India Nuclear News and Discussion 4 July 2011

[RoyG]

SOG seizes huge quantity of beryl from Kishangarh

TNN | Jan 11, 2016, 10.20 AM IST

Ajmer/Jaipur: The Special Operations Group (SOG) on Sunday raided several mines and other places in Ajmer's Kishangarh area and seized large quantity of beryl, a compound of beryllium mineral used for the purpose of atomic energy production and research. The seizure came two days after the arrest of Jumman Ali, the president of Kishangarh Waqf Board, for procuring beryl from mines and selling it to a gang operating out of Jaipur and Delhi. The gang is suspected to have exported hundreds of tonnes of beryl in the past two years. The gang was busted on December 31, when SOG seized 20 tonnes of beryl from the custom department's depot in Jaipur's Kanakpura area. Five persons including Jumman have been arrested and nearly 50 tonnes of beryl has been seized since December 31. It includes 20 tonnes seized on Sunday.

On Sunday, the police raided Sursura village of Kishangarh. "The mineral was found dumped in an open area in the village. It was seized and brought to the nearby Rupangarh police station. We are now looking for the owner of the place," said ATS sources.
The police are also looking for two men including Firoz, an aide of Jumman.

The SOG had earlier arrested the three men, Manish Kumar, Murtiza, Jagdish, Saleem and Jumman. Manish, who hails from Bihar, currently lives in Delhi. He has contacts with people in Hong Kong and China looking to buy the restricted substance beryl. Murtiza and Saleem are residents of Ramganj in Jaipur. Jumman used to get beryl from mines and with help of Jagdish, sell it to Saleem. Saleem would then sell it to Manish who had contacts with overseas buyers.
The state mines and geological department has also initiated a probe in this matter and superintendent mines engineer M L Bhati asked a fact-finding report from different mining engineers of Ajmer, Beawar and Makrana.

Beryl can also be used for atomic energy purposes, the reason why its distribution and sale is banned in India.
Several mines are under the SOG scanner for illegal sale.
When a mine produces beryl and some other compounds of beryllium, it has to be sold to the department of atomic energy only but many mine owners in Kishangarh area were selling it to the gang busted by SOG.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city ... 527307.cms

[KLP Dubey]

I guess we are in the same page. In the end what matters is total energy cost.
Would like to discuss, why I chose 10% purity and not 90% D2O purity based on my back of envelope calculation.

.....

Evaporating 89 kg of water is almost equal to 90 kg of water.
Key Question: Is cost of vacuum evaporating 90 kg of water is comparable to cost of electrolyzing 90 kg of water?

I am sure there would be a cost difference, but what matters is the overall process cost. It's possible the H2O selective membrane in the finishing step would not drop the overall cost enough to incentivize its adoption.

I totally agree that if precursor for e.chem method has higher D2O concn, it reduces the energy requirement significantly. Can that be achieved without vacuum distillation, where there is a significant energy loss as well as low recovery.

What if one had a D2O selective membrane with selectivity > 10 ?

[durairaaj]

...
What if one had a D2O selective membrane with selectivity > 10 ?

Building a D2O selective at the same time H2O agnostic membrane is an impossibility. Because, all of the membrane separation techniques exploit the difference in chemical and ionic affinity of species being separated. This chemical and ionic characteristics are solely determined by the electronic orbitals. So in case of isotopes, H and D have same electronic configuration and cannot be separated using membrane separation. If we build a something to extract D then H will go right in to it.
Also D goes slowly because of its heavier nature, whereas H being less than 45%wt moves much faster and overwhelms the membrane. This difference in speed is the only characteristics being exploited everywhere so far. The better way is to extract H efficiently.

Apparently the researcher in the reference quips about this membrane being first has ability to separate between sub-atomic particle. He meant this membrane preferably distiguishing proton (H+) from proton-neutron combo(D+) is unique. A reverse of this is impossible.

P.S.: In electrolysis, the electrical cost of pumping proton across proton conducting membrane is marginal, but most of the energy goes to hydrolyzing water.

[Vriksh]

[Admin request noted and snipped]

Perhaps Y shaped Carbon Nanotube separator to improve the separation of D2O from H2O in a centrifuge system based on mass may work.

[hnair]

Vriksh, this forum is against triangulation of identities. Desist please

[KLP Dubey]

...
What if one had a D2O selective membrane with selectivity > 10 ?

Building a D2O selective at the same time H2O agnostic membrane is an impossibility. Because, all of the membrane separation techniques exploit the difference in chemical and ionic affinity of species being separated. This chemical and ionic characteristics are solely determined by the electronic orbitals. So in case of isotopes, H and D have same electronic configuration and cannot be separated using membrane separation.

That is incorrect. First of all, you contradict yourself in your reply. You seem very excited about the recently reported membrane that can separate H with selectivity of 10 over D (which obviously indicates the two can be separated by a membrane) - yet you then state that "H and D have same electronic configuration and cannot be separated using membrane separation".

H2O and D2O are similar but by no means identical. While an isolated H2O molecule and D2O molecule would be practically identical, they are usually found in hydrogen-bonded environments ! In this case the mass differences between H and D create significant differences in the strengths and directionalities of the O-H and O-D bonds and hence their thermodynamic properties as well as mobility. Especially when they become confined in nanoscale spaces, these can lead to very unusual effects....

[Amber G.]

H and D have same electronic configuration

VERY similar but NOT identical.. For hydrogen, the reduce mass is μH=0.99946 me, and that the reduced mass of deuterium is μD=0.99973 me (can just calculate)..That is a very small difference, but it is measurable!
(The transition energy is something like: Ei−Ef=(μ^2*Z^2*e^4)/(4πε)^2)(2h^2)(1/n_f^2-1/n_i^2) where mu is the reduced mass.. Chemists generally take as equal to mass of electron (because nucleus is so much heavier than an electron)..
(I am sure you know physicists old joke that - all chemists need to know about Quantum Mechanics is to learn QM for Hydrogen type atom onlee )

[KLP Dubey]

VERY similar but NOT identical..

Well, D2 and H2 have pronounced differences in molecular size (D2 is actually smaller than H2), e.g. there are membranes which can permeate D2 about 3 times as fast as H2 because of differences in adsorption and diffusion properties in nanoporous materials:

https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... DH_zeolite

This is a "classical" effect. Unfortunately (for other technical reasons) these membranes don't work when exposed to a mixture of the two gases.

