Special Report-India US and Tarapur

Business India, October 25-November 7, 1993

Fuel for Controversy

The nuclear energy industry finds itself in an impossible situation strapped as it is for both fuel and funds. It has survived against great odds and could do much more in terms of energy generation if things improved.

Shivanand Kanavi

A delegation from the ministry of ex­ternal affairs, which also included the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission returned on 7 October 1993 from Washington after the latest round of discussions with their US counterparts. The members of the team didn't have much to celebrate on their return, for negotiations between India and US continue to be dead­locked over the issue of Tarapur fuel.

Meanwhile, on 24 October 1993, the treaty between India and US for nuclear co­operation, that involved the setting up of two Boiling Water Reactors and supply of low enriched uranium (2.4 per cent U235), expires. The 30-year-old treaty has seen many ups and downs in Indo-US relations in the field of nuclear energy, which started with co-operation but are now bogged down in contentious negotiations, if not outright confrontation.

Under the agreement, after calling for global tenders General Electric, the US built two Boiling Water Reactors, each capable of producing 210 mw of electricity. The two reactors went critical in February 1969 and commercial operations began on 28 October 1969.

Following the Pokharan blast in 1974, and the passing of Nuclear Non-prolifera­tion Act by the US congress in 1978, Tara­pur faced severe problem regarding spares as the US placed an embargo. This led to the Tarapur reactors getting downgraded from 210 mw to 160 mw.

The US applied the 1978 Act retroac­tively and stopped fuel supply from 1983, ten years before the contractual obligations ended. The reactors require 40 tonnes of fuel each. Ten tonnes of it need to be changed every 18 months. The spent fuel if chemically processed, this highly radioac­tive waste will yield Plutonium 239. This isotope of plutonium can be used to make nuclear weapons or to run a nuclear reactor. Hence, the spent fuel in nuclear industry attracts more attention than the actual fuel itself.

To prevent misuse of this plutonium for a weapons programme, a strict accounting procedure has been set up by the Interna­tional Atomic Energy Agency. IAEA in­spectors periodically visit the country and meticulously record the movement of every gram of uranium and plutonium from the fuel assembly stage to storing, loading in the reactor core and storage of spent fuel. In Tarapur reactor they even have two remote controlled cameras continuously video re­cording the fuel elements.

A tripartite agreement was made be­tween India, US and IAEA that the latter will subject Tarapur reactor fuel to safe­guards. The arrangement has worked so far with no friction between IAEA and India, In fact, Hans Blix, director general of IAEA said in Bombay recently, "There have been extremely good relations between Indio and IAEA. Even as the tripartite agreement expires, India and IAEA have entered into 0 bilateral safeguards agreement in anticipation of successful conclusion of a tripartite treaty.

The problem then is with the US. It tried to persuade India to sign the NPT, which would have placed all its nuclear establish­ments, including those built indigenously and supplied with indigenous fuel, under the "safeguards". India has staunchly re­fused to sign the treaty on the grounds that it discriminates between weapon states and others.

R. Chidambaram, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, takes pains to explain that India is not for proliferation 01 nuclear weapons. He says, "India does not agree with NPT in its present form which only seeks to prevent horizontal proliferation while doing noth­ing about vertical proliferation." If the US did not want to com­plete the contract, then India could have exercised its right to remove safeguards from the spent fuel in Tarapur and repro­cessed it in 1983, enabling it to use the recovered plutonium whichever way it wanted.

The US averted such a con­frontation by allowing France to supply the fuel for ten years. The uranium hexafluoride gas that used to come in cylinders from France was converted into uranium dioxide powder at the Nuclear Fuel Complex, Hyderabad. Here it was converted to pellets and loaded into fuel rods made of zirconium alloy. This was a major advance in India's fuel fabrication capability from the early days when the entire fuel used to come in the form of fabri­cated fuel rods from the US.

However, in 1992, France also signed the NPT, along with China and South Africa and several others, and brought further pressure on India to put all its installations under full scope safeguards, Since India did not agree to do so, France also did not want to continue the supply after the end of the contract in October 1993.

India has a strong legal case in going ahead with reprocessing the Tarapur fuel and extracting plutonium from it. It has built adequate facilities for the same in Tarapur. Since India has not yet developed large scale uranium enrichment facilities, it wants to run the Tarapur plant with a mix­ture of uranium and plutonium oxides called MOX fuel. Some bundles fabricated with this fuel have already been tested at the Cirus research reactor in Trom­bay. After trying out a couple of bundles in the core of the power reactor, India plans to use MOX bundles on a large scale in 1995.

The present stocks of low enriched uranium will last till then and, in fact, may be another year if managed prudently. India surprised the US team in Wash­ington recently by offering to continue the bilateral safeguards with IAEA for another two months and later conclude an annual agreement regarding the same. "Since the plutonium extracted from Tara­pur is put back into Tarapur under IAEA safeguards, there can be nothing more non­-proliferative and peaceful than this," says Chidambaram.

Atomic energy sources indicate a soft­ening of US stand on reprocessing and are hopeful of an amicable solution to the vexed issue. As a quid pro quo, Bill Clinton's administration seems to be interested in enlisting Indian support to a new proposal to agree to enforce a cut-off on the produc­tion of all weapon grade fissile materials like highly enriched uranium and plutoni­um. Chidambaram says, "We have no ob­jection in principle to this since it does not affect our peaceful nuclear energy pro­gramme and, for the first time, sounds non- discriminatory between wea­pon states and non-weapon states. However, we have yet to see the detailed proposal."

The international confer­ence to review NPT is coming up in 1995 and it is possible that with the current push be­ing given by the Clinton administration towards vol­untary moratoriums on tests and other confidence building measures, reduction of tension in West Asia, etc, there may be a wider consensus on how to achieve non-proliferation and an agenda for gradual disar­mament. If such a thing does come into being, then India might have very little moral justification for not signing the NPT in its new avatar.

Indian strategy to be energy indepen­dent and the embargoes imposed on transfer of nuclear technology to India after Pokha­ran, led to considerable development of indigenous capabilities in instrumentation and adaptation of the Canadian Pressurised Heavy Water Reactor technology.

However, from a plant engineers' point of view, Boiling Water Reactors are much easier to operate, Though Tarapur itself was state-of-the-art in BWRs in the '60s, by now six new generations of BWRs have come out and none of the original genera­tion are still working in the world except at Tarapur. The reason is that while BWR-I had a capacity of 210mw the present BWR-6 are advanced in every way be­sides producing 900 mw to 1,100 mw.

Due to the technology em­bargo India has totally missed these developments, It is the sheer ingenuity of Indian nu­clear engineers that has led to upgradation of Tarapur to BWR-3 level in various re­spects, Besides, while MOX will get rid of the problem of storing highly toxic plutoni­um, the already downgraded Tarapur reactor will be further downgraded power wise since the loading cycle for MOX is much shorter (nine months instead of the existing 18 months), thereby leading to further loss of generation.

Interestingly, the rest of the BWR-I s were shut down not because of any inherent design problems or accidents but due to the fact that operating costs for a 100 mw plant of that generation are nearly the same as that for a 1,000 mw plant. They proved uneconomical. However, in an energy-starved India, 320 mw is 320 mw.

The bane of Tarapur, as with the rest of nuclear power programme, has not been technology, but the tariff structure. As K. Nanjundeswaran, exec­utive director, corporate planning and co-ordina­tion, of the Nuclear Power Corporation, ex­claims. "If we are not given a rational tariff structure that will help us generate funds f(x plant modernisation and ex­pansion, then it be­comes meaningless to say that the govern­ment will not give us budgetary support and we have to expand based on internal re­sources."

B.K. Bhasin, chief superintendent at Tara­pur, is proud that the once barren industrial landscape of Tarapur is now filled with over 1,500 medium and small scale industries involving an invest­ment of over Rs.2,000 crore. At the same time, he rues the fact that the Maharashtra State Electricity Board, which pays 57 paise per unit to Tarapur, then sells it outside the plant gate at Rs. 1.75 to the adjoining indus­trial units. Says Bhasin, “The whole ap­proach towards power product ion has been altruistic. It is not based on economics leave alone market economics. After all, when we started production we were forced to sell power to Gujarat and Maharashtra at the rate 01'5 paise per unit. In those days, at least there was budgetary support. But in today's atmosphere of lessening state intervention in all fields, which translates to no budget­ary support to PSUs, how can we continue the same policy?"

S.K. Chatterjee, managing director of the NPC. claims that dues from the SEBs now stand at Rs.530 crore. Thermal power companies gets World Bank loans, but not nuclear power companies. "If we have to borrow from the market at the high interest rates prevailing and then, considering the world average of 7 to 8 years for the con­struction of a nuclear power plant, there is no way I can expand. Already a number of my projects are stuck for lack of funds," says Chatterjee.

He adds, "The Tarapur story does not end with reactors 1 and 2 or MOX. The next stage of reactors 3 and 4 will be the first 500 MW Pressurised Heavy Water Reactor that will use natural uranium as fuel. The reactor design group in Bhabha Atomic Research Centre has designed the new reactor and the main elements of the reactor have already been constructed by L& T and Walchandna­gar and others. The land is being acquired next to reactors I and 2 and the infrastruc­ture built for the new reactors is already in place. At such a moment, when one can reap the benefits of earlier investments in build­ing the infrastructure from scratch, for a modern nuclear power station, the corpora­tion is strapped for funds. It is very frustrat­ing." Chatterjee, incidentally, shared the excitement in the Golden Age of nuclear energy in India in the '50s and '60s, with Bhabha and others.

"I need about 3,000 mw of generating capacity to start earning profits of the order of Rs. 250 Crore to Rs.300 crore on which I can borrow further and expand," says Chat­terjee. "I need an investment rate of about Rs. 1,000 Crore a year to complete my projects. We have already placed orders and a number of items are ready under the advanced procurement schemes. But due to lack of money now I am stuck."

Having been spawned under the highly secretive Atomic Energy Act that prohibits even the Parliament from probing the De­partment of Atomic Energy too deeply, the atmosphere so far in the DAE has been very complacent. NPC, however is bringing in the first breeze of a corporate culture. Peo­ple in the headquarters or plants and con­struction sites talk frankly without looking over their shoulders.

