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New 700MW nuclear plant in Gujarat, India, begins running at full capacity
(www.power-technology.com)
this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
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The important bit:
Distributing solar cells and batteries in rural areas would probably be cheaper and help more people.
From a guy that installed a 5kw system on my house in Mexico, Solar non base load systems are so inconsistent that they are a poor choice if you want to really help people. You need base load power generation otherwise you will have very unstable power grids.
It took India 16 years from planning to operation. So it will not only be cheaper, but a lot faster as well.
India is building a ton of solar as well.
Is that India has limited uranium but lots of thorium...
And their over all strategy to get around that includes "coincidentally" making a shit ton of weapons grade plutonium...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%27s_three-stage_nuclear_power_programme
That plan from decades ago was to make a few of these so they dont burn through their uranium before they have enough plutonium to start using the thorium.
What Modi is doing doesn't make sense for that plan, he's moving to fast and investing too heavily in phase 1.
It only makes sense if he didn't care about long term nuclear power, and just trying to make as much plutonium 239 as possible. Which would be worth an absolute shit ton of you have no ethics on who you sold it too...
And Modi has spent the last couple years openly saying he doesn't give a shit about other countries and is fine doing business with anyone.
I'd be surprised if India had trouble finding someone to sell them uranium. Thorium is still a generation away.
Fast breeder reactors with on site fuel reprocessing are still not economical. Thorium is more than a generation away.
I think you drastically underestimate what "long term" means when talking about nuclear power
The entire reason for India using this method that coincidentally makes weapon grade plutonium is energy independence.
I'd say maybe I didn't do a good enough job in my summary, but you can just read that linked article if I'm the issue, so I won't try again
I browsed the Wikipedia page you linked and there’s a lot of info, could you maybe point me to which section details that part?
The reason p238 is so valuable is because there's so little floating around.
I don't know if NK can do it, I know we've started wars over the possibility of middle eastern countries building these reactors.
But think of 238 like diamonds. They're expensive because basically one group controlls the supply.
If even just a couple groups can supply it, suddenly the price plummets and the market floods with product.
It would be like the crack epidemic from the 80s.
Also:
Dude just spent years literally telling everyone that will listen he values money over the lives of any foreign citizen...
Buying Russian gas helped fund their invasion of Ukraine, and Modi flat out said over and over he didn't care because it was the cheapest India could get.
Why the fuck do you think India's government grew morals overnight?
India has nuclear bomb doesn't it? The plutonium would be for them I expect. There are more than some nuclear powers around them.
India currently has a plutonium stockpile that would allow them to assemble around 1k plutonium pits for bombs on top of the current hundred or so bombs they have. They're quite flush with the stuff. Pakistan mostly uses high enriched uranium for bombs.