In addition there are the well-known "quantum sieving" effects arising from the fact that the ground state energy of D2 (or T2) in a potential well is different from that of H2 due to the difference in molecular mass.

[Austin]

Moscow and New Delhi are negotiating to continue cooperation on supplying Russian nuclear fuel to India’s pressurized heavy-water reactors (PHWR), Russia’s fuel production holding company TVEL said Friday.


Russia in Talks With India to Continue Nuclear Fuel Deliveries

http://sputniknews.com/business/2016011 ... -fuel.html

[disha]

Must read PDF on Astrosat by nuculear wonks

http://www.isro.gov.in/sites/default/fi ... -final.pdf

Astrosat PDF by ISRO
Copied from space thread., full credits to the original poster there.

Why? Check out how X-Rays are focused.

[SaiK]

okay bla blah... they want us to close everything fissile, make china and pakistan laugh at us. how long these type of articles would be levy-ed?

OPINION
SECRET INDIAN NUKE SITE SPARKS NEW ARMS RACE
BY ADRIAN LEVY ON 1/16/16 AT 2:47 PM
http://www.newsweek.com/india-pakistan- ... rms-416328

This article first appeared on the Center for Public Integrity site.

http://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/12/ ... al-h-bombs
Experts worry that India is creating new fuel for an arsenal of H-bombs
Tribal lands are taken for a top-secret atomic city, known as Challakere, where centrifuges will spin uranium capable of being used in powerful bombs

When laborers began excavating protected pastureland in India’s southern Karanataka state in 2012, members of the nomadic Lambani tribe were startled.

For centuries, the scarlet-robed herbalists and herders had freely crisscrossed the undulating meadow there, known as kavals, and this uprooting of their rich landscape came without warning or explanation.

By autumn, Puttaranga Setty, a wiry groundnut farmer from Kallalli, encountered a barbed-wire fence blocking off a well-used trail. His neighbor, a herder, discovered that the road from this city to a nearby village had been diverted elsewhere.

They rang Doddaullarti Karianna, a weaver who sits on one of the village councils that funnel India’s sprawling democracy down to the grassroots.

Karianna recalls being baffled and frightened by the news. He said the 365,000 residents of the farming and tribal communities who live in over 60 villages alongside the kavals believe they are protected by a female deity that rises from the pasture, and so the “thought of not having [access to] the kavals was terrifying; like saying there will be no Gods.”

Officials with India’s state and central governments refused to answer his questions. So Karianna sought legal help from a combative ecological-advocacy group in Bangalore that specializes in fighting illegal encroachment on greenbelt land.

But the group’s lawyers were also stymied. Officials warned its lawyers that the prime minister’s office was running the project from New Delhi.

“There is no point fighting this, we were told,” Leo Saldanha, a founding member of the advocacy group, recalled. “You cannot win.” Indeed, an unprecedented election boycott and protests by thousands of local residents, some violent, have had no effect.

Only after construction on the site began that year did it finally become clear that two secretive agencies were behind a project that experts say will be the subcontinent’s largest military-run complex of nuclear centrifuges, atomic research laboratories and weapons and aircraft testing facilities.

Among the project's aims: to expand the government’s nuclear research, to produce fuel for India’s nuclear reactors and to help power the country’s fleet of new submarines, one of which underwent sea trials in 2014.

But another, more controversial ambition, according to retired Indian government officials and independent experts in London and Washington, is to give India an extra stockpile of enriched uranium fuel that could—if India so decides—be used in new hydrogen bombs (also known as thermonuclear weapons), substantially increasing the explosive force of those in its existing nuclear arsenal.

Such a move would be regarded uneasily by India’s close neighbors, China and Pakistan, which experts say might respond by ratcheting up their own nuclear firepower. Pakistan in particular considers itself a fierce military rival, having been entangled in four major conflicts with India, as well as frequent border skirmishing.

New Delhi has never published a detailed account of its nuclear arsenal, which it first developed in 1974. Until now, there has been little public notice, outside India, about the construction at Challakere and its strategic implications.

The government has said little about it, and made no public promises about how the highly enriched uranium to be produced there will be used. As a military facility, it is not open to international inspection.

But a lengthy investigation by the Center for Public Integrity, including interviews with local residents, senior and retired Indian scientists and military officers connected to the nuclear program and foreign experts and intelligence analysts, has pierced some of the secrecy surrounding the new facility, parts of which are set to open next year.

It makes clear that it will give India a nuclear capability—the ability to make many large-yield nuclear arms—that most experts say it presently lacks.

And if these tasks require the trampling of the kavals, so be it.

The independent Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates that India already has between 90 and 110 relatively low-yield nuclear weapons, as compared to Pakistan’s estimated stockpile of up to 120. And China, to India’s north, is estimated to have more than 260 warheads.

China successfully tested a thermonuclear weapon—involving a two-stage explosion, typically producing a much larger force and far greater destruction than single-stage atomic bombs—as long ago as 1967, while India’s scientists claimed to have detonated a thermonuclear weapon in 1998.

But test site preparations director K. Santhanam said in 2009 it had “fizzled,” rendering the number and type of such weapons in India’s arsenal uncertain to outsiders.

India, according to a recent report by former Australian nonproliferation chief John Carlson, is one of just three countries that continue to produce fissile materials for nuclear weapons (the others are Pakistan and North Korea).

The enlargement of India’s thermonuclear program would more clearly position the country alongside Britain, the United States, Russia, Israel, France and China, which already have significant stocks of such weapons.

Few authorities in India are willing to discuss these matters publicly, partly because the country’s Atomic Energy Act and the Official Secrets Act shroud everything connected to the Indian nuclear program, and in the past have been used to bludgeon those who divulge details.

Spokesmen for the two organizations involved in the Challakere construction, the Defense Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), which has played a leading role in nuclear weapons design, declined to answer the Center’s questions about the government’s ambitions for the new park, as did the Indian ministry of external affairs.

Western analysts, speaking on condition that they not be named, say however that preparatory work for this effort has been under way for four years, at a second top-secret site known as the Rare Materials Plant, 160 miles to the south in Rattehalli, close to the city of Mysore.

Recent satellite photos of that facility have revealed the existence of a new nuclear enrichment complex that is already feeding India’s weapons program and, some Western analysts maintain, laying the groundwork for a more ambitious hydrogen bomb project.

