A HEART transplant is being planned to keep India’s 5-year-old nuclear Apsara, fighting fit. This elective surgery on India’s oldest nuclear reactor has been precipitated because of the atomic tango, choreographed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President George W. Bush.

On August 4, the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) celebrated the golden jubilee of the Apsara reactor and a simple birthday celebration was conducted at Trombay. Incidentally, it is also the oldest research reactor in Asia.

Even today this reliable workhorse of the nuclear establishment is actively contributing to the research being conducted on the design of the futuristic Thorium based reactor, as part of the last stage of the grand Indian nuclear vision.

On August 4, five decades ago India’s first nuclear reactor aptly named Apsara after the `celestial water damsel’, started functioning with a sustained nuclear chain reaction. It was really the first day when India declared to the world that it was a nuclear power to reckon with, wrote nuclear scientists Raja Rammna in his biography Years of Pilgrimage. Peering over the swimming pool which houses this reactor, you can spot a characteristic mesmeric blue glow which scientists call the Cerenkov radiation. It was this captivating blue light that made Nehru name the reactor Apsara or ‘the water nymph’.

THIS reactor will now undergo a major surgery, a result of the Indo-US nuclear deal as part of which India has decided to extricate this highly enriched French uranium fuel, and place it outside the four walls of the Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC), Mumbai.

... contd.