India has an intricate history with nuclear technology. Both the Soviet Union and the US courted India in the 1950s, but in the end it was Canada who donated a design for the first Indian reactor that came online in the 1960s. The US assisted with building another. Indian testing of nuclear weapons in the 1970s drew a sharp rebuke from several countries and the US and Canada withdrew their assistance. This also resulted in the creation of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, an export control regime to prevent nuclear proliferation. Cut off from exporters of nuclear technology, they slowly continued with domestic designs and new research. But their tremendous size and influence made them an attractive partner in geopolitical power plays.
In 1988 the Soviet Union and India announced they would build two new reactors, and the US fiercely protested at the time. The Soviet Union fell apart, and the Russians didn't resume the project for another 10 years, but construction eventually began in 2002. In 2006 the US and India reached an agreement to cooperate and the US lobbied for an exemption for India from the Nuclear Suppliers Group, which was granted. It quickly became obvious that everyone wanted a slice of the Indian nuclear energy market.
Disregarding climate change for a moment, it's clear that the energy demand in India is increasing, and despite a rapid rise in the deployment of renewables, utility-scale generation is still 75% coal. This contributes greatly to pollution. Local coal lower quality than elsewhere, requiring more per unit of power. Nuclear will be an important complement to renewables as the energy mix slowly migrates off of coal. Unlike the US, which is awash in cheap natural gas that's readily stored and piped where needed, helping to even out the mismatch between solar generation and demand, India has very little natural gas, so it can't afford to pursue a strategy that deemphasizes nuclear energy.
Missing from that history was India developing nuclear weapons in the late 90s - I imagine that changed the politics immensely.
Today they are an even more important and influential geopolitical ally, and the pollution argument you raise is as important as you say, but the concerns about a power supplying them with nuclear weapons ala the alleged Israel/US history is no longer a part of it (I assume).
...then again, I could be completely wrong in any of this. Comments welcome.
India used the low enriched Uranium fuel reactor donated by Canada to breed plutonium and make nuclear bombs in 70's. Before that nobody thought it were possible to make nuclear weapons with low enriched uranium reactor to breed plutonium. Nonetheless India is a mature nuclear power, the world should really be worried about is pakistan as a nuclear state.
The only American reactors currently under construction, Vogtle 3 and 4, were originally supposed to be built in less than 5 years but are now projected to take 8 years.
But maybe the American reactors aren't intended to be part of the generation added by 2024. India does have 7 reactors currently under construction.
Anyone who, at the same time, claims that "we're all gonna die" if something is not done in the next decade, and doesn't want to consider nuclear is a hypocrite, and not a very bright person. If you believe in the first premise (for the record, I do not, although I do believe in man-made climate change), then you have to concede that nuclear is the only way out that's anywhere near viable without pretending that we can spend tens of trillions of dollars on infrastructure that needs to be replaced every 20 years.
The same AP1000 reactor model was installed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanmen_Nuclear_Power_Station at a cost of just $6b, although they were also 4 years late in becoming operational. But it does seem like other countries are capable of getting these large projects done while they whither and drag out in the US.
Inability to buid high-speed rail in US corroborates with this conclusion. It is not economically ineffective，it is US infrastructure projects huge inefficiency (sadly). If we check other industries, I think we would able to find more failed big projects.
The water lost to cooling ends up as steam and then precipitation. So it doesn't exactly delete water, it just disperses it. Some of it will fall straight back into the same river systems. A lot of it would probably be absorbed into the local water table—which is valuable if the table is already being tapped.
Does anyone know if there's any modelling to show how widely such activity disperses water? How much of the water is expected to land somewhere functionally useless (e.g. into oceans)?
Or, if they built a desalination plant next to each nuclear plant, would they be able to compensate for the water loss efficiently?
This is great new not just from environment perspective. This is a move that significantly reduces dirty politicians influence in India.
Guess who is awarded most of new Power Generation plants in India since private sector started building power plants? It almost entirely politicians and their family members.
