|
Blog Home
News Home
Write your Column at iVarta
India, Asia and Global
Breaking Stories, Latest News Headlines, Opinion, Analysis
Columns and Discussions Business, Social and Community Networking.
Comprehensive
Collection of India News, Articles, Columns, Analysis and Research Papers.
Facts about India, Indian History, Culture, Yoga, Meditation & Ayurveda and
more…
|
|
|
|
11/1/2007 2:59:52 PM
Author's Home Page
Views expressed here are author"s own and not of this website. Full disclaimer is
at the bottom.
(The author is a Professor in International Economics in Nagasaki University, Japan)
 Feedback to author
Indian media as usual is missing the main point of the debate and concentrating on the spoiler of the great-game CPI(M) without understanding where India’s interest should lie.
CPI(M) is not issue in this matter because even if that party would not exist, it is essential to understand the issue rather than going along with the wishes of the US government, who may or may not be interested in India’s gains or losses.
Although the Indian media and the government wants to promote the deal in terms of power generation, the deal has very little to do with power generation. Nuclear power contributes about 2 percent of the current electricity generations in India. At present, India was producing 3,300 MW. In 2020, the production would be 7,000 MW. According to the Planning Commission and the Prime Minister, the capacity of nuclear power would be 20,000 MW in the year 2020. In order to get there India will buy second-hand reactors from the U.S. to produce 13,000 MW of nuclear power. India will have to spend about Rs. 2 lakh crore for reactors and another Rs. 8 lakh crore to set them up with fuel facilities to achieve that goal. The Indian budget is only Rs. 6.5 lakh crore per year. Thus, India will spend two times more than the country’s annual budget on setting up these vintage reactors only. The cost of power will jump to Rs.7 a unit, which is double the present cost of nuclear power. Even if India were to achieve a 50% increase in nuclear power generation (which is unlikely) such a step would only increase India’s overall electricity output by one percent at most, and would only increase India’s overall energy output by a fraction of one percent.
Two questions should be raised. Why does USA so interested that India must accept the deal and why USA did not do anything but prevented India to develop nuclear energy for the last 33 years. The answer is that that the Indo-US nuclear deal has nothing to do with power generation, it has everything to do with nuclear non-proliferation. India so far has refused to sign the NPT (Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty) which would not allow India to develop or keep nuclear weapons but allow India to import civilian nuclear reactors which would be under the safeguard of the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Authority), whose Chairman, an Egyptian lawyer, has visited India recently to prepare the legal treaty to turn India into another Ukraine.
In 1974, USA has imposed sanctions so that India cannot get any nuclear related materials or technology. After 1998 USA has imposed more sanctions on India so that it cannot get any defense related technology or materials at all. However, India since 1974 has received every nuclear technology, and materials including conventional nuclear power plants, Fast Breeder reactors, reprocessing and enrichment plants and heavy water plants from the Soviet Union and Russia without any restrictions attached to these. As a result, India is nearly self-sufficient regarding nuclear technology and can produce nuclear weapons despite all the efforts of the United States to stop it.
Only for the last two years, because of its membership of the NSG, Russia now wants to supply nuclear power plants with added safeguards that the plants cannot be used to produce any nuclear weapons. However, at the same time, it has offered offshore nuclear plants to India, which would be without any restrictions. India can have both or either of the on-shore or offshore nuclear power plants from Russia and as a result for the future development of electricity production, India does not need US support at all. Thus, it really does not matter if India would refuse to sign the Indo-US treaty on nuclear energy.
Even if India needs nuclear power plants to supplement it energy requirement in future, India does not need nuclear power plants from USA. Russia can still supply whatever India needs at a much lower price.
The Treaty of Surrender:
Already the US senate has imposed a new clause in the Hyde Act that in future national security organizations of USA, which means CIA and FBI, would now collaborate with India regarding nuclear non-proliferation. This in effect would imply that US organizations would make sure India will not be able to gain any advantage to use its nuclear facilities to create nuclear weapons.
Section 104(d) (2) stipulates that transfers to India cannot begin without suitable changes in NSG guidelines. There are concerns related to the supply of nuclear fuel to the plants in India, which would be used to produce nuclear weapons, by using end-use monitoring of spent fuel by the International Atomic Energy Commission and the US organizations. Also there are provisions in the legislation, which would putt a cap on fissile material production. These would end India’s nuclear weapons programme.
About 90 percent of all nuclear facilities, including the Russian built Fast Breeder Reactors which can produce plutonium for nuclear weapons, will be included in the civilian sector and there will be regular inspection by the IAEA and the US authority to make sure that these facilities will not be used to produce nuclear weapons.
