MASSIVE URANIUM DEPOSITS FOUND IN ANDHRA PRADESH VILLAGE

By M H Ahssan

It's now a uranium treasure. Following the recent US$22 billion find of gold, diamonds and all manner of trinkets in a south Indian temple, explorers in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh have found one of the world's largest deposits of uranium.

The Tummalepalle mine in the Cuddapah district was estimated in 2007 to have nearly 50,000 tonnes of uranium ore, enough to feed an 8,000 megawatt nuclear power plant until year 2047. Explorers at the Atomic Minerals Directorate for Exploration and Research, India's official uranium hunters, now estimate the region could provide three times as much - or about 150,000 tonnes of uranium ore.

The uranium mega-find was disclosed on July 18 by Atomic Energy Commission chairman Srikumar Banerjee, when inaugurating the second pair of 700-megawatt indigenously built nuclear reactors in Rawatbhata town in Rajasthan, northwestern India. The find matches the world's existing single-largest source of uranium, Australia's McArthur River mine.

Uranium, discovered by German chemist Martin Klaproth in 1789 and named after the planet Uranus, is the world's only naturally occurring fissionable element. Fission, or splitting of the nucleus into smaller neutrons, releases a chain reaction of tremendous energy and more neutrons. The vast quantity of heat released in this process is used in modern nuclear reactors to generate electricity.

The Tummalepalle trove nearly doubles the existing quantity of uranium ore in India, according to state-owned Uranium Corp of India Ltd (UCIL). The 44-year-old company is developing Tummalepalle and 11 other uranium mines and two ore processing plants across the country.

India, one of 31 countries with nuclear-powered electricity, gets less than 3% of its energy from nuclear plants. The country has 27 of the world's 450 nuclear reactors that in total generate approximately 350 gigawatts (1 gigawatt = 1,000 megawatts), or about 16% of the world's electricity.

India plans to nearly double its current capacity of 4.7 GW to 7.3 GW by March 2012, and triple nuclear-sourced energy by 2020 - still only half of China's planned capacity of 40 GW by 2020, and only a small part of India's electricity needs.

"In the coming five decades, though coal-based thermal power plants will continue to be the mainstay of electricity generation, the share of nuclear power has to be significantly expanded," says a report "Strategy for Growth of Electrical Energy in India", from the Department of Atomic Energy. The study expects nuclear power to become the second-largest source of India's electricity within the next 50 years.

"The Tummalepalle mining discovery was a gradual process," said S K Malhotra, spokesman of the Mumbai-based Department of Atomic Energy, which oversees India's nuclear progam and functions under the country's Atomic Energy Commission. "Exploration has been going since the 1990s, when initial estimates were about 20,000 tonnes of uranium reserves. Now we estimate it to be about 150,000 tonnes."

India, however, faces severe hurdles as it seeks to make the most of its new-found treasure, not least in the controversial India-US nuclear deal of 2008, the accord to circumvent the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) under which India was denied nuclear technology and resources since exploding its first nuclear device in May 1974.

United States nuclear reactor equipment companies such as General Electric-Hitachi and Westinghouse were expected to earn billions from India through contracts for nuclear power plants following the agreement, which then-US president George W Bush strongly pushed as one of the "highlights" of his presidency. It was also the deal that nearly brought down Manmohan Singh's government in 2008 over nationwide opposition.

But riches from India's nuclear expansion riches have not yet flowed the US way; one hindrance is clause 17(b) in India's Civil Nuclear Liability Bill of 2010. The legislation makes suppliers of reactors liable for 80 years for any industrial accident, both to the Indian government and private litigators.

That's okay for state-run nuclear reactor builders in France and Russia backed with taxpayer money, but not for privately owned firms in the US. So French companies like Areva and Russia's Rosatom, rather than their US counterparts, are securing chunks of the $150 billion India is spending on developing its nuclear power industry.

Last December, Areva, the world largest supplier of nuclear reactors, signed a $7 billion agreement with the Nuclear Power Corp of India to build six nuclear reactors at the Jaitapur nuclear plant in Maharashtra. In March last year, agreements were signed for Russia to build six Russian-designed nuclear reactors and assist in building Indian-designed reactors.

