[ With new products like Bitcoin and AI requiring mind-boggling amounts of electricity, recent years have witnessed a sudden spurt in demand for energy. Global tech giants like Microsoft, Google and other are therefore moving into the power sector in a big way, while also tying up with traditional power companies. Sensing the mood of the market, Indian power oligarchs such as Adani, Tata Power, L&T are venturing into power plants and associated projects (coal mining for example) like crazy. In the process, they are evicting thousands of farmers, fishermen, forest dwellers and others and polluting the environment in brazen violation of the directive principles set out in the Constitution of India and laws of the land. While securing the support of the Union and State Governments, and in most cases also the Judiciary, everywhere the masses are up in arms against them. Notable examples of such protests include those against the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (Tamil Nadu), Jaitapur Nuclear Power Project (Maharashtra), Bargi Dam and Anuppur Thermal Power Plant (Madhya Pradesh), Mundra Thermal Power Project (Gujarat), Kakarapalli Thermal Power Plant (Andhra Pradesh), and so on. At this moment, a vigorous movement is going on in Assam’s Karbi Anglong against anticipated eviction drives for a solar power project of the State Government and a Compressed Biogas (CBG) project of Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Group.
In yet another big step ahead in the Modi government’s reckless privatisation drive, in December last year the NPCIL was ordered to open the door to nuclear sector for Indian private firms. And already Adani Power has rolled out plans to set up 30 GW of nuclear power capacity with foreign technology. In this overall context, Soumya Dutta zeros in on the most hazardous but relatively less understood segment of the power sector: nuclear (fission) power and explains why India must steer clear of this path and espouse other alternatives. - Ed.]
New Push for Nuclear Energy
In the recently presented Union Budget for 2025-26, the Indian government announced a “Nuclear Energy Mission for Viksit Bharat”, with a significant budgetary support of Rs.20,000 crores for R&D to develop an ‘indigenous’ Small Modular Reactor and install at least five such SMRs by the year 2033. The budget also announced a target of installing 100GW of Nuclear Energy capacity by 2047 (!) from today’s just over 8 GW. As part of the Nuclear Energy Mission, it was also proposed to amend the Atomic Energy Act and the Civil Liabilities for Nuclear Damages Act, to enable and attract private investments in the nuclear energy sector and reduce liability of nuclear power plant operators in case of any accidents. In the light of massive nuclear power plant disasters like Fukushima, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island etc. (also many others smaller ones including in India’s Rawatbhata in Rajasthan, Narora in UP), it is obvious that these steps go against all accepted risk reduction and response principles, throwing all caution to the winds.
Why it is that governments of several countries are still pursuing this dangerous dream? And most importantly for us, we the Indian Citizens must ask: Why our country? The "reason" offered by the government and Nuclear lobbyists was that “a power-starved country” like India needs a "reliable source" of electricity in nuclear energy. That "logic" was false earlier, and even more senseless now. If we recollect the earlier claims of Indian nuclear establishment, this country was to have an installed Nuclear (fission[1] ) power capacity of 20GW by around 2000, and 63 GW by 2030. Today, at the beginning of 2025, our total installed Power capacity is about 430 GW (with a tiny part, just 8.2 GW, about 1.9% of installed capacity contributed by nuclear), while the peak summer demands touch about 250 GW. Clearly, we have a huge excess installed capacity. Many of the coal-fired power plants are therefore being operated at low Plant Load Factors of less than 60%, wasting installed capacity built with taxpayer money. Why then waste our hard-earned savings into so-called “assets” that are non-productive as well as dangerous? Why indeed!
Nuclear Heydays Are a Thing of the Past
During the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the world went gaga over nuclear power. There were few alternatives then, and the mainstay coal power was known to be heavily polluting. The situation has changed completely. Today, the cheapest source of new electricity plants is Solar Photovoltaic and Wind Turbines. Their per MW installation costs have come down to less than Rs.5 crores/MW, while even a comparatively less costly PHWR (Pressurised Heavy Water Reactor) nuclear power plant costs around 10-12 crores/MW. At Rs.2.80 - 3.00 per KWHr, Solar and Wind power is also the cheapest. Nuclear power, taking subsidies into account, costs nearly double. Then there is the continuous stream of radioactive byproducts, which is poisoning our land-water-air, and will keep poisoning us for thousands of years to come. Apart from the massive costs and dangers of radioactive leakages and regular emissions (even when the NPPs OR Nuclear Power Plants are running ‘normally’), the cooling water consumption for nuclear (and thermal) power plants are very high. In the face of critical summer and winter water shortages accentuated by Climate Change, this decision to push nukes in a big way is nothing less than suicidal.
The devastation that the entire nuclear fuel chain causes, starts right at the beginning - the mining and refining of Uranium. One has only to visit the Indian mine sites of Jaduguda, Turamdih and Tummalapalle to witness the untold sufferings the local populations are undergoing. Lots of diseases and birth of severely deformed babies are commonplace in Jaduguda, the oldest of India's Uranium mining sites. Even the newest - Tummlapalle in Andhra Pradesh, has started causing devastation within 8-9 years of operation. Anyone visiting the nearby villages like KK Kottala and Mabbuchintalapalle will be struck by the cancerous lesions on skins of dozens of children, domestic animals strangely dying by the hundreds, the only cash crop of these poor villagers - banana plantations - being devastated by contamination from the mine wastes.
