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Thorium Based Indian Nuclear Programme

South India is rich in Thorium. Some of my Indian friends were saying that Indo-US nuke deal has to do something with Indian thorium. How much is it true or is there any link ??

One cant say if it has connection... coz Logically its not related.

Firstly, US is not alone to hev this deal.. and to believe that a dozen nation have any interest in some way.. the Indian Thorium Programme is a vague theory.

Secondly, It will certainly have affect on the Indian effort as u suggested... coz.. as Now India will have plentiful of Uranium.. the pace to quickly turn thorium tech to power generation will slow down .. a fear also suggested by Indian scientists..

But i firmly believe, India will not hampe its Indegenious Efforts as Called by Dr. Kalam , Though it will take some time say 2025, when India starts producing mass scale power suing Th-233
 
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well looks like Thorium dreams are going down the drain. For some reason, I dont like this news as Indian should continue pioneering Thorium research. Imagine with everybody needs nuke energy and Uranium could be way too dangerous due to profilteration risk India could make mega bucks by offering cost effective Thorium reactors.

India's Cabinet clears crucial nuclear bill
By AGENCIES

Published: Aug 20, 2010 20:20 Updated: Aug 20, 2010 20:20

NEW DELHI: India's Cabinet approved a nuclear liability bill Friday, a crucial step on the path to bringing foreign companies into its potentially vast nuclear energy market, a government official said.

The bill, which caps the liability of foreign firms at $320 million in the case of an industrial accident, is expected to be presented in parliament as early as next week for final passage, said Prithviraj Chavan, India's junior science and technology minister.

India needed this domestic law to get high-capacity nuclear reactors from developed countries to meet its energy needs, Chavan told reporters.

"Uranium-based nuclear energy is vital for us," he said.

Nearly 40 percent of India's households don't have electricity.

Some private firms, especially those from the US, have been reluctant to set up nuclear power plants in India without a law that would limit their liability.

But such a cap has stirred strong opposition in India, where victims of the 1984 gas leak at a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal are still seeking increased compensation for their suffering. That leak, the world's worst industrial disaster, killed 15,000 people.

The international community barred India from the trade in civilian nuclear technology while the country ran a covert program to develop nuclear weapons.

In 2008, India emerged from its nuclear isolation after it signed a landmark civil nuclear cooperation agreement with the United States. The 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group then lifted a three-decade global ban on nuclear trade with India.

The energy starved country hopes to harness its new acceptance to build nuclear power plants.

US-based firms GE-Hitachi and Westinghouse Electric, a subsidiary of Japan's Toshiba Corp, have been waiting for the liability bill to pass before they would enter India's nuclear energy sector.

Meanwhile, Russian and French nuclear companies linked to their governments have raced ahead and have been awarded contracts.
 
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Old but Interesting ::

United States Offers India Thorium Based Nuclear Reactors
United States Offers India Thorium Based Nuclear Reactors
2007-09-17 While India is still debating how to make the Indo-US nuclear deal work, an American company, anxious to enter the Indian market, has offered to build commercial nuclear power reactors in the country.

These reactors will rely entirely on India's thorium resources -- except at the start - and thereby remove the objections of critics.

The California-based Dauvergne Brothers Inc (DBI) says its novel type of thorium breeder reactor is fuelled with fissile material like uranium only once when it is started. It runs for its full operational life on Uranium-233 (or U-233) bred in its core from thorium.

Thorium, which India has in plenty, cannot be directly burned in a reactor. It has to be converted into fissile U-233. India's own thorium utilisation strategy hinges on reprocessing -- a contentious issue between India and the US. The DBI claims its design is tailor-made for the Indian situation.

According to the company, its reactor 'starts up using conventional uranium-based nuclear fuels, and incrementally converts to an all-thorium fuel cycle over a period of 10 years, using India's abundant supply of thorium ores to maintain energy independence'.

It said that computer simulations of the DBI thorium breeder reactor show that a single load of 25 percent uranium oxide fuel and 75 percent thorium oxide will keep the reactor running for a decade.

'In that time enough U-233 will be bred in the thorium oxide fuel to increase the output power of the DBI reactor core by 50 percent adding only fresh thorium oxide as fuel.' After that, no uranium ores are needed.

