|
India Thinkers Net Archives Index
|
Subscribe
|
|
| << March09, 2006 - [India Thinkers Net]Updates |
March13, 2006 - [India Thinkers Net]Sunday updates >> |
|
[1] From: Sukla Sen <suklasen@yahoo.com> Date: Fri Mar 10, 2006 Subject: Don't Switch Over to Nuclear Power Economic Times March 10, 2006 Don't switch over to nuclear power M V RAMANA http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1444956.cms TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ FRIDAY, MARCH 10, 2006 12:15:04 AM] The general assumption underlying the nuclear deal signed by US President Bush and our Prime Minister Manmohan Singh seems to be that nuclear power will be an important component of India's energy future. This is not a new idea, either in India or elsewhere. Nuclear energy advocates have always offered extravagant growth potential, none of which have materialised. This is despite huge budgets and unstinted government support. There are good reasons not to believe them again. Ever since its inception, the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) has made numerous confident predictions about nuclear power in India. Going by those, we should have had 43,500 mw of nuclear power by 2000. Instead we had a mere 2,720 mw. Attributing this to international sanctions following the 1974 nuclear test is a dubious excuse, especially given the DAE's rhetoric of indigenous development. Currently, nuclear power contributes only 3,310 mw, barely 3% of the total generation capacity. Prior to the recent deal, the DAE's medium term plans called for installing 20,000 mw by 2020, which would constitute only 8-10% of the projected total electrical generation capacity. Nuclear power, even going by the DAE ambitious projections, cannot be considered a significant source of electricity. The DAE asserts that not only that nuclear power would form an important component of the electricity supply, but it would also be cheap. Even this claim does not stand up to analysis. A comparison of the costs of generating electricity at the Kaiga reactors and the Raichur Thermal Power Station VII ??” both plants of similar size and vintage ??” using the standard discounted cash flow methodology showed that nuclear power would be competitive only with unrealistic assumptions; for a wide range of realistic parameters, it is significantly more expensive. The reason is simple: nuclear reactors cost a lot to build, substantially more than coal or gas based power plants. This has been made worse by the DAE ??” practically all the nuclear reactors they constructed have had significant time and cost overruns. However, even if one assumes that the future will be different and reactors come up on schedule, the price differential will persist. This is true elsewhere too. The 2003 Massachusetts Institute of Technology study on the future of nuclear power recommends an expansion of nuclear power but admits that nuclear power is today "not an economically competitive choice". The only way the study sees nuclear power growing is if the government offered various subsidies and instituted other favourable policies. One reason why construction costs cannot be reduced beyond a certain point is safety: nuclear power alone among all electricity generating technologies comes with the possibility of catastrophic accidents, such as the explosion at the Chernobyl reactor 20 years ago. While reactor safety has improved since Chernobyl, the fundamental characteristics that make them prone to accidents ??” highly interactive complex systems with parts that are tightly coupled ??” remain unchanged. These characteristics make it hard to foresee all possible accident modes and plan accordingly. Further, small unexpected events quickly spin out of control. Therefore with nuclear reactors, major accidents simply cannot be ruled out. Practically all the nuclear reactors operated by the DAE have had accidents of varying severity, as have other facilities associated with the nuclear fuel chain. Many of these could potentially escalate into a major accident, as happened at Chernobyl. The impact would be disastrous, especially in a country like India with a large agricultural sector. In the US, private companies considering the construction of nuclear reactors were concerned that such an accident would likely bankrupt them and tried to get insurance coverage. No insurance company was willing to take on the risk of indemnifying against such a huge liability; nor could they commit to pay beyond their own resources. The US Congress had to introduce the Price-Anderson Act that allowed the government to act as the ultimate insurer, offering in essence a subsidy to the nuclear industry. Such subsidies are not included in the quoted economic costs of nuclear power. Fast breeder reactors, which have figured prominently in the recent debate, pose even greater safety concerns and are even more uneconomical. Unlike the more common thermal reactors, breeder reactors, depending on the design details, can actually explode, though with a yield much smaller than that of a nuclear weapon. And because they use plutonium based fuel, which is about 30,000 times more radioactive than uranium-235, the fissile isotope of uranium, the public health impacts of a full-scale accident are worse. Breeder reactors use liquid sodium to remove the heat generated. Since sodium is opaque, burns on contact with air, and reacts violently with water, breeders are susceptible to serious fires and long shutdowns. These properties make breeder reactors costly to build and maintain. The use of plutonium as fuel also means that expensive safety precautions are required during