India’s nuclear fixation is not smart strategy

Reacting to the serious questions that have arisen in the wake of the Fukushima disaster about the future of the ambitious Indian nuclear programme and in particular to its flagship plant, the proposed facility in Jaitapur, Maharashtra chief minister Prithiviraj Chavan last month said:

“When we run out of natural resources, what shall we do for electricity?” According to a newspaper report, his message was clear: Natural resources such as coal are limited and tapping nuclear energy to meet growing demands is inevitable.

It is indeed quite amazing that this simplistic and sweeping generalisation continues to be at the core of the thinking about India’s energy future and even politicians of the calibre of Chavan, who is well informed, intellectually sophisticated, and highly articulate, have little hesitation in taking recourse to it.

The chief minister is resorting to the time-tested art of making statements that are dodgy, sound absolutely reasonable and credible by taking a simple fact (fossil fuels will run out) and connecting it to a popular concern (energy shortage/energy security) in a way that appears to make the solution he has in mind (nuclear energy) the obvious, reasonable and inevitable solution.

In the process, he expertly turns nuclear safety into a narrow technical issue on which he will assure an agitated public while presenting nuclear energy as inevitable to meet India’s growing energy needs in a secure way.

There are several assumptions and beliefs that are implicit in Chavan’s statement that is worth examining. I have listed the four key ones below. Each of these statements is either patently false or at least extremely contentious:

 Nuclear energy is perpetual, everlasting, and clean. It makes economic sense.

 There is no alternative (TINA): renewable technologies don’t count and won’t matter in meeting India’s energy needs.

 India’s current energy shortage is a result of insufficient production. Nuclear power can be ramped up quickly to make a significant impact on this shortfall.

 The technological and economic features of electricity generation, distribution and consumption in the future are going to replicate what we have now.

Driven by depleting oil, concern around climate change, maturity of renewable technologies and recognition that renewable technologies provide genuine energy security, the electricity sector is in the early stages of a complete revolutionary transformation. There is little doubt that in the future, the electricity network would resemble the internet. Nandan Nilekani says, “For instance, instead of building, say, one 500 MW coal plant, it might be better to invest in five hundred 1-MW solar, biomass, biogas, or wind plants. But the moment the grid starts to depend on generators whose energy production is based on natural phenomena, it has to be smart enough to cope with uncertainty. Information technology is the key to this. ...I think that paradigm sums up our energy future.”

If in complete deviation from historical experience of cost and time overruns in nuclear projects in India, Jaitapur gets built on time and on budget, it would produce 1650 MW from 2018. Given the centralised nature of the facility, it is highly doubtful what benefit this would have for the millions of people who are still waiting for electrification. A strategy of aggressively pursuing efficiency could easily free up 1650 MW in a matter of months at a small fraction of the costs. Replacement of incandescent bulbs with CFLs across the country alone can save approximately 12,000 MW at a cost of less than Rs50 lacs/MW as compared to a cost of Rs8-10 crores/MW for nuclear power. If we factor in transmission losses (which can be as high as 40%) the economics becomes even more absurdly in favour of efficiency measures.

India is today in serious danger of being left behind again and the nuclear fixation could well be a key factor in holding India back. China has probably ensured that it would be world’s manufacturing hub for these technologies while India has slid from being one of the world’s leading wind energy players to an insignificant one.

What India needs to implement is a strategy that rapidly invests in efficiency to have an immediate impact on the shortage and massively scale up investment in decentralised renewable energy as the key to inclusive growth. With its recent scaling up of investment in wind and solar technologies, India probably still has an immense opportunity to leverage its IT capabilities to become a world leader in smart grid technology.

But, are Chavan and his colleagues listening?

The writer is executive director,
Greenpeace India