Conventional breeder reactor designs -- including the one contemplated by Indian scientists -- require chemical reprocessing to retrieve bred fuel from used uranium fuel rods or from irradiated thorium' blankets'.

The DBI reactor, according to the company, uses a different strategy.

After approximately 10 years of operation, much of the activated thorium fuel would be transferred without any reprocessing into a second-generation DBI reactor core with higher power output than the first.

'Fresh thorium breeder bundles will be added to perpetuate the cycle.'

This fuel plan relies on a robust, low-neutron absorbing, radiation-resistant, proprietary fuel encapsulation system developed by DBI, the company said.

Unlike the zirconium fuel cladding of most breeder reactors, the DBI fuel capsules are derived from industrially available material, much less expensive than nuclear-grade zirconium alloys.

While the modular core design offers scalability, several other features of the DBI thorium reactor programme could prevent weapons proliferation, the company claims.

For instance, it says the start up fuel could be a proliferation-resistant fuel, such as the denatured plutonium/thorium fuel recently developed by Thorium Power Inc, another US company.

'International agreements between India and uranium-source nations to use proliferation-resistant fuels in the DBI Reactor Programme, subject to IAEA monitoring, could sever the link between civilian and military nuclear programmes in India, without adversely affecting India's ability to scale up the DBI Reactor Programme using native thorium in future generations,' the company said.
 
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WOW India being second largest reserve of Thorium!!

Now its clear why US and India got onto mutual consensus, US to sell India technology and India to sell its Uranium, Thorium and other radioactive reserves. And now, I know why Pakistan has been kept out of any deal and its begging to acquire any tech. to achieve its own demands.
 
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How Homi Bhabha's vision turned India into a nuclear R&D leader: The Guardian

Despite decades of relative neglect compared with conventional nuclear power, research into thorium is now forging ahead around the world.

But it is thanks to the vision of Homi Bhabha, the architect of India's atomic energy programme, that India is a world leader in thorium research and development. He died in a plane crash in 1966 aged 56, but had already laid the foundations for a research programme that is now beginning to bear fruit.

India's government-controlled nuclear power industry has been criticised in the past for lack of transparency and inadequate safety oversight. But it has its admirers around the world. "India has the most technically ambitious and innovative nuclear energy program in the world," Siegfried Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US, wrote in a recent issue of Physics Today. "The extent and functionality of its nuclear experimental facilities are matched only by those in Russia and are far ahead of what is left in the US."

Canada, Russia, Japan, the US and the EU all have active thorium research programmes. And China too is now sinking considerable resources into the field. It officially launched its thorium-based reactor project, led by the son of a former Chinese president, at a meeting of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai earlier this year.

"The commonly used (uranium-based) nuclear reactor isn't a 'perfect stove', and burns only a small proportion of the highest quality fuel, leaving a lot of 'cinder'," a lead researcher told a Shanghai newspaper. "We need a better stove that can burn more fuel."

The Chinese have chosen a different technology path from India in the quest for a thorium reactor – liquid-fluoride instead of heavy water. The International Atomic Energy Agency lists other technologies that are being explored in international thorium research projects. All have yet to prove that thorium reactors can be commercially viable. As far back as 1983, for instance, a high temperature 300MW thorium power reactor was commissioned in Germany, but shut down six years later as it was not found economically feasible.

How Homi Bhabha's vision turned India into a nuclear R&D leader | Environment | guardian.co.uk:tup:
 
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Thorium Nuclear fuel of the future :A.P.J Abdul Kalam