It is effectively a test bed for Challakere, they say, a proving ground for technology and a place where technicians can practice producing the highly enriched uranium the military would need.

The environment ministry approved the Mysore site’s construction as “a project of strategic importance” that would cost nearly $100 million in October 2012, according to a letter, marked Secret, from the ministry to atomic energy officials that month. Seen by the Center, this letter spells out the ambition to feed new centrifuges with fuel derived from yellowcake—milled uranium ore named after its color—shipped from mines in Jadugoda, 1,200 miles away in India’s north, and to draw water from the nearby Krishna Raja Sagar dam.

Finding authoritative information about the scope and objectives of these two massive construction projects is not easy. “Even for us, details of the Indian program are always sketchy, and hard facts thin on the ground,” a circumstance that leaves room for misunderstanding, a senior Obama administration official said in Washington.

But Gary Samore, who served from 2009 to 2013 as the White House coordinator for arms control and weapons of mass destruction, said "I believe that India intends to build thermonuclear weapons as part of its strategic deterrent against China." Samore said it is unclear when India will realize this goal of a larger and more powerful arsenal, but “they will.”

A former senior British official who worked on nuclear issues likewise said intelligence analysts on both sides of the Atlantic are “increasingly concerned” about India’s pursuit of thermonuclear weapons and “actively monitoring” both sites.

U.S. officials in Washington said they shared this assessment. “Mysore is being constantly monitored, and we are constantly monitoring progress in Challakere,” a former White House official said.

Robert Kelley, a former project leader for nuclear intelligence at Los Alamos, who served twice, from 1992-1993 and 2001-2005, as the director of the Iraq Action Team at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said that having analyzed the available satellite imagery, as well as studying open source material on both sites, he believed that India was pursuing a larger thermonuclear arsenal.

He warned that its development “will inevitably usher in a new nuclear arms race” in a volatile region, where India, China and Pakistan have border disputes, wary militaries, and diplomats who sometimes deploy incendiary rhetoric.

However, Western knowledge about how India’s weapons are stored, transported and protected and how the radiological and fissile material that fuels them is guarded and warehoused—the chain of custody—remains rudimentary.

After examining nuclear security practices in 25 countries with “weapons usable nuclear materials,” the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), a nonprofit organization headquartered in Washington, in January 2014 ranked India’s nuclear security practices 23rd, only above Iran and North Korea.

An NTI analyst told the Center India’s score stemmed in part from the country’s opacity and “obfuscation on nuclear regulation and security issues.” But the group also noted the prevalence of corruption in India and the insecurity of the region: the rise of Islamist jihad fronts inside India and in nearby Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan, as well as home-grown leftist insurgencies.

“Many other countries, including China, have worked with us to understand the ratings system and better their positions,” but India did not, the analyst said.

Like the villagers nearby, key members of the Indian Parliament say they know little about the project. One veteran lawmaker, who has twice been a cabinet minister, said his colleagues are rarely briefed about nuclear weapons-related issues. “Frankly, we in Parliament discover little,” he said, “and what we do find out is normally from Western newspapers.”

In an interview with Indian reporters in 2003, Jayanthi Natarajan, a former minister for environment and forests and past member of a parliamentary committee on defense and atomic energy matters, said that she and other members of Parliament had “tried time and again to raise [nuclear-related] issues…and have achieved precious little.”

Starting Work While the Nuclear Deal’s Ink Is Still Wet

Nonetheless, lawyers acting for the villagers living close to Challakere eventually forced some important disclosures. The Parliament’s representative for the region heard about plans for the park from the Indian defense minister as early as March 2007, according to a copy of personal correspondence between the two, seen by the Center.

This was the very moment India was also negotiating a deal with the United States to expand nuclear cooperation. That deal ended nearly three decades of nuclear-related isolation for India, imposed as punishment for its first atom bomb test in 1974. U.S. military assistance to India was barred for a portion of this period, and Washington also withheld its support for loans by international financial institutions.

The agreement was highly controversial in Washington. While critics warned it would reward India for its secret pursuit of the bomb and allow it to expand its nuclear weapons work, supporters emphasized language in which India agreed to identify its civilian nuclear sites and open them to inspection by the IAEA.

India also said at the time that it would refrain from conducting new atomic weapons tests. And in return for the waiving of restrictions on India’s civil nuclear program, the president was required to determine that India was “working actively with the United States for the early conclusion of a multilateral treaty on the cessation of the production of fissile materials for use in nuclear weapons.”

Then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 2006 that the deal would not trigger an arms race in the region or “enhance [India’s] military capacity or add to its military stockpile.”

Rice added: “Moreover, the nuclear balance in the region is a function of the political and military situation in the region. We are far more likely to be able to influence those regional dynamics from a position of strong relations with India and indeed with Pakistan.”

Opponents of the deal complained, however, that it did not compel India to allow inspections of nine reactor sites known to be associated with the country’s military, including several producing plutonium for nuclear arms.

The deal also allowed 10 other reactor sites subject to IAEA inspection to use imported uranium fuel, freeing up an indigenously mined supply of uranium that was not tracked by the international community and could now be redirected to the country’s bomb program.

Given India’s “need to build up [its] nuclear deterrent arsenal as fast as possible,” it should “categorize as many power reactors as possible as civilian ones, to be refueled by imported uranium, and conserve our native uranium fuel for weapons grade plutonium production,” strategist Krishnaswamy Subrahmanyam, a longtime adviser to the Indian government, notoriously wrote in December 12, 2005, in The Times of India.

By May 2009, seven months after the U.S.-India nuclear cooperation deal was ratified by Congress, the Karnataka state government had secretly leased 4,290 acres adjacent to Varavu Kaval and Khudapura villages in the district of Chitradurga to the defense research group and another 1,500 acres to the Indian Institute of Science, a research center that has frequently worked with the DRDO and India’s nuclear industry, the documents obtained by lawyers showed.

In December 2010, a further 573 acres were leased to the Indian Space Research Organisation and 1,810 acres were bought by the BARC. Karianna said the villagers were not told at the time about any of these transactions, and that the documents, which they saw two years later, “were stunning. We were being fenced in—behind our backs.”

Srikumar Banerjee, the chairman of India’s Atomic Energy Commission, first offered an official glimpse of the project’s ambitions in 2011 when he told CNN’s Indian news channel that the enrichment plant could be used to produce nuclear fuel, or slightly enriched uranium, to power India’s heavy and light water reactors.