So what is the way out of this resource crunch? NPC is looking at many options. Strategic Con­sultants, a financial con­sultancy, is working out ways to raise funds. One possibility is to set up separate corporations in the joint sector to operate the Tarapur complex. It would be easier to raise money when there is al­ready some generating capacity and, on top of it, one will get new capacity which will be paid for at new rates. New plants like Kakrapar are paid Rs.2.13 per unit of power.

Whatever be the strategy chosen, 25 years af­ter India's nuclear adventure began, it is clear that with minimal support much more can be done. In recent years, India's nuclear scientists have not been treated like the unalloyed heroes they were in the' 50s and '60s. As Nehru perceptively remarked while inaugurating the Apsara reactor in 1957, "In Greece, there were the mysteries and the high priests, who apparently knew about these mysteries. They exercised a great amount of influence on the common people, who did not understand them. Now we have these mysteries which these high priests of science flourish before us, make us either full of wonder or fear."

The position of the high priests of nucle­ar science has been sullied worldwide af­ter Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. Therefore, it is to be expected that they would not get the same adulation as they got before. However, looking at all sides, Indian nu­clear scientists have performed creditably and could perform even better if they lose the bureaucratic outlook that has dogged them for the last 40 odd years.

Special Report--Nuclear Power

Business India, Special Report, April 5-18, 1999

Reaching a Critical Mass

For energy-starved India, nuclear power is proving to be an economic necessity that needs governmental support. Private sector too can get seriously interested in it if long-term debt instruments can be introduced for this sector.

Shivanand Kanavi

The sun rises in the east for nuclear power. No, it is not a -parody of a Maoist hymn of Cultural Revolution vintage. Suddenly things are looking up for nuclear power. And it is mainly due to developments in Asia. How did an industry that was assailed as a "sunset industry" make this turnaround? No new reactors are being built in Germany, US and Nordic countries. But that is a superficial view, because hardly any power units have been added in these energy saturated economies recently and the discovery of cheap gas has led to marginal additions of a few gas-based projects.

But at the turn of the century, power hungry Asian economies are adding thousands of megawatts of nuclear power. South Korea, Japan and China have 15 reactors under construction that will add a handsome 13,000 MW. Another 22,000 MW are being planned for the future (see table Nuclear power programmes in Asia). The primary reason is, like India, these economies are also highly dependent on imported oil and gas. Naturally, they want to diversify their energy sources, so that they would not be caught on the wrong foot, as world fossil fuel reserves deplete in the 21st century. In fact, it has become abundantly clear now that each country has to prepare a long-term energy plan based on its energy reserves and aspirations. There can be no global blueprint.


Nuclear Power Corporation: High Wattage Performance
Particulars 1995-96 1996-97 1997-98 1998-99
Generation 7,983 9,071 9,618 10,189
in million units
Plant load factor 60% 67% 71% 73%
Income in Rs crore 925 1,233 1,285 1,400
Net profit in Rs crore 152 253 267 288
(Source: NPC)

Due to its capital-intensive nature and relatively long project execution time adding heavy interest during construction, some have argued it to be uneconomical. These arguments gained some credence due to teething problems of the early reactors built in India and elsewhere. In India, master­ing a new technology when all outside help was denied, took time. Develop­ing a decent time frame for the manu­facture and erection of complex equipment required new project management skills. Training the nascent Indian industry in learning high precision, zero defect manufac­ture had to be carried out painstak­ingly when there was no great economic incentive to do so.

These efforts have now paid off not only in developing a decent nuclear industry but developing high precision fabricating skills that have come as a boon to engineering companies like L&T, Godrej, Walchandnagar, BHEL, MTAR and others in these days of global competition. The civil construction involved in a nuclear station has also been mastered by companies like Hindusthan Construction and ECC. As newer safety measures are added to make reactors earthquake proof, flood proof, direct air crash proof, and worst case scenarios are added new sturdier designs are being made of containment domes involving pre-stressing. Some of these have taken time to fall into place. For example, the pre-stressed inner containment dome at Kaiga station of the Nuclear Power Corporation (NPC) under construction partially collapsed due to certain design errors. Failure analysis, design reviews took almost three years and the new design needed the use of high performance concrete (M-60) which had never been used in India before. The developmental work took away valuable money and time. But once it was done the domes at Kaiga and Rajasthan for four new reactors under construction have come up in breathtaking time. Two reactors are undergoing final tests before fuelling and going critical in July 1999. Two more will do the same in 2000. The operational engineers at NPC also had to get focused and learn to operate power stations at high capacity factors while taking care of safety inspections and procedures. Today they have shown that they can do it. The long dark night seems to be over for Indian nuclear power.

"My chief focus after I took over has been to constantly remind the opera­tional team that in the final analysis we are a utility company and as such our performance will be judged by how much and how safely are we producing power. That is what has led to continu­ously rising capacity factors in all our plants. What the company needed was clarity of roles, stress on manpower training and stress on achieving targets .. Once that was brought in, all stations are performing excellently," says Y.S.R. Prasad, chairman and managing direc­tor of NPC. This approach has mattered a lot. What is going to convince the government to allocate funds to this sector is finally hard-boiled economics. After all the projections are done and strategic energy plans are discussed threadbare, one has to look at profits and return on investments.

NPC has consistently performed well in the last three years and might yield a net profit of over Rs325 crore on a slim base of 1,820 MW and that too from power that is sold for 82 paise per unit at Tarapur to Rs2.50 at Kakrapar. NPC has thereby become the envy of other power utility companies in public or private sector. (see table High Wattage Performance)

Today India's meagre oil resources are under tremendous pressure. Bombay High production has fallen in this decade and no new fields have been discovered. In fact the pressure to produce more oil in the 1980s led to flogging the wells regardless of prudent reservoir management. This led to alarming rise in gas to oil ratio and water to oil ratio. As better sense prevailed production came down from 21 million tonnes in 1986 to 14 million tonnes in 1992-93. Only the commis­sioning of Neelam fields led oil produc­tion to rise back to 18 million tonnes in 1996. It is clear, however, that even to get oil at this level the fields have to be nursed properly using better oil recov­ery methods.

Nuclear power programmes In Asia





(as of Dec 31, 1996)
Country In operation Under construction Planned Total

China 2.3 GW 3.2 GW 7.2 GW 12.7 GW
India 1.8 1.9 4.9 7.6
Indonesia 0 0 1.8 1.8
Japan 42.7 3.6 6 52.3
N.Korea 0 0 2 2
Pakistan 0.1 0.3 1.5 1.9
S.Korea 9.6 6.1 8.2 23.9
Taiwan 5.1 0 2.7 7.8
Total 61.6 14.8 34.3 109.9

(Source: "'Nuclear Energy in Asia's Power Sector' - The Atlantic Council, December 1997)


The situation with coal is blacker.
The quality of coal is getting worse. The ash content has reached 40 per cent in many mines which led a wit to remark that if the ash content crosses SO per cent Coal India may have to be renamed as Ash India. The higher ash content is leading to increasing cost of beneficiation (reducing ash content by washing the coal) and thus fuel cost. In a coal-based thermal power plant a major share of cost of power comes from the fuel. Thus thermal power is becoming more expensive. Even then ash content in coal used in thermal power stations is large enough to create serious environmental problems. lf one uses imported South African and Australian coal which has much higher calorific content, as many steel makers are doing, then there are other prob­lems. Such coal has higher sulfur content and there is the additional cost of installing proper anti-pollution equipment, so that environmentally harmful nitrogen and sulfur oxides, that cause acid rain, are not poured into the atmosphere.

There is growing concern about greenhouse gases disturbing global weather. Some scientists are already postulating that it is not a distant prospect, but that the unusual weather patterns found recently are a direct result of global warming. In OECD countries there are serious moves to impose carbon tax of about $130 per tonne of carbon added to the atmos­phere on polluting industries. lf such moves continue then even in devel­oped economies coal-based power will become 50-100 per cent costlier while combined cycle gas-based power will become 25-50 per cent more expensive.

Nuclear power stations however are already sticking to international radia­tion emission norms and the costs of waste disposal are included in the project cost. Thus increasingly the balance is tilting in favour of nuclear energy. What was once considered as a future option in the 21st century is fast becoming an option here and now. In energy starved India's case, where the nation would have to start paying elec­tricity bills in dollars to independent power producers like Enron, nuclear power stations built in India will not only provide jobs but will consume Indian fuel which will not be linked to the exchange rate. Thus, economic logic heavily favours more investment in nuclear power.

This realisation is sinking in govern­ment circles as well. In a report titled 'Generating Capacity Planning Studies in India' dated November 1998 the Central Electricity Authority has recommended an addition of about 5,000 MW each of nuclear power in the Ninth and Tenth Plan periods. An opti­mal capacity mix proposed in the report for thermal hydro and nuclear is63 per cent, 32 per cent and 5 per cent respectively.

The main problem nuclear power faces is high capital cost. There is the additional problem of no soft loans available from the World Bank as is true for thermal power. Debt raised from the market is not long term enough besides being expensive. "The borrowing with maturity period less than 10 years puts pressure on the liquidity position of the company as repayment obligations occur in the initial phases of the opera­tion," says Prasad. "The only way out is to introduce long-term debt instru­ments," he adds.


A study done by the International Atomic Energy Agency, Vienna, shows that at a discount rate of 5 per cent (without considering carbon tax and other environmental taxes), nuclear can easily compete with thermal power whereas at a discount rate of 10 per cent thermal becomes more competitive. A more detailed study done by NPC, for 2x500 MW nuclear and thermal units (at a distance of over 1,200 km from pit­head western and southern India, which would be commercially avail­able in 2004-05 AD, assuming 1997-98 price level) nuclear power will be cheaper at 5 per cent discount and will level with thermal only at 6.7 per cent. This shows that higher capital cost is the main problem with nuclear power as it is known that fuel costs are anywhere between 12-17 per cent for nuclear while they are as high as 40-50 per cent for thermal. Moreover coal prices are likely to go up faster than nuclear fuel prices in the future.