Let us introduce a lesser-known member among radioactive materials — Thorium. It is perhaps the best solution possible in the future and would be technologically and commercially the best option in another two decades. Thorium, the 90th element in the Periodic Table, is slightly lighter than Uranium. Thorium is far more abundant, by about four timesxxvi, than the traditional nuclear fuel, Uranium, and occurs in a far purer form, too. It is believed that the amount of energy contained in the Thorium reserves on earth is more than the combined total energy that is left in petroleum, coal, other fossil fuels and Uranium, all put together. And information revealed in an IAEA Report (2005) on Thorium fuels indicates that India might have the largest reserves of Thorium in the world, with over 650,000 tonnes. (Note: The IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, is the world's centre of cooperation in the nuclear field. It was set up in 1957 as the world's ‘Atoms for Peace' organisation within the U.N. family.) This is more than one-fourth of the total deposits of Thorium; in comparison, we have barely 1 per cent of the world's Uranium deposits, which is currently being put to effective use, our having opted for the closed fuel cycle technology. Thorium has many other advantages. It is estimated that Thorium may be able to generate (through Uranium-233 that could be produced from it) eight times the amount of energy per unit mass compared to (natural) Uraniumxxvii. In the much debated issue of waste generation also, Thorium has a relative advantage. It produces waste that is relatively less toxic due to the absence of minor actinides (that are associated with Uranium).

At the same time, it is acknowledged that the long-lived high-level waste from Uranium, especially in light of the Indian strategy of adopting the closed fuel cycle involving reprocessing for the recovery of Plutonium and Uranium, can be effectively managed using technologies available today. Indian nuclear experts tell us that the relatively small volumes of such waste (long-term storage space of less than a quarter of the size of a football field is adequate for the estimated waste from a 1000 MWe plant) can be safely stored after vitrification for hundreds of years without causing any risk to the environment or the people.

One question that crops up is, why then has Uranium rather than Thorium become the popular choice for nuclear energy programmes across the world? There are two reasons: one is technological and the other is historical.

The technological reason stems from the simple fact that at first one needs to produce Uranium-233 from Thorium, and for this, reactors based on the naturally available nuclear fuel material, Uranium-235, are required. In addition, the recovery of Uranium-233 by large-scale reprocessing of irradiated thorium, as well as the likely presence of hard gamma emitting Uranium-232, pose certain practical hurdles. But according to experts, all these can be overcome technologically.

The second and the historical reason why Thorium has lagged behind in the ladder of development, comes from its advantage of being able to provide Thorium-based fuel, as seen from the context of the relatively unstable geopolitical conditions — which is that Thorium cannot be weaponised. Unlike Uranium, which is always on a tight-rope walk between being a power source and finding destructive applications, Thorium bombs just cannot be made. Here history steps in. It must be remembered that much of the current civil nuclear applications are direct offshoots of the military nuclear technologies of the Cold War period. So, the first significant outcome of nuclear technology was the Manhattan Project during the Second World War, which ultimately culminated in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing of 1945 by the U.S.

A nuclear weapon is different from a nuclear plant, as in the former there is no need to control or slow down the reactions that lead to a catastrophic energy release in a short time interval — which is the essence of a bomb. However, a nuclear plant needs moderation of the reaction to sustain a steady but controlled release of energy. It was only by the end of 1951 that some noteworthy work was done in controlled nuclear power generation at the EBR-1 experiment in Idaho to produce 100 KW of nuclear power. This “weapon first” approach to nuclear technology led to the fact that there was little focus on developing methods to energise from Thorium, which is non-weaponisable, and a larger focus on Uranium, which can be weaponised.

But now, being the largest owner of Thorium, and also being amongst the nations which will see the highest surge in power demand with its growth, the opportunity is for India to pursue its existing nuclear programme with a special focus on research and development on the Thorium route as the long term sustainable option, which we are already undertaking. For this purpose, it is imperative to continue to implement the current Indian plan of making use of the uranium and plutonium-based fuel cycle technologies as well as irradiate larger amounts of Thorium in fast reactors to breed Uranium-233 fuel as it graduates to the Thorium-based plants. It is noteworthy that the Indian plan for an advanced heavy water reactor (AHWR) is an important step to launch early commencement of Thorium utilisation in India, while considerable further efforts to use Thorium in both thermal and fast reactors would be essential to harness sustainable energy from Thorium-generated Uranium-233.

Various technologies for Thorium-based plants are already being developed and deployed on a test basis across the world including in India, which have a promising future. These include first breeding it to fissile Uranium-233 isotope in the conventional reactors or through the revived interest in technologies like the Molten Salt Reactors (MSR) which use salts to trap the fissile material and do not react with air or burn in air or water. In this technology, the operational pressure is near the ordinary atmospheric pressure, and hence the cost of construction is low and there is no risk of a pressure explosionxxviii.

