The way out

Yes, energy is an important objective. Yes, good relations with the US are important. One possible source was cooperation with the US in this field. But that cooperation, evidently, comes with an unacceptable price tag. Stop looking to this deal as the key to better Indo-American relations. Stop looking to Americans for nuclear energy. Stop looking to nuclear energy as a significant component of our electricity supplies.

This last factor — looking to atomic power as a major component of our electricity supplies in the future — has been the strategic flaw which has landed us in this quicksand. The sequence of the government’s reasoning has been:

• We need huge quantities of energy.

• Nuclear energy has to supply 35,000 megawatts of what we need — against the 3,500 megawatts it supplies today.

• While we have the requisite reserves of natural uranium, we are not able to get enough of it out of the ground for the reactors.

• Hence, the operating/plant-load factors of all the reactors have been falling since 2000. Therefore, we need imported uranium.

• Therefore, we need this agreement.

• Therefore, we have to accept the conditions that go with this agreement.

Now, it is true that with the quantities of uranium that we are currently mining and milling, we cannot pursue both — that order of power generation as well as our weapons programme — simultaneously. If for electricity one uses X amount of uranium, I was instructed, for weapons, one needs 7X. That is why we have had to come to two decisions:

... contd.