SCIENCE-INDIA: Embargoes Stimulated Nuclear Programme

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Dev Raj

NEW DELHI, Jun 11 1998 (IPS) - An abundance of naturally-occurring radioactive thorium and a pool of dedicated scientists have helped India beat discriminatory embargoes and build a fiercely independent atomic energy programme.

According to Dr. Raja Ramanna, 70, the man who oversaw India’s first nuclear test in 1974, various technology control regimes imposed since then have only stimulated India to cut its own nuclear path.

Now a member of India’s Rajya Sabha or upper house of Parliament, Ramanna thinks that technology control regimes and treaties such as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) have more to do with limiting the spread of technology in the developing world than for security reasons.

After the United States backed out on contractual obligations to supply low-enriched uranium, the country’s atomic scientists struck out on their own and switched to a new programmed based on thorium of which India has the largest knowN deposits in the world.

“We gained vast experience by handling the highly radioactive Uranium-233 which could be made by processing thorium,” Ramanna said.

Though nobody will confirm where the fissile material for India’s series of five tests last month came from there is reason to believe that it originated on the radioactive sands occurring on the beaches of southern Kerala state.

India’s fast breeder test reactor (FBTR) at Kalpakkam near Chennai city (previously Madras) has the capacity to transmute thorium into U-233 while the Kalpakkam Fuel Reprocessing Plant (KARP) can produce plutonium.

When KARP was commissioned in 1996, an official statement said it would “help build the necessary plutonium base to meet the initial fuel requirements of the FBTR at Kalpakkam.”

As for the heavy water that could have been used for making the ‘thermo-nuclear’ device (a step towards making the hydrogen bomb), India has an exportable surplus which comes as a by product from its fertiliser plants, Dr. Ramanna said adding that South Korea was a major buyer.

The liquid metal cooled FBTR has several firsts to it such as the fact that it uses plutonium rich mixed carbide fuel (plutonium uranium monocarbide), establishing India’s mastery over a variety of fuels.

Sources in the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) say India has specialised in handling mixed oxide fuels (mox), mixed carbide fuels and alloy fuels using natural uranium, thorium, plutonium and U-233..

The chairman of the World Association of Nuclear Operators (WANO), Remy Carle, acknowledged during a visit to India two years ago that this country’s nuclear programme had progressed on self-reliance of various services.

Carle said he was particularly impressed by India’s Pressurised Heavy Water Reactor (PHWR) programme for which fuel, heavy water reactor pressure vessels and other systems were available locally and covered the whole fuel cycle from mining to reprocessing of spent fuel.

Although Carle said creating an entirely new industry based on thorium involved huge investments, India has gone ahead with new reactor designs which would exploit its thorium reserves — reckoned as the largest in the world.

Ramanna and other scientists think that the United States and industrialised countries are making a big mistake by thinking that it can prevent the spread of nuclear technology through “outdated” concepts such as the CTBT and NPT.

India, since the tests in May, has been under tremendous international pressure to sign the two treaties as also has Pakistan.

“Treaties such as these are remnants of the thinking of the Cold War era and anyway do not add up to much since stockpiling can be made in such a way that it is difficult to detect, ” Ramanna said.

As the world moves to a commercially-liberalised stage, the rules of the game should forbid discrimination in all forms so that raw materials, technology and capital could be shared freely without controls, he said.

India is a particular victim of discriminatory regimes and although it has been offering reprocessing services since

the sixties, U.S pressure has ensured that no country has availed of them.

Although India wanted to sell widely available technologies such as research reactors and heavy water on purely commercial basis and conforming to safeguards set by the International Atomic Energy Association ((IAEA), deals were either sabotaged or resulted only in marginal success, Ramanna said.

Instead of promoting global prosperity and peace, the nuclear powers were spending enormous amounts of time, effort and money promoting, formulating and getting signed unfair and ineffective treaties, he said.