Atoms for Autonomy
- Nulu Rama Aditeya
- Sep 9, 2025
- 6 min read
The evolution for India’s nuclear programme
India’s nuclear story is one of ambition shaped by scarcity. Born in the aftermath of its post-colonial era, the programme promised strategic autonomy by turning limited uranium and abundant thorium into lasting energy security. Carrying the optimism of self-reliance, it endured sanctions, isolation, and domestic politics that rarely gave it priority. Yet this three-stage vision lingers between possibility and reality. Nuclear power sits at the margins, overshadowed by coal and renewables, even as policymakers set fresh targets and court sustainable technologies. What endures is the question of whether India can transform this bold but unfinished experiment into a defining pillar of its energy future.
Introduction
In the aftermath of its independence, India was impoverished and power-scarce. The country's electrical power was largely confined to its sparse industrial centres, resulting in minimal overall usage and even lower per capita consumption. At the same time, centuries of colonial subjugation had created in the new Indian establishment a need and a desire to avoid overreliance on foreign energy. The Indian government was presented with the challenge to come up with a way to spearhead development, while fostering self-reliance and protecting the energy supply from foreign dependence. Nuclear energy seemed able to address both these pressing issues. Over the next seven decades, the newly planned nuclear programme would be forced to breed excellence under the duress of limited resources and diplomatic isolation.
Energy composition at Independence
In 1947, nearly three quarters of total energy consumption was derived from non-commercial sources such as firewood, crop residue and animal waste. The limited share of commercial energy was heavily concentrated in metropolitan centres and industrial enclaves. Installed electricity capacity stood at 1,362 megawatts, a figure dwarfed by even modest economies of that time.
Rural electrification was virtually absent and industrial expansion was constrained. For the newly independent nation, there was a stark imbalance between potential demand and available supply. With the status quo being untenable, nuclear energy emerged as a potential equalizer: a technology-intensive investment that promised to fix India’s structural problems and vault the country into modernity.
Resource endowment: Thorium and Uranium
India’s geological surveys revealed a unique and paradoxical resource profile. Uranium reserves were modest, estimated at around 92,000 tonnes. Meanwhile, thorium reserves in the coastal monazite sands from Kerala to Odisha were the largest in the world, exceeding well over 4 million tonnes, putting the country at around 25% of global supply.
Despite the abundance, thorium is far more complex to exploit than uranium. Unlike uranium-235 or plutonium-239, thorium is not fissile. It cannot sustain a chain reaction on its own and requires conversion into uranium-233 through neutron absorption. This put India at odds with the prevailing global standards of nuclear power, which relied heavily on uranium and plutonium.
The three stage nuclear programme
It was Homi J. Bhabha, chairman of the newly created Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and the chief architect of India’s nuclear policy, who provided the institutional framework of the nuclear strategy. His three-stage strategy aimed to maximise the country’s limited uranium reserves while making full use of its abundant thorium deposits. Each stage is designed not only to produce electricity, but also to generate the fissile material required for the next stage.
Stage I: Pressured Heavy Water Reactors (PHWRs)- PHWRs use natural uranium as fuel and heavy water as both moderator and coolant. This process produces electricity while also generating plutonium-239 as a by-product which is a crucial input for the next stage.
Stage 2: Fast breeder reactors (FBRs)- In the FBR, the core fuel is plutonium-239 produced in the previous stage. Being fissile, plutonium can sustain a chain reaction, releasing both energy and a flux of neutrons. These neutrons facilitate the chain reaction but also spill into the surrounding material. Encasing the plutonium core, is a blanket of depleted uranium. While uranium-238 is not fissile, it can capture these excess neutrons and transform into a fissile isotope. Through a sequence of beta decays, the uranium-238 in the blanket becomes plutonium-239. In this way, the reactor not only produces energy but also multiplies the fissile stockpile.
Stage III: Advanced Heavy Water Reactors (AHWRs)- The final stage of the nuclear program is designed to use the country’s abundant thorium reserves. While thorium-232 itself is not fissile, it is fertile– when it absorbs a neutron, it eventually transforms into uranium-233 which is a fissile isotope capable of sustaining a chain reaction. The AHWRs core is a thorium based one which is loaded alongside a starter fuel (plutonium-239 from stage 2). The plutonium initiates the reaction, releasing extra neutrons that the thorium nuclei captures, eventually producing uranium-233. Heavy water is used to slow down the neutrons, as thorium is more likely to absorb slow neutrons than the fast ones released when plutonium or uranium fissions. Heavy water also happens to maximize neutron economy, as it captures less neutrons during this process than light water would. Once sufficient uranium is produced, it takes over as the main fuel, establishing a self-sustaining thorium-uranium cycle.
