Constraints on India’s Fast Breeder Program

India has long pursued a fast breeder program, which is seen as necessary because of a perceived shortage of uranium resources. The Indian Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) plans to expand nuclear power in the country by constructing a large fleet of plutonium fuelled breeder reactors, and has projected that nuclear power will grow from the current 4.5 GW, about 3 percent of total electricity generation capacity, to 470 GW by 2050. But progress so far has been disappointing, with only one test reactor having been constructed and having a chequered operating history. A larger Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR), to be fuelled by a mixture of oxides of plutonium and uranium (MOX), is being constructed and is expected to be commissioned by 2011. The DAE plans to follow this by constructing four more MOX fuelled breeder reactors, and then switch to a design using metallic fuel with a higher breeding ratio. This design is the basis of the DAE’s projection of 470 GW by 2050. In this paper, we describe these projections and examine the assumptions underlying them. We find that they use a simplistic methodology that does not carefully account for the availability of plutonium that is required to fuel breeder reactors. We demonstrate that this methodology is problematic, in particular that it would result in negative balances of plutonium if the DAE’s projections were to come true. The DAE’s projections also ignore constraints coming from reprocessing capacity in the country. As an alternative, we project the possible growth of nuclear power based on breeder reactors using a methodology consistent with plutonium constraints. The resulting breeder reactor capacity will be only between 17 and 40 percent of the DAE’s projections. These results suggest that that nuclear power will not constitute a major source of electricity in India for several decades at the very least if the emphasis on breeder reactors continues.