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Concept
India's three-stage nuclear power programme
Summary
India's three-stage nuclear power programme was formulated by Homi Bhabha, the well-known physicist, in the 1950s to secure the country's long term energy independence, through the use of uranium and thorium reserves found in the monazite sands of coastal regions of South India. The ultimate focus of the programme is on enabling the thorium reserves of India to be utilised in meeting the country's energy requirements.
Thorium is particularly attractive for India, as India has only around 1–2% of the global uranium reserves, but one of the largest shares of global thorium reserves at about 25% of the world's known thorium reserves. However, thorium is more difficult to use than uranium as a fuel because it requires breeding, and global uranium prices remain low enough that breeding is not cost effective.
India published about twice the number of papers on thorium as its nearest competitors, during each of the years from 2002 to 2006.
The Indian nuclear establishment estimates that the country could produce 500 GWe for at least four centuries using just the country's economically extractable thorium reserves.
The first Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor has been repeatedly delayed – and is currently expected to be commissioned by October 2022 – and India continues to import thousands of tonnes of uranium from Russia, Kazakhstan, France, and Uzbekistan. The 2005 Indo–US Nuclear Deal and the NSG waiver, which ended more than three decades of international isolation of the Indian civil nuclear programme, have created many hitherto unexplored alternatives for the success of the three-stage nuclear power programme.
Thorium fuel cycle
Homi Bhabha conceived of the three-stage nuclear programme as a way to develop nuclear energy by working around India's limited uranium resources.
Thorium itself is not a fissile material, and thus cannot undergo fission to produce energy. Instead, it must be transmuted to uranium-233 in a reactor fueled by other fissile materials.
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