India has enhanced its activities relating to Uraniumexploration in the country, as a result of this, we have been able to identifynew resources of Uranium and reserves have registered a steep increase of about70 per cent, Dr Ratan Kumar Sinha, the Chairman of Atomic Energy Commission(AEC) said.
This comes as great news for the India’s nuclear powerprogramme, which is expanding its power generation capacity.
“Nuclear power generation in India continues to grow due tothe improvement in supply of uranium from domestic as well as internationalsources and, this year, it has registered an increase of about 23% over thatgenerated last year. The average annual availability of the reactors has alsoincreased from 83% to 91%,” Dr Sinha said addressing the 56th GeneralConference of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) at Vienna onWednesday.
India continues pursuit of the three-stage nuclear powerprogramme, formulated under the visionary leadership of Dr Homi JehangirBhabha. This programme underlines our strategy of adopting a closed nuclearfuel cycle in order to extract the maximum energy from the limited uraniumresources, to ensure sustainable nuclear waste management and, above all, toachieve long-term energy security through utilisation of thorium.
Dr Sinha said India has recorded a production of PHWR(Pressurised Heavy Water Reactor) fuel of 751 MT in 2011-12, which is anincrease of about 15% over the production in the previous year. As you areaware, India has already successfully closed the nuclear fuel cycle for itsPHWR programme.
“The new reprocessing plant (PREFRE-2) mentioned last year,has completed the first year of its operation with outstanding performance. Theadjoining facility of our second advanced vitrification system at Tarapur hasbeen giving excellent performance in the vitrification of high level nuclearwaste,” Dr Sinha, who is leading the Indian delegation, told the internationalgathering of nuclear experts, scientists, technocrats and diplomats.
In March 2012, the 540 MWe indigenously built Tarapur AtomicPower Station unit-3 (TAPS-3) achieved a period of uninterrupted operationlasting 522 days. With this, till date, ten of our reactors have had continuousruns of over a year, with three of them registering over 500 days of continuousrun, the longest being 590 days.
The work on the construction of the first of the two 1000MWe Light Water Reactors (LWRs) at Kudankulam is complete. "The operationof unit-1 is expected to commence shortly and the commissioning of the secondunit is expected to follow early next year," Dr Sinha told the conferenceeven as there were protests at Kudankulam.
Construction of four indigenously designed 700 MWe PHWRs,two each at existing sites of Kakrapar in Gujarat and Rawatbhata in Rajasthan,is on schedule and these will be progressively completed by the year 2017.
The construction of the 500 MWe Prototype Fast BreederReactor (PFBR) is proceeding well at Kalpakkam. The construction andinstallation activities in the Reactor Vault are nearly complete, with all themajor reactor equipment in place.
The Fast Breeder Test Reactor (FBTR) at the Indira GandhiCentre for Atomic Research (IGCAR) has continued to operate smoothly, providingvaluable operating experience as well as technical inputs to India’s fastreactor programme. Post-irradiation examination of the test fuel subassemblyfor the Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR), which was irradiated in FBTR toreach a peak burn-up of 112 GWd/t, has provided valuable data and generatedconfidence in the design and manufacture of the fuel.