India for the military part of the nuclear sector will not be able to import technology or materials from any of the countries of the NSG, including Russia. Thus, India’s nuclear weapons programme will disappear. This is the real aim of the Indo-US treaty.
Dr Homi Sethna, former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and one of the founding-father of India’s nuclear programme, said that what Dr Manmohan Singh was about to sign was worse than joining the NPT regime. Dr A. Gopalakrishnan, former chairman of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, has outlined how precisely commitments made by Dr Singh to Parliament and the people have been blatantly undermined and notes that if the deal goes through in its present form, it will compromise the sovereignty of this country for decades to come. He has exposed the very enormous financial price that India will have to pay as well, between Rs 300,000 to Rs 400,000 crores in nuclear reactors that will be totally dependent for their existence on a yearly audit of our policies by the US Congress. Dr P.K. Iyengar, another former chairman of the AEC, has called the deal giving up sovereignty. These men have spent their lives translating an Indian vision of a self-reliant industrialization, crafted by Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, into reality. They do not have a political or personal agenda.
The US will not give India the right to reprocess spent. Reprocessing is needed to separate Plutonium 239, a byproduct from the first stage, and use it with thorium to fuel fast breeder reactors (FBRs), which is the second stage. The FBRs breed more fuel than they consume. In the third stage, the Uranium 233 (extracted via reprocessing) will fuel FBRs to generate electricity. The three-stage programme overcomes the scarcity of uranium by relying on the abundant reserves of thorium.
According to the US-based outfit Strategic Forecasting (commonly known as Stratfor), India owns more than 30 per cent of the world’s thorium reserves, compared to just 0.7 per cent of uranium reserves. It has said that using thorium made good economic sense but Uranium 233 also could be used to make nuclear weapons, and that was not something US President George W. Bush would like to see.
Reports in the Western media suggest that Thorium Power of the US and Red Star of Russia would jointly conduct research on the harnessing of thorium for use in commercial reactors. Australian Prime Minister John Howard has said that his government would support the efforts to develop a new generation of thorium-fuelled reactors. A Sydney-based firm is collaborating with British investors in this regard. However, according to the Indo-US Deal, Indian’s Fast Breeder Reactors, which can utilize Thorium to produce Plutonium, supplied by the USSR and Russia, would be under the control of the IAEA and the US authority, thus India will not be able to use these for either nuclear weapon. India also will not be able to use Thorium as it likes, because NSG will not supply the fuel for Fast Breeder as it would violate the Hyde Act of USA.
India decided on a three-stage nuclear program back in the 1950s, when Indias nuclear power generation program was set up. In the first stage, natural uranium (U-238) was used in pressurized heavy water reactors (PHWRs). In the second stage, the plutonium extracted through reprocessing from the used fuel of the PHWRs was scheduled to be used to run fast-breeder reactors (FBRs) built by the Soviet Union and Russia in India.
In the final stage, the FBRs use thorium and produce uranium-233 for use in the third stage reactors. India began the construction of the Advanced Heavy Water Reactor (AHWR) in 2005 with the help from Russia. Russian built FBRs will be ready by 2009.
The reason for Indias commitment to switch over to thorium, was its large estimated thorium reserves of some 290,000 tons, it ranks second only to Australia. This would help India to bring independence from overseas uranium sources and India would be in liberty to produce as many nuclear weapons as India likes. That is the precise reason Indo-US Deal will not allow India to utilize the Fast Breeder Reactors supplied by the Soviet Union and Russia, as India likes.
India already began the construction of the Advanced Heavy Water Reactor (AHWR) in 2005 with the help from Russia. The fuel for the AHWR will be a hybrid core, partly thorium-uranium 233 and partly thorium-plutonium. If, according to the Indo-US nuclear Deal India cannot reprocess the spent fuel to secure plutonium for the sake of converting thorium into fuel, the thorium reactors will never take off.
The second concern of the Indian scientists is the scope of full civilian nuclear energy cooperation (Section 123 of the U.S. Atomic Energy Act) that was promised to India in July 2005. India had assumed that this term encompassed the fuel cycle, namely enrichment of uranium and reprocessing of spent fuel. In the discussions leading to the adoption of the Hyde Act, U.S. legislators argued that the U.S. Atomic Energy Act of 1954 specifically forbids export of these technologies, as also heavy water production technology, to other countries. India has developed its own technologies with the help from the USSR and Russia since 1974 in these three important areas. All these now would go down the drain.