The three-stage process’s economic rationale was to bootstrap from scarcity to abundance by leveraging each stage’s by-product for the next.
International Cooperation and the 1974 break
International collaboration was crucial in the programme's formative years. The Canada-India Reactor (CIRUS) was India’s welcome to the international community of nuclear science. The initial optimism collapsed in 1974, when India conducted its first military nuclear test in Pokran, allegedly using plutonium derived from CIRUS. India called the test a “peaceful nuclear explosion”, but this sentiment wasn't shared by the West, fearful of the rise of another nuclear power. Canada and the United States immediately terminated nuclear cooperation, cutting off reactor reconstruction and technical assistance. The Rajasthan Atomic Power Station which was being built at that time, powered by Canadian design, was left stranded midstream. The following sanctions imposed a long period of technological isolation. India was forced to indigenize reactor construction, heavy-water production and reprocess technology under adverse conditions. The program barely survived this period of global isolation, with rising costs and capacity constraints causing major operational problems.
Domestic political economy
As a consequence of this, in the Parliament, critics from across the political spectrum questioned whether state resources should be spent on expensive nuclear projects while other pressing domestic issues prevailed. In one of the rare cases of bi-partisanship, the entirety of the political class viewed nuclear projects strictly as a core electoral issue. The high capital investment needs, paired with opposition from anti-nuclear groups, led to state governments taking little to no initiative in starting new projects or continuing old ones.
From the Kudankulam nuclear plant in Tamil Nadu to Maharashtra's Jaitapur project, there simply wasn't any strong enough short-term political incentive to push for the development of nuclear infrastructure in the country, with policymakers treating it as a negotiable issue within immediate political calculations.
Current capacity and Structural challenges
Today, nuclear energy accounts for just over three percent of total electricity generation in the country, at about 8,180 megawatts of nuclear capacity.
Trade of uranium supply remains constrained as domestic reserves are both geologically limited and low grade uranium deposits. New reforms aim to liberalize the mining and import of uranium, with New Delhi announcing that private firms would be permitted to mine, export and process this precious resource, breaking a decades-long State monopoly. This policy shift seeks to ease supply chain bottlenecks.
Parallel investments are directed towards thorium-based technologies, which are the final stage of the nuclear cycle. Research at BARC has yielded designs for 300MWe AHWR with low coolant requirements and a closed fuel cycle aimed to minimise long-lived radioactive waste. While there have been significant and noticeable research advancements, all of them are far from commercial deployment.
Another structural challenge lies in the economics behind nuclear development. Projects are often plagued with cost overruns, delays and litigation. To add to this, the complexity of integrating multiple supply chains necessitates the establishment of a framework by the government. Both the union and state governments have spearheaded sustainable energy projects as India aims to scale its nuclear power generation to 100 gigawatts by 2047. The recent interest in Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) could potentially reduce upfront capital investment and shorten construction periods, allowing it to complement other forms of renewable energy more flexibly.
Conclusion
India’s nuclear programme is best understood as a long negotiation between vision and constraint. Conceived in the post-independence years as a path to strategic autonomy, it was designed to harness domestic resources and generate power on India’s own terms, independent of Western priorities and supply chains.
With ambitious targets of reaching 100 GW by 2047, the government has introduced reforms to attract both public and private investment into large-scale reactors and new small modular designs.
India should have been well-positioned to pioneer a unique nuclear pathway. Instead, its treadmill of progress has left the country with neither the technological maturity nor the robust supply chains needed to fully realise the vision first conceived more than 75 years ago.
Bibliography:
Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC)(2025). Thorium fuel cycle
CGPI. (2021). Historical evolution of electricity supply in independent India, 1947 to 1992.
Encyclopédie de l’énergie. (2018). Energy in India: From Jawaharlal Nehru to Indira Gandhi.
Government of India. (2012). Thorium based nuclear power programme. Press Information Bureau.
Nuclear Business Platform. (2025). Thorium-powered future key to India’s nuclear goal.
Nuclear Weapon Archive. (1999). India’s nuclear weapons program – The long pause: 1974–1989.
Times of India. (2025). Centre unilaterally making rules for mineral mining.
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. (2024). Reclaiming the Promise of Nuclear Power in India.
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