 Towards the end of the year 2000, I was given the charge of strategic planning for Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) in addition to my other responsibilities. This made me think about the role to be played by nuclear energy. In India, Central Electricity Authority carries out electric surveys periodically and looks at growth in electricity demand over a fifteen year horizon. My group found dearth of detailed quantitative study focusing on a long-term horizon. All of us working on Atomic Energy intuitively felt that over a long term horizon, India will face shortage of energy resources, but no quantitative analysis was available. All publications indicated that coal would last for 200 years or 300 years with a caveat: at present rate of consumption. It is obvious that as economy grows, requirement for electricity will grow and rate of consumption of coal will also grow. To determine the role to be played by nuclear energy, we found it necessary to estimate as to how long coal would last at increasing rate of consumption.
With this backdrop, we decided to work on a long-term forecast for requirement of energy in India and chose a 50 years horizon. This was at the beginning of the 10th five year plan and so our baseline was the year 2002-03. We looked at growth rate in economy, projections about population growth, and published the results in the form of a report titled, "A Strategy for Growth of Electrical Energy in India". This study builds a scenario for the growth of energy in India based on relationship between growth of economy and growth in requirements of energy. It uses a study by Goldman Sachs for growth of economy and makes appropriate assumptions about improvements in energy intensity. The study projects annual electricity generation of about 8000 TWh by the middle of this century. To put this number in perspective, you may like to know that the generation in the year 2007-08, from utilities and captive power plants put together, was about one-tenth of this number. Even at this rate of generation, it would amount to per capita annual generation of about 5000 kWh, which may be compared with the present per capita generation of about 8000 kWh in OECD countries. Until a few years back, some energy specialists expected that electricity requirements in a tropical country would be much less than cold countries. However, increasing demand of air-conditioning has defied this expectation and per capita consumption in tropical countries is rising rapidly. For example, in Singapore, annual per capita consumption is above 8000 kWh.
India must seek to expand its energy resource base and seek new and emerging energy resources.
India has, right from the inception, decided to follow a closed fuel cycle approach due to the fact that it is not endowed with significant deposits of uranium and has vast thorium deposits. This requires explanation. Nuclear reactors use uranium fuel. After use in the reactor,
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