Though Electricite de France and Modis had publicised their intention of entering the Indian nuclear power sector, no serious proposal seems to have reached the Department of Atomic Energy. This has also been confirmed by R. Chidambaram, chairman, Atomic Energy Commis­sion. "We would like to investigate the possibility of joint ventures but prob­lems will continue till long-term soft debt is not available to this important section of energy infrastructure," says Prasad. It is clear that such instruments cannot come into being from funds available to banks and financial institu­tions. Only when insurance companies and provident fund trusts are allowed to invest in such infrastructure projects can long-term cheap funds flow into nuclear power. Then NPC'S technology and operating experience, Atomic Energy Regulatory Board's supervision, private sector's better project manage­ment skills can all blend into a highly efficient nuclear power programme.

Major industrial disasters like Bhopal and Chernobyl in the 1980s swung public perception from the blind faith (of the 1950s and the 1960s) in scientists to bursts of irrationalism and anti-science. Peddling "alternate this" and" alternate that" became fash­ionable and later even big business.

Many well meaning souls forgot that the standard of living achieved by a fairly large section of people on this planet and aspired to by an even larger number of people especially in Asia and the developing world, requires large scale industrialisation and highly interdependent social production, which in turn needs abundant energy. At the end of 1990s, economic realities are sinking in and safety features in nuclear reactors too have greatly improved. It goes without saying that unlike Europe and North America's industrial revolutions, which were environmentally dirty, the newly industrialising Asia could leapfrog into more environmentally benign technologies. Nuclear power is proving to be one of them.

All that you never wanted to know about Nuclear Engineering

• Fission: Splitting heavy nucleus of say uranium using a slow neutron to "produce smaller daughter nuclei, plenty of energy and many more' neutrons.
• Chain reaction: If the fission of a single nucleus can produce one more neutron which can be used to split another nucleus and so on, then the reaction can be self-sustaining and is called a chain reaction ..
• Isotope: A chemically identical form of an element but with slightly differ­ent atomic mass. like U 233, U 235 and U238'
• Heavy water: Hydrogen has a heavier isotope called deuterium. Water formed by combining heavy hydrogen and oxygen instead of ordinary hydrogen is called heavy water.
• Moderator: A material such as ordi­nary water, heavy water or graphite that is used in a reactor to slow down fast neutrons thus enhancing the fission rate.
• Uranium: The heaviest element normally found in nature. It has three main isotopes: U 233 - a fissile mater­ial but not found in nature. It has to be artificially produced by bombarding thorium with neutrons. U 235 - a fissile material but natural uranium contains only 0.7 per ·cent of this isotope. U 238 - a non-fissile material, which constitutes 99.3 per cent of natural uranium. It can however be used to produce PU239 by bombarding with neutrons ..
• Plutonium: Not a naturally occurring element. One of its isotopes, PU239' is fissile while others are not. Plutonium can be produced by bombarding U 238 with neutrons.
• Thorium: A rare earth element found naturally in the beach sands of Kerala. It can be converted into fissile U 233 by bombarding with neutrons.


Heart of the matter

A nuclear power plant is similar to a coal-fired plant except for the way heat is produced. In a thermal plant coal or gas is burnt. In a nuclear plant, the fuel consists of uranium or plutonium whose tiny nuclei (radius 10 -12 cm) are split, using a subatomic particle called the neutron as the scalpel. This results in the release of a large amount of energy. However, there is a substantial difference in the efficiency of the two processes. In fact, one ton of uranium can produce as much energy as 2.5 million tonnes of coal.

Natural uranium consists of two types (isotopes) - of uranium U 238 (99.3 per cent) and U 235 (0.7 per cent). However, only U 235 is fissionable. But extracting U 235 or increasing its percentage (enriching) is a highly expensive process, even though a power reactor needs only 3-4 per cent enrichment while a bomb needs very high enrichment (80 per cent and above). India's uranium reserves are limited to about 78,000 tonnes. So the choice in front of Homi Bhabha and his associates in the 1950s was to look for a reactor that did not need enriched uranium as fuel

Canada came up with such a reactor known as Pressurised Heavy Water Reactor (PHWR), which uses natural uranium with­out enrichment while using heavy water as a moderator. Canada offered the technol­ogy at very attractive terms and even showed willingness to involve Indians to some degree in developing and stabilising the design. However, Canada built only one such reactor in Rajasthan and aban­doned the other reactor half-way in pique after India exploded a nuclear device at Pokhran in 1974. Incited by the US, it cut off all further contact, aid and even infor­mation regarding nuclear matters.

Indian scientists had to, with great difficulty, develop capabilities to build and improve these PHWRS and then trans­fer the technology to a nascent industry. Indian engineering industry had no expe­rience in large-scale precision fabrication. It could just about fabricate equipment for dairies, cement plants or small chemi­cal plants. But today, the painstaking developmental work has paid off and companies like L&T, BHEl, Walchandna­gar, Godrej, MTAR and others can willy-nilly produce not only the 220 MW reac­tors but the more modern 500 MW PHWRS as well.

PHWRS are the workhorse of NPC - an undertaking of the Department of Atomic Energy - corporatised in 1987. It is esti­mated that the present uranium reserves are sufficient to produce 10 GW per year (1 GW is 1,000 MW) for 30-odd years. At the same time, the beach sands in Kerala contain more than 360,000 tonnes of thorium. In appropriate conditions, thorium can be converted to another fissionable isotope of uranium (U 233).

So the current wisdom in nuclear plan­ning consists of producing about 10 GW of power by using PHWRS. The spent fuel of PHWRS can be reprocessed to obtain another fissionable material- plutonium (Pu 239). The plutonium produced is less than uranium consumed. But if we mix plutonium, uranium and thorium and burn them in a Fast Breeder Reactor, then more plutonium is produced than consumed and thorium is converted into fissionable U 233 as well - hence the name "breeder reactor". This U 233 produced in a breeder reactor can be mixed with thorium and again burnt in a reactor to produce power. Thus, in a three-stage programme, India's nuclear resources can be optimally utilised.

India has mastered PHWR technology and has moved ahead to design a 500 MW reactor on its own. But development of Fast Breeder Reactor technology is still at R&D stage at Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research, Kalpakkam. Meanwhile scientists at Bhabha Atomic Research Centre have also produced small amounts of U 233 by bombarding thorium and demonstrated the feasibility of the three-stage nuclear programme by building a small research reactor using U 233.


Interview: Nuclear power is ready to take off

"There is no single energy plan at a global level. Each country has to examine its particular conditions and devise one for itself. In India's case Nuclear Power has to be an important component. The learning curve is over. Our own R&D, Indian industry, trained manpower, etc have all reached a critical mass. The nuclear power programme is ready to take off", said Dr R.Chidambaram, chairman, Atomic Energy Commission, while talking to Shivanand Kanavi


How is the fund allocation for nuclear programme now?

The lack of funds during the Eighth Plan hurt the power programme. Now it is better. The funding has gone up from Rs1 70 crore during 1993-94 to Rs900 crore this year. This should continue during the Ninth Plan. Four 220 MW units are coming on stream this year and the next. Two 500 MW units are going to come up at Tarapur, and civil work has already started. We are hoping to get funding for another four units of 220 MW and four more of 500 MW have been planned but are yet to be sanctioned money.

What is holding up the Fast Breeder programme? Is it funds?

No, it is not funds. Technology development itself takes time. Now the Fast Breeder Test Reactor at Kalpakkam is functioning very well. A lot of R&D work has been done. The sodium coolant circuit is functioning well. Excellent burnout rates of 40,000-50,000 MW per tonne have been achieved. Now the 500 MW Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor's design is being reviewed by Atomic Energy Regulatory Board. Once we get the go-ahead we will start making the prototype. It should be ready by about 2001 .

If there are snags in the Fast Breeder Programme then is there any way of using our thorium reserves?

The Advanced Heavy Water Reactor (AHWR) designed by Anil Kakodkar and his team in BARe will use a mixture of oxides of uranium and plutonium in the central zone of the core, while a mixture of thorium and uranium 233 will be used in the outer areas. So, that is one way to start using thorium even before we master fast breeder technology and go over to thorium-uranium reactors. AHWR is a very interesting design. It has not only advanced safety features but also uses light water as coolant.

It is believed that India can make bomb grade highly enriched uranium. So why can't we make reactor grade low enriched uranium and develop a Pressurised Water Reactor (PWR) - which is much easier to operate?

No comments on the first part of your question. If there is enough need for low enriched uranium then we can do it. It is not technologically beyond us. The issue is economic. Once we get more experience with PWRS by working with the two 1,000 MW Russian reactors which we are buying from the Russians, then we can go for PWR design as well.

There is a feeling that if India signs the nuclear non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) then it will help the power sector. What is your view?

There is no question of India signing the NPT in its present form. If they are ready to change the NPT and let us sign it as a nuclear weapon power, then it is a different issue. We are ready for safeguards for any installation that has been built with external assistance. Other installations are off bounds. Just as the Chinese or any member of the nuclear club do. If these changes take place then of course there will be easier flow of technology, turnkey projects, fuel, etc. Even with meagre funding we have kept nuclear technology alive, since it is the technology of the future as far as energy is concerned.

Today we cannot access soft loans from the World Bank for funding nuclear power. Will that change if we sign NPT?

The World Bank is not funding nuclear projects anywhere. So to that extent it will not change by signing the NPT. But it is being increasingly realised that for developing countries and especially in Asia, nuclear power is an integral part of modernising the infrastructure. So even the World Bank might eventually change its stand.

Safety--Indian Nuclear Plants

Business India, March 14-27, 1994

Crying Wolf

Exaggerated fears about safety in the Indian nuclear power industry obscure the more pressing regulatory issues.

Shivanand Kanavi

A fortnight ago the American TV network, CBS, broadcast a film on India's nuclear power stations -Another Chernobyl? The film described the Indian nuclear programme as the most dangerous in the world and cited numerous 'instances' of unsafe operating practices at Indian nuclear power plants. Unfortunately, in its eagerness to titillate a jaded American TV audience, CBS overstated its case. Sensational they may be, but such exaggerated accounts, in fact, obscure and detract attention from the very real technical and safety problems that bedevil the nuclear industry everywhere.

Concern has, however, centred on what CBS correspondent Steve Kroft described as "the crack in the Rajasthan reactor.” Unit I of the Rajasthan Atomic Power Station, at Rawatbhatta, commissioned in 1972, has developed certain problems, which have worried nuclear engineers. It is important to understand the nature of these problems.

