07-30-2006, 07:19 AM
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Nuclear deal is without techno-economic merit in </b> Â
- By Bharat Karnad
Asian Age, July 27, 2006
As always, it is the Americans themselves who reveal the nitty-gritty of the bargains they strike, confident that this will in no way harm the US getting its way. Ashley J. Tellis, the Washington security specialist whose services have been extensively utilised by the George W. Bush administration in forging the nuclear deal with India, has confessed that the Congress Party government has given "more" to make it possible in contrast to the Vajpayee government, which "gave nothing in return."
<b>What this "more" is, is no secret â a nuclear de-fanged India. The BJP external affairs minister Jaswant Singh in his memoirs â Call to Honour: In Service of Emergent India â discloses this as the end-state his "strategic dialogue" partner, the US deputy secretary Strobe Talbott, was after. The Vajpayee government, however, decided against signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty directly or via the backdoor, as this deal attempts to do, by making the "voluntary" test moratorium a legally binding commitment, which would restrict the Indian arsenal to the only proven and reliable armament in the Indian inventory â the 20 kiloton "firecracker," or getting hustled into joining a Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty that would ensure the Indian deterrent remained forever small-sized. </b>
It is on these two counts, contained in the July 18, 2005 Joint Statement, as <b>Tellis has confirmed, that the Manmohan Singh regime compromised. The grievous flaws are then in the basic document itself as much with the conditionalities inserted especially in the Senate version of the amended draft US law, which has yet to be voted on.</b>
Having "negotiated" a rotten fish of a deal, Manmohan Singh seems to have now woken up to the stink. Whence his complaining to the US President at the G-8 meeting about the many provocative new conditions extraneous to the July 18 accord strapped on by the US Congress. Much good this bellyaching will do, considering these impositions had the consent of the Bush administration. Senator Richard G. Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee steering the legislative process, has advised the Indian PM not to be "adamant" and warned that non-acceptance of these "constructive changes" would kill the nuclear deal.
But foreign secretary Shyam Saran and the media trumpeters continue to brush aside new Congressional conditions in the House Bill, in particular, as only "preambular" in nature and, by way of rationalisation, refer to Chinaâs ignoring similar Congressional terms on the trade-related "most favoured nation" issue. They need to be reminded that China â unlike India â has forced its way into the senior nuclear league, commands respect, and cannot be trifled with by the US. And, that the US Congress is not Indian Parliament, which rubberstamps any deal the government makes however much it may harm the national interest.
The nuclear deal encompassed in the July 18 statement has been ballyhooed as fetching India an energy-cum-technology windfall. This is a lie based on three myths that have been propagated.
No.1 Myth: India has limited natural uranium resources and will have to rely on the US to ease the Nuclear Suppliers Group guidelines allowing India to buy the ore ("yellow cake") on the world market. But this claim is wrong and does not take into account the proven reserves and the uranium ore-bearing regions of the country that remain unmined. This analyst had pointed out earlier (Desperate for a nuclear deal, The Op-ed Page, January 17, 2006) that the uranium shortage is mostly self-created because of bad futures planning by the Department of Atomic Energy, compounded by a strange reluctance on the part of the Indian government to exploit the ore locally available in considerable quantities. Tellis in his Carnegie report â Atoms for War: The US-Indian Civilian Nuclear Cooperation and Indiaâs Nuclear Arsenal â released last month, reached the same conclusion, saying "India has all the natural uranium it needs to produce as many nuclear weapons it may wish without any assistance from the outside, while being able to generate up to 480 GWe (Giga Watt) years of electricity" and that the shortage is entirely short-term and will last only so long as the DAE and Indian government donât get their act together. Tellisâ study apparently deflated the arguments of the non-proliferation lobby in the US.
But what Tellis and the Bush White House cannot do is remove the enriched uranium fuel-baited trap set for an India bent on importing reactors, the July 18 Statement conceived and the US Congress has now realised. A condition in one of the enabling Bills in the US Congress requires the US President to dissuade all NSG countries, should India break its vow and test again, from supplying enriched uranium fuel for these power plants, which directly contravenes the undertaking by President Bush in the July 18 Statement to facilitate such supply from other NSG countries if the US is unable to do so for any reason.