However, Banerjee added that the site would also have a strategic use, a designation that would keep international inspectors away.

Erecting Barricades and Draining the Local Water Supply

The sensitivity of the Challakere project became clearer after the legal team filed a lawsuit in 2012 at the High Court of Karnataka demanding a complete accounting of pasture land being seized by the authorities, only to learn from the state land registry that the Indian army was to be granted 10,000 acres too, as the future home for a brigade of 2,500 soldiers.

The State Reserve Police, an armed force, would receive 350 acres, and 500 acres more was being set aside for a Commando Training Centre. The nuclear city close to Challakere would, in short, be ringed by a security perimeter of thousands of military and paramilitary guards.

In July 2013, six years after the plans were green-lit by Delhi, the National Green Tribunal—India’s environmental agency—finally took up the villager’s complaints. It dispatched investigators to the scene and demanded that each government agency disclose its ambitions in detail. The DRDO responded that national security trumped the tribunal and provided no more information.

While the IAEA would be kept out, villagers were being hemmed in. By 2013, a public notice was plastered onto an important shrine known as Boredevaragudi warning worshippers it would soon be inaccessible. A popular altar for a local animist ceremony was already out of bounds. The route for a festival of Hiriyara Habba at Khudapura, which celebrated the community’s ancestors, was also blocked.

“Then the groundwater began to vanish,” Karianna said. The district is a semi-arid zone, and local records, still written in ink, show that between 2003 and 2007, droughts had caused the suicides of 101 farmers whose crops failed.

Now, due to the construction, a critical manmade reservoir adjacent to Ullarthi was suddenly fenced off. Bore wells dug by the nuclear and military contractors as the construction accelerated siphoned off other water supplies from surrounding villages.

Seventeen miles of 15-foot-high walls began to snake around the villagers’ meadows, blocking grazing routes, preventing them from gathering firewood or herbs for medicine.

Hundreds rallied to knock holes into the new ramparts. “They were rebuilt in days,” Karianna said, “so we tried again, but this time teams of private security guards had been hired by someone, and they viciously beat my neighbors and friends.”

BARC and the DRDO still provided no detailed explanations to anyone on the ground about the scope and purpose of their work, Karianna added. “Our repeated requests, pleadings, representations to all elected members at every level have yielded no hard facts. It feels as if India has rejected us.”

Highlighting local discontent, almost all of the villagers ringing the kavals boycotted the impending general election, a rare action since India’s birth as an independent democracy.

The growing local discontent, and the absence of public comment by the U.S. or European governments about the massive project, eventually drew the attention of independent nuclear analysts.

Suspicions Stoked by Satellite Photos

Serena Kelleher-Vergantini, an analyst at the Washington, D.C.–based nonprofit the Institute for Science and International Security scoured all the available satellite imagery in the summer of 2014.

Eventually, with the help of the Bangalore-based environmental group, she zeroed in on the construction site in the kavals. The journal IHS Jane’s Intelligence Review was separately doing the same in London, commissioning Kelley, formerly of the IAEA, to analyze images from the Mysore plant.

What struck both of them was the enormous scale and ambition of the projects as well as the secrecy surrounding them. The military-nuclear park in the kavals, at nearly 20 square miles, has a footprint comparable to the New York state capital, Albany.

After analyzing the images and conducting interviews with atomic officials in India, Kelleher-Vergantini concluded that the footprint for enrichment facilities planned in the new complex would enable scientists to produce industrial quantities of uranium, although the institute would only know how much when construction had progressed further.

As Kelley examined photos of the second site, he was astonished by the presence of two recently expanded buildings that had been made lofty enough to accommodate a new generation of tall, carbon-fiber centrifuges, capable of working far faster to enrich uranium than any existing versions.

Nuclear experts express the productiveness of these machines in Separative Work Units, abbreviated to SWUs (pronounced swooz). Kelley concluded that at the second site, the government could install up to 1,050 of these new hyper-efficient machines, which together with about 700 older centrifuges could complete 42,000 SWUs a year—or enough, he said, to make roughly 403 pounds of weapons-grade uranium.

A new H-bomb, with an explosive force exceeding 100,000 tons of TNT, would require just 4 to 7 kilograms of enriched uranium, according to the International Panel on Fissile Materials, a group of nuclear experts from 16 countries that seek to reduce and secure uranium stocks.

Retired Indian nuclear scientists and military officers said in interviews that India’s growing nuclear submarine fleet would be the first beneficiary of the newly-produced enriched uranium.

India presently has one indigenous vessel, the INS Arihant, constructed in a program supervised by the prime minister’s office. Powered by an 80-megawatt uranium reactor developed by BARC that went critical in August 2013, it will formally enter military service in 2016, having undergone sea trials in 2014.

A second, INS Aridaman, is already under construction, with at least two more slated to be built, a senior military officer said in an interview. Each would be loaded with up to 12 nuclear-tipped missiles.

The officer, who was not authorized to be named, said the fleet’s expansion gained a new sense of urgency after Chinese submarines sailed across the Bay of Bengal to Sri Lanka in October 2014, docking in a port facility in Colombo that had been built by Chinese engineers.

Asked what else the additional uranium would be used for, a senior scientist at the DRDO, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said it would mostly be used to fuel civilian nuclear power reactors and contribute to what he called “benign medical and scientific programs.”

The government has not made such a promise publicly, however, or provided details. India does not have to report what it does with its indigenous uranium, "especially if it is not in the civilian domain,” said Sunil Chirayath, a research assistant professor at Texas A&M University who is an expert on India’s civilian nuclear program.

A senior Obama administration official in Washington, who was not authorized to be quoted by name, expressed skepticism about the government scientist's private claim. The official said that India’s civilian nuclear programs, including power stations and research establishments, were benefiting from new access to imported nuclear fuel (after the embargo’s removal) and now require almost “no homemade enriched uranium.”

India has already received 4,914 tons of uranium from France, Russia and Kazakhstan, for example, and it has agreements with Canada, Mongolia, Argentina and Namibia for additional shipments.

In September 2014, Prime Minister Tony Abbott of Australia signed an agreement to make his country a “long-term, reliable supplier of uranium to India,” a deal that has sparked considerable controversy among Australians.

The International Panel on Fissile Materials estimates that the Arihant class submarine core requires only 65kg of uranium, enriched to 30 percent. Using this figure and the estimated capacity of the centrifuges India is installing in Mysore alone—not even including Challakere—Kelley concluded that, even after fueling its entire submarine fleet, there would be 160kg of weapons-grade uranium left over, every year, or enough to fuel at least 22 H-bombs.

