India's Nuclear Program: HJ Bhabha's dream remains unfulfilled

It was in 1942 that the great physicist Enrico Fermi successfully built the first ever nuclear reactor under a sports ground at the University of Chicago. Yet, already by 1946, within just four years of that pioneering breakthrough, India, a nation on the other side of the world still under the shackles of colonial rule and considered backwards and destitute, had nevertheless set up an Atomic Research Committee to explore nuclear energy possibilities.

Dr Homi Jehangir Bhabha (Others)

This was years ahead of many "advanced" nations of the time. Soon thereafter, in 1948, India’s Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was set up. These farsighted steps are owed both to Jawaharlal Nehru and to leading scientists of the country, notably M.N. Saha, S.S. Bhatnagar and Homi Bhabha, who had been closely following nuclear developments around the world.

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But the primary credit for taking the entire enterprise forward and developing it belongs to Dr Bhabha, who was named the first Chairman of AEC and Secretary tothe Department of Atomic Energy (DAE). Using his international stature as a physicist and his easy access to Prime Minister Nehru (both Cambridge men), Bhabha set about building the vast nuclear empire which today consists of over 50 different institutions working variously on civilian energy, nuclear weapons as well as pure scientific research.

For a person who had started his career as a theoretical physicist, Dr Bhabha’s vision and skill as a builder of institutions and as a diplomat in establishing India’s due role in the international nuclear community were quite remarkable. Equally impressive were his aesthetic and artistic tastes. The Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, another of Dr Bhabha’s creations, not only had numerous original paintings in its lobby but also the best lawns (and the cleanest toilets) among all our scientific organisations.

How well has Dr Bhabha's nuclear dream been realised? This is not the appropriate place to discuss the nuclear weapons part of the program. But the civilian reactor program has, sadly, not progressed anywhere nearly as far as had been hoped, in spite of the considerable financial support and bureaucratic freedom DAE enjoyed. At the turn of the century, over 50 years after it was set up, the DAE could deliver only 2.77 GW (gigawatts) of nuclear power.

Worse still, the DAE brass kept announcing targets that were getting pushed further and further away into the future, as results on the ground fell well short of the projections. There were several reasons behind this. One was the tragic death of Dr Bhabha in 1966 in an air crash over the Alps. He was just 56 years old then. It is possible that if he had been alive longer to guide the program, he would not have let it drift and slide so much. One also suspects that he would have refrained from making the tall claims and unrealistic promises that the nuclear agency periodically indulged in.

The other factor was the imposition of nuclear sanctions by the international community after we had conducted the first nuclear test at Pokhran in 1974. This prevented all nuclear commerce with the outside world, including technical collaboration and the import of equipment and uranium fuel. The sanctions were further extended when we conducted more nuclear tests in 1998.

Things began to improve in the new millennium. The Indo-US nuclear Deal in 2008 lifted the sanctions against us allowing us to import Uranium fuel as well as collaborate with other countries to build bigger modern reactors for us. But once again, actual progress has belied much of the hype. At the time of writing, we still have only 7 GW of nuclear energy, less than 3 per cent of the current total energy capacity. Even this improvement is largely because of the two reactors the Russians have built at Kudangulam. Partnerships with French and US reactor suppliers, under negotiation since 2008, are yet to bear fruit.

In view of this, the plan that the current government announced in the aftermath of the Paris Climate Agreement, of generating 63 GW of nuclear energy by 2032, is extremely unlikely to be realised.