BHEL, NPCIL and L&T Select Partners:40 Gigawat by 2020 Mission Nuclear India

European nuclear firms Alstom SA, Siemens AG, Skoda Power, a part of Skoda Holdings AS, and Russia’s OAO Power Machines are in the run as partners for BHEL for the "40 Gigawat by 2020 Mission Nuclear "of Asia’s third-largest economy. BHEL, NPCIL and Larsen & Toubro Ltd. who have announced plans for building manufacturing facilities for nuclear reactors are looking to bag orders in an industry worth over 20 billion dollars.

 

The Nuclear Power Corporation is responsible for designing, constructing, and operating the nuclear power plants within the first stage nuclear power program (i.e., not breeder reactors, which are the responsibility of another government owned company called BHAVINI), and the Uranium Corporation of India Limited is in charge of mining and milling of uranium. Industrial organizations include the Heavy Water Board, in charge of the many plants that produce heavy water, and the Nuclear Fuel Complex, which manufactures the fuel for the nuclear reactors.The best known research centers are the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), the most important facility involved in nuclear weapons research, and the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research, where the breeder program was cultivated.

 

However after five decades of sustained and lavish government support, nuclear power amounts to just 3310 MW, less than 3% of the country’s total electricity generation capacity. As far as cost per unit of generation is concerned nuclear power is still way beyond hydroelectricity and ofcourse fossil fired electricity. Present estimates put the levelized cost of electricity at Rs 8 per unit.(at a discount rate of 9%). Besides safety issues and accidents are causes of concern. The most serious accident has been at Narora where the last stage blades of a steam turbine failed and the reactor had to be shutdown on a last recourse basis.

Over the next few years, this capacity is to increase, largely because of the import of two 1000 MW reactors from Russia. The DAE has only just started operating a reactor not fully based on an imported design, a 540 MW heavy water reactor, which is scaled up from the design of the 220 MW reactor that was imported from Canada.

India has been pursuing a long term nuclear mission with huge government support depends on Fast Breeder Technology in India's three stage nuclear program where the second and three stages involve breeder reactors, all that the DAE has however today is a pilot scale Fast Breeder Test Reactor (FBTR), which has not achieved its rated capacity as yet though. However while other countries seem to have discontinued research on Fast Breeeder Technology on  safety issues, India's atomic energy establishment On the basis of the experience of FBTR pilot reactor, the DAE has started to build a 1250 MWt breeder, the Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR), scaling up the FBTR by a factor of about 70, announced for completion by 2012. This apparently as per experts is likely to be beset with huge delays and performance gaps.

 

India could obtain 50 percent of its power from atomic energy by 2050, after emerging from decades of nuclear isolation in 2008 when it signed a civilian technology supply agreement with the United States.

 

India now gets less than three percent of its energy needs from atomic power from 17 operating nuclear power reactors and plans to increase its current capacity of 4,120 megawatts to 10,000 megawatts by 2012 and 40000 MW by 2020, as contracts are under finalization with nuclear vendors from France, Russia and the United States for the construction of eight reactors.

 

In spite of the tremendous opportunity and the excitement generated all around, however considering the progress so far and the complexity of the business, business and project planning for nuclear business in India has to be done considering interdependencies when it comes to Nuclear Power in India

Himadri Banerji consults with leading institutions through GLG