The Congressional requirement means that India, without assured fuel supply, will be stuck with a host of inactive reactors and hundreds of billions of dollars in dead investment. Further, reactor technology is about the extent of civilian nuclear wherewithal this country will be permitted to obtain from the NSG states, whence a nyet to importing American reprocessing, enrichment and heavy water production technologies by India.
No. 2 Myth: With the fictional uranium shortage as premise, the purchase by India of enriched uranium-fuelled reactors is mooted as a short-cut to meeting at least some of the energy deficit by 2020. But the fact of plentiful uranium in India has led to a recalibrated objective. The proposed deal, Tellis told a luncheon meeting last week, merely offers India "the option," energy economics permitting, to go in for high capacity (1,000 MWe plus) reactors available abroad.Â
But one reason why the 220 MWe capacity level for pressurised heavy water reactors has been persisted with, is because of the poor state of the national grid. A large quantum of power surging through the grid can stabilise electricity supply. Equally, a sudden loss of a vast quantity of power owing to a breakdown of grid infrastructure, can have crippling downstream economic consequences. 220 MW going off-line is bad enough; imagine instantly losing 2,000 MW from a single two 1,000 MWe reactors source!
No. 3 Myth: The case for Indiaâs importing enriched uranium-fuelled reactors rests principally on the American conviction, predictably shared by Manmohan Singhâs "gang that canât think straight," that the three-stage Bhabha plan of natural uranium reactors in the first stage leading to plutonium-fuelled breeder reactors in the second stage, in turn, providing the feedstock for the third stage thorium-fuelled power plants, is way beyond Indiaâs technical grasp.
If the last is true then why is the "unsafeguarded breeder" programme again agitating American legislators, which may lead to yet another unacceptable condition being inserted when a final Bill is moved in the US Congress? The Bhabha plan is infeasible, Tellis implied, because of the belief that "breeders donât breed." He pointed to France which after years of effort attained a "breeding ratio" of 1.5. The trouble is Tellis misrepresented Franceâs experience and doubted the success of Indiaâs breeder programme. He did so partially on the basis of a recent article by V.S. Arunachalam, former science adviser to the defence minister, who has lately been in the news.
The French Super-Phenix breeder was shut down, not because of any problems with the reactor itself, but because of secondary reasons â a leak of liquid sodium coolant in the adjoining fuel bay. It was not revived because of the plenitude of enriched uranium but, mainly, because President Jimmy Carterâs Nuclear Fuel Cycle initiative in the mid-Seventies arm-twisted France, as it did other advanced countries, into abandoning the development of breeder reactors owing to Washingtonâs fear that this reactor type can efficiently convert spent fuel to weapon-grade fissile material.
India has experience of the 40 MW fast breeder test reactor generating some 100,000 MW of power per ton of carbide fuel â unmatched by any other state â and, the upscaled 500 MW breeder under construction, is expected to achieve a breeding ratio of 1.5. This means that the reactor can breed a full fuel load of fissile material every five years which, incidentally, is no mean achievement.
With the series of fast breeders as stepping stone, full-fledged thorium reactors are eminently realisable. In fact, a small experimental reactor, Kamini, running on Uranium 233 produced by irradiating thorium, has been functioning for many years now and will help in developing thorium utilisation technologies.
Indian scientists, moreover, are strongly against any kind of cooperation with the US under the aegis of the GNEP (Global Nuclear Energy Project) as promised by the nuclear deal, because of their fear the US will milk the Indian breeder programme dry of its technical data and insights and then deliberately "mislead" the Indian scientists into pursuing technically dead-end solutions or try and demoralise them by talking of the technological complexity involved, and persuading Indian leaders to give up on the indigenous effort and grab the "easier" option of importing uranium reactors.Â
In fact, so pronounced has the governmentâs tendency been uncritically to accept external diktat and direction detrimental to national interest and to pressurise the Atomic Energy Commission chairman into doing what it wants him to do, that it is time, as this writer has been advocating for some years, to establish a counterpart of the American "Jason Committee," except that it should be answerable to Parliament. Stalwart Indian nuclear scientists, reputed physicists in the academia, and renowned technologists â all chosen for their probity and eminence, thereby putting them beyond the pale of political pressure â should constitute this committee. It should be tasked with evaluating nuclear R&D schemes, pronouncing on weapons designs, verifying test data, and independently advising Parliament, in camera, on the technical aspects of nuclear and strategic programmes. It will compel the chairman, Atomic Energy Commission, to be more objective in his advice to the Prime Minister.
