20 New Nuclear Power Plants to be Commissioned in Country by 2031

India plans to commission 20 nuclear power plants by 2031, adding nearly 15,000 MW in power generating capacity, the government told the Lok Sabha.
India plans to commission 20 nuclear power plants by 2031, adding nearly 15,000 MW in power generating capacity, the government told the Lok Sabha. The first of these 20 nuclear power plants, a 700 MW unit, is expected to be commissioned in 2023 at Kakrapar in Gujarat, which already has three atomic power generating units operational.

Nuclear Power Plants in India

There are 22 reactors in the nation running above 80% plant load factor as of 2021, with a combined installed capacity of 6780 MWe. There are four light water reactors and eighteen pressurised heavy water reactors (PHWRs) in total (LWRs). Under Homi J. Bhabha’s direction, India’s nuclear energy programme was started around the time of independence.

The Mumbai-based Apsara Research Reactor is Asia’s first nuclear power plant. India has a little indigenous uranium deposit; hence the country must import uranium from other nations to fuel its nuclear power industry. Russia has been India’s main source of nuclear fuel since the 1990s.

Nuclear Power Percentage in the World

As of 2009, India envisaged increasing the contribution of nuclear power to overall electricity generation capacity from 2.8% to 9% within 25 years. By 2020, India's installed nuclear power generation capacity was expected to increase to 20 GW. In fact, the 2020 capacity did not exceed 7 GW, as the 2018 operating capacity was only 6.2 GW, and only one more reactor was expected online before 2020. As of 2018, India stands 13th in the world in terms of nuclear capacity. Indigenous atomic reactors include TAPS-3 and TAPS-4, both of which are 540 MW reactors.

The Indian nuclear power industry is expected to undergo significant expansion in the coming years, partly due to the passing of the U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Agreement. This agreement will allow India to trade nuclear fuel and technologies with other countries and significantly enhance its power generation capacity. When the agreement goes through, India is expected to generate an additional 25 GW of nuclear power by 2020, bringing the total estimated nuclear power generation to 45 GW.

Risks related to nuclear power generation prompted Indian legislators to enact the 2010 Nuclear Liability Act which stipulates that nuclear suppliers, contractors and operators must bear financial responsibility in case of an accident. The legislation addresses key issues such as nuclear radiation and safety regulations, operational control and maintenance management of nuclear power plants, compensation in the event of a radiation-leak accident, disaster clean-up costs, operator responsibility and supplier liability. A nuclear accident like the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster would have dire economic consequences in heavily populated India as did the 1984 Union Carbide Bhopal disaster, considered among the world's worst industrial disasters.

India has already been using imported enriched uranium for light-water reactors that are currently under IAEA safeguards, but it has developed other aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle to support its reactors. Development of select technologies has been strongly affected by limited imports. Use of heavy water reactors has been particularly attractive for the nation because it allows Uranium to be burnt with little to no enrichment capabilities. India has also done a great amount of work in the development of a thorium centred fuel cycle. While uranium deposits in the nation are limited there are much greater reserves of thorium and it could provide hundreds of times the energy with the same mass of fuel. The fact that thorium can theoretically be utilised in heavy water reactors has tied the development of the two. A prototype reactor that would burn Uranium-Plutonium fuel while irradiating a thorium blanket is under construction at Kalpakkam by BHAVINI.

Uranium used for the weapons programme has been separated from the power programme, using uranium from indigenous reserves. This domestic reserve of 80,000 to 112,000 tons of uranium (approx 1% of global uranium reserves) is large enough to supply all of India's commercial and military reactors as well as supply all the needs of India's nuclear weapons arsenal. Currently, India's nuclear power reactors consume, at most, 478 tonnes of uranium per year. Even if India were quadruple its nuclear power output (and reactor base) to 20 GW by 2020, nuclear power generation would only consume 2000 tonnes of uranium per annum. Based on India's known commercially viable reserves of 80,000 to 112,000 tons of uranium, this represents a 40–50 years uranium supply for India's nuclear power reactors (note with reprocessing and breeder reactor technology, this supply could be stretched out many times over). Furthermore, the uranium requirements of India's Nuclear Arsenal are only a fifteenth (1/15) of that required for power generation (approx. 32 tonnes), meaning that India's domestic fissile material supply is more than enough to meet all needs for it strategic nuclear arsenal. Therefore, India has sufficient uranium resources to meet its strategic and power requirements for the foreseeable future.

Two IPHWR-700 reactors are under construction at the Kakrapar Atomic Power Station in Gujarat. Former Indian President A. P. J. Abdul Kalam stated while he was in office that "energy independence is India's first and highest priority. India has to go for nuclear power generation in a big way using thorium-based reactors. Thorium, a non-fissile material, is available in abundance in our country." India has vast thorium reserves and quite limited uranium reserves.

The long-term goal of India's nuclear program has been to develop an advanced heavy-water thorium cycle. The first stage of this employs the pressurised heavy water reactors (PHWR) fuelled by natural uranium and light water reactors, which produce plutonium incidentally to their prime purpose of electricity generation. The second stage uses fast neutron reactors burning the plutonium with the blanket around the core having uranium as well as thorium, so that further plutonium (ideally high-fissile Pu) is produced as well as U-233. The Atomic Minerals Directorate (AMD) has identified almost 12 million tonnes of monazite resources (typically with 6-7% thorium). In stage 3, Advanced Heavy Water Reactors (AHWR) would burn thorium-plutonium fuels in such a manner that breeds U-233 which can eventually be used as a self-sustaining fissile driver for a fleet of breeding AHWRs. An alternative stage 3 is molten salt breeder reactors (MSBR), which are believed to be another possible option for eventual large-scale deployment.

In June 2014, Kudankulam-1 became the single largest power generating unit in India (1000 MWe). In January 2021, India's atomic energy secretary K.N. Vyas announced that the 700-megawatt pressurised heavy water reactor of the Kakrapar Atomic Power Station would be the first of the 16 such units planned in the country.