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 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.)

What of “recent work” by the Planning Commission that the PM mentioned? The most recent one is the Report of the Working Group on Power, which the commission published as recently as February 2007. The working group lists the cost per megawatt for generation projects. The report places the cost at Rs 4 crore per megawatt for coal based projects; Rs 3 crore per megawatt for gas based projects; Rs 4.50 crore to Rs 5 crore per megawatt for run-of-the-river hydro projects; Rs 5.50 crore to Rs 6 crore for storage hydro projects. And for nuclear power projects? Rs 6.50 crore per megawatt. And, recall, this group was straining to pad up the necessity for nuclear power to justify recourse to the deal.

But we don’t have to go just by estimates: there is an actual and current example. The new unit at Tarapur is supplying power at Rs 2.70 to Rs 2.80 a unit. What is the price per unit that has been accepted for power from the new ultra-mega thermal power project? Rs 1.19 per unit! The moment I recalled this contrast in the Rajya Sabha the other day, Dr Kasturirangan, who had just spoken in favour of the deal, interjected, “That price for nuclear energy is subsidised.” Others who have studied the matter intervened, “Actually the cost is Rs 9 per unit.” So, power at double or seven times the cost from other sources.

Indeed, even at these levels, these Indian estimates of the cost of nuclear power are gross underestimates. To cite just one fact, they do not build in the cost of disposing nuclear waste. The US itself is today plagued by this problem — having spent over $9 billion for developing a storage repository in the Yucca Mountain in Nevada, having striven for two decades to develop the site, the expectation is that the site will not become operational till 2015/2020 or so.

Nor do our estimates build in the cost of the more and more stringent and increasingly expensive security arrangements that will have to be made to prevent theft of fissile material as the number of reactors multiplies. Even countries that have exerted to the utmost to secure such material are experiencing insuperable difficulties. “The nuclear material currently unaccounted for at plutonium reprocessing facilities could make many bombs,” Ferguson notes. “For example, Japan cannot account for more than two hundred kilograms of plutonium at the Tokai-mura plant. In Britain, the Sellafield plant cannot account for about thirty kilograms of plutonium. According to the IAEA, only eight kilograms of plutonium are needed to make a bomb. But even less than that was used in the Nagasaki bomb, which employed six kilograms. More advanced designs could use as little as one to three kilograms.” (In addition to Ferguson’s study, for an instructive analysis of all this see the oft-cited report by Brice Smith, Insurmountable Risks, The dangers of using nuclear power to combat climate change, Institute for Energy and Environment Research, Md., 2006.)