Be that as it may, considering the upward curve of the indigenous breeder and follow-on thorium technology development, instead of seeking nuclear servitude what the Manmohan Singh government ought to have aggressively demanded as priority is resolution of the Tarapur spent fuel problem. Some 1,800-2,400 tons of spent fuel accumulated over the last 30 years from the two safeguarded light water reactors in Tarapur, are proving a serious space and safety risk. The US neither wants to take the spent fuel back to add to its "nuclear waste" nor approves of India reprocessing it for use in the Indian CANDU reactors.
The 1963 Tarapur agreement was valid for only 25 years and any strong-minded Indian government after 1988 could have forced Washingtonâs hand, given it an ultimatum to lift the spent fuel, failing which ordered the entire stock of spent fuel rods to be reprocessed and, as per the original contract, without any downstream safeguards obligations on Indiaâs part. But successive Indian governments, covering up their timidity with the rhetoric of "responsible behaviour" have, instead, pursued a policy of endless pleading. This was also the course followed when the US violated contractual obligations and stopped fuel supply to Tarapur in 1974 and New Delhi could have approached the International Court for relief, but did not.
Diffidence and absence of self-respect have characterised the Indian government in its dealings with the US and the West. But the country had every right to expect that, in line with its unchained economic prowess, an assertive 21st century India would propel itself to the great power ranks rather than, as the Manmohan Singh regime would have it, get reduced to an American appendage.
Bharat Karnad is Professor at the Centre for Policy Research and author of Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security, 2nd edition<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
- By Bharat Karnad
Asian Age, July 27, 2006
As always, it is the Americans themselves who reveal the nitty-gritty of the bargains they strike, confident that this will in no way harm the US getting its way. Ashley J. Tellis, the Washington security specialist whose services have been extensively utilised by the George W. Bush administration in forging the nuclear deal with India, has confessed that the Congress Party government has given "more" to make it possible in contrast to the Vajpayee government, which "gave nothing in return."
<b>What this "more" is, is no secret â a nuclear de-fanged India. The BJP external affairs minister Jaswant Singh in his memoirs â Call to Honour: In Service of Emergent India â discloses this as the end-state his "strategic dialogue" partner, the US deputy secretary Strobe Talbott, was after. The Vajpayee government, however, decided against signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty directly or via the backdoor, as this deal attempts to do, by making the "voluntary" test moratorium a legally binding commitment, which would restrict the Indian arsenal to the only proven and reliable armament in the Indian inventory â the 20 kiloton "firecracker," or getting hustled into joining a Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty that would ensure the Indian deterrent remained forever small-sized. </b>
It is on these two counts, contained in the July 18, 2005 Joint Statement, as <b>Tellis has confirmed, that the Manmohan Singh regime compromised. The grievous flaws are then in the basic document itself as much with the conditionalities inserted especially in the Senate version of the amended draft US law, which has yet to be voted on.</b>
Having "negotiated" a rotten fish of a deal, Manmohan Singh seems to have now woken up to the stink. Whence his complaining to the US President at the G-8 meeting about the many provocative new conditions extraneous to the July 18 accord strapped on by the US Congress. Much good this bellyaching will do, considering these impositions had the consent of the Bush administration. Senator Richard G. Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee steering the legislative process, has advised the Indian PM not to be "adamant" and warned that non-acceptance of these "constructive changes" would kill the nuclear deal.
