'Sanctions act as catalyst'

Interview with B. Bhattacharjee, Director, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre.

B. Bhattacharjee took over as Director, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), the country's premier science and technology centre, on April 3, 2001. Earlier, he was Project Director, Rare Materials Project, Mysore, and Director, Chemical Engineering and Technology Group, BARC. He was a key person in the building of the Uranium Corporation of India Limited, Jaduguda, Bihar, which supplies the entire uranium needed for India's nuclear electricity programme.

Later, Bhattacharjee switched over to multidisciplinary research and development (R and D) activities at BARC, Mumbai, for the development of High Speed Rotor (HSR) needed for producing enriched uranium and other strategic materials. The successful commissioning of HSR technology in India has put the country among a select band and enabled production of some materials of "strategic importance".

Bhattacharjee played a key role in two other projects: desalination plant coupled to a nuclear electricity station and the Special Materials Project. BARC has already supplied 15 desalination plants to different States. It is now constructing a massive desalination plant adjacent to the Madras Atomic Power Station at Kalpakkam, at a cost of Rs. 40 crores.

After getting his Master's degree in chemical engineering from the University College of Technology, Calcutta, in 1965, Bhattacharjee passed the post-graduate diploma programme in nuclear science and technology at the BARC Training School in 1966.

T.S. Subramanian met Bhattacharjee at the BARC for an interview. Excerpts:

How do you plan to steer the BARC, the DAE's flagship, during the Tenth Plan? What will be its thrust areas in research and development?

Our broad areas of activities are to provide R and D support for our ongoing nuclear power generation, develop technology for supply of fuel for the Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR) to be built at Kalpakkam and R and D work to develop technologies for inducting newer concepts of reactors for power generation from thorium. We have limited resources of uranium, while thorium reserves in India form one-third of the total reserves in the world.

Our present per capita electricity consumption is about 400 kwh. To reach even a level of 1,000 kwh per capita electricity consumption (which is only one-tenth of the value in advanced countries) for our already one billion plus population, we need a huge generation capacity. But we do not have the fuel resources for this. Our coal reserves will last only for 70 to 80 years. Oil and gas reserves are even smaller. So sustainable growth of electricity has to be dependent on nuclear energy, particularly because we have huge reserves of thorium.

But the technologies to exploit thorium are complex and since large reserves of cheap uranium are available in the world, other countries have not directed their attention to this. India must take the leadership in the utilisation of thorium. The Western world is looking towards us. So this is one thrust area.

The reactor we have conceptualised for thorium utilisation is called Advanced Heavy Water Reactor (AHWR). The AHWR has a lot of safety features which are innovative and totally passive in nature. They do not need any active components like valves or pumps and we do not even have to rely on the intervention of the plant personnel to cope with any abnormal situation. The world over, they are trying to build newer and newer reactor concepts that are inherently safe, in the sense that if anything goes wrong, the reactor will come back to the safest possible position without the intervention of any human beings or instruments or mechanical devices.

So, to ensure energy security for India, the BARC's first priority will be to develop these technologies for the design, development and demonstration of nuclear reactors based on thorium. We have developed some technologies. For example, the KAMINI reactor operating at the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research, Kalpakkam, is based on U-233 which comes from thorium. What we have done is to put the thorium bundles in a Pressurised Heavy Water Reactor (PHWR), where the thorium gets converted into U-233. The U-233 is separated by the reprocessing technology just as we separate Plutonium-239 from the spent fuel of the PHWRs.

We have also taken up another concept called ADSS (Accelerator Driven Sub-critical System), where we can use thorium to produce U-233, which can be used for generating electricity. In addition, ADSS has the capability to convert the long-lived radio nuclides present in nuclear wastes either to stable nuclides or to short-lived nuclides. If we can do this, the problem in handling the waste generated from our PHWRs or even the Fast Breeder Reactors (which form the second phase of our nuclear power programme) will be fully addressed because we will not have the problem of handling the long-lived nuclides.

There are other areas, not related to power generation, where nuclear science and technology have to be used in a big way for improving the quality of life. These relate to health care (for cancer diagnosis and therapy, thyroid function disorder, sterilisation of medical products, and so on); agriculture to produce various mutants with high yields and pest resistance. Another area is food preservation through irradiation. In our non-power programme, the Potato and Onion (POTON) project for the preservation of onions and potatoes by gamma irradiation will be commissioned at Lasalgaon in Maharashtra by the end of this year.

In Navi Mumbai, we have our Irradiation Plant for protection of spices against bacteria, which is a must for preservation. We have a big R and D programme to use irradiation technology in the industrial area. We have a programme to build Electron Beam Accelerators which will be used to cross-link polymers used in the cable industry for high voltage applications.

When will the Detailed Project Report on the Advanced Heavy Water Reactor, which will use thorium, be ready?

It will be ready by April 2002; the construction is scheduled to start in April 2004. Before the construction of the AHWR, we need to discuss this in peer groups outside and also do more experimental work particularly because we have to validate our calculations and establish experimentally the adequacy of the passive sub-systems, etc.

