After the heated debates of the past months over the Manmohan Singh-George Bush nuclear deal, it is now perhaps time to sit down and re-evaluate India’s objectives as well as the deal being considered in the US Congress as we wait for the Senate to take up the S. 3709 Bill in November.
Much has been made of the supposed benefits and an expected freeflow of nuclear materials and technology from the India-US nuclear deal. These expectations are unfounded and should not form the basis for India accepting any final legislation.
Instead, the costs and benefits should be given a very critical look before signing up. In particular, India must debate whether the strategic compromises involved are necessary or are worth the actual benefits that could result from the deal.
The Americans have already made it clear that all materials and technologies that the US would allow to be transferred to India would have to meet one overriding criterion – none of it should be applicable for weapons purposes.
Thus, both the US and the nuclear suppliers cartel have ruled out transferring, for instance, reprocessing and enrichment technologies. There are a variety of other materials and technologies too that will continue to be unavailable to India for the simple reason that even after India signs the nuclear deal with the US, it will continue to be treated as a non-nuclear weapons state. The conditions and constraints being imposed on India are to ensure this ‘principle’ in substance.
In the final analysis, the maximum contours of the deal, so far as possible benefits to India are concerned, are limited to three things: uranium, power reactors and some dual-use technologies.
Of these, dual-use technology trade has already been ‘freed up’ under the India-US Next Steps in Strategic Partnership programme that preceded the Bush-Manmohan Singh Joint Statement of July 2005.
‘Freeing up’ amounts to nothing more than a change in US policy from the earlier blanket ‘presumption of denial’ of licenses to export dual-use technology to India to a ‘presumption of approval’.
Dual-use exports will still require license and such license will still be given on a case-by-case basis. This situation will not change even under the nuclear cooperation agreement. Moreover, any dual-use technology supplied will probably be applicable elsewhere, rather than in the nuclear programme.
Secondly, India has already built up sufficient capabilities to build medium-sized power reactors, thanks to the isolation imposed on us by the US.
Until its recently-found love for the world’s largest democracy, America routinely refused to allow supply of even safety technology and know-how for India’s nuclear power plants. It would rather have millions of Indians die in nuclear accidents than sell India safety technology -- simply because India defied its orders not to build nuclear weapons for its own security.
The fact that India’s nuclear power plants have operated for all these decades without any major accident shows that India’s nuclear establishment is capable of building safe nuclear power reactors.
The only benefit from the nuclear deal seems, therefore, to be the prospect of India being able to buy uranium. Pro-deal commentators have latched on to this and repeatedly said that such supply is critical for the Indian nuclear power programme, even to the point that the major strategic and foreign policy compromises being forced on India would be justified if only we could import uranium.
But a recent report by Ashley Tellis, perhaps the most knowledgeable strategic expert on the Indian nuclear programme and a principal architect of the India-US nuclear deal, says that India’s uranium shortage is only a temporary problem, one of its own making, and is not a principal reason why India needs the nuclear deal.
His report effectively debunks the scare scenario that has been orchestrated by supporters of the nuclear deal that if India could not import uranium immediately it would have to shut down both its nuclear power and weapons programme five or ten or even twenty years down the line.
Using the most conservative estimates of Indian uranium reserves and even accounting for the lowest quality of uranium ores, Tellis has demonstrated that not only does India have sufficient uranium reserves for all of its power reactors, both currently operating and those under construction, to last for several decades but also enough to make a weapons arsenal several times as big as India currently desires.
The report, Atoms for War? U.S.-Indian Civilian Nuclear Cooperation and India's Nuclear Arsenal, says ‘‘India has sufficient natural uranium reserves to sustain the largest nuclear weapons program that can be envisaged relative to its current capabilities; it also possesses enough uranium to sustain more than three times its current and planned capacity as far as nuclear power production involving pressurized heavy water reactors (PHWRs) is concerned’’.
According to Tellis, the official Indian estimate of India’s natural uranium reserves is 78,000 tons of uranium. Even if this figure were to be discounted for exploitable resources, the most conservative estimation of India’s ‘reasonably assured reserves’ is 54,636 tons of uranium, according to OECD-IAEA data. If this figure was still downscaled to account for extraction and processing losses, the resulting value of the reasonably assured assets would be 40,980 tons.
Now, India’s currently operating power reactors require some 478 metric tons of indigenous fuel every year. The approximate total fuel requirements from the current year 2006 to the end of the notional 30-year life of every Indian PHWR is 9,972 Metric Tons of Uranium (MTU).
If the total fuel requirements of all of India’s PHWRs under construction -- an additional 3,370 MTU – is factored in, India’s current and planned indigenous nuclear power programme would require 13,702 MTU in all to produce about 4.46 GW of electricity.
