Why India’s electricity is likely to remain in short supply: The economics of nuclear power

Abstract

India’s government has extremely lofty ambitions for future nuclear energy generation, but the author argues that the poor economics of such generation, among other reasons, will not allow those to be realized. The nuclear establishment’s calculations are flawed, and any expansion is likely to lead to a price hike in a country where so many people already cannot afford electricity. The author writes that the government’s inordinate focus on nuclear energy is therefore misguided.

Keywords

coal Department of Atomic Energy economics electricity India Manmohan Singh nuclear power Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd reactors

India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh predicted in September 2009 that the country could have 470 gigawatts (GW) of nuclear power capacity by 2050. To put this in perspective, by September 2013, the country’s nuclear capacity—more than 60 years after its atomic energy program was established—was just 4.78 GW, a small fraction of the total electricity generation capacity of 226 GW. The projected capacity also would exceed today’s global nuclear power capacity.

Is this feasible, let alone desirable? More generally, is nuclear power likely to become a significant source of electricity for the country? A close examination of the history of India’s nuclear power program suggests that the answer to both these questions is in the negative. Though there are many contributing factors, a key reason is that nuclear power is simply uneconomical.

Historically, making nuclear power seem cheap has been understandably important to India’s Department of Atomic Energy, a government entity that promotes nuclear power. Unsurprisingly, when India—a developing country that had just become independent in 1947—looked to nuclear in the early 1950s, there were already numerous demands on scarce government finances. It would have been difficult to garner the large amounts of public funding needed for the nuclear program if those running the program, such as Homi Bhabha, the founder of India’s nuclear program, had been honest in estimating the actual cost of nuclear power, or even open about the uncertainties involved in assessing it.

Hence, almost from the very inception of the nuclear program, the Department of Atomic Energy has confidently asserted that nuclear power is, or will soon be, economical.¹ Today, more than half a century later, the assertion that nuclear power is cheap—not only for India, but for nations around the world—continues to be important in persuading policy makers to invest in expensive reactors, reprocessing plants, uranium mines, and a host of other facilities.

Arguably the most notorious statement in the history of nuclear power was the prognosis that it would be “too cheap to meter” the electricity produced in reactors. This prediction was, ironically, not that of someone trained as a physicist, an engineer, or an economist, but someone who never went to college, who started his career as a traveling shoe salesman. Lewis L. Strauss rose from his first position to become a partner in a Wall Street investment bank and, eventually, chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission (Pfau, 1984).

But in reality, nuclear power is anything but cheap. As an influential interdisciplinary study conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology some years ago baldly stated, “Today, nuclear power is not an economically competitive choice” (Deutch et al., 2003: 3). The lack of competitiveness arises mainly from its capital-intensive nature.

The ongoing electricity-sector restructuring process in many countries, leading to a greater emphasis on economic competition, has accentuated this problem. Financial risks that consumers once bore increasingly are seen as the investors’ responsibility.² The increasing role of economic markets in electricity supply also has brought with it greater demands to curtail subsidies, or at least to make them explicit and subject to democratic debate (Economist, 2001). The nuclear industry, in India as elsewhere, has tried to resist such efforts, with mixed success.

Given the high costs associated with the technology, what are the implications of the Indian nuclear establishment’s plans for rapid expansion? The answer is simple: It would result in a price hike for the overall supply of electricity. The Department of Atomic Energy’s plans for including a large fraction of breeder reactor capacity would exacerbate this. For a country that already has high electricity rates—industrial tariffs are among the highest in the world (Rao et al., 2009)—nuclear energy remains, as commentator Sukumar Muralidharan (1985: 109) pointed out a quarter-century ago, “an expensive indulgence.”