His calculation presumes that the plant is run efficiently, and that its excess capacity is purposeful and not driven by bureaucratic inertia—two large uncertainties in India, a senior U.S. official noted. But having a “rainy day” stockpile to deter the Chinese might be the aim, the official added.

Attempting to Match China’s Nuclear Arsenal?

A retired official who served inside the nuclear cell at the Indian prime minister’s office, the apex organization that supervises the military nuclear program, conceded that other uses besides submarines had been anticipated “for many years.” He pointed to a “thermonuclear bomb program” as “a beneficiary,” and suggested India had had no choice but to “develop a new generation of more powerful megaton weapons” if it was to maintain “credible minimum deterrence.”

Once this meant the bare minimum required to prevent an attack on India, but a new Indian doctrine adopted in 2003—in response to Pakistan’s increasingly aggressive nuclear posture—altered this notion: “Nuclear retaliation to a first strike will be massive and designed to inflict unacceptable damage.”

The official said: “China has long had a thermonuclear capability, and if India is to have a strategic defense worth its salt, and become a credible power in the region, we need to develop a similar weapon and in deployable numbers.” U.S. and British officials affirmed that they have been aware of this discussion among Indian scientists and soldiers for years.

Asked for comment, Vikas Swarup, India’s official spokesman for the Ministry of External Affairs in New Delhi did not respond to email or calls.

In an interview, General Balraj Singh Nagal, who from 2008 to 2010 ran India’s Strategic Forces Command within its Nuclear Command Authority, declined to discuss specific aspects of the nuclear city in Challakere or the transformation of the Rare Materials Plant close to Mysore. But he said that keeping pace with China and developing a meaningful counter to its arsenal was “the most pressing issue” facing India.

“It’s not Pakistan we are looking at most of the time, like most in the West presume,” General Nagal said. “Beijing has long managed a thermonuclear program, and so this is one of many options India should push forwards with, as well as reconsidering our nuclear defense posture, which is outdated and ineffective. We have to follow the technological curve. And where China took it, several decades before us, with the hydrogen bomb, India has to follow.”

The impact of the U.S.-India deal and India’s fissile production surge on the country’s neighbors can already be seen. “Pakistan recently stepped up a gear,” the recently retired British Foreign Office official said.

He pointed to an increase in Pakistan’s plutonium production at four new military reactors in Khushab, a reprocessing plant known as Pinstech, near Islamabad, and a refurbished civilian plutonium reprocessing plant converted to military use in Chashma, as well as “the ramping up of uranium production at a site in Dera Ghazi Khan.”

The retired foreign office official added: “India needs to constantly rethink what deterrence means, as it is not a static notion, and everyone understands that. But the balance of power in the region is so easily upset.”

The official said that in choosing to remain publicly silent, the United States was taking a risk, evidently to try and reap financial and strategic rewards.

Officials at the Pentagon argued before Washington reached its 2008 nuclear deal with India that lifting sanctions would lead to billions of dollars worth of sales in conventional weapons, according to a U.S. official privy to the discussions.That prediction was accurate, with U.S. exports of major weapons to India reaching $5 billion from 2011 to 2014, and edging out Russian sales for the first time.

“But the U.S. is also looking for something intangible: to create a new strategic partner capable of facing down China,” and so India has taken advantage of the situation to overhaul its military nuclear capability, the British official noted.

Pushing back China, said the official, who has worked for 30 years in counter terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and non-proliferation, especially in Southern Asia, is regarded as being “in everyone’s interest.”

White House officials declined to comment on this claim on the record. But Robert Einhorn, the State Department’s former top nonproliferation official, told the Carnegie conference in March that some officials in the Bush administration had the ambition, in making a nuclear deal with India, to “work together to counter China, to be a counterweight to an emerging China.”

He added that in his view, that ambition has not been realized, due to India’s historic insistence on pursuing an independent foreign policy. He also said the nuclear deal had unfortunate repercussions, because other nations concluded that Washington was playing favorites with India.

In Challakere, construction continues despite a ruling by the National Green Tribunal on August 27, 2014, that called for a stay on all “excavation, construction and operation of projects” until environmental clearances had been secured.

Blocked roads were to be re-opened with access given to all religious sites, said Justice M. Chockalingham and Dr. R. Nagendran of the tribunal. But when villagers have attempted to pass over or through the fences and walls, they are met by police officers who hand out photocopied notes in English: “Environmental clearances has (sic) been awarded [to BARC] dated 24 July 2014, which is a secret document and cannot be disclosed.”

Karianna said: “Still, to this day, no one has come to talk to me, to explain to us, what they are doing to our land,” which he depicted as being at the “epicenter of historic India.”

The kings of Mysore once used the kavals as a crucible for experimental breeding of the muscular cows, known as Amrit Mahal, recognizable by their ebony hump and ape-hanger horns, which hauled chariots and six-ton cannons into four, bone-crushing campaigns against the British Empire fought in the last three decades of the 18th century.

The cattle remain, picking their way between towering rough stone walls and barbed wire fences patrolled by private security guards, while weavers like those in Karianna’s village continue to manufacture thick, black kambli or goat-wool blankets that are bought in bulk by the Indian army for its troops facing down Pakistan and China, and stationed in the thin air of the Himalayas to the north.

“Is this what national interest means?” Karianna asked, looking out over the rolling pasture, enveloped in the red dust kicked up by diggers. “We sit beneath our ancient trees and watch them tear up the land, wondering what’s in store.”

Adrian Levy is an investigative reporter and filmmaker. His most recent books are: The Meadow, about a 1995 terrorist kidnapping of westerners in Kashmir, and The Siege: The Attack on the Taj, about the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

Center for Public Integrity national security managing editor R. Jeffrey Smith contributed to this article from Washington, D.C.

This story was co-published with Foreign Policy and the Huffington Post as part of a series about India's civil and military nuclear program. The other articles can be found here.

[SSridhar]

SaiK, the above has been posted and discussed here already.

[VinodTK]

India suspects nuclear security index a ploy to reveal country’s stockpile

NEW DELHI: Even though India moved up two places in a somewhat controversial international ranking on nuclear security, the 2016 Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) security index was greeted here with derision. This biennial exercise, a joint effort between Washington-based Nuclear Threat Initiative and Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) comes weeks before the nuclear security summit, this year to be held in Washington DC in March.

