Chairperson of the Atomic Energy Commission Srikumar Banerjee on Saturday pitched for nuclear energy, arguing that it was the way to meet India's energy needs in a situation when fossil fuel-based power consumption caused global warming.
Delivering the ninth convocation address of the National Institute of Technology-Karnataka (NIT-K) at Surathkal here, Mr. Banerjee said that there was fear over use of nuclear energy. The world had 14,000 reactor years (the sum total of the number of years nuclear reactors across the world have been in existence) of experience in dealing with nuclear energy, and India had 350 reactor years of experience. Of the three nuclear accidents, Three Mile Island (US) and Fukushima recorded zero fatalities from the nuclear accident per se. Chernobyl (Ukraine) claimed 60 lives. The deaths resulting from the earthquake and tsunami in Fukushima were separate, he said. Fatalities from nuclear accidents were the least, Mr. Banerjee said. “Is fear (of nuclear energy) unfounded? No, because some radioisotopes can live for 10,000 years, which is longer than recorded human history,” Mr. Banerjee said.
He said storing nuclear waste for so long was not possible, but it could be given a stable structure by converting it into a “glass-like substance”. Storing nuclear waste even in geological material such as in granite blocks was still vulnerable to seepage or leakage. But “vitrification of nuclear waste” could give it stable structure. “The solution is nuclear incineration,” Mr. Banerjee said. Bombarding nuclear waste with a certain voltage would reduce the life of the isotope to 100 years after which, the waste would become “innocuous”, thus, making storage much easier.
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He said the process was scientifically feasible. The safety of nuclear reactors today was much better than it was in the 1960s. Mr. Banerjee said dependence on fossil fuel was not likely to be eliminated by the end of the century. It was necessary to invest in solar energy, considering that most parts of the country had around 300 sunny days a year. “The bottleneck at present… is the high cost of photovoltaic conversion,” he said.
In the convocation, 1,132 students, including 607 postgraduates, were eligible to receive degree certificates.