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Showing posts from August, 2009

Nuclear Power for India at the cost of Environment?

A few days back, I and my students had a chance to interact with a Nuclear Physicist. The pertinent question that all of us had on our minds and came out in our discussions was Would Nuclear Power mean a boon or a curse for India? Nuclear Power is amazing! In a nutshell, it takes just a little radioactive substance to be 'processed' in a Nuclear Power reactor and the whole substance with its looooong half life, takes its own sweet time to divide itself into smaller and smaller particles, producing large amounts of heat and thereby power for India. Sounds simple, isn't it? However its not so! The underlying political, administrative and technical processes finally will define how the nuclear power gets generatedand used. The N-Deal that was publicized by the media and politically negotiated by our Prime Minister simply states that we can now import Nuclear fuel for power generation in our country. The technical negotiations will now begin to fire up existing nuclear reactors