The crack in the 'endshield' was discovered in 1981. The endshield is an attachment to the main reactor vessel called the 'calandria’. The fuel bundles pass through the end shield and are defuelled or refuelled through it, on line. The endshield does not contain radioactive fuel or the heavy water coolant that is used both to draw the heat away from the nuclear reaction to the steam generator and as a moderator to control the chain reaction within the limits suitable for steady power production. Plain water is circulated through the endshield chamber. Unlike the heavy water, this water does not become radioactive. Due to a minute crack in the endshield some of this water was found to have trickled into the containment chamber. It did not cause any release of radioactivity inside the reactor or to the outside environment.

The reactor was immediately shut down, and investigations revealed that the crack had been caused by embrittlement due to neutron bombardment of the carbon steel plate. The reactor had been designed by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited. They too had faced a similar problem earlier at their plant at Douglas Point, in Ontario, Canada, and subsequently had changed over to another material for fabricating the endshield. But following the 1974 nuclear explosion at Pokhran, Canada had ceased all nuclear co-operation with India, and Indian nuclear engineers had to fall back on their own resources to deal with the problem.

The Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, the Indian watchdog body for safety in all installations handling radioactive materials, immediately stepped in. The AERB along with reactor engineers at BARC and the Nuclear Power Corporation decided that the crack would not increase nor would it lead to greater seepage if the reactor were operated at half its designed power level, of 220 MW. Since then RAPS-I has been operating at a power generating capacity of 100 MW and the crack is being continuously monitored.

The crack has caused more worry to the power engineers than to the safety personnel. Indium foil, which has the property of changing shape under pressure and seeping into cracks, thereby sealing them, has been pressed onto the endshield crack. The fuel channels near the crack have also been defuelled as abundant caution. Attempts are also on to design methods to reach the endshield and replace it with a new stainless steel one. These attempts will take some time to fructify but can then be used profitably at all reactors as they ‘age’.

Even in the worst case scenario of the end shield cracking open and all the water pouring out, there will be no radioactivity released, either inside or outside the station. The reactor will be immediately shut down and unless methods are developed to safely clean the leaked water and replace the endshield, the reactor will be permanently shutdown by the AERB.

The other problem that is being monitored in RAPS-I&II and MAPS-I is the sagging of the primary heat transfer tubes within the reactor. These are tubes containing pressurised heavy water which carries away the heat from the nuclear fission taking place inside the fuel bundles. These pressurised tubes are separated from the calandria tubes by a concentric gap of 8mm by garter springs placed at intervals. While the heavy water in the primary heat transfer tubes is at about 270 degrees Celsius, the calandria tubes are surrounded by cold heavy water, used as a moderator, at 70 degrees Celsius.

It has been observed that due to vibrations within the PHT tubes, the springs tend to shift from their positions leading to a lack of support at certain portions of the PHT tubes. The weight of the zircalloy PHT tube containing heavy fuel bundles makes it then sag. If the sag leads to contact with the colder calandria tube, a local cold spot which develops at the point of contact leads to the accumulation of deuterium in the zircalloy tube at that point, which can lead to blistering and even a possible rupture, leading to the coolant draining away from the PHT tube. Even in such an eventuality the heavy water is still not released outside the reactor. The reactor will have to be shut down and the particular tube isolated. The same loss of coolant in a boiling water reactor will lead to an extremely serious accident, as witnessed in the Three Mile Island, US. The Indian pressurised heavy water reactor is much safer in that respect.

When such blistering was observed in the Pickering reactor, in Canada, the Canadians switched over, in 1983, to a better material called niobium-stabilised zircalloy with a greater support of a larger number of more or less fixed garter springs. Again, due to the embargo on Indo-Canadian nuclear exchanges, the information reached India only in 1985. Since then all reactors are being periodically monitored for any sign of sagging using an ultrasonic probe developed by BARC. BARC and the NPC are also developing a complex retubing machine that can change the old tubes with the newly developed niobium-stabilised zircalloy tubes. The newer reactors at Kaiga and Kakrapar are fitted with these newer tubes.

Another worrisome problem is the corrosion of some valves that use cobalt alloys. Their corrosion, though very small, leads to cobalt being exposed inside the reactor to radiation which coverts into radioactive Cobalt-60. This isotope has a long half-life and poses an exposure risk to workers carrying out maintenance. However, a very positive development in this regard is the development of a chemical method using dilute organic acids to remove this CobaIt-60 from the system. It has been recently used successfully in MAPS-I; the results showing the reduction of radiation ranging from 50 to 97 per cent was reported in the last week of February at the International Conference on Operational Safety of Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors.

Conversion of small amounts of heavy water in the reactor to the deadly tritium is another problem that is monitored in all Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors, Recently BARC has also developed a method to remove tritium from the heavy water used in reactors. Its on-line application is still to be developed but has given a fillip to all those concerned with safety.

Dr A. Gopalkrishnan, a nuclear engineer from the University of California, at Berkeley, who worked on reactor designs and safety in various establishments in the US for 15 years, now heads the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board. While being proud of the achievements of our scientists and engineers regarding safety, he has a very clear agenda for higher safety standards in Indian nuclear power stations. Right now no individual worker is exposed to more than internationally accepted levels of radiation, but this is being achieved by using more manpower and rotating them so that the accumulated dosage per person is still at international levels.

But Gopalkrishnan is not satisfied with this arrangement. Most exposure happens not during the operation of the plant but while maintaining it or carrying out some repairs. He says, "More attention to local shielding, training repair crews using mockups prior to the job so that they spend the least amount of time in radiation zones, semi-automation of maintenance and inspection jobs, will definitely bring the total dosage of all workers in a plant to international levels.” Internationally acceptable radiation exposure levels are continuously being scaled down, leading to pressure on our own nuclear establishment to better safety practices.

Following the fire at the Narora Unit-l power station in March 1993, the AERB initiated a planned shut down of all nuclear power stations to check for faulty turbine blades. Cracks in a few blades in the General Electric-designed generator at Narora had led to the fire that caused damage worth over Rs.75 crore and considerable revenue loss due to plant shut down. Though over 50 such sets worldwide have shown cracks after prolonged usage, the sets used in India tend to break down earlier due to unstable conditions in the Indian power grid system. Due to wide load fluctuations, the frequency of the alternating current in the grid varies widely between 49 Hertz and 51.5 Hertz, leading to dangerous vibrations in the turbine.

The AERB' s insistence on checking all the turbines meant a loss of revenue for the NPC, but already the precaution has yielded results. Four blades with cracks were found in MAPS-l in Madras recently by the independent consulting group from the Central Mechanical Engineering Research Institute that carried out the tests. Though very new, the Kakrapar-I turbine is also being checked and, in fact, all blades are being replaced with design modifications made by BHEL. The Narora fire was not in the reactor but in the turbine and the safety systems of the reactor operated as designed. That is why although it was a financial disaster; the fire was classified on the Nuclear Events Scale - a sort of nuclear 'Richter scale' - as a level-3 incident and not an accident.

When asked why no official report has been published so far about Narora to allay public fears and permit informed debate, Gopalkrishnan says, "My aim is to make at least safety related information as publicly accessible as possible. Instead of leaving this to the individual initiative of the chairman of the AERB, it is better that it is statutorily recognised as well."

Regarding some of the questions raised by the critics about the radiation hazard at the thorium-rich, monazite sands in Kerala and the unusual number of deformities among people in villages around the Rawatbhatta power station, Gopalkrishnan says, "A highly rigorous epidemiological study is being conducted at Chavara, Kerala, by the regional cancer research institute. In another year the results will be available. Let us wait till then. Meanwhile, no such epidemiological work can be conducted in the villages around the Rawatbhatta plant since the sample size is too small to come to any conclusion. However, according to the suggestion of Dr Sanghamitra Ghadekar (an activist who has herself painstakingly collected the Rajasthan data and who is asking for a scientific investigation), I am going to constitute a panel of genetic and medical experts to analyse it from that angle and see. After all, as far as radiation from the Rajasthan power station is concerned, it has been continuously monitored and no dangerous level of radiation has been released outside."

Given the pressure on PSUs to become profit centres and the temptation on part of managements to take short cuts, the question of safety in nuclear power stations assumes new significance. Due to increased openness shown by the AERB, more individual workers, as well as unions, are directly approaching the AERB, often anonymously, with safety related complaints. The AERB is examining the complaints. However, there is a need to develop a second opinion regarding safety and nuclear engineering. In this respect, it is inexplicable that the NPC is not utilising the safety audit services offered by the International Atomic Energy Agency. After all, the safety services are independent of signing the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and, in fact, Indian experts have participated in such multinational teams to check safety in others' plants.

There is, however, no excuse for not developing nuclear engineering faculties in some academic institutions, like the IITs and the Indian Institute of Science, which can then provide the expertise for a second opinion as well. Besides, without questioning the authenticity of the data provided by the health physics division of BARC, which checks the release of radiation to the environment at all power stations and monitors the individual doses absorbed by each worker, it is clear that constituting the division as a separate body will enhance the credibility of the nuclear programme.

Lastly, while the developments in indigenous nuclear R&D have been impressive, particularly in the light of the embargo both in the supply of equipment and technical information to India, the weaknesses are there for all to see. For example, while all the reactors are working at lower than their rated capacity, the natural focus should be on carrying out well-focused R&D. At this stage the hurry to also develop advanced reactor systems, fast breeder prototype reactors, etc, shows that, without solving the problems at hand, there is a tendency to go on to the next prestigious project. In fact, it is most puzzling that BARC wants to have its hand in every scientific pie, whether parallel processing, superconductivity, or lasers, which can very well be done by other academic and R&D institutions. It would do well to concentrate instead on making our nuclear programme both safer and economically successful.