Reactor case studies

The Department of Atomic Energy’s assertions about the economic competitiveness of nuclear power are typically based on arbitrary assumptions about the cost of constructing reactors. In reality, just about every reactor built in the country has significantly exceeded initial projections. About a decade ago, energy analysts Amulya Reddy and Antonette D’Sa of the International Energy Initiative and I tested the claims about the economics of nuclear power in India by examining the costs of generating electricity from the first two units of the Kaiga Atomic Power Station (Kaiga I and II) in southern India (Ramana et al., 2005). Commissioned in 1999, these reactors were typical of the pressurized heavy water reactor technology that constitutes the bulk of nuclear generating capacity in the country.

Besides the cost of constructing the reactor, an important component of the total cost of getting a heavy water reactor to start operating is the cost of loading it with heavy water. Each 220-megawatt reactor, like the ones at Kaiga, requires 70 and 140 tons of this substance for the initial coolant and the moderator inventory, respectively (NEI, 1994).

Herein is one of the first methodological problems with the government’s assertions. Rather than treating the initial inventory as an up-front capital cost, the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd., the government-owned nuclear utility, treats the initial heavy water requirements as a non-depreciating asset that is leased from the Department of Atomic Energy (Muralidharan, 1988).³ This methodological detail aside, the most pertinent fact about heavy water is that it is very expensive to produce.

Comparing the costs of generating electricity at the Kaiga atomic power station with the same from a coal power plant, the Raichur Thermal Power Station VII—both plants of similar size and vintage—I assumed that the coal for the latter came from a mine that was significantly more than the average distance between Indian coal mines and power plants. The comparison showed that nuclear power is significantly more expensive for a wide range of realistic parameters.

One particularly key variable is the discount rate, a measure of the value of capital. Nuclear power, because of its capital-intensive nature, is competitive only for low discount rates. In a country where there are multiple demands on capital for infrastructural projects, including in the electricity sector, such low discount rates are not realistic. At market rates of return on investment, nuclear power could be 50 percent more expensive. This comparison also did not include the significant expenses involved in dealing with irradiated spent fuel (Ramana and Suchitra, 2007).

Finally, if, as argued by economists, the greater financial risk in the case of nuclear power is translated into different discount rates for the two forms of generation, then nuclear power would be even less competitive.

Though my results are for the specific cases of Kaiga and the Raichur Thermal Power Station VII, which, I argue, do offer a fair point of comparison, the basic point should hold true for other cases; thus, one could conclude that nuclear power from heavy water reactors would generally be costlier than thermal power in India.

Another case worth examining is that involving fast breeder reactors, the second major reactor type that figures prominently in Indian nuclear planning. The Department of Atomic Energy’s interest in breeders goes back to the 1950s. Several countries around the world spent large quantities of money on research and development related to breeders; about half a dozen countries constructed pilot-scale or demonstration breeder reactors (Cochran et al., 2010). However, over the decades, most have suspended their programs.

Economics was an important cause for disenchantment with breeders. Several studies have shown that electricity from breeder reactors is expensive in comparison with that from light water reactors that dominate the world’s nuclear capacity (Bunn et al., 2005; Chow, 1995; Cochran, 1974; Feiveson et al., 1979). In contrast, the Department of Atomic Energy has long claimed that the cost of electricity from breeder reactors is comparable to that of electricity from a pressurized heavy water reactor, the reactor type that accounts for the largest share of nuclear generation in the country (Bhoje, 2003; Paranjpe, 1991).

Again, the Department of Atomic Energy offered no real, empirically based economic analysis to back up this claim. My then-colleague and economist J. Y. Suchitra and I started examining this issue soon after the construction of the first commercial-scale breeder reactor, the prototype fast breeder reactor, had begun in 2004. This allowed us to base our calculations on a specific cost estimate rather than an abstract figure.

Just calculating the cost of generation does not make as much sense as comparing it with the cost of generation at another similar plant. The comparison we carried out was with the mainstay technology adopted by the Department of Atomic Energy itself—the pressurized heavy water reactor.

