Antinuclear

The meager information I was able to gather was that the nuclear liability bill which India had held as a lakshmana rekha remains intact, but its teeth have been blunted via an end-run. Instead of foreign suppliers of equipment being liable for damages, a group of Indian power distributors (PSUs), Indian insurers (again GIC, a government entity), and the Indian government, will underwrite the cost of insurance to the tune of some Rs. 1500 crore. It appears that, therefore, the entire liability in case of a nuclear disaster will be borne by India one way or another.

This is startling. The cost of a nuclear disaster is extremely high;………

What if there are no accidents? What about the cost of nuclear waste cleanup and decommissioning of obsolete plants? The Hanford nuclear complex in the US state of Washington has so far experienced costs of $40 billion, and is expected to cost another $115 billion. The total effort is expected to last till 2046, after the reactor complex was shut down in 1989. There are 11,000 people involved in an ongoing effort. These are astronomical numbers, and are just estimates, as nobody really knows the true cost………

 I’m afraid the sums simply don’t add up for nuclear power, purely from an economic point of view. The fully loaded cost (including decommissioning and waste management) of a unit of power would be probably 100 times that of a unit of conventional power today.

Given the high capital costs and the possible politically motivated embargos on uranium (which India doesn’t have much of, for instance the US reneged on its treaty obligations to supply Tarapur with uranium) the risk is too high. We would be paying good money to buy trouble in future. Now add the cost of potential terrorism and dirty bombs – no sane person would want this sort of liability, even in the absence of a meltdown as in Chernobyl.

Furthermore, the approval of this insurance agreement means that all suppliers, not only Americans, will now be freed from liability, and the Indian taxpayer would pick up the tab should there be, heaven forbid, a nuclear calamity. I will stick my neck out and suggest that despite the latest brouhaha, there is no reason to budge from nuclear skepticism.

On the other hand, it appears as though the time has come for solar power. Plummeting costs of photovoltaic panels, improvements in storage and transmission, and other technological factors now mean that solar lifecycle cost is approaching conventional costs in the West. Given India’s inherent availability of sunlight, I am of the opinion that we would be better off spending the billions needed for nuclear power on a crash program of research into solar power, and maybe even on subsidizing it heavily to kick-start it.

An International Energy Agency Study quoted by The Economist in “Special Report: Energy and Technology” recently says that cost of solar panels has fallen by “a factor of five in six years”, which I take to mean it’s fallen by 80 percent. New solar technology with 3D printed graphene can be applied to any surface as film or even as paint! Storage of intermittent solar energy, always a problem, can be eased in India by retrofitting home inverters-battery devices, which the entire middle class in India has thanks to the erratic grid. There is even a suggestion of using an electric car as a storage system; of course there is also feed-in-tariffs to be earned by selling your generated electricity to the grid.

Why, then, is the Modi administration pursuing what looks like a total loss in nuclear energy?………

it would be best if India avoided the hugely expensive nuclear route and instead invested in new solar technologies, despite teething-trouble uncertainties in the latter. India could well be a solar-energy superpower, with “energy so cheap that it won’t even be metered” – ironically nuclear energy’s siren-song sixty years ago. We are the kings of sunshine, with 300 day’s worth of intense radiation: one of the (few) benefits of being largely tropical in a global-warming world.

Investing now in nuclear power is a bad idea, nuclear deal ‘breakthrough’ notwithstanding. http://www.firstpost.com/india/indo-us-nuclear-deal-why-is-modi-pursuing-what-looks-like-a-total-loss-in-n-energy-2064385.html