The International Nuclear Event Scale

Level and Examples

Major accident, 7 ,Chernobyl, USSR, 1986

Serious accident, 6, None

Accident with off-site risks, 5, Windscale, UK, 1957 and Three Mile Islands, USA,1979

Accident mainly in installation, 4 , Saint- Laurent, France, 1980

Serious incident, 3, Narora, India, 1993, Vendellos, Spain, 1989

Incident, 2 , None

Anomaly, 1, None

Special Report--Bhabha Atomic Research Centre

Business India September 6-19, 1999


Thorium is the word

Often criticized for being covered in a shroud of security and secrecy, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre has been the incubator of many strategically important technologies. Today Anil Kakodkar is focusing BARC on developing thorium technology for power generation

Shivanand Kanavi

When you are finally able to get through the security shielded gates of BARC understandable after Pokhran-II - and enter its labs ensconced in verdant surroundings in Trombay, you are likely to hear only two words - Thorium and mum. Ask director Anil Kakodkar or any senior scientist about the future of BARC and they will say, "Thorium". But if you want to know anything about Pokhran-I1, thermonuclear bombs, nuclear submarines, and so on, be warned - mum's the word.

A band of highly motivated scientists and engineers went about building Apsara, the first nuclear reactor in Asia, more than 45 years ago at the Atomic Energy Establishment, Trombay. Today they have converted that marshland into a veritable storehouse of science and technology. "As far as scientific and engineering expertise goes, I think we have a goldmine here," says Anil Kakodkar. A 56-year-old nuclear engineer, Kakodkar threw away several offers from the private sector after his graduation from VJTI, and joined the atomic energy establishment against the wishes of his friends and relatives, but he has not looked back since then.

"Every day here, is a challenge for an engineer or a scientist. We have vastly grown since those early days and today have over 4,500 scientists and engineers on this campus and about 10,000 technicians and support staff. Naturally the informality that existed then is difficult to maintain, but as for scientific dissent, we thrive on it. In fact, if we had all the division heads here for this discussion on BARC we may not have a very peaceful session!" he says.

Is the money spent on BARC commensurate with its output? One observer who preferred to remain anonymous said: "Half of India's R&D budget has gone into atomic energy. Is that justified?" This is a question often asked both by the lay public and in scientific circles, though it has been muted after the five nuclear explosions in Pokharan in May 1998. For most people BARC has always meant the bomb, but why are scientific circles envious of BARC? The answer, naturally, is money. When research funding in India has been meagre the fight for a share of the pie becomes intense.

Indian universities are starved of research funds. Even leading universities do not have any. Many top-ranking universities have cut down the number of research journals they used to subscribe to for want of money. As for modernising labs and other infrastructure, the less said the better. Increasingly, they are being asked to raise funds from non-governmental sources, primarily industry and alumni. Even the blue-eyed boys of higher education and research in the IITS found it traumatic when they were told that government funds were no longer available.

However, the IITS have been lucky. Criticised for their flight to North America, it is these very alumni that are coming to their aid. The IITS are increasingly tapping them for funds and are having some success. Kanwal Rekhi, a successful entrepreneur in the Silicon Valley, is in fact confident that nearly $500 million can be raised from IIT alumni worldwide if the idea is marketed properly. University Department of Chemical Technology at Mumbai has pioneered non-governmental fundraising through industrial consultancy and donations from alumni. Of course, it helps when UDCT'S alumni practically run India's chemical industry. But one swallow does not a summer make.

The 44 national laboratories of CSIR which form the largest chain of publicly-funded R&D labs in the world have an annual budget only twice that of BARC! However, CSIR saw the writing on the wall in the late 1980s and, in the past five years, under R.A. Mashelkar's leadership, has implemented a vigorous programme of innovation and technology marketing worldwide. This is making a positive impact on R&D in India in terms of a trend, though the large numbers have yet to come. In such a situation, would you grudge a scientist outside atomic energy and space a little bit of heartburn?

So what has been the outcome of R&D at BARC? Strategically it is clear that the single most important contribution to India's nuclearisation programme has come from BARC. Its founders were way ahead of their times and invested in a small way in many technologies that have proved strategically indispensable. For example, reprocessing spent fuel from power reactors and some research reactors leads to recovery of fissile material like plutonium, which can be used to either build fission bombs or fuel other power reactors. It is obviously a dual-use technology.

Research into reprocessing started way back in 1963-64, much before any fuel needed reprocessing. In fact, India is one of the very few countries today which has this complex chemical technology. This work has two aspects. One, obviously, was Pokharan-I in 1974. But it also led to reprocessing at an industrial level, so that today reprocessing plants at Trombay, Tarapur, and Kalpakkam are operating with BARC technology. The simultaneous work on fast breeder reactors with French help has led to important cumulative experience in this technology so that a new Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research has been built at Kalpakkam near Chennai to develop this further towards building a 500 MW-prototype fast breeder reactor. Such a reactor will produce more fissile material than it consumes, roughly in a ration of 1:1.2, and hence the name 'breeder'.

Similarly, the unit in BARC which assembled instruments for controls at Apsara and later CIRUS (Canada-India Research Reactor) was spun off as Electronic Corporation of India (ECIL), which produces control instrumentation not only for all the reactors but also for several defence projects. The work done on heavy water production using a new hydrogen sulphide process has been industrialised under the Heavy Water Board, which runs several plants that produce heavy water for the power reactors.

A small group at BARC known as the Atomic Fuel Division took on the challenge of fabricating fuel for the Apsara, CIRUS, and Tarapur plants despite the fact that the original equipment suppliers from the UK, Canada, and the US were ready to supply it themselves. This work led to the large industrial Nuclear Fuel Complex at Hyderabad that fabricates all the fuel elements required for the power reactors. The isotope division, which used research reactors like CIRUS and, later, Dhruva to produce over a hundred radioactive isotopes for medical and other applications, has spun off another industrial unit, BRIT (Board for Radiation and Isotope Technology). Today over 150 hospitals practice nuclear medicine and about 500 laboratories use radio-immuno-assay techniques. Nearly a million patients a year in India are investigated using radio isotope techniques developed at BARC, with isotopes made industrially by BARC. Moreover, 350 commercial organisations have sprung up to service the need for isotope radiography used in non-destructive testing of industrial plants.

The nuclear power plants themselves require a lot of R&D work for operation and maintenance. Some of it involves advanced reverse engineering in adverse circumstance when you do not even possess the drawings of spares, as in the case of Tarapur Atomic Power plant, in other cases it involves innovative work to keep the power running. For example, Kakodkar is proud of the work done to get the reactors at Chennai on line when they were about to be shut down for good because of a moderator manifold collapse in the heart of the reactor. Similarly, when the coolant channels in the two Rajasthan reactors had to be replaced, BARC developed the expertise and the robotics required - a highly complex engineering challenge. Till then only Canada had the technology, but the BARC-NPC technology was much cheaper and accomplished the task in less time and well within the radiation exposure limits.

"If you want to discuss the commercial or industrial applications of R&D carried out at BARC then these are some major ones. Our mandate has been to develop the technology of applying nuclear energy for power and other purposes. It is clear that BARC has been the mother institution for the entire nuclear industry in India," says Kakodkar. "The monies earned through transferring some of the spinoff technologies like the enzyme-based process to manufacture invert sugar, used heavily in biscuits and the confectionery industry, or particle size analysers are used in the pharmaceutical industry, etc, are incidental. Unlike CSIR laboratories, which were set up to develop processes and technologies for existing industry and earn money through royalties and licensing, were set up to give birth to many industries which did not even exist," says A.K. Anand, director of the Reactor Projects Group, who is in charge of technology transfer and international relations.

"For example, the expertise in robotics developed at BARC under M.S. Ramkumar's leadership is of a very high standard. We had to develop it to build an online fuelling machine for the power reactors and then a coolant channel inspection system for the same.Just then Indian Oil Corporation, which owns over 6,000 km of overland cross-country pipelines, tapped this expertise. Thus came into being the Instrumented Pipeline Inspections Gauge (IPIG), which will soon be tested on the Patna-Barauni pipeline. Since IOC pays over a Rs11akh per kilometre for such an inspection to foreign companies who hold proprietary technologies, the development of IPIG is very welcome," says Kakodkar. "Similarly, several groups started working on parallel processing in the early 1990s in India when the Cray XMP computer was denied to us and even the purchase of the Cray XMP by the meteorological department had several humiliating conditions attached. Our supercomputer group produced Anupam, which has reached 1.3 gigaflop speed and is the only Indian supercomputer that is successfully running the weather modelling programme," he adds.

Being such a hi-tech centre, isn't BARC concerned about intellectual property rights (IPR)? "We are slowly becoming aware of IPR in the case of non-nuclear technologies and are preparing to protect some of our innovations. As far as strategic technologies are concerned the issue does not arise. If somebody is ready to licence these technologies for a fee there is no problem. We can then say there is a free market for technology. But if such technologies are brought under sanctions and embargoes, where is the issue of patents?" asks Kakodkar, warming up to the subject of IPR.

"In the 1950sand 1960s, when there was hardly any high-technology infrastructure in the country. But now that there are the IITS, the CSIR labs, etc, is it necessary to do everything under one roof and that too such diverse things as biotechnology, lasers, and parallel processing?" ask some critics. Kakodkar says things are changing. He believes in networking and that is why there is an increasing emphasis on partnering with universities, the IITS, and the CSIR labs. At the same time he claims that only four engineers worked on Anupam and that, some of the biotechnology was a by-product of work being done with nuclear applications in mind. "We have a simple guideline to approve projects - they have to be relevant or excellent. That gives a general focus to the work. The specific focus, of course, is thorium, while work on isotope technology will continue," he says.

What is thorium technology and what is its relevance to India? "India has a limited supply of uranium (estimated reserves are only 78,000 tonnes) as against 518,000 tonnes of thorium. Therefore, to achieve long-term energy security, it is imperative to develop technology for large scale electricity generation using thorium," says R.K. Sinha, head of the reactor engineering group. (see box)

While the reactor engineering group is busy setting up critical facilities for advanced heavy water reactors that will use large amounts of thorium as fuel, K. Balu and his group at the nuclear recycle group are already studying reprocessing and waste treatment for thorium. Balu's group is credited with having developed the vitrification technology that will immobilise highly radioactive nuclear waste in a glasslike structure so that the waste will not leach out. This glass will be further covered by two stainless steel jackets and then lowered into a thick concrete vault built into basaltic rock. The site is chosen so that there is very little seismicity in the area and no fissures that carry groundwater. "The technology is there, though it will be used several decades later," says Balu.
Thus the whole cycle of making fuel bundles, designing reactors that will burn thorium, reprocessing the spent fuel, and disposing of waste are being worked on today with thorium as the centre. "Just as the technology that we are now using in power reactors was developed about 30 years ago, we need to start developing technologies that will be used 30 years hence," says Kakodkar.

