Part One of Two Parts
India is one of the most populous nations on Earth. They are woefully short on the energy needed to run their nation and provide the growth they desire. The current energy mix in India consists of about fifty eight percent coal, about twenty seven percent oil, about six and a half percent natural gas, about four percent hydroelectric, a little over two percent renewables and a little over one percent nuclear.
This has been a difficult year for the nuclear industry. At the beginning of the year, Areva, the French nuclear company went bankrupt in the midst of a scandal over substandard nuclear components. The French government had to step in and support the purchase of Areva by EDF which has its own financial problems. In March, Westinghouse, the nuclear subsidiary owned by Japan’s Toshiba, declared bankruptcy, throwing the completion of nuclear reactor projects in the U.S. into doubt. In May, the U.S. Energy Information Agency estimated that the percent of nuclear power in the U.S. energy mix would be cut in half in the next thirty years. The new Presidents of both Korea and France have pledged to cut the percent of nuclear power in their nations. Switzerland just voted to phase out nuclear power entirely.
Last June, Indian Prime Minister Modi and U.S. President Obama announced that Westinghouse would build six new nuclear power reactors at Kovvada. Areva had made an agreement with India to build the biggest nuclear complex at Jaitapur. Critics of these arrangements had claimed that the deals were fiscally irresponsible and now they may been cancelled. Considering the recent financial problems of both of these companies, it is likely that if the projects had gone forward, they never would have been completed and the Indian taxpayers would wind up paying inflated prices for electricity. The critics say that the whole idea of nuclear power for India needs to be reevaluated.
Critics of nuclear power in India demand that the Indian government’s recent approval of the construction of ten seven hundred megawatt Pressurized Heavy Water Reactors (PHWR) be carefully reviewed and reconsidered. The projects to build the ten reactors have been in development for some time. In 2012, the United Progressive Alliance government provided a list of sites for the ten new reactors. Even so, construction delays for the first reactor projects, the problems in the global nuclear industry, the low cost of natural gas and the dropping cost of renewable energy sources have all combined to prompt calls for India to abandon all ten of the planned reactor projects.
The domestically manufacture of seven hundred megawatt PHWR reactors would certainly be cheaper than importing foreign reactors. However, it is likely that the energy they generate will be expensive compared to other sources. These seven hundred megawatt PHWR reactors have never been actually built and tested before in India. The biggest domestic reactors that have been built in India are five hundred forty megawatt PHWR. The construction of the first two seven hundred megawatt PHWRs has been delayed by more than two years and the government has been reluctant to share information about the related cost increases. Estimates of the cost of electricity during the first year of operation of the first two seven hundred megawatt PHWR reactors show that it will likely be greater than the cost of all the coal, natural gas and hydroelectric power currently being generated. Even the cost of renewable power has been dropping below the cost of nuclear power.
Please read Part Two