As in the past, the Indian government has refused to respond to the report officially.

In the past two reports India has featured near the bottom — this year it moved up to 21 but as the report itself states, is near the bottom in theft ranking. "India improved by participating in bilateral assistance activities with the United States and putting in place the IAEA Additional Protocol. In the future, India's nuclear materials security conditions could be improved by strengthening laws and regulations for on-site physical protection, control and accounting, and mitigating the insider threat, and ensuring protection of materials during transport is in line with IAEA guidance."

India ratified the IAEA's Additional Protocol in 2014, having committed to it in 2006.

Indian officials take particular umbrage at the report's contention that "India's nuclear materials security conditions remain adversely affected by its continued increase in quantities of nuclear material". Indian officials say the report's description of weapons material also includes civilian material which has certainly increased in India following a number of nuclear agreements with different countries. That, they say, is no reason to conclude that more equals to less security.

Officials involved in India's nuclear programme told TOI on condition of anonymity that India has in place a robust security process, but that they would not make it public. Other countries in the same category of increased stockpiles include Japan, the Netherlands, North Korea, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom.

A new law to create an autonomous regulatory body is still to be cleared by Parliament. Indian officials, who generally bristle at this report every couple of years, say this is intended to get India to "reveal" its stockpile. In recent days, another report from the US Congress saying Pakistan possesses more nuclear weapons than India is, they feel, also intended for the same purpose.


That appears to be a major problem with the international NGO which has pushed for greater "openness". In 2014, Rajiv Nayan of IDSA had critiqued the NTI report thus: "The report is nothing but an anti-India Western non-proliferation document. Highly subjective indicators have neutralised objective steps. The Indian government has taken the right decision in ignoring the latest NTI report."


Since both the NGO and the Indian government appear to be occupying two different planets where this report is concerned, the gap has only widened, which will only impact the accuracy of the report since it can only work if both sides agree to work with each other.

[member_29325]

Even this whole charade of "pakis have more nukes than India" that is played out by the likes of Michael Crapon and the the tools armscontrolwonk.org are to try and goad India to reveal its nuclear strength...but like schrodinger's cat, the uncertainty helps in deterrence as far as India is concerned. Adversaries won't know how to play you if they don't know what you actually possess.

[arun]

With the paperwork, both at the multilateral IAEA level and the Bi-lateral Indo-US level having been concluded, I would have expected the US to have said that it is India’s right to conclude nuclear power generation deals with anyone they choose. OTOH the response by US State Department Spokesperson John Kirby is to the say the least shifty.

So is the US backtracking on the Civil Nuclear deal they entered into with India and shifting goal posts?

I do hope our MEA will take this up with the US and obtain clear cut clarifications:

QUESTION: Wait a minute. How does the U.S. view that last week, Russia and New Delhi decided to build 12 atomic plants and nuclear component reactors? What is the U.S. Government view on that?

MR KIRBY: You’ll have to let me take the question. I don’t – I can’t speak to that particular report, so you’re going to have to let me get back to you on that.

Clicky

[member_29325]

Don't see how the US can have a problem with that (and what exactly it can do w.r.t India if it does have a problem), especially since the deal with Russia is a word-for-word copy of the Indo-US deal, and ditto for France, and Russia and France do not have to follow US diktats on anything. The fact is that India does not depend on the "civilian deal" from US for its energy needs of the future, and if US and India cannot agree on the terms of purchase for these plants, then India will find another way -- India's biggest problem was getting fuel for its existing nuclear plants when the deal came into force and that situation has been resolved.

[member_29325]

Useful idiot Ankit Panda anal-izes India-Pakistan "nuclear security"

But this joker is another one from von Hippel's tribe of NPA wankers at princeton, like MV Ramana.

@nktpnd Writer/Editor @Diplomat_APAC in NYC. IR/Security/Asia/Nukes/Econ. Previously worked on Syria/Middle East. Via @WilsonSchool, @Princeton.

[durairaaj]

Building a D2O selective at the same time H2O agnostic membrane is an impossibility....

That is incorrect. ....

I stand corrected. Thanks for the clarification. In my years of pumping proton across a membrane, I underestimated the magic that zeolite can do. Long long ago my professor listed the separation of D2 from H2 as one of the achievement of PSA, albeit with a huge energy cost. Apparently, recent innovations are indeed breaking the barriers.

For anyone interested in reading a scientific article on this subject,Novel low energy hydrogen–deuterium isotope breakthrough separation using a trapdoor zeolite

[Vipul]

Francois Hollande visit to finalize deadline for 6 nuclear reactors.

India and France are expected to announce a roadmap and deadline for construction of six new nuclear reactors by French company Areva when President Francois Hollande meets Narendra Modi for bilateral discussions on Monday.

India has also decided to move away from the Russian model of building two reactors at a time and will steam ahead with all six reactors simultaneously.

[Kakkaji]

Twin snags in French N-talks - Made-in-India, ownership stand in way

New Delhi, Jan. 24: New Delhi's quest to put a few "Made in India" tags on imported nuclear reactors and a change in ownership of France's reactor supplier were clouding last-minute negotiations as French President Francois Hollande arrived in India today.

Government officials and nuclear power executives from both countries have been locked in weekend talks to overcome hurdles to building six French-made 1600MW reactors in Jaitapur in coastal Maharashtra.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will lead India in two hours of bilateral talks with Hollande's team tomorrow morning. In the lead-up to the visit, both countries were keen to ensure that some breakthrough could be announced after that meeting.

But senior officials familiar with the recent rounds of negotiations have said that a change in Areva's ownership last year has also meant a change in the lead French negotiator with India over the past few months.

India's government and domestic nuclear suppliers are also keen to use a pact the two countries had sealed during Modi's Paris trip last April to push the French into allowing the manufacture of key reactor components in India.

Both these issues, which will determine the cost of the reactors and the electricity they will generate for Indian homes, have made it uncertain that any breakthrough will emerge from tomorrow's summit, the officials said.

"EDF will be in the lead now; that is creating a change in the way nuclear negotiations will be conducted," the French ambassador to India, Francois Richier, told reporters this week. Electricite De France, a French government-owned utility, had taken over Areva's nuclear operations last June.