A significantly large quantity of highly active nuclear material exists, and will continue to exist in the form of nuclear armaments — which was the mother programme of the nuclear energy programme. In 2010, there were about 22,000 nuclear warheads spanning at least nine countries of the world, and 8,000 of them are in active state, carrying a risk far greater than controlled nuclear power reactors. If the argument of risk is to be used to eliminate the peaceful energy generation programme, then the nuclear opposition factions must first direct their efforts at Washington and Moscow, the owners of 90 per cent of the world's nuclear warheads, to disband their nuclear arsenal — which is, by design, intended to be hostile. Would that happen? Unlikely, at least in the foreseeable future. Our aim should be to minimise the risks associated with nuclear power.

The power of the nucleus is mighty and the future of humanity lies in harnessing it in a safe and efficient manner. In the years to come, it will fuel not only our earth-based needs but also our space missions and perhaps even our civilisation's reach to other planets for habitation. Our current nuclear projects will expand into better and safer materials, like Thorium, and later on, into better reactions like fusion, which once completely developed, will be able to generate hundreds of times more of power than current fission methods. Affordable, clean and abundant energy provided by nuclear sources is our gateway to a future that is healthy, learned and connected — a future that will span deep into space and crosses the boundaries of current human imagination.

The Hindu : Opinion / Op-Ed : Nuclear power is our gateway to a prosperous future:tup:
 
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So thoruium has been blessing for india either way.
If its the thorium reserves of india which is making US, aussies and rest of world open there uranium reserves/technology for india, then so be it. I say all is well. That does not mean india slow down its uranium reactor programme, that will be real win win for india. Dono haath ghee mein.
 
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We have the worlds largest reserves of thorium.Can this thorium be used in nuclear weapons(instead of uranium or plutonium)?

I dont think thorium is so radioactive to produce a nuclear weapon !!!
However a new powerfull non radioactive weapon may be developed :)
 
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India will start Thorium-based Advanced Heavy Water Reactor(AHWR,300-MWe) project in next 18 months :tup:

Tapping its abundant thorium reserves, the Government has decided to commence the construction of 300-MW thorium-based Advanced Heavy Water Reactor in the next 18 months, a senior official said on Tuesday.

“Under the third stage of nuclear programme based on thorium utilisation, a reactor of 300 MW will be constructed in a year and a half from now..,” Kalpakkam-based Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research Director, Mr S.C. Chetal, told reporters here.

“The work for that will commence in the next Five-Year Plan,” he said on the sidelines of a function.

According to Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), the currently known thorium reserves in India amount to 3,58,000 GWe-yr of electrical energy and can “easily meet the energy requirements during the next century and beyond.”

Mr Chetal said, a technology to separate uranium from thorium was being developed by BARC in the third phase of its nuclear programme.

Business Line : Industry & Economy / Economy : Work on thorium-based reactor to commence soon
 
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India will start Thorium-based Advanced Heavy Water Reactor(AHWR,300-MWe) project in next 18 months :tup:

Tapping its abundant thorium reserves, the Government has decided to commence the construction of 300-MW thorium-based Advanced Heavy Water Reactor in the next 18 months, a senior official said on Tuesday.

“Under the third stage of nuclear programme based on thorium utilisation, a reactor of 300 MW will be constructed in a year and a half from now..,” Kalpakkam-based Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research Director, Mr S.C. Chetal, told reporters here.

“The work for that will commence in the next Five-Year Plan,” he said on the sidelines of a function.

According to Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), the currently known thorium reserves in India amount to 3,58,000 GWe-yr of electrical energy and can “easily meet the energy requirements during the next century and beyond.”

Mr Chetal said, a technology to separate uranium from thorium was being developed by BARC in the third phase of its nuclear programme.

Business Line : Industry & Economy / Economy : Work on thorium-based reactor to commence soon

with the completion of this reactor we complete our self made nuclear cycle. nice we can build 100s of these reactors all over the country. its cheap and we have largest reserves. thi si pure awsomeness..
 
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We need to make less radioactive Thorium bomb and integrate it with pdv to make it intercept dozens of missiles.
 
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