Explaining his assessment about the cost at which nuclear power would be available, the prime minister told the Rajya Sabha on August 17, 2006, “Arun Shourie asked me what calculations I have seen. I have seen many calculations in the Department of Atomic Energy. In the eighties when K.C. Pant was the chairman of the energy policy committee, a detailed study was done and it was shown that if you are talking of generating power and reaching it to a place 700 km away from a coal mine, nuclear energy is the right economic answer. Things can change. And I think the Planning Commission has done recent work, and they have also come to the conclusion that having the nuclear option is something which will give us a greater degree of security on the energy front.”

Actually, if energy security is what we are after, shifting from power dependent on imported oil to power dependent on imported technology, imported reactors, imported components, imported uranium, each of which is controlled by an even tighter cartel than oil, is hardly the answer. And, as we saw, even the Planning Commission’s Integrated Energy Policy acknowledges this.

As for some study done in the 1980s, the price of uranium used to be $7 per pound then. It is over $140 per pound today.

The change of much greater consequence relates not to the price of uranium, but to that of reactors. The US has not placed an order for a new reactor since 1978 — and that order was cancelled. The last order for a reactor was placed in 1970 — and it took 26 years for that reactor to come into operation. With this attenuation of demand for reactors, the capacity of the US nuclear industry today to build reactors is very limited. By contrast, see what that industry has to do just in the US in the coming years. The MIT report, The Future of Nuclear Power, 2003 — as well as the study by the University of Chicago published the following year — had already established that energy from nuclear sources would be one and a half times to twice as costly as that from coal and gas. Since then an all-important consideration has been the focus of analysis. The US has a total of 103 commercial reactors today. The original licensed life of US reactors used to be 40 years. This life has been extended for forty-odd of these reactors for 20 more years. Even with that having been done, every single reactor of the US will have to be replaced by 2056. Other countries too have plans to build reactors. Given the extremely limited capacity to build reactors, the price that will be charged by vendors is bound to leap up. (A recent study published in April 2007 by the most influential organisation on US foreign policy gives a succinct and authoritative account of the prospect in this regard: Charles D. Ferguson, Nuclear Energy, Balancing Benefits and Risks, Council on Foreign Relations, April 2007.)

... contd.