The six proposed reactors at Jaitapur will add 9,600MW to India's installed nuclear capacity. The government-owned Nuclear Power Corporation, the sole company that builds and operates commercial nuclear reactors in India, has set a "target" of expanding the installed nuclear power capacity from the current 5,720MW to about 14,000MW by 2024.

But NPC officials have hinted they are prepared to meet this target even without the Jaitapur reactors.

The officials said this additional capacity was expected to come from a series of 700MW reactors - two at Kakrapar, four in Rajasthan, two in Haryana, two at a site yet to be finalised, and two new Russian reactors at Kudankulam, Tamil Nadu.

India and France have moved beyond one of the key concerns that was holding up their nuclear partnership - India's nuclear liability law.

France has communicated it is comfortable with a nuclear insurance pool India has set up that foreign nuclear equipment providers can dip into to cover their products against accidents. But short and long-term financial considerations continue to pose challenges.

Indian nuclear industry executives say that domestic manufacture of key components and equipment will be essential to making electricity from imported nuclear reactors affordable.

Several private and public-sector companies in India have been routinely supplying non-nuclear components, ranging from turbines to electronic systems, for India's home-grown 540MW and 700MW pressurised heavy water reactors.

"We can do as good a job at competitive rates," said Kaustubh Shukla, chief executive officer at the industrial products division of Godrej and Boyce, a major Indian nuclear kit supplier. "Domestic manufacture of components could significantly reduce costs."

Areva and Larsen & Toubro, the Indian engineering and construction giant, had last year signed an MoU to "explore avenues of collaboration for the Jaitapur project" when Modi visited France in April.

"Global manufacturing is moving to India in other industrial areas, so it should be applicable to the nuclear sector also," Shukla said.

But France's nuclear industry is in financial churn, and Paris is striking a hard bargain over the extent of "localisation" of the manufacture of nuclear components in India.

Areva posted a 14-billion-euro loss in 2014, and in June 2015 the French government - which owned 87 per cent of the company -- decided it was time to split the giant firm into two.

Areva (Nuclear Power), which designs, engineers and manufactures reactors, was sold to EDF.

[vera_k]

^^

It does look like nuclear will be uneconomical for a while given current market conditions for gas, solar and coal. Perhaps everyone needs to take a break until the cycle turns and try again. Particularly unfortunate for the French that the Jaitapur site is in Maharashtra, where the Enron saga provided an object lesson in power tariffs.

[member_29294]

Let Areva bleed.

Russia, Japan, and US would love to take their place for their own nuclear reactors. Now that nuclear fuel can freely be imported into India, it doesn't seem like there is much need for foreign reactors that won't use indigenous components and aren't competitively priced.

[hanumadu]

^^

It does look like nuclear will be uneconomical for a while given current market conditions for gas, solar and coal. Perhaps everyone needs to take a break until the cycle turns and try again. Particularly unfortunate for the French that the Jaitapur site is in Maharashtra, where the Enron saga provided an object lesson in power tariffs.

More than economics, we need those reactors to graduate to stage 2 and stage 3 of our nuclear program.

[member_29325]

More than economics, we need those reactors to graduate to stage 2 and stage 3 of our nuclear program.

This is true -- the gestation period for the third stage to kick in is in the order of decades according to Indian scientists.

[arun]

Marshall Islands sue Britain, India and Pakistan over nuclear weapons : Archipelago where notorious Bikini Atoll test took place tells international court that nuclear powers have not lived up to disarmament obligations:

In 2014, the Marshall Islands – a Pacific Ocean territory with 55,000 people – accused nine countries of “not fulfilling their obligations with respect to the cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament”.

They included China, Britain, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia and the United States.

The government, based in the Marshall Islands capital of Majuro, said by not stopping the nuclear arms race, the countries continued to breach their obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) – even if the treaty has not been signed by countries such as India and Pakistan. ……………………………..

But the court only admitted three cases brought against Britain, India and Pakistan because they already recognised the ICJ’s authority. ………………………..

From here:

Guardian

Added later:

Earlier article in the New Indian Express speculates on what India's position will be:

India’s main argument would be based on its reservations as delineated in its declaration for recognizing the jurisdiction to the ICJ by then Indian foreign minister Swaran Singh in 1974.

India had declared that the ICJ cannot adjudicate on disputes concerning multilateral treaties, which will cover the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty.

Further, India may argue the “self-defence” clause for the strengthening of its nuclear forces. The 1974 declaration which lists disputes on which India also does not accept ICJ’s role as “relating to or connected with facts or situations of hostilities, armed conflicts, individual or collective actions taken in self-defence, resistance to aggression, … and other similar or related acts, measures or situations in which India is, has been or may in future be involved”.

India Submits Reply to ICJ on Marshal Islands Suit

[vera_k]

More than economics, we need those reactors to graduate to stage 2 and stage 3 of our nuclear program.

Everything comes down to economics ultimately. Nuclear energy is not necessary if other sources are cheap and plentiful.

[Austin]

Putin awards Indian director NPP "Kudankulam" Order of Friendship

http://in.rbth.com/news/2016/01/29/puti ... hip_563555

Russian President Vladimir Putin has awarded the Order of Friendship to the "Kudankulam" Nuclear Power Plant Site Director Ramayahi Shanmugam Sundar.

According to the text of the decree published on the government's official website on Friday, R S Sundar was awarded "for major contribution to the implementation of the NPP "Kudankulam" project".

The Kudankulam NPP is being built with Russian technical assistance under the inter-governmental agreement signed in 1988. In 2014, Russia and India signed a general framework agreement for construction of the second stage, including the third and fourth blocks.

The Order of Friendship was established in 1994 to reward foreign citizens for special merit in promoting peace, friendship, cooperation and understanding between nations.

[member_29172]

More than economics, we need those reactors to graduate to stage 2 and stage 3 of our nuclear program.

Everything comes down to economics ultimately. Nuclear energy is not necessary if other sources are cheap and plentiful.

also pathetically inefficient, with no storage ability and basically very very low ROI. other than green jihadi's no one takes solar and wind other cheap and plentifool feel good enegy sources seriously.

Nuclear is the best option, after coal and oil.

[vera_k]

Since coal and oil are cheap, nuclear is not feasible without putting a price on carbon or subsidies from central government.

[member_29325]

Since coal and oil are cheap, nuclear is not feasible without putting a price on carbon or subsidies from central government.