Suchitra and I considered the same set of cost components for both the prototype fast breeder reactor and the pressurized heavy water reactor, namely, construction of the reactor (capital cost), fueling, operations and maintenance, decommissioning, refurbishment, working capital, and management of low-level radioactive wastes. For the pressurized heavy water reactor, the fueling cost included the cost of uranium and the cost of fuel fabrication. Also included were the costs of the initial heavy water inventory and of replacing the heavy water that is lost during routine operations. For the prototype fast breeder reactor, the fueling cost included that of producing plutonium through reprocessing and fabricating it into mixed oxide, or MOX, fuel.

Technically, breeder reactors can be expected to be more expensive for two reasons. First, the use of molten sodium as coolant brings with it several operational requirements, such as heating systems to keep the sodium molten at all times, and safety-related requirements, such as extensive firefighting equipment (Farmer, 1984; IGCAR, 2004). The second reason stems from the realization that some accidents at breeder reactors could lead to the release of large quantities of explosive energies (Bethe and Tait, 1956). Therefore, breeders have to include extensive safety features that are a significant component of the total capital cost.

Historically, every reactor constructed by the Department of Atomic Energy has experienced cost overruns. Indeed, in August 2009, it was reported that the prototype fast breeder reactor may end up costing 50 billion Indian rupees ($1.03 billion), over 40 percent more than the projection of 34.9 billion rupees in 2004 when construction started ($771.8 million in 2004 dollars) (Jagannathan, 2009). By November 2011, when approximately 80 percent of the work on the reactor had been completed, the cost estimate had gone up to 56.8 billion rupees ($1.21 billion in 2011 dollars) (Srikanth, 2011). Despite these many reasons to expect cost escalation, we used the Department of Atomic Energy’s estimate so as to be favorable toward breeder economics.

In economic terms, the primary material requirement for the prototype fast breeder reactor is plutonium. The Department of Atomic Energy maintains that the plutonium is available “free of cost” (Govindarajan, 2003: IT–23/3). The essential argument for this assumption is that a breeder reactor produces more plutonium than it consumes. But this argument is financially unsound because the plutonium that is recovered by reprocessing the core will be available only years after the reactor starts generating electricity, with the period determined by the effective breeding ratio.

Methodologically, the sound way of taking this future plutonium production into account is by adding the cost of plutonium for fueling the reactor initially and providing a credit for the plutonium produced when it is recovered; the latter would have to be discounted to the same time as the initial plutonium procurement. The corresponding assumption for the pressurized heavy water reactor is that the heavy water for the initial loading of this reactor is purchased from the Department of Atomic Energy (with a cash outflow) and resold when the reactor is shut down.

The prototype fast breeder reactor design requires an initial inventory of more than 1.9 tons of plutonium in its core (IAEA, 2006). Even though the rationale for breeder reactors is that they produce more plutonium than they consume, it should be obvious that the plutonium for the initial core has to come from elsewhere. In the Department of Atomic Energy’s scheme, this plutonium will be produced by reprocessing pressurized heavy water reactor spent fuel at the Kalpakkam Atomic Reprocessing Plant in southern India (Hibbs, 2003). In addition, the first few reloads would have to come from the same source. Future reactors may also have to adopt the same practice of using plutonium from reprocessing pressurized heavy water reactor spent fuel for the initial cores and the first few reloads. This is because the prototype fast breeder reactor will not produce adequate amounts of plutonium to fuel other breeder reactors, for technical reasons having to do with its design.

It costs approximately 7,800 rupees ($172) to produce each gram of plutonium at the reprocessing plant (Ramana and Suchitra, 2007). However, there is another process that is needed to deal with this plutonium before it can be used as fuel. In any given year, the reprocessing plant does not have adequate reprocessing capacity to produce enough plutonium to fuel the prototype fast breeder reactor. Therefore, much of the plutonium that is used in the prototype’s initial loading would have been separated several years before it is fabricated into MOX fuel. As the plutonium ages, one of its isotopes, plutonium-241, decays into americium-241, another radioactive material that absorbs neutrons and lowers the amount of energy produced by the reactor. This would have to be chemically separated before the plutonium could be fabricated into MOX. The cost of removing americium would have to be incurred only in the case of plutonium coming from the reprocessing plant.

