World News @lemmy.ml lntl @lemmy.ml 1 yr. ago

New 700MW nuclear plant in Gujarat, India, begins running at full capacity

www.power-technology.com /news/nuke-plant-india-begins-operations/

NPCI is building two 700MW pressurised heavy water reactors (PHWR), including Units 3 and 4 at Kakrapar, where there are two 220MW power plants. Officials say that in July, the fourth unit recorded 97.56% progress.

Wonder why they're building these instead of thermal coal plants

28 comments

The important bit:

NPCI also plans to build a total of 16 700MW of nuclear plants at Rawatbhata, Rajasthan and Gorakhpur, Haryana.

The Indian Government has further approved the construction of ten indigenously built PHWRs across the four states of Haryana, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka.

The plan is to ramp up the present nuclear capacity from 7.48GW to 22.4GW by 2031.
- That'll be huge for India. I imagine with that big of an increase in their power generation, that the quality of life for a huge swathe of Indians will improve.
  
  Distributing solar cells and batteries in rural areas would probably be cheaper and help more people.
- The important bit:
  
  Is that India has limited uranium but lots of thorium...
  
  And their over all strategy to get around that includes "coincidentally" making a shit ton of weapons grade plutonium...
  
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/India's_three-stage_nuclear_power_programme
  
  That plan from decades ago was to make a few of these so they dont burn through their uranium before they have enough plutonium to start using the thorium.
  
  What Modi is doing doesn't make sense for that plan, he's moving to fast and investing too heavily in phase 1.
  
  It only makes sense if he didn't care about long term nuclear power, and just trying to make as much plutonium 239 as possible. Which would be worth an absolute shit ton of you have no ethics on who you sold it too...
  
  And Modi has spent the last couple years openly saying he doesn't give a shit about other countries and is fine doing business with anyone.
  
  I'd be surprised if India had trouble finding someone to sell them uranium. Thorium is still a generation away.
  
  And their over all strategy to get around that includes "coincidentally" making a shit ton of weapons grade plutonium...
  
  I browsed the Wikipedia page you linked and there’s a lot of info, could you maybe point me to which section details that part?
  
  Permanently Deleted
  
  India has nuclear bomb doesn't it? The plutonium would be for them I expect. There are more than some nuclear powers around them.
We need this badly. It's the stop-gap until we get fusion reactors online. Nuclear is a clean energy as long as it's maintained correctly.
- Fusion reactors might be hundreds of years away, if they are possible at all.
  
  But nuclear power is perfect for bridging such long times. This unit took 16 years from planning to full operation. So we won't be done soon, if we go this route.
  
  We've had several net positive fusion tests. I believe they're possible. The science is there. How long it takes is another matter.
It's interesting that India is building lots of heavy water reactors, because they produce tritium, which would be useful for bootstrapping fusion: https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-power-may-run-fuel-even-gets-started
- Makes having a robust nuclear weapons program cheaper too. It's the primary maintenance cost in maintaining modern nuclear weapons. Due to the short half life of tritium and it turning into neutron absorbing He3 you need to refresh it every 10 years or so for each bomb.
  
  No no, definitely fusion. Not nuclear bombs.
  
  Oh and the plutonium produced will be stored in our super safe facility over here. Please don't look into it.
  
  A sufficiently-large pile of cash could redirect that tritium from weapons to fusion development when the time comes. Seems better than not having enough supply anywhere.
India likes CANDU based reactors like this because they don't want to enrich uranium. They focus on plutonium production for their bombs and want to eventually create plutonium breeder reactors for a thorium fuel cycle.

Edit: the fact that they natively breed tritium without a dedicated lithium channel is good for fusion or variable yield bomb initiators too.
700MW isn't much, but I see they plan to build 16 which is a bit more significant (2023 usage is 236.59 and rising). Are they planning to ramp up 15GW by 2031 using these planned plants? The math checks out on the generation, but it does not check out on the timeline. 2 more are reportedly largely complete, but on the other hand 10 have just received approval. These appear to mostly be similar designs, and for context this particular unit took three years from achieving criticality to supplying power.

I have some other concerns/questions about the plan other than what appears to be an impossible timeline - like how well they've modeled the risk of local climate change on their cooling ponds. It's not that nuclear is bad, I'm just wondering if the priorities were correctly evaluated here - or if things like corruption might be at play.
- isn't much compared to what?
Mmmm exlusion zone roulette

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