New Delhi: Penguin Books India; Viking, 2012. xxxiv, 366 pp. (Illus.) US$20.00, cloth. ISBN 978-06-7008-170-7.
The study of nuclear history and policy is reaching an almost-mature stage, and part of the reason for that is the work of M.V. Ramana; this book, written in Bengalaru and Princeton, adds weight to the list of his serious and searching work. With an analytic mind, and trained as a physicist, Ramana has arranged a feast for those of us who want a comprehensive map of the evolution of the Indian nuclear complex, and who want to compare its past with the present. Too much of the strategic and nuclear analysis is ahistorical and unhistorical. Not Ramana’s, however.
Like others of us who study this subject, Ramana rightly criticizes the paucity of the evidence available from official sources, and its unreliability when it is available. In the now-huge offices of the Department of Atomic Energy and the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board and the Atomic Energy Commission there lie “files in piles” of important information, some of it many years old, still unreleased. Relatively recent and non-classified information remains unreleased. And in the minds of key actors, scientists and engineers among them, are stored those crucial interpretations of the data that “make sense” of this complex undertaking, also unrevealed and unreleased. But Ramana has been assiduous in his search, every news clipping has entered his file, every public utterance, every interview (however few). His assistant even “appealed the denial of requests for information.” The book is a map of a labyrinth of half-closed doors and nearly empty files, something that it takes a lot of patience to penetrate, and throws many people off the scent.
This book is written by a person trained as a physicist (even though not now working as one) and reviewed here by someone who is not (the kind of person Ramana is trying to reach). But what would count more with Ramana, as much as what I have to say, is the response of the reactor physicists, nuclear engineers, metallurgists, geologists, and radiation specialists who are or (importantly) were employed to carry out all these complex tasks, and who understand them even if they are unable or unlikely to translate them into our analytic frame, as Ramana does so well. Reviews from people in the nuclear business will (or should) reveal new (more accurate?) evidence on which to base energy planning.
This book is not primarily about weapons, and even the “plutonium” chapter takes in non-defence aspects of this rare unstable element. The nuclear weapons issue he tackled in Prisoners of the Nuclear Dream in 2003; though, as Ramana points out, the 2005 US-India nuclear agreement was a shadow negotiation about nuclear weapons and tests. He tried to check out the sites of nuclear accidents directly, and talked to people responsible for monitoring and change. The book has a first-hand and engaging quality about it that is compelling.
Ramana surprisingly invokes M.K. Gandhi’s criticism in Hind Swaraj (1909) that technologies cast away from elsewhere have been enthusiastically embraced in India, and then applies this point to the modern pursuit of breeder reactors (involving thorium as fuel, of which India has abundant reserves). “The DAE’s pursuit of breeder reactors when countries in the West have abandoned them for all practical purposes offers an excellent but unfortunate example of such ignorant adherence” (187). It was Bhabha (and many others too, in and outside India) who expected a working thorium-based reactor. It was partly on that basis that the US began buying Indian thorium in 1950. But, Ramana says, that remains far off.
Ramana is a close observer of and sometimes an advisor to movements against the choice of sites for reactors, or sites for uranium mines, or against the displacement of people living “in the way.” He concludes that the nuclear program will not be much deterred by the hard news in this book, and that explaining how the cost of electricity per Kw hour is higher in India with nuclear power will not be sufficient to deter elite commitment to this form of energy. No, he explains that “the DAE has to be able to promise limitless abundant energy, even if it never manages to deliver on that promise” (268). This will continue until, he says, movements appear that resemble the Greens in Germany: committed to alternative fuel and energy systems and dedicated to “mass” or “popular” political action at local levels which coalesce effectively at the national level.
For whom is this book recommended? Curiously and refreshingly, it spans the arc across the position of a beginning nuclear activist, the mid-stream student, and the advanced specialist. It is part source book (there is a good explanation of types of nuclear reactors), part critical nuclear history (there is a sharp account of the 2005 US-India nuclear deal), and part political and policy program (an appendix explains the Environmental Impact Assessment process). Moreover, it is easier to use than many academic books, enabling the reader to move back and forth between the carefully arranged chapters, whether on economics, safety or heavy water. It doesn’t address India’s nuclear program in isolation, but compares it with others. And when cost comparisons are made, say to France, it is not with evidence from the PR office of the CEA (the atomic energy authority) but to the evidence before the Court of Audit of the French state.
For most of the reactors in India, Ramana concludes that they “took longer to build, cost more than projected, and performed worse than had been envisioned when plans were made” (41). This is not unique to India, he shows that other reactors elsewhere follow a similar path. Moreover, each reactor requires a lot of land and an enormous volume of relatively clean water, both scarce in India. The puzzle as to why, after fifty years of self-reliant experience, India decided to import Russian reactors for the Koodankulam project (and would now import US models too) is something Ramana lays bare. For that, you need to read this fascinating book!
Robert Anderson
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada
pp. 364-366