Subsequently, the plutonium for the prototype fast breeder reactor could be obtained from reprocessing its own spent fuel. Because of the higher plutonium content of the prototype’s spent fuel, the cost of such plutonium would be lower. Based on construction costs of the reprocessing plant that deals with the spent fuel from the smaller fast breeder test reactor and scaling it up, the cost to produce each gram of plutonium through this route is about 1,900 rupees ($42)—much lower than the corresponding cost to obtain plutonium from reprocessing spent fuel from heavy water reactors (Suchitra and Ramana, 2011).

This plutonium is converted to MOX fuel by mixing with uranium. MOX fuel is much more expensive to fabricate than uranium fuel due to two characteristics: the higher radioactivity of plutonium, and the higher density of heat production in the fuel used in breeder reactors.

In all, it is 80 percent more expensive to produce each kilowatt hour of electricity at the prototype fast breeder reactor than it is at the pressurized heavy water reactor.⁴ Thus, as with the comparison between Kaiga and the Raichur Thermal Power Station, the Department of Atomic Energy’s assessment that breeder electricity is competitive is simply not borne out upon empirical examination. The main culprit this time is plutonium, specifically the much higher costs associated with the production and fabrication of plutonium.

In his classic work from 1910, Hind Swaraj, Mahatma Gandhi made a remarkably prescient observation: “The systems which the Europeans have discarded are the systems in vogue among us. Their learned men continually make changes. We ignorantly adhere to their cast-off systems” (Gandhi, 1997: 103). The Department of Atomic Energy’s pursuit of breeder reactors—when countries in the West have abandoned it for all practical purposes—offers an excellent but unfortunate example of such ignorant adherence.

Expensive imports

India’s nuclear power program has been unique in one respect: Following its first nuclear weapon test in 1974, the country has been mostly cut off from international trade in nuclear technology. This forced it to rely significantly on its own technical abilities, and that has been one reason for increased nuclear costs. However, in 2005, former US President George Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh entered into an agreement that called upon India to open up some more of its nuclear facilities to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the United States to change international trade regimes so as to allow India to import nuclear reactors. Since then, there have been numerous official and unofficial pronouncements on how many reactors were going to be imported.⁵ But the major problem that imported nuclear reactors will face is the high cost of electricity generation as a result of high capital costs, a factor that has increased in salience as estimated costs of new nuclear reactors mount.

Recent estimates from the United States and Western Europe bear out the expectation of high capital costs. According to a French government’s Court of Audit report in January 2012, the current cost estimate of the only reactor under construction in France, at Flamanville, is 6 billion euros ($7.74 billion), which translates to about $4,500 per kilowatt (Chaffee, 2012). The US Energy Information Administration estimates that a new nuclear plant could have an overnight cost of $5,335 per kilowatt (EIA, 2010). In comparison, the Department of Atomic Energy’s estimates of recently completed pressurized heavy water reactors are all around $1,500 per kilowatt (Bohra and Sharma, 2006). This problem was recognized well before negotiations on the deal began. In 2003, former Secretary of the Department of Atomic Energy M. R. Srinivasan said, “Recent cost projections show that if a [light water reactor] were to be imported from France, the cost of electricity would be too high for the Indian consumer. This is because of the high capital cost of French-supplied equipment” (Srinivasan, 2003).