Looking Back at Fukushima
Exactly fourteen years ago, on the 11th of March 2011, ‘all hell broke loose’ in the Pacific coast of Japan. A huge tsunami, triggered by the monstrous ‘Tohuku earthquake’ (of magnitude 9 in Richter scale), swept away towns and villages near the coast, killing about 20,000 people. The gigantic tsunami waves also hit the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on the coast, overwhelming the ‘defensive sea walls’, cutting off power supply, disabling backup generators and triggering a devastating nuclear accident. What followed is now well known to the whole world, as the live television coverage of the apocalyptic events streamed into all homes around the globe. Three of the six boiling-water nuclear reactors went into meltdown, spreading deadly radioactive materials. Lakhs were evacuated, huge areas became uninhabitable for decades or even centuries, massive amounts of radioactively contaminated water was (and is still being) dumped into the Pacific ocean causing untold damage to marine life. An area with a radius of 30 KMs from the devastated NPP still remains heavily contaminated by radioactivity and practically out of bounds for normal living. The pains and sufferings of lakhs of Nuclear Refugees, the first in the 21st century (after the disaster of Chernobyl in 1986) were seen almost live by people on their TV screens, throughout the world.
And that disaster is still unfolding fourteen years down the line, with no certainty about when the technologically and financially sound Japanese government and the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), which owns and ran the Fukushima Daiichi NPP will be able to fully contain and decommission these reactors. The Pacific ocean, which came to be a big help in trying to cool the melted down reactors with their nearly infinite supply of water, was itself subjected to massive discharges of ‘radioactively contaminated water’. One was reminded of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the then Soviet Union, as the only comparably horrendous nuclear disaster, both being classified at the highest rank of Level-7 in the deceptively named “International Nuclear and Radiological Events Scale” (INES). These are not just events, these are apocalyptic events. Many such nuclear disasters have happened every decade, in many countries operating nuclear power projects, in various smaller scales.
Closely linked to nuclear (fission) power is nuclear bombs. So let's not forget the cataclysmic nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That’s not the end of nuclear bombs destructive story though, as the ‘nuclear powers’ have tested over 2000 of these nuclear weapons of mass destruction in several designated areas of the world. Another horror story is that of the major US testing site -- the Marshal Islands -- and how unsuspecting citizens were used as nuclear-exposure guinea pigs. There are similar but lesser known stories from the Soviet nuclear test sites of Semipalatinsk, Novaya Zemlya and others; the French nuclear test sites of Reggane and Akker in Algeria and the Mururoa Atoll in the Pacific; the British test sites in the Australian territories of Monte Bello, Maralinga, Emu Field, and the Chinese test site of Lop Nur in the Uyghur Autonomous Region.
Global nuclear fission power industry was in decline for the past three decades but has started being revived – with the spectre of Climate Change Crisis staring down the world. From its glory days in the 1960s to the 1980s, many countries built these reactors, with scientists hoping that they will find some ‘solution’ to the intractable problems of nuclear wastes. Then happened the Three-some – Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima – to show the world that this is a very dangerous genie out of the bottle. In a desperate effort to revive itself, the dying nuclear fission power industry tried to present itself to be Carbon-neutral and thus, a solution to the Climate Change Crisis. Even that claim has since been debunked, with clear calculations showing the significant amounts of carbon emission through its entire fuel cycle, from mining, refining, fabrication, very high embedded emission of construction etc.
India is a party to the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor or ITER, the biggest scientific experiment so far to harness the power of another and much safer form of nuclear energy, that of hydrogen fusion[2] – the process that powers the Sun and most other stars. Controlled Thermonuclear Reactor experiments – with no possibility of explosion and minimal radioactive footprint – is a promise shown to us for the last fifty-plus years, but is nearing the first scientific breakeven demonstration only now. The predecessor Tokamaks[3] before ITER – the Joint European Torus in UK, the Chinese Tokamak EAST (Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak), and the French WEST Tokamak, have already come tantalisingly close to a ‘technical break-even’. If scientists are successful in harnessing this with commercial viability, which is expected by the year 2045-50, humanity’s need for energy can be tackled for many millennia.
So, for now, we have to shift out from the climate damaging fossil fuels to the emerged Renewables, in a manner empowering the millions of landholders in the country, not by dispossessing them for the large land requirements of Renewables. In the meantime, the old, highly dangerous and toxic technology of Nuclear Fission power must be placed where it belongs – in the “tried and failed” bin of history as one more dangerous and failed experiment. We the Citizens must demand from our governments – scrap all planned nuclear (fission) power projects and phase-out the existing ones in a planned manner.
- In memory of all the people of the world who suffered terribly from this 20th century legacy of Nuclear bombs and nuclear reactors, and with respect to many future generations who will have to contend with large amounts of long lived radioactive waste materials.
Notes:
1. Fission occurs when a neutron slams into a larger atom, forcing it to excite and split into two smaller atoms—also known as fission products. Additional neutrons are also released that can initiate a chain reaction. When each atom splits, a tremendous amount of energy is released. Uranium and plutonium are most commonly used for fission reactions in nuclear power reactors. This is the process used in atom bombs and like them, fission-based NPPs are also potential sources of death and destruction.
2. Fusion occurs when two atoms slam together to form a heavier atom, like when two hydrogen atoms fuse to form one helium atom, generating huge amounts of energy—several times greater than fission. Moreover, it doesn’t produce highly radioactive fission products. This is the process that powers the Sun – the source of light and life. However, the process is difficult to sustain for long periods of time because of the tremendous amount of pressure and temperature needed to join the nuclei together. Scientists are hopeful of overcoming this difficulty, but more attention and funds are required for that.
3. A tokamak is a device that uses strong magnetic fields to confine and arrest plasma – an extremely hot, ionized state of matter – for achieving controlled nuclear fusion. Put in another way, it is a device for producing controlled nuclear fusion, which involves the confining and heating of a gaseous plasma by means of an electric current and magnetic field.
