Author: Neelesh Misra
Publication: Hindustan Times
Date: June 7, 2008
Introduction: India has enough uranium for
its N-plants. So why is it hunting for fuel across the globe?
Nearly Three years ago, when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh stood on the lawns
of the White House with President George W. Bush, announcing a civil nuclear
deal with the US, there was another country he could have turned to for fuel
for India's N-power plants: India.
Even as it scouts for nuclear fuel from the
US and elsewhere, India has been sitting on massive, untapped reserves of
uranium, hundreds of tons of which have been discovered over the past couple
of years adding to the over 1 lakh tons al ready identified in Jharkhand,
Meghalaya, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu. Together, these uranium
resources would be enough to run all of India's current and planned nuclear
power plants for their entire lifetime of 40 years. In the context of the
bitter political debate in India over taking N- fuel from the US, the irony
is inescapable.
India's atomic energy establishment has done
next to nothing to tap deposits identified up to 15 years ago. Mining is yet
to be- gin at several sites explored, identified and handed through the 1990s
by the Atomic Minerals Directorate (AMD), the govern- ment's uranium exploration
arm, to the Uranium Corporation of India Ltd (UCIL).
Some of the untapped reserves in Megha laya
contain the best-available quality of uranium. And according to Anjan Chaki,
chief of the Hyderabad-based AMD, many of the new reserves too contain a much
better quality of ore than is currently available.
However, despite having no uranium, the government
has gone about spending thou sands of crores on new N-power plants. "The
country has been burdened with over-capac ity of nuclear power plants with
little urani um to run them even though, ironically, we have had it all along,"
a top official told Hindustan Times.
Out of the 4,000 MW-plus installed capacity
of India's nuclear power plants, almost 2,000 MW capacity is lying idle. That
is a waste of at least Rs 16,000 crore of public investment. India currently
uses about 1,300 tons of uranium a year.
Chaki suggests costs might have been behind
the sloth. "Perhaps if they had come out of Singhbhum in Jharkhand, and
gone out to mine, things would have been better, but perhaps they did not
have sufficient funds."
However, lack of funds has never been seen
as a problem for India's atomic energy programme, which has a Rs 8,000 crore
budget, direct supervision of, and access to, the prime minister, and the
legal power to acquire any area for exploration.
