Chain reaction

The first gains from the Indo-US nuclear deal are starting to get fired up. By the end of this fiscal year, public sector Nuclear Power Corporation (NPC) will generate 25.5 billion units of power, a 35% jump from last fiscal year. How can such gains come so soon, long before the first new nuclear projects start up? The answer is simple: many of the country’s reactors were starved of fuel and were functioning well below capacity . The deal has let overseas suppliers, like France’s Areva, which sold over 300 tonnes of uranium to NPC for a reactor in Rajasthan, to top up India’s nuclear tank. No longer parched for fuel, our reactors are now running at full throttle, allowing NPC to generate close to its capacity of 4,680 mw. NPC has 19 reactors of which nine are built and fuelled by partners like Russia, France and the US. These are now running at 90% plant load factor, up from 50% levels even a year ago. All that has emboldened the government to project a target of 40,000 mw of nuclear power, nearly 10 times its current output. This is an ambitious target, but it can be achieved.

Around 900 mw of new capacity is ready to come online from reactors in Karnataka and Rajasthan. Another 2,500 mw will get fired up soon from two plants in Tamil Nadu. By 2017, nearly 3,000 mw more will come from plants in Gujarat and Rajasthan. These projects, about 6,500 mw in all, will more than double NPC’s capacity in a relatively short time. But the really big push will come through the next few years when construction starts at seven different sites across India for large nuclear power projects. Apart from one indigenous project in Haryana’s Gorakhpur, all the others will have overseas partners , like Russia’s Atomstroy, France’s Areva and Westinghouse and GE-Hitachi from the US. With such experienced and technically-savvy partners, these projects should move ahead rapidly. Once complete, they’ll bring more than 14,000 mw of additional electricity to the grid. Over time, each of these plants will be scaled up, till nuclear power becomes a major component of India’s energy mix, something that’ll be a big boost for clean, efficient electricity generation in the country.