But foreign secretary Shyam Saran and the media trumpeters continue to brush aside new Congressional conditions in the House Bill, in particular, as only "preambular" in nature and, by way of rationalisation, refer to Chinaâs ignoring similar Congressional terms on the trade-related "most favoured nation" issue. They need to be reminded that China â unlike India â has forced its way into the senior nuclear league, commands respect, and cannot be trifled with by the US. And, that the US Congress is not Indian Parliament, which rubberstamps any deal the government makes however much it may harm the national interest.
The nuclear deal encompassed in the July 18 statement has been ballyhooed as fetching India an energy-cum-technology windfall. This is a lie based on three myths that have been propagated.
No.1 Myth: India has limited natural uranium resources and will have to rely on the US to ease the Nuclear Suppliers Group guidelines allowing India to buy the ore ("yellow cake") on the world market. But this claim is wrong and does not take into account the proven reserves and the uranium ore-bearing regions of the country that remain unmined. This analyst had pointed out earlier (Desperate for a nuclear deal, The Op-ed Page, January 17, 2006) that the uranium shortage is mostly self-created because of bad futures planning by the Department of Atomic Energy, compounded by a strange reluctance on the part of the Indian government to exploit the ore locally available in considerable quantities. Tellis in his Carnegie report â Atoms for War: The US-Indian Civilian Nuclear Cooperation and Indiaâs Nuclear Arsenal â released last month, reached the same conclusion, saying "India has all the natural uranium it needs to produce as many nuclear weapons it may wish without any assistance from the outside, while being able to generate up to 480 GWe (Giga Watt) years of electricity" and that the shortage is entirely short-term and will last only so long as the DAE and Indian government donât get their act together. Tellisâ study apparently deflated the arguments of the non-proliferation lobby in the US.
But what Tellis and the Bush White House cannot do is remove the enriched uranium fuel-baited trap set for an India bent on importing reactors, the July 18 Statement conceived and the US Congress has now realised. A condition in one of the enabling Bills in the US Congress requires the US President to dissuade all NSG countries, should India break its vow and test again, from supplying enriched uranium fuel for these power plants, which directly contravenes the undertaking by President Bush in the July 18 Statement to facilitate such supply from other NSG countries if the US is unable to do so for any reason.
The Congressional requirement means that India, without assured fuel supply, will be stuck with a host of inactive reactors and hundreds of billions of dollars in dead investment. Further, reactor technology is about the extent of civilian nuclear wherewithal this country will be permitted to obtain from the NSG states, whence a nyet to importing American reprocessing, enrichment and heavy water production technologies by India.
No. 2 Myth: With the fictional uranium shortage as premise, the purchase by India of enriched uranium-fuelled reactors is mooted as a short-cut to meeting at least some of the energy deficit by 2020. But the fact of plentiful uranium in India has led to a recalibrated objective. The proposed deal, Tellis told a luncheon meeting last week, merely offers India "the option," energy economics permitting, to go in for high capacity (1,000 MWe plus) reactors available abroad.Â
But one reason why the 220 MWe capacity level for pressurised heavy water reactors has been persisted with, is because of the poor state of the national grid. A large quantum of power surging through the grid can stabilise electricity supply. Equally, a sudden loss of a vast quantity of power owing to a breakdown of grid infrastructure, can have crippling downstream economic consequences. 220 MW going off-line is bad enough; imagine instantly losing 2,000 MW from a single two 1,000 MWe reactors source!
No. 3 Myth: The case for Indiaâs importing enriched uranium-fuelled reactors rests principally on the American conviction, predictably shared by Manmohan Singhâs "gang that canât think straight," that the three-stage Bhabha plan of natural uranium reactors in the first stage leading to plutonium-fuelled breeder reactors in the second stage, in turn, providing the feedstock for the third stage thorium-fuelled power plants, is way beyond Indiaâs technical grasp.
If the last is true then why is the "unsafeguarded breeder" programme again agitating American legislators, which may lead to yet another unacceptable condition being inserted when a final Bill is moved in the US Congress? The Bhabha plan is infeasible, Tellis implied, because of the belief that "breeders donât breed." He pointed to France which after years of effort attained a "breeding ratio" of 1.5. The trouble is Tellis misrepresented Franceâs experience and doubted the success of Indiaâs breeder programme. He did so partially on the basis of a recent article by V.S. Arunachalam, former science adviser to the defence minister, who has lately been in the news.