What does that mean "putting a price on carbon"? And what is the definition of "feasible" being used here? Carbon and oil are all short term, but it creates dependence on external suppliers long term -- unlike Thorium-based three stage program, which is going to take a few decades to start the first stage. So have to start now, and work through all the issues that are at research level right now, and when the time comes, also have enough material to burn for transforming Th to U that is central to the three-stage program.

[nelson]

India's largest single unit to reach full capacity generation 1000MWe shortly after a service break of seven loong months. KKNP Kudankulam

http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/t ... 193065.ece

It has reached 900 MWe as yet ...
http://srldc.org/var/ftp/schedule/dc/dc040216CAP69.txt

[Amber G.]

Since coal and oil are cheap, nuclear is not feasible without putting a price on carbon or subsidies from central government.

May be good if you can provide some basis for the above statement .. (eg links which does some quantitative comparison - how much subsidies? what is current prize per Kwh etc)

OTOH, "not feasible" may be too strong a word...just a routine item from UK's "Concordat on Public Engagement" (published last December) explains this may indeed be feasible even in UK where public opinion is not that pro-nuclear after 2011, and central govt. subsidies hardly matter..

>>> "The UK is set to embark on a new nuclear build program that is expected to see around 16 GWe added to the electricity grid over the next 10 to 15 years"

[member_29172]

Uk is getting China's help for high speed rail and nuclear reactors. There was some massive butthurt in the umpire land over China doing all that a few months ago. I think it was when 11 visited uk in november or december last year.

[Amber G.]

I have a high regard for Prof. Moniz. (A good physicist, decent human being and Obama's right-hand man in recent Iran nuke deal)..
A Statement from U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz on India Joining the Convention on Supplementary Compensation for Nuclear Damage (CSC)

February 4, 2016 - 11:52am

Dr. Ernest MonizDr. Ernest Moniz
Secretary of Energy
NEWS MEDIA CONTACT

202-586-4940
DOENews@hq.doe.gov

“India’s membership in the Convention on Supplementary Compensation for Nuclear Damage (CSC) is a crucial step toward facilitating the growth of safe, civilian nuclear energy in the world’s second most populous country. In addition, India’s membership is a major step towards the global liability regime called for by the IAEA's Nuclear Safety Action Plan to provide prompt compensation in the event of an accident and to establish a legal framework for commercial arrangements.

“I welcome India to the CSC and look forward to their deployment of civil nuclear energy technologies to help provide reliable, low-cost power to millions of Indians. These efforts will help spur a low-carbon economy to combat climate change. Additionally, we are eager to work with India, and all CSC member countries, to facilitate the use of advanced nuclear technologies developed in the United States.”

(Recent News Item: India ratified an international convention on nuclear energy accident liability, , the final piece in its efforts to address the concerns of foreign nuclear suppliers and draw them into a market worth billions of dollars)

[Amber G.]

India ratifies nuclear liability convention, hopes to win foreign investment

[disha]

India ratifies nuclear liability convention, hopes to win foreign investment

Jai Ho!

Quoting from above:

Energy-starved India plans to construct about 60 nuclear reactors and has been in talks with Westinghouse Electric Co LLC, GE as well as France's Areva (AREVA.PA) for setting them up at sites already selected around the country.

Russia is separately building six reactors in southern India and is in talks for another six. The total size of the Indian market is estimated at $150 billion dollars, making it equal to or just behind China's.

India expects to seal an agreement with Westinghouse to build six reactors by the first half of this year, a government official said in December, after it ratified the international convention on compensation.

India's goal should be to achieve 50% of power from nuclear by 2050. And it should go for it like this 25% in 2020, 30% in 2030, 40% in 2040 and 50% in 2050.*

* Atleast that is my wish.

[RoyG]

We are looking at something like 25-30% for nuclear in 2050. Coal will consume around 50%. Renewable at 25%.

[member_29325]

renewables at 25% sounds a stretch, especially if coal is going to be mainstay 25 years from now. Anyway, anything better than today's situation is welcome.

[ShauryaT]

renewables at 25% sounds a stretch, especially if coal is going to be mainstay 25 years from now. Anyway, anything better than today's situation is welcome.

Dream higher for here is an example of the potential for a tropical place.

Hawaii has a renewable portfolio standard of 40% renewable energy by 2030 and 100% (with the help of lithium ion battery farms) by 2045.

Also, in that renewables figure is Hydro and Wind. Much is doable, if a feed in tariff system is put in place for Solar. In Hawaii, the public utility is NOT granting solar connections to feed into its grid. They are making losses due to solar production at about 12-15% today in that little place. Hydro potential in India alone is 150 GW and if one includes Bhutan, Nepal and Myanmar then much higher. One thing we ought to do is move away from Coal to Gas as the main stay.

On the Nuclear liability convention, so finally the Modi government goes back and does what its own party insisted that India should not do. In this process Indian law, the 2010 act takes a back seat. A power that cannot even uphold its own laws is no upholder of sovereignty. The right thing to do would have been to change Indian law but it seems the government wants to work around it and create more uncertainties through insurance pools and signing on to contradictory treaties, which when signed get the status of law. The treaty will channel all liabilities to the "operator" and limit the liability on the supplier.

PS: There is a reason why Modi went to the Tesla unit on his SFO trip, it was not for the electric car as much, it was for the batteries that power it.

[member_29325]

Firstly, nuclear plant negotiations with suppliers has nothing to do with the indigenous program -- we just have to pick and choose the contracts that do not come with unnecessary baggage.

. A power that cannot even uphold its own laws is no upholder of sovereignty. The right thing to do would have been to change Indian law but it seems the government wants to work around it and create more uncertainties through insurance pools and signing on to contradictory treaties, which when signed get the status of law. The treaty will channel all liabilities to the "operator" and limit the liability on the supplier.

All this "power" stuff is irrelevant IMO. There is nothing that says that all treaties that are signed have to be logically consistent -- the whole point is to selectively pick and choose which part of which treaty you intend to ignore and which ones you are not...that is pretty much normal behavior for any "power". No reason why India cannot do the same -- indeed, it must do exactly what is required to get what it wants as a nation, without getting all stuck up on words in signed treaties. "Money talks and BS walks" is probably an appropriate cliche in this case.

As for "renewable energy" and Tesla batteries, they go against any concept of a central grid which is past its sell-by date. Independent local grids that are charged by wind/solar tech and excess capacity stored in such batteries is the way of the future. No reason to connect every single village together with electricity, other than it being a "traditional idea", AFAICT.