Pokhran fallout

"A major management technique that Kakodkar is associated with at BARC is the formation of multi-disciplinary task forces," says A.P. Jayaraman, a senior scientist who now heads the public awareness division. "We have at least 20 major task forces operating today," says Kakodkar. "The composition is purely need-based and not hierarchical. These groups also work in a very transparent way - nobody can hide behind technical jargon to explain why he did not fulfill his task"
Like all hi-tech organisations in the country, BARC is losing up to 30 per cent of its young scientists working in computers and electronics within five years of their joining. But Kakodkar points out that this is happening in the IT industry itself. Pokhran-II, of course, has helped attract young people to BARC. Recently, when he went to deliver the convocation address at IIT Madras, the generally self-effacing Kakodkar was faced with hordes of IIT graduates asking for his autograph. "For the first time in my life," he says.

Did Pokhran-II create butterflies in his belly? "Surprisingly, no. In fact the only time I remember spending a sleepless night was when, as a young engineer at BARC 30 years ago, I went ahead with designing and putting together a high-pressure, high¬ temperature loop beg, borrow, or steal. The day before it was to be tested I could not sleep as I had not listened to the traditional wisdom of some of my senior colleagues and had done what I thought was right. But the next day it worked." Kakodkar still carries the courage of his convictions, but has grown wise enough to carry his junior and senior colleagues with him. At BARC undoubtedly there is a spring in everybody's step. Pokhran has contributed to it in no small measure and Kakodkar's leadership no less.


BARC budget
Rs crore
1996-97 1997-98 1998-99 1999-2000
Revenue
(salaries, Consumables) 220 290 330 340
Capital ex (new assets) 42 57 103 200


Unlocking thorium secrets

India would be a leader in nuclear technology if it develops the thorium cycle for power.

Thorium has several advantages over uranium.
• Worldwide thorium deposits are three times more than that of uranium. In India’s case it is nearly seven times.
• Thorium is a more fertile material than natural uranium, i.e. there will be a larger percentage of thorium 232 converted to fissile uranium 233 than uranium 238 converted to plutonium 239 in the existing pressurised heavy water reactors.
• Thorium is a better conductor of heat and that makes the fuel bundles last longer in the reactor without significant deterioration.
• Long-lived radioactive by-products (actinides) which create waste disposal problems are produced in much less quantity in the thorium fuel cycle than with uranium.
BARC today is concentrating on all elements of a thorium fuel cycle, from fuel fabrication to reprocessing and extraction of uranium 233 while avoiding the complications posed by the highly radioactive U232, and then disposing of the waste produced during the thorium cycle. For experimental purposes thorium is already being loaded into existing power reactors. This has not only helped in power-flattening in the core of the reactor but also provided some quantity of U233. Exposing thorium to neutrons in the Dhruva research reactor has also generated small quantities of U233. A new research reactor Kamini has been built using U233 and thorium.

The whole three-stage nuclear programme might take considerable time for both technological and financial reasons. For example, according to the original plan, 10,000 MW was supposed to be produced by 2000. However, after the Nuclear Power Corporation placed orders with equipment suppliers for advanced procurement and so on, funding was withdrawn by the Central government. That left both NPC and Indian industry involved in hi-tech nuclear fabrication high and dry.

Business India is witness to the fact that two 500MW reactors, which will now be erected in Tarapur around 2004, were already fabricated and lying ready in 1993 at BHEL, Walchandnagar, and L&T! Thus the biggest brakes on India’s nuclear power programme have been the planners in Delhi rather than the Department of Atomic Energy.

In such a situation Kakodkar and his team at BARC have come up with an innovative intermediate solution called the advanced heavy water reactor (AHWR). This technology is highly competitive compared to the existing technologies in several ways:

• Instead of heavy water, ordinary water is used as a coolant.
• The complexity of steam generation is greatly reduced, thereby reducing delivery time.
• Natural convection used in safety systems reduces the capital costs considerably.
• It is thermally more efficient due to the use of moderator heat in preheating feed water.
• Coolant channels can be constructed on an assembly line, thereby reducing construction cost and time.
• It is safer than existing reactor technologies.
The additional advantage of AHWRs will be the use of a large amount of thorium in the fuel. However, since nobody in the world yet possesses thorium technology, BARC’s efforts today will start having positive economic effect in 2020. Considering that the technologies being used industrially today for power production were actually worked on 30 years back that is really investing in the future.

Radiation with a heart

The word 'radiation' conjures up images of the deformed bodies after Hiroshima. However, radiation can be lifesaving as well. Besides the well-known gamma irradiation of tumours using Cobalt-60 units that are supplied all over India by BARC, the centre's scientists have also come to the rescue of cardiac surgeons. One of the techniques used to save cardiovascular patients suffering from choked arteries is angioplasty.

Simply put, the surgeon sends a tiny balloon into a choked artery and inflates it at the right place. The additional internal pressure thus expands the blood vessel, facilitating the flow. To make sure that the arterial walls do not collapse, surgeons insert tiny metallic coils called stents within the blood vessel. However, these stents can cause tiny injuries to the walls and when these injuries heal the scar tissue can choke up the vessel again.

BARC scientists led by S.M. Rao and his team at the isotope division came up with a solution for this fatal problem. They coated these stents with tiny amounts of radioactive phosphorus so that wounds caused by stents are cauterised in a short time, preventing scar formation and saving the patient's life. Already 30-40 such implants have been carried out by surgeons on Mumbai with a very good success rate. Currently multicentric trials of this technique are being carried out and, if successful, will give patients undergoing angioplasty a new lease of life.

Nuclear medu wada

Hardly any body outside of BARC or its nuclear agriculture division and a few agriculture universities might know that 95 per cent of urad dal (black gram) grown in Maharashtra is a BARC product. Urad, a pulse whose flour is the main ingredient of medu wada, a popular south Indian snack, is produced with varieties developed by genetically altering conventional breeds through irradiation. The variety TAU-1 has led to an increase of yield per hectare by 29 percent.

Similarly, a popular mustard variety grown in Assam is another BARC product. The widely exported large-sized groundnut is another BARC product Trombay Groundnut (TG-1). Today more and more varieties of ground nuts, soya beans, moong dal, and tur dal, are produced with higher yields, pest-resistance, and other desirable qualities.

Plant breeders and farmers depend on the genetic variability available in nature for cross-breeding and developing new breeds. The former is the result of .spontaneous mutations. However mutations can be induced artificially to enhance variability manifold. One of the most efficient methods of changing plant genes (mutagenesis) is exposing the seeds to neutrons or gamma radiation. The irradiated seeds are deeply studied to understand the effect brought about by irradiation and it has been found that best results are obtained when these modified seeds are further used in cross-breeding. BARC has been working in this field since the early 1970s and the result is a little-known but significant contribution to increased food production.

Indian Nuclear Industry

Business India, December 6-19, 1993

The Nuclear Fallout


With the nuclear power programme facing a serious resource crunch, industries will have to explore new options for using their nuclear-related skills.

Shivanand Kanavi

When we talk of nuclear power we talk about its economic viability, envi­ronmental hazards, fears of radiation leak­age, waste disposal, or even problems regarding closing down the reactor after its useful life. But the other spin-offs to our economy - in terms of scientific-technical manpower, engineering skills and capaci­ties, not to talk about the bottom lines and business turnovers - have not been studied in any detail.

These spin-offs have been varied. Since the 1960s, when India start­ed generating electricity us­ing nuclear power, a host of industries have sprung up in heavy engineering, fabrica­tion, and construction. All these owe their entire devel­opment of skills, quality consciousness, confidence to tackle bigger and bigger problems (in size as well as in technological levels), to their participation in the in­digenous nuclear power programme.

Anyone who does not know the abysmal condition of our laboratories and uni­versities in the 1940s, and even our engineering indus­try in the 1960s and early 1970s, cannot easily appreciate the spin ­offs that have occurred due to the nuclear programme. M.S. Krishnamurthy, joint general manager, of the engineering giant, Larsen and Toubro, who has been associat­ed with the nuclear program for over 25 years, says, "Without the push given by the nuclear power programme we would not be able to do what we are capable of doing today. In the pre-nuclear era, we used to make some equipment for dairies and small cement plants, that weighed a couple of tones. Today, we have moved into the third generation of heavier precision engineer­ing at Hazira that can fabricate components weighing up to 450 tonnes."

This technological advantage works out in other areas as well. For P.J. Bhounsule, sales development manager, L&T (an IIT graduate who has worked on nuclear projects for nearly two decades), the engi­neering challenges they encountered while catering to their nuclear commitment were of the toughest variety. "One of the toughest assignments we faced was the welding of the two halves of the half-a-metre thick steel disk, that was the deck plate of the Dhruva reactor," says Bhounsule. "The weld had to be so perfect that even the tiny atoms of helium couldn't leak through. Simple heating of the two lips in the joint, led to unequal expansion along the diame­ter and circumference of the half disks, leading to gaps between the lips of the joint. We had not calculated the different heat sink characteristics. This led us to use com­puter simulation for the first time."

An analysis of the results revealed that the problem could be solved if the disks were thermally insulated and heat provided at twenty-five distributed points all over. "Finally, we machined channels into the lips so that they could lock into each other and after careful deep welding from both sides of the disk, we got the defect-free weld," claims Bhounsule proudly.

This precision and problem-solving ca­pacity that they have acquired is what all the industries associated with nuclear technol­ogy praise. T.S. Sakethan, general manager, special products division, Walchandnagar Industries (WIL), proudly shows his hi-­tech dust-free shop floor, ingeniously as­sembled right in the midst of the cranes and fork lifts. He points out a welder meticu­lously welding the tubes to a tube sheet in a heavy water heat exchanger. The Welds have to be totally defect free," he says. "Normal methods of non-destructive test­ing (NDT) like sonography, radiography, dye penetration, and magnetic particle pat­terns cannot be used here, so we do statisti­cal quality analysis. The welder has to be trained in the technique for months together and pass all sorts of tests."

