Nuclear Energy can be off grid and free.
Provided the reactor is small enough
And the fuel is thorium
Solar is the winning solution for renewable power, thanks to abundant sunshine and unlimited demand. However solar requires land and that forces it to be located far away. This makes it dependent on the grid to connect to the customer. It also needs batteries as solar is only available six hours a day. End result is that it costs Rs 12.5 crores in solar cells, Rs 37.5 crores in batteries etc and 12.5 acres of land to get 1 MW of solar power on 24/7 basis.
Nuclear can do this in Rs 28 cr per MW and will need one acre of land. So nuclear triumps solar unless batteries become cheap enough. But nuclear will get cheaper as well as soon as we replace steam turbines with TEGs. Nuclear also gives u waste heat – 3 mwh for each mwh of electricity which can be used for various applications including air conditioning.
The issue is fuel. India has poor quality uranium. With 0.7% active content. India does not make enriched uranium. We have to import that. That is what drives our existing Russian technology reactors which optimise at 750 MW per reactor.
What we do have in abundance is thorium. However you have to either mix thorium oxide with enriched uranium to run it on the existing reactors or you have to develop a particle accelerator to convert thorium into uranium 233. As yet, we do not have an indigenous particle accelerator.
Without this, use of thorium to produce nuclear power is a hope, not an industry. Companies like L&T have tied up with foreign companies to develop solutions involving a fuel which is a mix of thorium oxide and enriched uranium. The plan is that this fuel will drop into existing reactor designs which can be replicated. But this is still flogging an obsolete horse with a lower fuel cost outflow.
What we need is a thorium molten salt reactor and requisite thorium fuel. Various media announcements not withstanding, we don’t as yet have it.
The IIT Alumni Council ran a hackathon and the three winning startups are addressing the three pieces of the jigsaw. The first is to make thorium fissile using a particle accelerator, the second is to use this fuel to run a molten salt reactor to produce heat, and the third is to convert this heat into electricity. However what is most interesting about this architecture is that you can make the reactor really small.
So small that it could fit into your garage, will not need refueling for five years, and the spent fuel cannot be used to make a bomb. The reactors will be available from next year. They are expected to beat solar power on price performance for applications like desalination and ev charging right away. And on mainstay grid supply in three years.
This really marks the end of solar. Solar will not die away right away but growth will get stymied.
The nuclear age is now here.