There is credible action on the nuclear power front. But India must step up indigenous work. Last week, during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to St Petersburg, India and Russia inked a pact to build Units 5 and 6 of 1,000 MW each at the Kudankulam nuclear plant. Moscow is to provide a loan to cover half the total capital cost of around Rs 50,000 crore — and supply all the nuclear fuel as well. It makes sense to leverage global expertise to boost domestic nuclear power generation capacity. Yet, it would be far more cost-effective to build plants that use both indigenous technology and fuel. We need to fast-forward thorium-fuelled nuclear plants for a variety of reasons.

India has abundant thorium reserves and the thorium cycle in nuclear power plants produces far less nuclear waste. However, thorium is not ready fissile material. It needs a material such as plutonium to transmute to uranium-233. True, following the 2008 Indo-US civil nuclear deal, supplies of uranium fuel are no longer a constraint.

However, uranium is expensive and India imports several thousand tonnes annually to meet the bulk of its requirement in 6,700 MW of nuclear power capacity. (In comparison, a mega coal-fired thermal power plant requires over a thousand tonnes of fuel per day.) India has decided to build 10 nuclear plants of 700 MW each using indigenous pressurised heavy-water reactor technology. But these again would have uranium as fuel, which means more imports and high opex. Even with the promise of cheap solar, India needs to develop nuclear capability, to eventually reap the fruits of fusion energy.

The way forward is to fast-forward indigenous technology such as the long proposed advanced heavy-water reactor, which would use 20 per cent uranium and 80 per cent thorium as fuel. We need to concretise plans for thorium power plants.