fuel fabrication. Just the fabrication cost for plutonium based fuel is many times the total cost of uranium fuel. Producing the plutonium through reprocessing spent fuel is also expensive ??” we estimate that each kilogramme of plutonium could cost about Rs 6.7 million. The PFBR needs about 1,900 kg of plutonium just to become operational and another 900 kg each year to keep it running. All of these factors make electricity from breeder reactors uneconomical. No wonder many countries, especially those that have privatised their electricity generation such as the UK, have abandoned breeder programmes. The DAE argues that we need breeder reactors because our uranium resources are limited and because we have large deposits of thorium. But this conclusion is mistaken. Availability of a resource does not mean that it would be economically prudent to utilise it. If that were to make sense, then all our electricity could come from, say, solar photovoltaic cells. But that would be extremely expensive and uneconomical at the present time. Similarly the thorium cycle will be uneconomical. Nuclear power is an expensive, risky and unsustainable way to produce electricity. The deal with the US does not change this. ----- The author is fellow, Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Environment and Development, ISEC Campus, Bangalore and co-editor of Prisoners of the Nuclear Dream ------------ M. V. Ramana Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Environment and Development ISEC Campus Bangalore 560072 http://www.cised.org Ph: (91) 80 2321 7013 (X35) ---------------------- [2] The Secret War Against The Defenseless People Of West Papua By John Pilger http://www.countercurrents.org/pilger100306.htm Indonesia's brutal occupation of West Papua, a vast, resource-rich province -- stolen from its people, like East Timor -- is one of the great secrets of our time.An estimated 100,000 Papuans, or 10 percent of the population, have been killed by the Indonesian military. This is a fraction of the true figure, according to refugees ------------------ [3] Profs protest washing of temple after Khurshid??™s visit HT Correspondent Varanasi, March 10 THREE PROFESSORS of Banaras Hindu University, Mahatma Gandhi Kashi Vidyapeeth and Sampurnanand Sanskrit University, on Friday, sat on a hunger strike at Bharat Mata Mandir to protest the washing of Sankat Mochan Temple after UPCC chief Salman Khurshid??™s visit there on Thursday. Prof Satish Rai (MGKV), Prof Rakesh Pandey (BHU) and Prof Harik Kanti Chakravorty (SSU) sat on a hunger strike to protest the act of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh volunteers who washed Sankat Mochan Temple with Ganga jal on Thursday. Prof Satish Rai said that this act of RSS volunteers was against the Indian culture. He demanded the RSS volunteers to request pardon for their act. District Congress Committee president Satish Chaubey also joined the dharna. ------------------------- [4] From: rkurian@bgl.vsnl.net.in Date: Sun Mar 12, 2006 Subject: The Quiet Indian.. M. J. Akbar.. http://asianage.com/ The Quiet Indian - By M.J. Akbar If you want to hear the Indian story, listen to the sound of silence once the roar of the explosion has ebbed away into time. India's weakness is institutional. We have not found the means, although doubtless there is the will, to prevent terrorist action of the most brutal sort, in the cavernous heart of our most vaunted cities, whether it is aimed at shoppers in a public bazaar in Delhi on the eve of Diwali or worshippers at the Sankatmochan temple in Varanasi. India's strength is the reaction. One is referring to the reaction of the people, for the reaction of the authorities is almost perfunctory: a lot of initial bustle, and then the hope that yet another tragedy will disappear, unwept, into the misery of dusty files. There is anger in the popular reaction, for only the supine do not get angry. But this anger does not degenerate into hysteria. The terrorist has two objectives. The first is immediate: he seeks to leave pools of blood on the streets. The second is strategic and perhaps more important: he seeks to lace the lines, the thin lines that separate communities, with poison. The Indian people know that communal peace is the best answer to vicious terrorism, and the only way to frustrate the strategic design. A self-proclaimed separatist group from Kashmir has claimed responsibility for the terrorism in Varanasi. The simple response is that the future of Kashmir cannot be determined by injecting fear in Varanasi. Those who think they can weaken the resolve of India do not understand the depth of India. This depth is not just geographical and demographic; India also has great reserves of psychological depth. That is what both Hindus and Muslims of Varanasi displayed when they were tested. The test is becoming more difficult of course. There has been what might be called a fundamental change in the level of provocation. There is nothing new about Hindu-Muslim tension. Where there is a relationship, whether individual or collective, there will be both amity and the occasional spot of tension. Islam came to India through merchants and traders from the earliest days of the new faith, as it did later to South-East Asia, and Muslim communities appeared not only along the coast of Gujarat and Kerala but also in the interior cities of the North. Since then Hindus and Muslims have interacted commercially, socially - and politically. The first Arab-Muslim armies appeared in Sind in 711, the same year that the western momentum took Arab armies into Spain. But while Spain fell comparatively easily, the