M. V. Ramana

India is one of only two countries that are currently constructing commercial scale breeder reactors. (The other is Russia.) Both the history of the program and the economic and safety features of the reactor suggest, however, that the program will not fulfill the promises with which it was begun and is being pursued.

History

Breeder reactors in India were originally proposed in the 1950s as part of a three- stage nuclear program as a way to develop a large autonomous nuclear power program despite India’s relatively small known resource of uranium ore.1

The first stage of the three-phase strategy involves the use of uranium fuel in heavy water-reactors, followed by reprocessing the irradiated spent fuel to extract the plutonium.

In the second stage, the plutonium is used to provide startup cores of fast breeder reactors. These cores would be surrounded by blankets of either depleted or natural uranium, to produce more plutonium. If the blanket were thorium, it would produce chain-reacting uranium-233. So as to ensure that there is adequate plutonium to construct follow-on breeder reactors, however, breeder reactors would have to be equipped with uranium blankets until the desired nuclear capacity was achieved.

The third stage would involve breeder reactors using uranium-233 in their cores and thorium in their blankets. Though the thorium-uranium-233 cycle would result in slow growth of nuclear power, presumably the rationale for going to this stage was to completely eliminate the requirement for uranium.

The three-stage program remains the official justification for pursuing breeders, despite their slow and disappointing progress.

A version of this chapter has been published in Science and Global Security 17 (2008): 54-67.

Though India’s Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) has been talking about breeder reactors since its inception, work on even conceptual studies on breeders began only in the early 1960s. In 1965, a fast reactor section was formed at the Bhabba Atomic Research Center (BARC) and design work on a 10 MWe experimental fast reactor was initiated.2 This seems to have been abandoned and, in 1969, the DAE entered a collaboration agreement with the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and obtained the design of the Rapsodie test reactor and the steam generator design of the Phenix reactor.3 This was to be the Fast Breeder Test Reactor (FBTR), India’s first breeder reactor.

As part of the agreement with the CEA, a team of approximately thirty Indian engineers and scientists were trained at Cadarache, France. Once they returned, they formed the nucleus of the Reactor Research Centre (RRC) that was set up in 1971 at Kalpakkam to lead the breeder effort. In 1985, this was renamed the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research (IGCAR). Over the years, the center has emerged as the main hub of activities related to India’s breeder program.