Meanwhile in the US SCE&G abandoned their two under construction AP1000s after Westinghouse went bankrupt and the remaining two that Southern is building at Vogtle are on life support. The only AP1000s actually operating are in China.
Finally something that helps us avoid the beginning climate catastrophe. Nuclear power is of the very few effective means of working towards that goal.
India has one nuclear reactor's worth of diesel power plants (about 1000 MW). And 90 times more (90 GW worth) of all kinds of smaller diesel generators used as backups during power outages.
If the new nuclear electricity decreases the outages in the grid, I am sure it will almost 1:1 turn to savings in burned diesel.
Nuclear power gets a bad rap. Instead of abandoning the technology we should be focusing on how to safely contain a meltdown. I mean if we use boron control rods to absorb the neutrons, then why not encase the whole thing in a boron tomb that vacuum seals when radiation is detected?
of course these have never been tried in an accident because both Chernobyl and Fukushima are very old reactors. On the other hand before Fukushima I used to see people say that the problem with Chernobyl is there was no containment vessel as there is in western reactors, then in Fukushima the containment vessel did melt through. So who knows how well the core catcher would work in practice.
I'm starting to get the feeling that all terrestrial energy generation should ultimately come from sunlight, and our nuclear reactors should be out in space, and on other celestial bodies, especially those further away from the sun.
But in order to do that, we need to further develop nuclear reactor technology by building utility-scale nuclear energy plants here on Earth--not because we need our energy to be nuclear, but because we need our nuclear energy to be reliable and efficient.
The cynical part of me is thinking that the US can apparently build nuclear plants anywhere on Earth except in the US.
Why? There is literally no reason to have nuclear reactors in space.
Building a modern reactor that is not based on 60 year old technology would make more sense, but regulation have made that impossible and the government itself has 0 interest in doing so.
India undoubtedly become power hungry, when I was visiting couple of years back power cut has become a norm which i don't remember when I grew up. There are so many wind mill installation around my hometown but at the same time there is so much opposition for nuclear power. https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/0f/a1/06/fa/...
While Afganistan is called the graveyard of empires, India is where emperors face their first miserable defeat.
There is a book titled "Confessions of an economic Hitman". The book is written by an ex-CIA agent to was an economist and would write a lot of fake reports claiming developing nations can grow much faster only if they invest heavily in infrastructure. Then US would generously offer loans in return of assurance that the contracts will be awarded only to American companies. Fe decades down the line those countries would be left holding the can and debt. This model failed miserably for USA in India because India' growth story after 1990s turned out of be true, India's hunger for infra actually grew. Enron who had a weird misadventure in India eventually had to file for bankruptcy.
While I am happy that India is tripling the nuclear energy capability I am unhappy that American companies are involved. It might end up badly for Indian but more than likely to Americans.
Your premise here seems to be "countries paying back their loans is bad for the companies that built the infrastructure", and I think I'm really going to need some more explanation for that one.
I don't understand your point, how did America lose when India grew quickly after investing in infrastructure with the help of American capital? Furthermore, I'm unaware of any real adversarial relationship between the US/India. Is it portrayed in India as being so?
I'm actually serious... I don't get why we still have coal power plants at all. I know there are various risks involved, and disposal is another, but a lot of lessons have been learned and there's a lot of room here for this. It's just incredible that a couple of movies could set back nuclear power in the US for as many decades as has happened.
Can somebody explain to me what happens with all the nuclear waste? How is nuclear power anything else but an environmental catastrophe waiting to happen? We pile the waste on and on, how do we deal with that?
When we burn fossil fuels a huge volume of hazardous waste just goes into the environment, and we know what it does then. With nuclear there is also a huge volume of hazardous waste, but at least it remains spatially consolidated and in our control. The consensus best solution is deep burial. Sure we might run out of space and create nuclear "landmines" over the very long term, but it's a preferable tradeoff to the much more imminent threats of the global warming.
