The Hindu Business Line : Nuclear deal: Much ado for marginal gain

THERE are enough straws in the wind pointing to the so-called nuclear deal signed by the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, and the US President, Mr George W. Bush, turning out to be an albatross round India's neck.

For one thing, it was heavily loaded against India which was constrained to give an unresilable undertaking to fulfil several conditionalities circumscribing its future manoeuvrability and flexibility in establishing and managing nuclear facilities and hurting its strategic and security concerns, while the US got away with nebulous verbiage about working "to achieve full civil nuclear energy cooperation with India as it realises its goals of promoting nuclear power and achieving energy security (and) seek agreement from Congress to adjust US laws and policies, and the US will work with friends and allies to adjust international regimes to enable full civil nuclear energy cooperation and trade with India, including but not limited to expeditious consideration of fuel supplies for safeguarded nuclear reactors at Tarapur."

Unseemly spectacle

Subsequent events have amply borne out my comment in these columns made the very next day after the signing of the deal to the effect that "One is unable to shake off the impression that while the President has only agreed to work towards whatever India wants of him, India has explicitly burdened itself with a lot of obligations which may or may not result in commensurate benefit.

What might happen in the end is that India's arms will be twisted to deliver on its commitments, but the US will wriggle out" on some pretext or the other.

The US Congress has not only been singularly unenthusiastic about endorsing the deal, but some of its members have been traducing India in vitriolic language calculated to inflict humiliation and cast doubts on its good faith. Never before did India have meekly to put up with its Foreign Minister (who, after all, is the voice and visage of India insofar as other countries are concerned) being hauled over the coals and called names in open Congressional hearings in the full glare of the media. More humiliating than this was the omission on the part of India to lodge a strong protest with the US President and get him to disown the treatment of India as if it was some kind of banana republic standing with a begging bowl before the US.

Turning the stomach further is the unseemly spectacle of the Foreign Secretary of India, a country which was used to proudly hold its head high in the era of Jawaharlal Nehru to Indira Gandhi, carrying the report of its compliance with the conditionalities for submission to the US Under-Secretary of State, Mr Nicholas Burns, the lowest level functionary in the State Department, for favour of his review, much like a student timorously taking his homework to his teacher.

Fundamental question

Could it not have been sent by the diplomatic pouch, leaving it to Mr Burns or whoever was there at the Foggy Bottom (a sobriquet by which the State Department is aptly known) to come back with his request for clarifications, if any, after going through the report?

What puts the seal on the utter forsaking of all propriety and self-respect by India for the sake of propitiating the boon-dispensing deities of the US is the resultant preposterous situation in which the people, the Cabinet and Parliament of India are finding themselves in the dark about the contents of the compliance report while functionaries of the political and administrative establishments of the US, and through them the media of that country and everyone else in the diplomatic circuit round the world would by now be poring over it without let or hindrance.

There can be nothing more galling to a nation's prestige than its arms being twisted and its nose being rubbed on the ground like this.

Is there any guarantee that placing all our cards unreservedly on the table and putting ourselves in such sore straits will eventually let the manna of fuel for our nuclear stations fall from the US and the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG)? The answer is No. There is, indeed, even a more fundamental question: Does nuclear power in the country's energy scenario occupy such a critical niche as to force India to go to such great lengths to placate the US and the members of the NSG? The resounding answer is: A thousand times No!

A deal India could have done without

Let us first consider the quantum. India has now a total installed capacity of 1,23,542 megawatts (MW), of which (coal, oil and gas powered) thermal power constitutes 81,939 MW, hydro 32,135 MW, non-conventional and renewable 6158 MW and the nuclear making up the tail end 3310 MW. The 10 nuclear power plants accounted for a mere 2.5 per cent of total utility generation.

The Government has formulated a Power-for-All by 2012 strategy under which it has envisaged the creation of an additional installed capacity of 100,000 MW, making for a per capita availability of 1,000 kilowatthours (KwH), as against 600 KwH now.

The primacy under this plan to the extent of close to 50,000 MW will be on hydro power and rightly so, since it is clean, relatively inexpensive to maintain and operate (though requiring large capital investment), renewable and abundant precisely in those States (the seven sisters of North-East, Sikkim, Uttaranchal, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir) to whose economic development it can make a huge contribution.

The projected addition to nuclear power by 2020, if Murphy's three laws (Nothing is as simple as it seems; everything will take longer than you think; if anything can go wrong, it will) can be staved off, is about 20,000 MW, not even approaching 10 per cent of the total installed capacity by then.

Let us now consider technological aspects, especially whether cringing for favours from the US or the NSG is central to our keeping the projects on the rails and to running the nuclear power stations with reasonable efficiency when they are completed.

Of the units in the pipeline, six will be the Russian version (VVER) of the pressurised water reactor (PWR) of 1000 MW each, 14 pressurised heavy water reactors (PHWR) (4 of 220 MW each and 10 of 700 MW each) and three fast breeder reactors (FBR) of 500 MW each. Some units based on advanced heavy water reactors (AHWR) are also planned, but the number is uncertain.

Indian scientists' achievement

A heartening feature of India's nuclear power development effort has throughout been that it has converted its being blackballed by the US and the NSG into a blessing and successfully commissioned the units without fuel or any technological assistance from other countries. True, it initially had to pay a price: In the 1990s, the plant load factor (PLF) of some of the units hit rock bottom because of recurrent technical problems brought on by fuel scarcity, but in the period between 1995 and 2002, there was a spectacular recovery largely due to the enterprising, innovative spirit of the scientists, leading to a steep rise in PLF from 60 to 85 per cent.

Indian scientists, undaunted by impediments placed in their way by self-styled guardians of nuclear power, are well on their way to master the technology of advanced heavy water thorium cycle and are already in the second of the three stages. "They, thereby, have to quote the World Nuclear Association, "set the scene for eventual full utilisation of the country's abundant thorium to fuel reactors." (India has a reserve of 290,000 tonnes of thorium, one-fourth of the world's total, as against 54,000 tonnes of uranium). With the impending completion of stage 3 in which AHWRs burn the U-233 already bred from thorium in stage 2, India would come out of the woods in respect of technology as well.

Benefit marginal, if not illusory

The above, necessarily broad brush account will show that there was no desperate hurry or unavoidable necessity to cast about for the nuclear deal with the US in the way it had been done, throw open our facilities for harassing inspections and subject ourselves to dictation by external authorities.

As one who had been in the energy sector for 15 years and on the Government's Expert Group on Energy, I can unhesitatingly affirm that if only the Prime Minister had had the benefit of correct advice, especially if he had listened to the scientists of the younger generation (as C. Subramaniam did when he launched the Green Revolution) before he signed the deal with the US President, he would have known that nuclear energy was not, and could never be, a critical factor in meeting India's energy needs , and that the deal has needlessly disturbed the pre-existing and on-going nuclear policy regime. What is far worse, it would self-destruct the indigenous technological development programme to kowtow to the Americans just to gain a distantly marginal, if not illusory, benefit.

Is there a way out? Yes, there is. India should take a tough take-it-or-leave-it stand in sticking to the scheme it has drawn up for separating civil from military nuclear facilities, and welcome any resulting breakdown of the negotiations as a means of retrieving the situation.

In no event should the US be allowed to exploit India's plight, as reputed defence analyst Dr Brahma Chellaney has cautioned, "to limit the size of India's deterrent, control its fast breeder programme and bring a maximum number of Indian nuclear facilities under international inspection."

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