Alternative is still available:
It is not true that without the American support India’s nuclear energy programme would come to a halt. As Pakistan is getting everything regarding nuclear energy from China, India can also get nuclear power plants from Russia.
Without the nuclear deal India would be able to maintain its nuclear plants by using reprocessed plutonium as a fuel and using its own uranium in the conventional plants. It will continue to get offshore nuclear plants from Russia. In that case it will be at liberty to test further nuclear weapons in future. This is exactly what President Putin has suggested but India so far is not interested.
Russian atomic concern Rosenergoatom continues the construction of the first floating nuclear station (PATES). The project is supervised by the specially set up Directorship on Floating Nuclear Stations. PATES was designed by the N.Novgorod based OKB Afrikantova, which has a number of floating nuclear stations with different power levels for different regions and climates. All are based on the reactors that had been for decades used in Russian nuclear subs and icebreakers. The smallest (3 Mega Watt tons) unit costs just US$ 20 Million. Reloading of nuclear fuel takes place once in 12 years. Lifetime is 50 years. It is worthwhile to emphasize that this is the world’s first project of this kind. The head station will be used for Sevmash itself. KLT-40C (the reactor of PATES) with 70 Mega Watt power is sufficient for supplying the energy to a town with the population of 50 000 people.
The project of floating stations first originated in Russia as an idea to heat the northern regions along the Arctic Ocean. It can be used also as a station for making fresh water from the seawater. Foreign customers from Asia and the Middle East are interested in the Russian development before Russia made the first station for itself. Traditional Russian partners in China and India with their growing economies demanding more energy are viewed as potential customers. Indirectly this was confirmed during a meeting at Sevmash, where the president of Kurchatov Institute Evgeny Velihov drew attention to the opportunities of building international nuclear reactor.
India can certainly take advantage of this new technology, which can avoid the restriction imposed by the Nuclear Suppliers Group, as the offshore nuclear plants would outside the jurisdiction of either Nuclear Suppliers Group or the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. In that case India will at liberty to test and develop nuclear weapons any time it likes without any restrictions using plutonium from its FBRs and enriched Uranium from other nuclear plants. Given the fact that China has a massive amount of nuclear weapons and Pakistan can have unlimited supplies from China, India needs that freedom to develop its nuclear weapons without any restrictions. Indo-US Nuclear Deal will increase both real and perceived restrictions on India that would in reality destroy any credible nuclear deterrent for India against possible attacks from either China or Pakistan.
The real issue is whether India needs any US assistance at all regarding its nuclear energy sector. The argument of Man Mohan Singh, as he said in the Parliament recently, that otherwise India would be a nuclear ‘Pariah’ is false. In 1974, USA has imposed sanctions so that India cannot get any nuclear related materials or technology. After 1998 USA has imposed more sanctions on India so that it cannot get any defense related technology or materials at all. However, India since 1974 has received every nuclear technology, and materials including conventional nuclear power plants, Fast Breeder reactors, reprocessing and enrichment plants and heavy water plants from the Soviet Union and Russia without any restrictions attached to these. As a result, India is al most self-sufficient regarding nuclear technology and can produce nuclear weapons despite all the efforts of the United States to stop it.
Only for the last two years, because of its membership of the NSG, Russia now wants to supply nuclear power plants with added safeguards that the plants cannot be used to produce any nuclear weapons. However, at the same time, it has offered offshore nuclear plants to India, which would be without any restrictions. India can have both or either of the on-shore or offshore nuclear power plants from Russia and as a result for the future development of electricity production, India does not need US support at all. Thus, it really does not matter if India would refuse to sign the Indo-US treaty on nuclear energy.
Even if India needs nuclear power plants to supplement it energy requirement in future, India does not need nuclear power plants from USA. Russia can still supply whatever India needs at a much lower price.
Section 103 of the Hyde Act suggests that the US would oppose development of a capability to produce nuclear weapons by any non-nuclear weapon state within or outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty regime. The section requires the US to work with the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group to further restrict transfers of equipment and technologies related to uranium enrichment, reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel and production of heavy water to all countries, including India. The legislation also requires the US government to seek to prevent transfer of these equipment and technologies from other members of NSG or from any other source if the transfers are suspended or terminated. Section 104(d) (2) stipulates that transfers to India cannot begin without suitable changes in NSG guidelines. There are concerns related to the supply of nuclear fuel to the plants in India, which would be used to produce nuclear weapons, by using end-use monitoring of spent fuel by the International Atomic Energy Commission and the US organizations. Also there are provisions in the legislation, which would putt a cap on fissile material production. These would end India’s nuclear weapons programme.