Where is India placed with regard to nuclear desalination?

Desalination technologies available today are broadly based on processes belonging to three categories 1. reverse osmosis (RO); 2. multi-stage flash (MSF); and 3. multi-effective distillation (MED). We have pursued all the three for some time. We realised that the RO and MSF technologies were the two in which we can be self-reliant. The MSF particularly does not need any imports. RO has a membrane module which is imported.

The MSF technology has taken a firm footing mainly in the West Asian countries where there is plenty of oil and gas, and they do not mind spending such fuel. As far as India is concerned, we found that if we use low pressure steam from the nuclear power stations, it becomes very attractive to produce drinking water from sea water.

In what stage is the construction of the nuclear desalination plant at Kalpakkam? What is the cost of the project?

The Kalpakkam plant, costing about Rs.40 crores, has two separate production streams with a total production capacity of 63 lakh litres of drinking water a day from sea water. One is for drinking water from sea water using MSF technology and the other stream is based on the RO process. This hybrid technology has a lot of advantages. We hope to commission the RO stream by March 2002. The RO method will produce 18 lakh litres of water a day. The MSF will give 45 lakh litres a day and it is expected to be ready by the end of 2002. As far as cost of production is concerned, it will be Rs.55 to Rs.60 for 1,000 litres using the RO technology. The water produced from the MSF process will cost a bit more - about Rs.65 for 1,000 litres.

You have coupled the MSF technology with a nuclear power station.

The world over MSF technology uses very expensive materials. But we feel that it is not necessary to use those exotic materials. We can use conventional materials such as simple carbon steel, provided we properly control the chemistry of water (namely, the residual oxygen content) and the pH of the water before it is heated and passed on to the MSF chambers. So cost of production will be low. India does have the total technology for this and there are big industrial houses which can easily handle this. An innovative feature of the coupling with nuclear reactor centres on the isolation of the nuclear plant from MSF plants in the event of any emergency in either of these plants. But we have a programme for that (MED) at the BARC; because we think we should be able to develop imported components such as titanium tubes, steam compressors. Then we can fall back on MED, because it has a lot of potential for further advancement and a lot of flexibility too.

There is a feeling that desalination plants consume a lot of electricity and cost a lot to build. What is the technological base of the desalination process at the BARC?

The power consumption in RO has been brought down significantly through technological innovations. The cost of production has also been brought down significantly by inducting innovative pre-treatment technology. In MSF and MED, constant development is going on the world over.

We developed the RO technology using the spiral membranes developed in-house at the BARC. That work has been going on for the last 25 years or so. We have supplied more than 15 pilot scale desalination plants in different places in the country, based on our in-house technology. The MSF plants at the BARC have been working for more than a decade and our operating experience has been established beyond doubt. We can operate these plants without using the expensive material normally used in other countries by means of proper maintenance of the chemistry/pH of water.

When A.N. Prasad was Director, BARC, he made a serious effort in late 1996 to build a desalination plant at the Ennore Thermal Power Station near Chennai. But it did not come through because of the Tamil Nadu government's disinclination. How are you going to convince the State governments to accept the desalination plants?

To my mind, the BARC has been keen to provide this technology. We are going to demonstrate it at Kalpakkam. Do you know that this plant is the largest capacity desalination plant coupled to a nuclear power station in the world now? There was a bigger plant in Kazakhstan in the Soviet Union which has been shut down. We will supply drinking water from the Kalpakkam desalination plant to outsiders and also meet the requirements of the Madras Atomic Power Station. IAEA officials have already visited the site.

You were the Project Director of the Rare Materials Project near Mysore, where enriched uranium is produced. Do we still import enriched uranium to run the Tarapur Atomic Power Station (TAPS)?

Yes. To run TAPS, it is imported.From China?

Yes. We may get the supply from Russia. But we have developed our own MOX technology with which we can run TAPS without any problem.

Why should we import from China or Russia when we can produce it?

It is purely a question of cost-benefit.

You and your team has successfully developed the highly complex High Speed Rotor (HSR), that is, the gas centrifuge technology needed to produce strategic materials for the nuclear programme.

Our technology for HSRs is indigenous. That programme is advancing. We are developing more and more advanced models of gas centrifuges.

After the nuclear tests at Pokhran in May 1998, the BARC was removed from the purview of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB). A safety committee was to oversee the safety of the BARC. Has it been set up? Does it have members from outside?

Yes. It is called BARC Safety Committee (BSC). After we took up our weapon-related activities (which are highly classified areas), the BSC had to be created with members from within and this is a usual practice everywhere, including the United States.

The U.S. government has lifted the sanctions on India and Pakistan.

Sanctions with respect of the BARC have not been lifted. Further, we are really comfortable when we work under sanctions. Our scientists and engineers enjoy working under sanctions because it acts as a catalyst for all of us, from the lowest level to the topmost level, to give our best.