The French Super-Phenix breeder was shut down, not because of any problems with the reactor itself, but because of secondary reasons â a leak of liquid sodium coolant in the adjoining fuel bay. It was not revived because of the plenitude of enriched uranium but, mainly, because President Jimmy Carterâs Nuclear Fuel Cycle initiative in the mid-Seventies arm-twisted France, as it did other advanced countries, into abandoning the development of breeder reactors owing to Washingtonâs fear that this reactor type can efficiently convert spent fuel to weapon-grade fissile material.
India has experience of the 40 MW fast breeder test reactor generating some 100,000 MW of power per ton of carbide fuel â unmatched by any other state â and, the upscaled 500 MW breeder under construction, is expected to achieve a breeding ratio of 1.5. This means that the reactor can breed a full fuel load of fissile material every five years which, incidentally, is no mean achievement.
With the series of fast breeders as stepping stone, full-fledged thorium reactors are eminently realisable. In fact, a small experimental reactor, Kamini, running on Uranium 233 produced by irradiating thorium, has been functioning for many years now and will help in developing thorium utilisation technologies.
Indian scientists, moreover, are strongly against any kind of cooperation with the US under the aegis of the GNEP (Global Nuclear Energy Project) as promised by the nuclear deal, because of their fear the US will milk the Indian breeder programme dry of its technical data and insights and then deliberately "mislead" the Indian scientists into pursuing technically dead-end solutions or try and demoralise them by talking of the technological complexity involved, and persuading Indian leaders to give up on the indigenous effort and grab the "easier" option of importing uranium reactors.Â
In fact, so pronounced has the governmentâs tendency been uncritically to accept external diktat and direction detrimental to national interest and to pressurise the Atomic Energy Commission chairman into doing what it wants him to do, that it is time, as this writer has been advocating for some years, to establish a counterpart of the American "Jason Committee," except that it should be answerable to Parliament. Stalwart Indian nuclear scientists, reputed physicists in the academia, and renowned technologists â all chosen for their probity and eminence, thereby putting them beyond the pale of political pressure â should constitute this committee. It should be tasked with evaluating nuclear R&D schemes, pronouncing on weapons designs, verifying test data, and independently advising Parliament, in camera, on the technical aspects of nuclear and strategic programmes. It will compel the chairman, Atomic Energy Commission, to be more objective in his advice to the Prime Minister.
Be that as it may, considering the upward curve of the indigenous breeder and follow-on thorium technology development, instead of seeking nuclear servitude what the Manmohan Singh government ought to have aggressively demanded as priority is resolution of the Tarapur spent fuel problem. Some 1,800-2,400 tons of spent fuel accumulated over the last 30 years from the two safeguarded light water reactors in Tarapur, are proving a serious space and safety risk. The US neither wants to take the spent fuel back to add to its "nuclear waste" nor approves of India reprocessing it for use in the Indian CANDU reactors.
The 1963 Tarapur agreement was valid for only 25 years and any strong-minded Indian government after 1988 could have forced Washingtonâs hand, given it an ultimatum to lift the spent fuel, failing which ordered the entire stock of spent fuel rods to be reprocessed and, as per the original contract, without any downstream safeguards obligations on Indiaâs part. But successive Indian governments, covering up their timidity with the rhetoric of "responsible behaviour" have, instead, pursued a policy of endless pleading. This was also the course followed when the US violated contractual obligations and stopped fuel supply to Tarapur in 1974 and New Delhi could have approached the International Court for relief, but did not.
Diffidence and absence of self-respect have characterised the Indian government in its dealings with the US and the West. But the country had every right to expect that, in line with its unchained economic prowess, an assertive 21st century India would propel itself to the great power ranks rather than, as the Manmohan Singh regime would have it, get reduced to an American appendage.
Bharat Karnad is Professor at the Centre for Policy Research and author of Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security, 2nd edition<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->