But even this is not enough. The welder's skill is constantly checked out, since there is little or no room for error. "Every day before he starts work, he has to weld a few sam­ples, which are then phys­ically sawed off and tested for defects," says Sa­kethan. "Only when the samples show zero defect is he allowed to touch the job that day." This may sound unnecessarily time­consuming but with the risks of nuclear leaks tak­ing precedence over all else, it's a necessary precaution.

One corollary to this kind of nit-pickety precision is that cus­tomers of nuclear manufacturers are posi­tive that they will get quality that's of the best kind. P.J. Bhounsule of L&T says, "The philosophy of quality control had to be changed from post manufacture checks to planned quality assurance, systematic definition of manufacturing procedures and documentation. All these have helped us obtain authorisation to use various quality stamps of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the ISO 9001 certification. "

M.L. Mitra, director, environment and public awareness, Nuclear Power Corpora­tion, who was deeply involved in the hand­holding operations in the early years, recalls, "We had to convince many in the industry that quality does not mean higher cost but lower project cost."

As the confidence in their technical abilities and quality grew, the industries were able to take on more challenging tasks. Currently, nuclear man­ufacture involves the stan­dardised design of the 235 MW reactor, the consolidation of infrastructure and manufac­ture using the convoy system, cutting project time, the design and manufacture of 500 MW reactors for Tarapur III and IV and Rajasthan III and IV. The industries have also built components for the heavy water projects and the Fast Breeder Test Reactor. Now, the pool-type Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor to generate 500 MW, using liquid sodium, has been designed and the industry will participate in its fabrication as well.

But perhaps the best spin-offs to these nuclear-affiliated industries have been in terms of turnover. L&T alone has done Rs.312 crore of nuclear work. Bharat Heavy Electricals, which has gained the maximum benefit, has made over Rs.800 crore. Most of the business is pure profit in ­the industry only has to pay for labour costs, as the raw materials are provided by the DAE and the NPC.

Besides its contribution to corporate bottom-lines, what have been the spin-offs in terms of new business? "With our expertise, if not on a turnkey basis, at least as critical component manufacturers, we can get con­tracts from multinationals who want to set up industries in India," says T.V. Rudrappa, general manager, quality assurance, WIL.

R.D. Hariani, technical director, GR En­gineering. concurs, "Association with the Nuclear Power Corporation has helped us indirectly in getting jobs in other sectors as the quality has been upgraded in an overall sense." Krishan Kumar, general manager of the public sector giant, Bharat Heavy Electricals, is equally upbeat regarding spin-offs, "BHEL has gained considerably technologically through its association with nuclear power. Now, we are in a position to execute the conventional side of the nuclear power plant on a turnkey basis." After the recent fire in the generator in Narora I the turbine generator that was based on GE design is also being redesigned for Indian conditions by BHEL and NPC.

With these design modifications Indian Nuclear-related industries have finally come into their own. They have moved from their total dependence on foreign designs, to making design changes, to finally conceptualising and manu­facturing their own designs. K.R. Balakrishnan, general manager, control panels, GEC Alsthom India. Ltd, who have supplied' over Rs.15 crore worth of control protection equipment and switch gear to all the reac­tors, says unequivocally that association with NPC projects has helped them acquire experience in designing and manufacturing equipment suitable for an earthquake-prone environment.

K.K. Sinha, chairman and managing director, Mishra Dhatu Nigam (Midhani), a PSU set up to develop super alloys, is proud that hundreds of tonnes of very special steel called grade 403 (which is a medium car­bon steel but whose composition is con­trolled within a very narrow range) were produced by Midhani. Similarly, another copper niobium special steel, called 17-4 PH grade, was also developed and pro­duced by Midhani for the nuclear reactor components using electro slag refining and vacuum arc furnaces. Not many countries in the world have these capabilities, says Sinha proudly.

Where to, from here? With the resource crunch threatening India's own nuclear programme options, the logical next step would have been to export the technology. But the government has given very little thought to going into the global nuclear business, although Japan and South Korea are feverishly building nuclear power sta­tions. Besides this, there may be a number of developing countries that will go in for the smaller 235 MW PHWR if the fuel supply can be arranged. Indian expertise in building research reactors had been sought world wide, but India did not pursue it.


The real test of our nuclear industry will come in delivering systems and compo­nents on schedule for international clients. And in the ultimate analysis, the industry will be able to use the skills it has acquired in other fields. For although the nuclear industry is facing a serious resource crunch, the resourceful among them will turn this adversity into opportunity.

Light Emitting Diodes

Business India, December 19, 2005-January 1, 2006

Chips of light

LEDs convert electricity much more efficiently into light than say incandescent bulbs or fluorescent lamps

Shivanand Kanavi

Can semiconductor chips, which have revolutionized the way we live, give us light? Yes they can. Such chips for lighting are not made of silicon, which is used in electronics but more complex semiconductors, made of alloys of gallium, indium, arsenic, nitrogen, aluminum, phosphorous etc. They are fast becoming the coolest new technology in lighting.

It has been known since the turn of the century that some semiconductors emit light when a current is passed through them. However it has taken almost a hundred years for the technology to do it efficiently and inexpensively. Most of these semiconductors are what are called direct band gap semiconductors and they have led to the development of semiconductor lasers as well. Inexpensive semiconductor lasers drive your CD player, DVD player or even a laser pointer used during a presentation or even your TV’s remote control.

Semiconductor lasers are also extensively used in high speed data communication from the run-of-the-mill office computer networks called LANs(Local Area Networks) to mighty submarine fibre optic cable networks, like the ones acquired recently by VSNL (Tyco) and Reliance (Flag).

The discovery and perfection of direct conversion of electricity into light has also led to the reverse that is the development of more efficient solar panels to convert light into electricity.

The diodes, which emit light when they are conducting an electrical current, are called Light Emitting Diodes or LEDs. They are already becoming quite popular as Diwali or Christmas lights and in traffic signals. Those green and red light dots that indicate whether the device is active or in sleep mode in your digital camera, camcorder, DVD player and TV are also LEDs.

Compound semiconductors are considered the country cousins of the more flamboyant silicon chips that power our computers, cell phones and all electronics. However, without much ado their optical applications are increasing manifold in every day life.

The first bright LEDs to be invented were emitting red light and later orange and yellow. However attempts at producing green and blue LEDs were not very successful till a Japanese scientist Shuji Nakamura invented a bright blue LED and later white LED in the mid 90s. Nakamura’s work brightened up the whole field and intense activity ensued leading to fast growth. He worked hard with very little funding and repeated disillusionment for several years to come up with the blue LEDs. The company he worked for at that time, Nichia is today one of the world leaders in blue and white LEDs and lasers. A few years back he moved out of Nichia and is currently a faculty member in the University of California at Santa Barbara. While Nakamura works in optical properties of Gallium Nitride and other compound semiconductors his colleague Umesh Mishra researches into the electronic properties of Gallium Nitride to produce high powered transistors for cell phone companies and the US Defence Department. If successful Mishra’s Gallium Nitride transistors will replace the vacuum tubes from their last refuge—high power microwave systems in Radar and communication networks. Together Nakamura and Mishra have built up a formidable team of cutting edge researchers in Gallium Nitride at Santa Barbara.

Yes, all you Baywatch junkies, they also do serious science off the sands of Santa Barbara.

On a more serious note, the technology is evolving rapidly and in the next five years might revolutionise lighting. LEDs for lighting purposes have many advantages. They convert electricity much more efficiently into light than say incandescent bulbs or fluorescent lamps. In fact 90% of the energy is wasted in incandescent bulbs as heat. They also last much longer—upto 100,000 hours. That is more than 12 years of continuous operation! Where as in the case of incandescent lamps it is of the order of 1000 hours and in the case of fluorescent lamps it is of the order of 10,000 hours. They also consume much less electricity hence your batteries in a LED flashlight for example, seem to go on forever. That is ideal if you are in a remote area on your own as in camping, trekking or even a natural disaster. For example Pervaiz Lodhie a Pakistani entrepreneur in Southern California dispatched over 2000 solar powered LED flashlights to Kashmir soon after the earthquake hit the inaccessible Himalayan region. Last year his firm had also sent such items to South East Asia after the killer Tsunami hit the area.

What are the weaknesses of this promising lighting technology in an increasingly energy starved world? Primarily three. One the brightness that is measured in Lumens per Watt of electrical power is still nowhere near the standard required for high brightness lighting. Two, the products are still expensive. For example a decent flashlight costs around $15-40. Thirdly the light is extremely bright in one direction hence a LED light directed towards your work bench or a flashlight works well but if you try to light up your room with it then you end up using too many LEDs.

The US Department of Defence and the Department of Energy are heavily funding research into semiconductors to come up with high power lighting and electronics. As a result the developments are feverish in this field.

Recently, the venerable General Electric, a company that was founded by Thomas Edison to sell the light bulbs he invented, has announced Organic Light Emitting Diodes. In layman’s terms, soon there will be inexpensive plastic sheets, which will light up panels and curved surfaces. Cree Research Inc. a Nasdaq listed leader of LED chips, has produced very bright LEDs (more than 90 Lumens per Watt) two years ahead of industry’s expectations.

“A much less fashionable but critical area to work in, is encapsulation of LEDs” says Rajan Pillai of Nanocrystal Lighting Corporation, a research based start-up from New York. He is referring to the fact that the semiconductor chip is surrounded by a transparent lens capsule which act as a protective cover as well as an out let for light. All LEDs emit light of only one colour. In order to generate white light one introduces substances called phosphors into this casing. These phosphors then absorb the original light from the LED and emit light of different colours. An appropriate phosphor would thus create green light from a blue LED or white light from blue LED etc. Thus, if the phosphor can be improved, then the brightness of the led can be improved. Pillai claims that the new phosphors invented in Nanocrystals Lighting Corporation are smaller than the wavelength of light and hence invisible and that they can increase the brightness by about 20%.

You know when a technology has moved out of the lab and VC firms and into the market place, when you find the products on the Christmas shopping lists of visitors at Walmart and other retail chains. That is what LED flashlights have just achieved this holiday season, just as digital cameras and iPods did earlier.

Perception and Technology

Business India, January 29, 2006

Psy-Tech

Can the soft sciences combine with hard technology to produce winners?

