Paris, March 8: India proposes to establish five nuclear “energy parks” in its coastal states and is in talks with the United States, France and Russia for technical collaboration, the chairman of India’s Atomic Energy Commission, Mr Srikumar Banerjee, said on
Monday in Paris. The chairman and managing director of the Nuclear Power Corporation of India, Mr S.K. Jain, said the objective was to set up two nuclear reactors in each of the five energy parks at Mithi Virdi in Bhavnagar district of Gujarat, Kovada in Andhra Pradesh, Ratnagiri in Maharashtra, Haripur in West Bengal and at a site in Orissa as well. “The land acquisition process is already on for
this,” Mr Jain told reporters in Paris. He said this would help enormously in meeting India’s energy needs in the next few years.
“We are in talks with the US, France and Russia for this. It all depends on the offers that India gets (for the technical collaboration),” Mr Banerjee said. Speaking earlier in the day at a conference on access to civil nuclear energy in Paris, Mr Banerjee told delegates the world should adopt a “closed fuel nuclear process” in nuclear plants, which essentially means reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel. This is essential since even the uranium reserves in the world to generate nuclear energy will get exhausted after 70 to 80 years and so should be reprocessed, he said.
Mr Banerjee said that the use of a closed fuel cycle is essential to meet energy needs of the world and said that the world could look at thorium, which is “proliferation resistant”. He said that the uranium derived from thorium is “gamma active”, which renders it ineffective for purposes of developing nuclear weapons.
The AEC chairman also pointed to the fact that developing countries have to grow at much faster rates (about 10 per cent of GDP) compared to the developed world and that the energy needs of the developing world would therefore grow immensely in the next few years.
Sridhar Kumaraswami
