{"id":174013,"date":"2022-03-12T20:55:50","date_gmt":"2022-03-12T15:25:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.forumias.com\/?p=174013"},"modified":"2022-03-12T20:55:50","modified_gmt":"2022-03-12T15:25:50","slug":"shutdown-this-misguided-energy-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/shutdown-this-misguided-energy-policy\/","title":{"rendered":"Shutdown this misguided energy policy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

News:<\/strong> On March 3, a fire broke out near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in Ukraine during the course of a military battle that could have triggered a major nuclear disaster.<\/span><\/p>\n

Trends of Nuclear Accident in the Past<\/strong><\/h5>\n

On March 11, 2011, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant suffered severe accidents after an earthquake and a tsunami hit it. The cooling system was broken and as a result radioactive cores continued producing heat and eventually melted down. It attracted the world\u2019s attention towards the dangers of nuclear energy.<\/p>\n

However, the Indian government in dec. 2021 said that it is planning to build \u201c10 indigenous reactors\u201d and had granted \u201cin principle approval\u201d for 28 additional reactors, including 24 to be imported from France, the U.S. and Russia.<\/p>\n

Why is the Indian governments\u2019 nuclear policy misguided?<\/strong><\/h5>\n

Given the post-Fukushima global and national trends in the nuclear industry, such a policy seems misguided;<\/p>\n

Nuclear power is not an economical source of electricity: <\/strong>nuclear power plants are capital intensive and recent nuclear builds have suffered major cost overruns. For example, V.C. Summer nuclear project in South Carolina (U.S.) was abandoned due to cost overrun, after an expenditure of\u00a0over $9billion.<\/p>\n

Renewable-energy technologies have become cheaper: <\/strong>As per one estimate,\u00a0the cost of electricity from solar photovoltaics and wind turbines in the U.S. declined by 90% and 72%, respectively, between 2009-21. The cost of for solar power, and solar-wind hybrid project was \u20b92.14 per unit and \u20b92.34 per unit respectively whereas power from the EPRs at Jaitapur was at least \u20b9 15 per unit excluding transmission costs.<\/p>\n

Global Nuclear Energy Share is declining:<\/strong> In contrast to India\u2019s policy projection, the world\u2019s nuclear power share in total electricity has declined from 17.5% in 1996 to\u00a0just 10% in 2020.<\/p>\n

Unviable Imports: <\/strong>India has to import many light-water reactors but imports are not happening on ground. For example, even after 13 years of the India-U.S. civil nuclear deal, not a single new nuclear plant has been established.<\/p>\n

Design Issues in foreign reactors:<\/strong> Of the 24 foreign reactors with \u201cin principle\u201d approval, (a) 6 reactors are of the VVER (water-water energetic reactor) design which are already facing operational problems at Kudankulam in Tamil Nadu, (b) some reactors proposed to be imported from the U.S., has the same design that was abandoned in South Carolina, and (c) Some are of the EPR design that France has been unable to successfully complete in its home country.<\/p>\n

Safety Concern:<\/strong>\u00a0 For example, the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster raised concerns about safety of nuclear plants. In fact, many multinational nuclear suppliers demanded that they be indemnified of liability for the consequence of any accident in India. Therefore, India\u2019s liability law was enacted to largely protects them. It means, manufacturers do not really believe in their own claims about how safe their reactors are.<\/p>\n

Protest Against Nuclear Plants: <\/strong>\u00a0for example, \u201clocals turned against\u201d the Mithivirdi nuclear project after the Fukushima disaster in Gujarat.<\/p>\n

Climate Change Induced Disasters:<\/strong> Climate change will increase the risk of nuclear reactor accidents. For example, A wildfire approached the Hanul nuclear power plant in South Korea. Also, in 2020, a windstorm caused the\u00a0Duane Arnold Nuclear Plant in the US to cease its operations. The frequency of such extreme weather events is likely to increase in the future.<\/p>\n

Way Ahead<\/strong><\/h5>\n

Therefore, nuclear power is not the right choice to \u201cadapt\u201d to climate change, and to mitigate India\u2019s carbon emissions since it cannot be deployed at the necessary scale.<\/p>\n

The resources spent on nuclear plants will yield quicker results if they are redirected to renewables.<\/p>\n

Source:<\/strong> The post is based on the article \u201cShutdown this misguided energy policy\u201d published in the Hindu newspaper on 12th March 2022<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

News: On March 3, a fire broke out near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in Ukraine during the course of a military battle that could have triggered a major nuclear disaster. Trends of Nuclear Accident in the Past On March 11, 2011, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant suffered severe accidents after an earthquake and a tsunami… Continue reading Shutdown this misguided energy policy<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10320,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1230,9],"tags":[216,10498],"class_list":["post-174013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-9-pm-daily-articles","category-public","tag-gs-paper-3","tag-the-hindu","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","views":{"total":0,"cached_at":"","cached_date":1704890971},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10320"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174013"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174013\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}