United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's visit to New Delhi this week - ostensibly for the second Indo-US Strategic Dialogue - was also aimed at clearing the way for US nuclear reactor companies to enter India.

Clinton failed to make much headway, with suspicions of nuclear plant safety having increased in India, as elsewhere, since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant disaster that followed the earthquake and tsunami in northeast Japan in March this year. It would be political suicide for Manmohan to ease liability conditions in the nuclear liability bill, as Clinton demanded.

India's indigenously designed reactors have safety features that do not require manual intervention, as in the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan.

Uranium Corp of India expects to process the uranium ore at the Tummalepalle mine into yellow cake by 2012, in the process leading up to using purified uranium in a reactor. The mining facilities and ore-processing plants are being built.

The quality of uranium ore found in India, though, is relatively poor compared to other countries, with less than 0.1% of the actual uranium found in one tonne of uranium ore. "With about 0.04% to 0.05% of uranium per tonne of ore, we need to invest much more effort to get the uranium compared to other countries," Department of Atomic Energy spokesman Swapnesh Kumar Malhotra told Asia Times Online.

India spends about $100 to $140 to extract one kilogram of uranium. The material can be extracted from Australia's much richer ore at less than $40 per kg. Australia owns 43% of the world's known high-yielding uranium ore, followed by countries like Kazakhstan (21%), Canada (18%) and South Africa (8%).

Australia refuses to sell uranium to India because of Canberra's support for the Non-Proliferation Treaty. That continued refusal is "not anti-India", Peter Varghese Australian High Commissioner to India, said this week.

"Our policy on uranium sales is not anti-India policy but pro-NPT policy," Varghese told the Press Trust of India.

India's Atomic Minerals Directorate for Exploration and Research has identified about 4,000 tonnes of uranium deposits at Gogi in Gulbarga district of Karnataka, with a very rich ore.

But like the 2008 India-US nuclear deal, trouble invariably follows India's nuclear riches and projects. New uranium ore processing plants and nuclear plants, such as in Jaitapur, in Maharashtra state, are tangled in conflict with locals protesting at having to live near quantities of one of the most valuable and deadliest known metals, and land acquisition troubles.

Trouble seems to follow treasured metals like a shadow, a reality the first uranium miners appear to have foreseen. The earliest known instance of uranium mining was in early 16th century in Germany, in the silver mining mountain town of Sankt Joachimsthal, near Bohemia and Saxony. The miners discovered a black mineral that they named pech blende - from the German words pech, meaning "bad luck", and blende meaning "mineral".

In 1789, German chemist Martin Klaproth isolated uranium oxide from pitch blend, the "bad luck" mineral. Less than 200 years later, the world was never the same again, with Hiroshima, Nagasaki, weapons of mass destruction and the accident in the Russian Chernobyl nuclear plant in 1986 that gradually killed over 4,000 people and affected more than three million through nuclear radiation.

Similar "bad luck" is said to haunt metals and stones in the $22 billion temple treasure found in South India. A week after the discovery on July 8, India's Supreme Court forbade the opening of the Vault "B", the sixth chamber unopened for over 100 years and said to contain treasures greater than those found in the other five chambers. Locals believe the gods and dark forces protect this treasure, the world's single-largest treasure find in one location.

The Supreme Court and the rest of India have chosen to let sleeping dogs and the vast treasures lie undisturbed, leaving it to wiser times to decide. Nine days after the Supreme Court decision to maintain the status quo, lawyer T P Sundarrajan, who exposed the treasure to the world with his petition to the Supreme Court, died on July 17. He was 70 years old, and took ill suddenly two days earlier.

Locals declared that the deadly curse that protects the temple treasure killed Sundarrajan. Others said he died of natural causes, without too much suffering, and of old age.

The miners in Medieval Germany may have been more accurate in not calling the first uranium mineral "pech" or "bad luck", but naming it "wahl", the German word for "choice". India's choice appears to remain committed to digging up and using as much uranium as it can.