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By T.S. Subramanian
"Everything is on course and we are targeting to start the construction of the AHWR in 2004," Anil Kakodkar, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), told The Hindu. He said, "we will treat it as a technology demonstrator for thorium utilisation which marks the third phase." It would be "an innovative reactor", he said, in its use of thorium fuel and passive safety features. "This is a system which has operator-forgiving characteristics. It will give a grace period of three days for the operator to intervene in any situation. The demands (on the operator) are not likely to be very stringent," he said. Dr. Kakodkar is spearheading the AHWR project for which huge engineering development facilities have been set up on the campus of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) at Trombay. The BARC has designed the AHWR. The detailed project report was completed in 2002. The AHWR design has been frozen and its peer review by knowledgeable persons in the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited completed. Minimum engineering development work was done separately. Technology relating to production of uranium-233 have also been established. The safety review is now in progress and techno-economic studies will begin soon. "We are very much on course at present," the AEC chairman said. "We will do fine-tuning here and there." The fuel for the AHWR will be a hybrid core, partly thorium-uranium 233, and partly thorium-plutonium. In other words, the reactor will convert thorium into uranium-233, which will then undergo fission in situ. It will use a small amount of plutonium as driver fuel. Most of the energy will come from thorium-uranium. While boiling light water is the coolant, heavy water will act as the moderator. The reactor was to generate 235 MWe but its capacity has now been stepped up to 300 MWe because "extra margins" were found. India had entered the commercial domain of the first stage of its nuclear power programme, with 12 Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors (PHWRs) generating electricity in different parts of the country. These PHWRs use natural uranium as fuel, and heavy water as both coolant and moderator. Dr. Kakodkar said, "we are transiting in the second stage from the R & D (research and development) phase to the commercial domain." The starting of the construction of the Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR) on August 18 this year at Kalpakkam in Tamil Nadu, using plutonium-uranium oxide as fuel, marked India's entry into the commercial domain of the second stage. The PFBR would generate 500 MWe. "The AHWR will be a technology demonstrator for thorium utilisation," he said. While the country has abundant reserves of about 5,18,000 tonnes of thorium of metal equivalent, it has only 78,000 tonnes of natural reserves of uranium. The design philosophy of the AHWR is simple but challenging: enhanced safety at less cost. It will incorporate passive safety features, which do not require human intervention. "We are building a lot of new safety features into the AHWR. It is a system in which dependency on active components is minimised to a large extent. Circulating pumps are not there. It has a high degree of passive safety and endless operator-forgiving characteristics. These are new concepts," Dr. Kakodkar said.
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