Indian nuclear officials have set their hopes on licensed domestic manufacturing. In the words of Sudhinder Thakur, executive director of the state-owned Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd., “When you build a reactor here, costs come down dramatically” (Jishnu, 2008). Just how much of a dramatic cost reduction is necessary for nuclear power to become competitive with its favorite competitor, coal, becomes clear in a paper by Thakur (2008: 59). The aim of the analysis is laid out explicitly:

The initiatives of the Indian government on international cooperation in nuclear energy and the option of a significant increase of the nuclear share in electricity generation based on nuclear power reactors set up with international cooperation … have stirred up a debate in the country on these issues … [T]here is apprehension in some sections that the likely tariffs of electricity generated by large imported nuclear power reactors would be unaffordable. This paper … demonstrates that these tariffs would be competitive with other options for large base load generation across a range of overnight costs and fuel prices.

The analysis, however, shows nothing of the sort. Thakur starts off by considering a “base case of overnight costs of $1,500 per kilowatt hour at 2007 prices” (Thakur, 2008: 59). Compared to estimates in excess of $4,500 per kilowatt, this is absurdly low. Why has this been assumed? The answer has to do with the cost of coal power. It turns out from Thakur’s analysis that when the cost of an imported light water reactor goes above $1,600 per kilowatt, electricity from coal will become cheaper.

For the specific case of the European pressurized reactors that are to be imported from France’s Areva and constructed in Jaitapur in western India, it turns out that the first-year tariff on the electricity from the Jaitapur reactors could be as high as 14 rupees per kilowatt hour (25 cents), much higher than the current tariffs of nuclear plants in the country, which are all less than 5 rupees per kilowatt hour (9 cents) (Raju and Ramana, 2013).⁶ Since it is impossible for the government to pass on tariffs of this magnitude to consumers without public outrage, it may seek to reduce consumer tariffs by bearing a loss through the exchequer.

There are also good reasons to worry that, as has been the case in Finland and France, the project could take much longer to construct than envisioned. This will only increase the economic burden on the public. All in all, importing nuclear reactors from the West is not likely to make nuclear energy competitive in India or pave the way for a large-scale expansion.

Games people play

If nuclear power is uncompetitive, then why do many people believe that it is cheap? In part this is because, at every opportunity, the nuclear establishment keeps repeating the claim about the competitiveness of nuclear power. It also tries to substantiate it through “calculations.”

These calculations, however, are flawed. Typically, they are based on estimated costs of future facilities rather than actual costs of facilities already constructed. Given the huge cost overruns at most facilities, the distortion due to this practice is significant. The nuclear industry also makes assumptions about other cost components with no support from data of any sort. For instance, the operations and maintenance cost is merely pegged at a specific percentage of the capital cost, with no basis for arriving at it. The costs of decommissioning a reactor are accounted for by periodically adding a set amount of money, called a decommissioning levy, into a fund (Sebastian et al., 2001). But there is no reliable estimate of how much decommissioning a reactor will cost, and the few examples in other countries that have decommissioned reactors have invariably cost much more than expected. Similarly, the cost of radioactive waste management is completely arbitrary (typically, 0.05 rupee [0.09 cents] per unit).

One reason that the nuclear establishment gives for not relying on past experience with costs is the possibility of technological and organizational learning that could lead to lower future costs. However, historically, learning in the nuclear field has been limited at best. In the United States—with around 100 commercial nuclear reactors, it is the country with the most plants—construction costs grew steadily from $1,279 per kilowatt (in 2006 dollars) for reactors commissioned between 1966 and 1967 to $4,377 per kilowatt (in 2006 dollars) for reactors commissioned a decade later (CBO, 2008). The steady growth in costs persisted even in later reactors (Koomey and Hultman, 2007).

Similarly, during the late 1970s and 1980s, the period when France brought online most of its current nuclear power plants, the capital costs (measured in constant francs) increased with time (Grubler, 2010). This tendency continues: The current cost estimate of the Flamanville plant being constructed in France is about 2.4 times the average per-unit cost of the existing fleet (Chaffee, 2012).