France burns its waste in nuclear plants. The US created a geologically stable dump that was shut down for political reasons. The EPA had certified it as safe for 10,000 years.
You hear all the time about how there's thousands of tons of high level radioactive waste and that sounds scary and huge but really when you're talking about the scale of an entire country that's absolutely peanuts. I do think the way we handle nuclear waste in America needs to be overhauled but even just deep burial in long term casks would be sufficient. The only chance of someone accidentally digging one up is contingent on such a massive loss of knowledge and continuity of society that it would have to be an apocalyptic event.
But if you're interested in other approaches that could be taken nuclear waste is primarily U-238 and Plutonium. Rather than bury it all the waste can be reprocessed to extract usable fuel and depleted Uranium from the waste which reduces the amount of waste to deal with by about 90%. Another thing commonly repeated is that nuclear waste has a half life of tens of thousands of years. This is wrong, isotopes have half lives, nuclear waste does not. Nuclear waste is a toxic soup of different isotopes, some short lived, others long lived. As the isotopes spontaneously fission the concentrations in the waste change. 10kg of nuclear waste on day 1 is immensely more radioactive than 10kg of nuclear waste on day 1,000,000. Fresh nuclear waste has substantially higher amounts of short lived isotopes which is why when spent fuel is removed from a reactor it has to be stored in a cooling pond for a long time before it can be stored in a cask. Radioactivity has an inverse relationship with the half live, short lived isotopes are extremely radioactive and extremely long lived isotopes are barely radioactive.
If you wanted to go further than just reducing the amount of waste you can actually burn up waste so to speak. If you bombard it with tons of neutrons (like from a fusion reactor hopefully in the long term) you either split the fissile isotopes or breed them into a different isotope.
Just by processing our waste we could split the waste into stuff that has a short half life that you would just let decay naturally, stuff that has a long half life that can be buried without any real concerns about someone building a dirty bomb with it, and stuff in between that could potentially be burned up in a reactor or just buried in more secure facilities like what Yucca mountain was supposed to provide.
- Bury it underground in geological repositories. These have been extensively studied and are, to the best of our knowledge, more than safe enough.
- We can reprocess it and burn it in breeder reactors. The remaining waste will decay to background levels in about 300 years. Oh, and we can shutdown the uranium mining industry for, oh, the next 1000 years while we burn up the uranium we have already dug up.
Also keep in mind that while the waste is dangerous, it's absolutely minuscule in volume. All worldwide spent (civilian) nuclear fuel could fit on a football field, stacked a few meters high.
Nuclear waste in reality is a tiny problem. The amount of waste is insignificantly small. Its not even waste as its valuable material for the future and should be considered as such.
The amount of fear spread about nuclear waste is so far out of proportion with the reality of the situation that its hard to even explain how crazy many of the believes about nuclear waste are.
Compared to all other forms of energy, including solar and wind, nuclear produces by far the least amount of waste to the envoirment. In fact, nothing escapes into the environment, everything is captured and can be handled appropriately.
nuclear is much cleaner then anything else... the waste is only less radioactive then the fuel. What is your better alternative that doesn't create any waste?
[+] [-] niftich|7 years ago|reply
In 1988 the Soviet Union and India announced they would build two new reactors, and the US fiercely protested at the time. The Soviet Union fell apart, and the Russians didn't resume the project for another 10 years, but construction eventually began in 2002. In 2006 the US and India reached an agreement to cooperate and the US lobbied for an exemption for India from the Nuclear Suppliers Group, which was granted. It quickly became obvious that everyone wanted a slice of the Indian nuclear energy market.
Disregarding climate change for a moment, it's clear that the energy demand in India is increasing, and despite a rapid rise in the deployment of renewables, utility-scale generation is still 75% coal. This contributes greatly to pollution. Local coal lower quality than elsewhere, requiring more per unit of power. Nuclear will be an important complement to renewables as the energy mix slowly migrates off of coal. Unlike the US, which is awash in cheap natural gas that's readily stored and piped where needed, helping to even out the mismatch between solar generation and demand, India has very little natural gas, so it can't afford to pursue a strategy that deemphasizes nuclear energy.