Shivanand Kanavi

The word ‘technology’ immediately conjures up in our mind, machines, number crunching or in IT jargon algorithms. Conventional wisdom says that to go up in the technology ladder we need to hone our mathematical skills, analytical skills and the engineer’s practical problem solving skills. So what is this newfangled Psy-Tech? Is it ESP, psycho-kinesis or a pearl of wisdom from Spock—the one with serious face and pointed ears in StarTrek? Or is it something brewed and marketed by Deepak Chopra to gullibles in Mumbai and Malibu?

No. Psy-tech is nothing as fashionable as that. It is a fact that hard sciences and liberal arts rule different worlds, of objectivity and subjectivity, and eye each other with great suspicion. However many technologies have to marry the two to create successful products. Thereby giving rise to psy-tech.

In the world of technology there is nothing new in what I am saying. The Internet, PC and Artifical Intelligence are all a product of psy-tech. J C R Licklider, left MIT to head the Information Processing Technology Office of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, (ARPA), attached to the US government’s Defence Department in the early sixties. He funded and brought together a computer science community in the US in the early 1960s. He also encouraged the development of computer science departments for the first time at Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley. This visionary was not a computer scientist but a psychologist. Over forty years ago he championed the need for interactive computing and PC and his ideas drove the creation of ARPANET the first computer network in the late 60s. ARPANET eventually led to the Internet.

In a classic 1960 paper, “Man-Computer Symbiosis”, Licklider wrote, “Living together in intimate association, or even close union, of two dissimilar organisms is called symbiosis. Present day computers are designed primarily to solve pre-formulated problems, or to process data according to predetermined procedures. All alternatives must be foreseen in advance. If an unforeseen alternative arises, the whole procedure comes to a halt.
“If the user can think his problem through in advance, symbiotic association with a computing machine is not necessary. However, many problems that can be thought through in advance are very difficult to think through in advance. They would be easier to solve and they can be solved faster, through an intuitively guided trial and error procedure in which the computer cooperated, showing flaws in the solution.”

“When I read Lick’s paper ‘Man-Computer symbiosis’ in 1960, it greatly influenced my own thinking. This was it,” says Bob Taylor, now retired to the woods of the San Francisco Bay Area. Taylor worked as Licklider’s assistant at ARPA and brought computer networks into being for the first time, through the Arpanet. After he left Arpa, Taylor was recruited by Xerox to set up the computing group at the Palo Alto Research Centre, the famous Xerox Parc, which became the cradle of PC, Windows, Mac, Ethernet and local area networks, laser printer, mouse and so on. No other group can claim to have contributed so much to the future of personal computing.

Another shining example of cross-pollination between liberal arts and science is Herbert Simon, who was a political scientist and a psychologist. He created the first computer based Artificial Intelligence programme at Carnegie Mellon University and is truly considered one of the founders of Artificial Intelligence. Simon received the Turing Award, considered the Nobel Prize in Computer Science in 1975 and later went on win the Nobel in Economics as well in 1978 for his theory of ‘Bounded Rationality.’

These visionaries approached technology from a psychology background. What about engineers who approached psychology to come up with better products? I can think of at least three such and all of Indian origin. The first and the most well known globally is Amar Bose, chairman Bose Corp. Bose finished his PhD with Norbert Wiener, at MIT in 1957. He received a Fulbright Scholarship to spend a year in India. He used it to lecture at the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta where P C Mahalnobis was heading it and at the National Physical Laboratory, Delhi headed by K S Krishnan.

While waiting to sail off to India, Bose had bought a HiFi (High Fidelity) audio system, the hottest thing then. Bose had repaired radios at his father’s workshop in Philadelphia since childhood and knew the system inside out. However he found that the sound produced by the system out of the speakers was far from HiFi. As a classical music lover and a violinist himself, Bose could not bear it. This led him to study acoustics by the night during his sojourn of India. He was intrigued by the fact that the speakers, even when they actually adhered to the technical specifications printed in company catalogues, were not producing music as it was heard in a concert hall. At a very early stage, with a stroke of a genius, Bose realized that improvements in circuitry were not the only key to better audio. He decided to venture into the budding field of psycho-acoustics pioneered at Bell Labs in the 30s. Psycho-acoustics deals with the perception of sound by human beings rather than the physical measurement of sound. MIT allowed Bose, then a very popular and a very unconventional teacher of electrical engineering, to set up his company while continuing to teach at his alma mater. After years of painstaking experimentation, it resulted in the revolutionary Bose speakers. To the surprise of all audio experts, they did not have the familiar woofers and tweeters for the low and high frequency sounds and in fact directed almost 90% of the sound away from the audience! In fact a top honcho at a well known Japanese consumer electronics company, told Bose that they never took Bose seriously, since they thought he was nuts! Of course the tables turned later and today Bose is considered the most valuable audio brand globally.

The second example is that of N Jayant, Executive Director of the Georgia Centers for Advanced Telecommunications Technology (GCATT). A PhD student of B S Ramakrishna, a pioneering teacher in acoustics and signal processing at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, Jayant joined the Bell Labs in 1968. The focus in communication then was how to get good quality voice signals at low bit rates. Those were the early years of digital signal processing. Normally one would require 64 kbits of bandwidth but can it be done at much lower bandwidths that are encountered in wireless and mobile situations? Among others, the US military was keen on developing low bit rate technology. The mathematicians and engineers came up with innovative coding and compression techniques to send as much data as possible in as thin a bandwidth as possible. However if one wanted good quality sound, one could not go lower than 32 kbits. Bishnu Atal another alumnus of Indian Institute of Science working in the Bell Labs came up with his Linear Predictive Coding techniques that allowed telephonic conversations at 16 kbits using a very unconventional approach and in fact a version of his method is used in all cell phones the world over. But we can discuss Atal’s fascinating story at another time.

Going back to digital music on which primarily Jayant was working, Jayant too discovered that pure mathematical and algorithmic approach had limitations and instead adopted a perceptual approach. This led to major study of the frequency components actually heard by the human ear. They discovered that if a sound at any point in time had a thousand frequencies then the ear was sensitive to only a hundred of them. That is 900 (90%) of the components of a sound could be thrown away without affecting the sound heard by the human ear. If the sound is sampled into 1000 frequencies every 100th of a second then one could figure out which 900 of them could be thrown away. All that one needed was processing power that was fast enough, which became possible in the late eighties and early nineties with developments in chip technology. It is this approach that led to MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and the now hugely popular MP3. We all know that MP3 technology has made digital music industry possible. Once again perceptual studies provided the break through.

While Bose and Jayant have seen their studies leading to consumer products soon enough, in the case of Arun Netravali it has taken nearly three decades of waiting. Netravali joined Rice University for a PhD in application of mathematics in communications soon after his graduation from IIT Bombay in 1967. After his PhD however he found US enveloped in a recession post Oil-shock of 1973. With no jobs available in industry, he found an offer from the venerable Bell Labs, most welcome. He was asked to work in the video signal-processing group. Those days the hot thing that was being discussed was the “Picture Phone”, where the speakers can see each other. Obviously it was an idea whose time came three decades later through video conferencing and 3G mobile phones. But in the seventies soon after putting a man on the moon, everything seemed possible, at least to engineers in the US.

Once again the main obstacle for sending pictures and video through a wire was limited bandwidth. A TV signal requires 70 MB bandwidth where as the good old copper wire networks of AT&T offered only a thousandth of it. Once again all sorts of ingenious techniques were thought up by engineers to assist in compressing the video signal. If the subject of the image (say the head and neck of the speaker on the other side) is not moving very fast then one could assume that in the next frame of the picture being sent the image would have changed very little. So instead of sending the whole image again one could send just the difference from the previous one. Going further if the subject’s motion can be reasonable predicted (says the head moving from side to side in an arc of a circle) then one could calculate the possible position of the image in the next frame, send that information and the difference between the calculated and the actual and so on. These are called adaptive differential coding in the jargon of digital communication engineers. But all these ingenuity had limited use since the amount of compression needed was huge.

Then once again perceptual studies came to the rescue of Netravali. Which colours are the human eyes sensitive to? If a lady is sitting on a lawn and you are sending that picture across then what elements of that picture are more important that others? For example the grass in the lawn may not bee noticed in detail b the viewer other than its green colour where as the face and the dress worn by the lady may be noticed immediately. Then why not send the relevant parts of the picture in greater detail and the others in broad strokes? Can patterns in an image be recognized by the sender and just a predetermined number be sent to denote a pattern rather than the whole pattern and so on and so forth. The result was the development of many video compression techniques at bell labs, in which Netravali played a major role.

This led to the concept of high quality digital TV broadcast rather than flickering analogue images. But there is a long chasm between a consumer friendly concept and a whole industry accepting it as a standard. To persuade the skeptics Netravali and his team set up the demonstration of such a digital TV broadcast in the 1984 Olympics at Los Angeles. However we remember the 1984 Games today for the success of Carl Lewis and the heroics of our own P T Usha and not the digital TV. Soon enough Netravali got enormous peer recognition. The IEEE medals, fellowship of the US National Academy of Engineering, the position of President of Bell Labs,National Technology Medal from the US President and Padma Bhushan from the Indian government, however he could not get over the fact that the global politics of broadcast standards the cost of leaving the old analogue technology by broadcasters, TV makers and the viewers would always brand his work as “one ahead of its time”. But the 21st century has changed all that. Today the rage of US TV industry is High Definition TV (HDTV) and Arun Netravali is a fulfilled man.

What is the moral of these stories?
Technology, unlike science, does not lead to a new theorem or another charmed quark or the secrets of a fold in a protein, all of which will be appreciated as breakthroughs in knowledge. But it creates products, which are primarily used by other human beings. Thus the user—human being—and his intelligence, stupidity, frailty, habit, curiosity, variable sensory and cognitive capabilities have to be kept in mind while developing products. An engineer is normally not sensitive to these things. He looks at speed, robustness, reliability, scalability, power consumption, life cycle cost etc. There are innumerable examples of such products of pure engineering genius, bombing in the market place. But we in the Indian tech companies have not learnt the lesson yet. A North American colleague recently remarked, “I have seen enough philosophy, psychology, history and English majors in US companies but in India I see 99.99% engineers. And that is their strength and weakness!”

If innovation is the bridge to survival and prosperity in the new economy then a diversity of knowledge bases, soft sciences and hard technologies need to be put together in the cauldron and hope for the best to come out of the brew!