In addition, various subsidies complicate the cost issue. As discussed earlier, the Department of Atomic Energy takes care of the costs of dealing with spent fuel, which contains the bulk of the radioactivity produced during reactor operations, thereby subsidizing waste management. It provides the plutonium obtained to the breeder program at no cost. The department also provides heavy water at a subsidized cost. Nuclear power has been favored with fiscal concessions, such as customs duty waivers on import of equipment and tax holidays (DAE, 2002; Financial Express, 2000).

A somewhat subtler subsidy extended to the nuclear establishment is due to the risk of catastrophic accidents. The impact of such an accident would be disastrous, especially in a country such as India with a high population density and a large agricultural sector. Prior to the 2008 US–India nuclear technology-sharing deal, the implicit assumption was that the Indian government would take care of the immense costs of dealing with a potential accident. That represents a subsidy to the nuclear establishment.

Following the deal, there are plans to import nuclear reactors from international vendors. Independently, domestic big businesses would like to enter the nuclear business because the potential profits are so large. Neither wants to be held liable for compensating the full range of damages in the event of an accident, since they might be bankrupted.

To appease these constituencies, the Singh government got a nuclear liability bill passed in Parliament, which limited the liability of the operator of a nuclear power plant to about $250 million at current exchange rates, and the Indian government’s own liability to roughly $400 million. In comparison, official government estimates of the cost of the 1986 Chernobyl accident run into hundreds of billions of US dollars. The difference between the operator’s liability cap and the government’s liability cap amounts to a subsidy to nuclear power.

Victims or society at large would bear the rest of the risk associated with a catastrophic accident whose damage exceeds the government’s cap. Therefore, the profits are privatized, but part of the risk is socialized. This legislation would also implicitly be providing perverse incentives for operators and suppliers of nuclear plants to cut costs at the expense of safety (Raju and Ramana, 2010b). This creates a classic example of what in insurance parlance is called a “moral hazard”: Insulating a party from risk has a distorting effect on its behavior (Raju and Ramana, 2010a).

All in all, there is much evidence that the Department of Atomic Energy is not really serious about economic considerations. This proposition is illustrated by Bhabha’s oft-quoted dictum: “There is no form of power as expensive as no power, that is, doing without power altogether” (Jain, 1974: 153). While it is true that doing without power does pose costs on individuals and society, the question is not whether it should be generated in the first place.⁷ The question is which combination of generating technologies should be used. This question is most often decided—at least theoretically—through comparative costing and least-cost methods of analyses.⁸

But, for the multiple reasons mentioned above, official efforts at comparative costing, especially those of the department, make a capital-intensive source of power such as nuclear energy seem more economical than it really is. The result has been to bear out renowned economist I. M. D. Little’s prognosis from 1958: “As Dr. Bhabha says, electricity is in short supply in India. It is likely to go on being in short supply if one uses twice as much capital as is needed to get more” (Little, 1958: 1486).

To summarize, the economics of nuclear energy in India are not conducive to a rapid expansion. It remains an expensive way of generating electricity: The high up-front capital costs and long construction period associated with the technology result in large amounts of capital being tied up with no economic returns for an extended period of time. Because this capital could be used more profitably elsewhere within the power sector, investment in nuclear power imposes significant opportunity costs.

Many of these characteristics hold true not just for India, but many other developing countries. As regions of the world with fast-growing electricity demands, developing countries are expected to be the source of a large fraction of future carbon dioxide emissions in the future. The constraints on nuclear power imply that the role nuclear power could play in mitigating climate change is limited.

Footnotes

Editor’s note

This article is largely drawn from the author’s most recent book, The Power of Promise: Examining Nuclear Energy in India (New Delhi: Penguin, 2012).

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Author biography

M. V. Ramana, a physicist by training, is with the Nuclear Futures Laboratory and the Program on Science and Global Security at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University. He works on the future of nuclear energy in the context of climate change and nuclear disarmament. He is the author of The Power of Promise: Examining Nuclear Energy in India (Penguin, 2012) and the co-editor of Prisoners of the Nuclear Dream (Orient Longman, 2003). He is a member of the International Panel on Fissile Materials and the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

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