[+] [-] ergothus|7 years ago|reply
Today they are an even more important and influential geopolitical ally, and the pollution argument you raise is as important as you say, but the concerns about a power supplying them with nuclear weapons ala the alleged Israel/US history is no longer a part of it (I assume).
...then again, I could be completely wrong in any of this. Comments welcome.
[+] [-] writepub|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pankajdoharey|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] elsonrodriguez|7 years ago|reply
One has to admire the no-nonsense problem solving happening here.
[+] [-] philipkglass|7 years ago|reply
That's a really short timeline. India's newest reactor Kudankulam 2 took 14 years from construction start to first criticality:
https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails....
The only American reactors currently under construction, Vogtle 3 and 4, were originally supposed to be built in less than 5 years but are now projected to take 8 years.
But maybe the American reactors aren't intended to be part of the generation added by 2024. India does have 7 reactors currently under construction.
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|7 years ago|reply
Aspiration alone is no different than failure.
[+] [-] m0zg|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawaysea|7 years ago|reply
Somehow the two under construction in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...) are estimated to cost $25B and are complicated by Westinghouse having declared bankruptcy. Others (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgil_C._Summer_Nuclear_Gener...) have been cancelled.
The same AP1000 reactor model was installed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanmen_Nuclear_Power_Station at a cost of just $6b, although they were also 4 years late in becoming operational. But it does seem like other countries are capable of getting these large projects done while they whither and drag out in the US.
[+] [-] xvilka|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fmajid|7 years ago|reply
India should also be investing in thorium reactors given its indigenous reserves and the inherent safety advantages.
Another issue is cooling: water supplies in Andhra Pradesh are highly erratic, and this will only get worse with global warming.
[+] [-] sjwright|7 years ago|reply
Does anyone know if there's any modelling to show how widely such activity disperses water? How much of the water is expected to land somewhere functionally useless (e.g. into oceans)?
Or, if they built a desalination plant next to each nuclear plant, would they be able to compensate for the water loss efficiently?
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] throwwarm|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kumarm|7 years ago|reply
Guess who is awarded most of new Power Generation plants in India since private sector started building power plants? It almost entirely politicians and their family members.
Example (Owned by Member of Parliament Galla Jayadev's Family) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amara_Raja_Group
[+] [-] gigatexal|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] khuey|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jwr|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] i_am_proteus|7 years ago|reply
I doubt that any nuclear capacity will significantly affect India's oil consumption. Nuclear typically displaces coal or gas.
[+] [-] sampo|7 years ago|reply
If the new nuclear electricity decreases the outages in the grid, I am sure it will almost 1:1 turn to savings in burned diesel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_and_gas_industry_in_India#...
[+] [-] gdy|7 years ago|reply
https://www.powermag.com/indias-nuclear-liability-law-breakt...
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] thisisit|7 years ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_India
India's history with nuclear power plants hasn't exactly been great. Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant faced tons of protests:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kudankulam_Nuclear_Power_Pla...
[+] [-] blackflame7000|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] javagram|7 years ago|reply
of course these have never been tried in an accident because both Chernobyl and Fukushima are very old reactors. On the other hand before Fukushima I used to see people say that the problem with Chernobyl is there was no containment vessel as there is in western reactors, then in Fukushima the containment vessel did melt through. So who knows how well the core catcher would work in practice.
[+] [-] logfromblammo|7 years ago|reply
But in order to do that, we need to further develop nuclear reactor technology by building utility-scale nuclear energy plants here on Earth--not because we need our energy to be nuclear, but because we need our nuclear energy to be reliable and efficient.
The cynical part of me is thinking that the US can apparently build nuclear plants anywhere on Earth except in the US.
[+] [-] nickik|7 years ago|reply
Building a modern reactor that is not based on 60 year old technology would make more sense, but regulation have made that impossible and the government itself has 0 interest in doing so.