When India will sign the Indo-US treaty, Pakistan without any treaty with the US will receive whatever it wants from China and will go on producing nuclear weapons but India cannot. The reason is that the treaty will force India to separate Indian’s nuclear facilities including the research institutes into two groups, military and non-military. About 90 percent of all nuclear facilities, including the Russian built Fast Breeder Reactors which can produce plutonium for nuclear weapons, will be included in the civilian sector and there will be regular inspection by the IAEA and the US authority to make sure that these facilities will not be used to produce nuclear weapons.
If India, in this situation, wants to keep its option for nuclear weapons, it needs to reconstruct every facility once again at a prohibitive cost. India for the military part of the nuclear sector will not be able to import technology or materials from any of the countries of the NSG, including Russia. Thus, India’s nuclear weapons programme will disappear. This is the real aim of the Indo-US treaty. Man Mohan Singh’s recent declaration in the Indian parliament that India would maintain the option to test nuclear weapons is very theoretical. In practice, India will be unable to do that because of lack of availability of appropriate facility to develop and test nuclear weapons in near future.
China-Pakistan Collaboration:
Pakistan and China have finalized in August 2006 landmark accord on nuclear energy cooperation, under which Islamabad will acquire 6 Chinese nuclear reactors. The nuclear energy cooperation deal with China has brought great solace to Pakistan, as the United States is not willing to extend such cooperation to Pakistan. With Chinese cooperation, Pak would build six new nuclear reactors in next 10 years having capacity of 2,000 megawatts. This was part of Pakistan’s plan to increase the capacity of N-power generation to over 8,000 megawatts by 2025. China has already helped Pak build a nuclear reactor of 350 megawatts at Chashma and it was currently building one more at the same place with the same capacity.
China has already supplied Pakistan enrichment plants and heavy water plants, and nuclear weapons as well. Chinese nuclear plants offered to Pakistan will not be under the control of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Thus, Pakistan can very well use these to produce nuclear weapons. Although China is a member of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) of 45 nations and a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), China like in all other international spheres does not care about its obligation to any international treaty if its national interest demands so. China’s national interest is to set up Pakistan against India by providing every weapons and missiles it has got.
China has so far violated every rule of the NPT (Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty) and NSG (Nuclear Suppliers Group) by supplying nuclear power plants with enrichment facility, which can produce nuclear weapons to Pakistan, North Korea and possibly Iran. For that USA will never dare to impose any sanction against China.
Conclusion:
The prospect for India in this situation is very bleak but the government of India itself is creating it. In the case of nuclear deal with the US also, India just like in 1991 and 1995 is accepting a subordinate position in relation to USA and the Western countries. USA will never accept any inspection of its nuclear facility by the IAEA. It will carry on developing new nuclear weapons and will test those in laboratory conditions. It has no separation of nuclear facilities into military and civilian sectors. However, India is accepting inspection of its nuclear facility by the American authority without demanding any corresponding right of inspection of the American nuclear facilities by the Indian authority. Just like other two treaties, with IMF in 1991 and with WTO in 1995, this Indo-US deal on nuclear energy is unequal, discriminatory and unjust.
The government of India is not going to consult the people regarding this matter of Indo-US nuclear deal. Just like in 1991 and in 1995 the government of India has surrendered to the Anglo-American imperialism very gladly by going against the public opinion. This is certainly not a sign of a democracy, but of an unpatriotic dictatorship within a democratic set-up.
U.S. Congress does not need to take any action until a formal agreement for nuclear cooperation has been negotiated with India, and until the International Atomic Energy Agency has agreed with India upon suitable inspection arrangements, and until the Nuclear Suppliers Group has decided whether to change its rules to accommodate the deal. Once an agreement is made and presented for consideration, U.S. Congress can add more conditions that seem warranted.
The result will make Pakistan much stronger than India in very near future. That serves the geo-political interest of the United States with Pakistan as the bridge to the Islamic world as Pakistan was the bridge to China in 1971, when both USA and China were about to attack India jointly to save East Pakistan. The unfolding scenario will ruin India in the process when India will be forced to surrender also to the demands of Pakistan, a NATO ally of USA and China, the most important business partner of the U.S corporations and on whom the fate of the US Dollar depends. Thus, it would be a total surrender for India to the U.S. This is the real issue, which Indian media is ignoring.
Feedback to author
References & Notes:
Author's Home Page
|
|
|
|
|