next year we were successful. The
argument is that all failures and accidents propel us to think and develop
better and safer technologies. Improvement, and not escapism, should be our
step forward.
Nuclear
fuel of the future: Thorium
Let
us introduce a lesser-known member among radioactive materials — Thorium.
Thorium is far more abundant, by about four times, than the traditional nuclear
fuel, Uranium, and occurs in a far purer form, too. It is believed that the
amount of energy contained in the Thorium reserves on earth is more than the
combined total energy that is left in petroleum, coal, other fossil fuels and
Uranium, all put together. And information revealed in an IAEA, International
Atomic Energy Agency Report (2005) on Thorium fuels indicates that India might
have the largest reserves of Thorium in the world, with over 650,000 tonnes.
This is more than one-fourth of the total deposits of Thorium; in comparison,
we have barely 1 per cent of the world's Uranium deposits. Thorium has many
other advantages. It is estimated that Thorium may be able to generate (through
Uranium-233 that could be produced from it) eight times the amount of energy
per unit mass compared to (natural) Uranium. In the much debated issue of waste
generation also, Thorium has a relative advantage. It produces waste that is
relatively less toxic.
Being
the largest owner of Thorium the opportunity is for India to vigorously pursue
its existing nuclear programs with a special focus on research and development
on the Thorium, which we are already undertaking. The power of the nucleus is
mighty and the future of humanity lies in harnessing it in a safe and efficient
manner. Affordable, clean and abundant energy provided by nuclear sources is
our gateway to a future that is healthy, learned and connected — a future that
will span deep into space and crosses the boundaries of current human
imagination.
Conclusion: History is written by those who
stood for their ideas
I
was asking myself “What did I learn from great thinkers who have brought
transformation?” From them I learnt no crowd mongers and no easy routes have
ever brought progress and change to the nation. It is only the individual, the
mighty mind and soul, which have transformed the
world, brought the innovative transformation and he and she had the courage to
stand alone for their idea and contribute which in course of time has been
respected by the masses. I always cherish how Prof. Satish
Dhawan can build a high performance space
organization which has today sent so many satellites in the orbit or how minds
like Dr. C. Subramaniam and Dr. M.S. Swaminathan brought the green revolution which today has
enabled us to produce 235 million tonnes of food from 50 million tonnes in
1960s. They stood against the fear of failure, didn’t they? Our nuclear program is one of the
indispensible keys to our future and our technological leadership, political
leadership and every citizen of the nation must realize this.
© Authors
SS-182/SF-182/ 22-11-11
PRA/RTS