expansion of what might be called political space froze in the deserts of Sind. The Thakur principalities of Rajasthan, Punjab and Afghanistan maintained their power for a nother four centuries until Prithviraj was defeated in the second battle of Tarain (Prithviraj won the first battle of Tarain). The story of kings is different from the narratives of people. The communal riot in its present manifestation is, by and large, a phenomenon of post-feudal India. Its causes form a pattern from the trivial to the significant, but are familiar enough to suggest that it is more often fomented rather than natural. What is undoubtedly true is that politics has been a principal agent provocateur, including the politics of democracy. But whatever the cause, popular conflict very rarely extended to attacks on places of worship or deities: there was a sense that the sacred should be kept above conflict. This is not completely true, but it is largely correct. But the violence of terrorism is significantly different: it is aimed as much against the sacred as it is against the people. It does not require a degree in nuclear physics to appreciate that the Sankatmochan temple in Varanasi was selected in order to incite Hindu anger against Muslims, and inspire perhaps a Gujarat-style reaction. The variance is another clue in the argument that this attack has been planned by un-Indian if not non-Indian elements. What the people preserve, so often the government manages to squander. Let me note a second institutional weakness: the remarkable tendency of governments to sound triumphalist long before any real victory is evident on the nearest horizon. The trumpets are always out to herald a mirage. In Delhi a mirage is neither a desert phenomenon nor a fighter plane; it is a working philosophy, a way of life. For a few weeks now it has been commonplace to hear, including from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, that Indian Muslims have rejected violence thanks to the therapeutic virtues of Indian democracy. As a proposition it has the merit of not only being virtuous but also broadly accurate. But what is largely true should not be misconstrued as being wholly true. There is also the danger that someone with an agenda might want to prove the opposite. But it seemed that this proposition was not put into circulation accidentally, or only because it was true. President George Bush's entourage joined this catechism in preparation of their leader's visit to India. While this was of course a just and justified tribute to India, it was also part of the wider discourse to sell the future of Iraq as a democracy and thereby to rationalise the occupation of Iraq. President Bush is searching for democracy these days in Iraq, rather than weapons of mass destruction. Ironically, democracy in Iraq is beginning to look more and more like a weapon of mass destruction. Be that as it may, Varanasi brings the agenda back to India, and its unsolved problems. India is a nuclear power straining to become an economic giant with seriously solid military muscle, and with the proven capability of reaching its ambitions within a believable timeframe. It has a growing right to a place on the high table of world affairs, and the world, now led by the United States, is taking this claim seriously. But India also faces a grave danger, one that could sabotage its dreams. This danger is internal, not external. It is a problem of governance, not of the people. It is the danger of an institutional ego that sends the government's head into the heady superstructure of nuclear clouds, and, through an opposite of the gravitational pull, lifts its feet high above the harsh realities on the ground. The ground is swarming with cancerous problems. Varanasi is only an instance: security is so porous that terrorists who operate out of Kashmir can disdainfully slip into Varanasi and set off blasts that kill and maim hundreds. The real tragedy is that the perpetrators will never be found. The police has now become accustomed to alibi punishments: a few scapegoats to be sacrificed for public consumption in the hope that immediate passions are assuaged. There is a parallel network of violence operating in India. No one really knows if Naxalites, spread across the breadth of the country, have linked up with separatists in Kashmir and Assam or not. All of them certainly have a common purpose, which is the destabilisation of government and governance. Poverty feeds violence, and subsistence-level poverty is still the fate of four hundred million Indians. Communal anger is always hovering as a menace over stability, its noxious fumes wafted by despair. This too is shrouded in silence, but it is a different kind of silence. The story of India can be heard in both kinds of silence. ---------------- [5] From: rkurian@bgl.vsnl.net.in Date: Sat Mar 11, 2006 Subject: Dr. Strangedeal.....A View from the West. http://www.economist.com/opinion/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=5603449 Nuclear proliferation Dr Strangedeal Mar 9th 2006 From The Economist print edition --------------- [6] From: rkurian@bgl.vsnl.net.in Date: Sat Mar 11, 2006 Subject: Realpolitik Gone Nuclear.. Realpolitik Gone Nuclear By Joseph Grosso 11 March, 2006 Countercurrents.org -------------------- |
|
| << March09, 2006 - [India Thinkers Net]Updates |
March13, 2006 - [India Thinkers Net]Sunday updates >> |
|
India Thinkers Net Archives Index
|
Subscribe
|
|
|
Archives powered by Zinester's Mailing List Service
Details on India Thinkers Net |
Browse for more newsletters at Zinester's Ezine Directory
Managed by Zinester's Mailing List Management |