[+] [-] sandwall|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sabareesh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KorematsuFred|7 years ago|reply
There is a book titled "Confessions of an economic Hitman". The book is written by an ex-CIA agent to was an economist and would write a lot of fake reports claiming developing nations can grow much faster only if they invest heavily in infrastructure. Then US would generously offer loans in return of assurance that the contracts will be awarded only to American companies. Fe decades down the line those countries would be left holding the can and debt. This model failed miserably for USA in India because India' growth story after 1990s turned out of be true, India's hunger for infra actually grew. Enron who had a weird misadventure in India eventually had to file for bankruptcy.
While I am happy that India is tripling the nuclear energy capability I am unhappy that American companies are involved. It might end up badly for Indian but more than likely to Americans.
[+] [-] DuskStar|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dahdum|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RickJWagner|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Krasnol|7 years ago|reply
https://publicintegrity.org/national-security/indias-nuclear...
[+] [-] tracker1|7 years ago|reply
I'm actually serious... I don't get why we still have coal power plants at all. I know there are various risks involved, and disposal is another, but a lot of lessons have been learned and there's a lot of room here for this. It's just incredible that a couple of movies could set back nuclear power in the US for as many decades as has happened.
[+] [-] Torwald|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MFLoon|7 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#High-level_w...
[+] [-] merpnderp|7 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
[+] [-] MertsA|7 years ago|reply
But if you're interested in other approaches that could be taken nuclear waste is primarily U-238 and Plutonium. Rather than bury it all the waste can be reprocessed to extract usable fuel and depleted Uranium from the waste which reduces the amount of waste to deal with by about 90%. Another thing commonly repeated is that nuclear waste has a half life of tens of thousands of years. This is wrong, isotopes have half lives, nuclear waste does not. Nuclear waste is a toxic soup of different isotopes, some short lived, others long lived. As the isotopes spontaneously fission the concentrations in the waste change. 10kg of nuclear waste on day 1 is immensely more radioactive than 10kg of nuclear waste on day 1,000,000. Fresh nuclear waste has substantially higher amounts of short lived isotopes which is why when spent fuel is removed from a reactor it has to be stored in a cooling pond for a long time before it can be stored in a cask. Radioactivity has an inverse relationship with the half live, short lived isotopes are extremely radioactive and extremely long lived isotopes are barely radioactive.
If you wanted to go further than just reducing the amount of waste you can actually burn up waste so to speak. If you bombard it with tons of neutrons (like from a fusion reactor hopefully in the long term) you either split the fissile isotopes or breed them into a different isotope.
Just by processing our waste we could split the waste into stuff that has a short half life that you would just let decay naturally, stuff that has a long half life that can be buried without any real concerns about someone building a dirty bomb with it, and stuff in between that could potentially be burned up in a reactor or just buried in more secure facilities like what Yucca mountain was supposed to provide.
[+] [-] jabl|7 years ago|reply
- Bury it underground in geological repositories. These have been extensively studied and are, to the best of our knowledge, more than safe enough.
- We can reprocess it and burn it in breeder reactors. The remaining waste will decay to background levels in about 300 years. Oh, and we can shutdown the uranium mining industry for, oh, the next 1000 years while we burn up the uranium we have already dug up.
Also keep in mind that while the waste is dangerous, it's absolutely minuscule in volume. All worldwide spent (civilian) nuclear fuel could fit on a football field, stacked a few meters high.
[+] [-] nickik|7 years ago|reply
The amount of fear spread about nuclear waste is so far out of proportion with the reality of the situation that its hard to even explain how crazy many of the believes about nuclear waste are.
Compared to all other forms of energy, including solar and wind, nuclear produces by far the least amount of waste to the envoirment. In fact, nothing escapes into the environment, everything is captured and can be handled appropriately.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] OrgNet|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kp666|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] known|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sachin18590|7 years ago|reply