If the uranium needed to produce plutonium for the weapons programme from the Cirus, Dhruva and a planned Dhruva II research reactors were added, the uranium requirement for the combined weapons programme and the indigenous nuclear power programme is about 14,640-14,790 MTU for the lifetime of this programme.
In effect, therefore, if India’s uranium reserves were taken to be only the lowest exploitable assets at 40,980 tons, India would still be able to step up both its weapons and power programme by nearly three times the current and under construction capacity. About 13 GW of power could thus be produced for over three-four decades.
If India’s reserves were taken at the OECD-IAEA data level of 54,636 tons, India could step up the programmes by nearly four times – producing over 16 GW of power -- and run the nuclear programmes on indigenous uranium for over three decades. This does not even take into account any technological breakthroughs that might occur or any new uranium deposits that may be found in the interim.
Professor V.S. Arunachalam, a former scientific adviser to the prime minister who favours the nuclear deal as a way to meet India’s energy requirements, has argued in an article in the Economic and Political Weekly of March 2006 that India’s uranium reserves are sufficient to produce 10 GW of power for about 40 years.
According to the Department of Atomic Energy itself, India can generate 480 GWe-years of electricity without any assistance from outside. Thus, the Indian nuclear programme would be able to produce about 20 GW of electricity per year for nearly a quarter of a century, even assuming the most conservative estimates of indigenous uranium resources.
What then is the problem with the Indian nuclear power programme that is pushing the Manmohan Singh government into a hurried deal that will compromise India’s core strategic interests?
According to Tellis, India’s uranium shortage is only a temporary problem, a result of the fact that since the early 1990s successive Indian governments did not build up enough uranium mining and milling capacity to keep pace with the power reactors being installed.
A 2001-02 report of the Planning Commission says, “This is primarily due to non-availability of nuclear fuel because the development of domestic mines has not kept pace with addition of generating capacity.”
The combined requirement of the current Indian power and plutonium production programme is 509 MTU per year. But India’s uranium milling capacity using the lowest grade ore available is about 301 MTU per year. There is therefore a shortfall of 208 MTU per year caused by the lack of additional uranium milling capacity at present.
If the fuel requirements of all the nuclear reactors under construction are added to the current requirement, India will need to produce about 654 MTU per year, says Tellis. If India’s milling capacity was not expanded at all, in several years’ time, the nuclear programme would face a deficit of about 353 MTU per year.
But Tellis says this problem is now being addressed and would be rectified within a few years.
Currently, India’s uranium milling capacity is limited to an ore concentration plant in Jaduguda that provides the 300 MTU of uranium a year. But a major new milling facility is being built in Turamdih, Jharkhand, which would increase India’s milling capacity to 733 MTU per year, more than the 654 MTU required for the entire, current and under construction, nuclear programme. Two more facilities are being built at Seripally in Andhra Pradesh and Domiasiat in Meghalaya. Together, they will take the milling capacity to 1,100 MTU per year.
According to Tellis, ‘‘This output would far exceed the currently assessed feedstock levels required to power all of India’s indigenous nuclear reactors, but developing such a processing capacity is essential if the growth of India’s nuclear power program in the post-2020 period is to continue apace.’’
Uranium mining capacity too is being increased. Until now, India’s uranium mining has been concentrated in three proximate places in Jharkhand -- Jaduguda, Narwapahar and Bhatin. There are other comparable or better quality deposits in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka (reportedly 1% ore assays found, compared to the 0.06-0.08% ore in Jaduguda) and in Meghalaya, which is said to have about 9,500 tonnes of exploitable uranium.
Mines are being developed at Turamdih, Bandugurang, Baghjanta, Mohuldih (all in Jharkhand) and in Domiasiat in Meghalaya, Lambapur-Peddagattu and Pulivendula in Andhra Pradesh and in Gogi in Karnataka. There are also deposits of uncertain estimation in Rajasthan.
Again, according to Tellis, ‘‘New Delhi possesses the wherewithal necessary to correct the problems known to afflict its mining and milling infrastructure, whether or not the U.S.-India civil nuclear cooperation agreement is realized in the manner desired by President Bush and Prime Minister Singh’’.
Tellingly, Tellis himself has concluded that, ‘‘the shortages of uranium fuel experienced by India presently are a near-term aberration…and not an enduring limitation resulting from the dearth of physical resources…As such, these shortages do not offer a viable basis for Congress to extort any concessions from India regarding its weapons program—for example, by demanding a lasting cap on the production of fissile materials or a permanent moratorium on nuclear testing…’’
It is therefore quite a mystery why the Manmohan Singh government is so keen on an extremely cruel, condition-ridden, autonomy-strangling nuclear cooperation agreement with the US and why the government and certain sections of the media have indulged in relentless propaganda to convince the nation that it cannot survive without this nuclear deal. It is quite a mystery as to why the Manmohan Singh government is so keen to subject India to a US-imposed permanent ban on nuclear testing when there are no circumstances forcing India to do so.
