NEW DELHI: In a bid to earn foreign exchange India’s Atomic Energy (AEC) has offered to reprocess spent fuel from nuclear reactors of other countries as a commercial service.

AEC chairman Dr P K lyengar has informed the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna about AEC’s readiness to carry out fuel reprocessing work for countries that require such services.

This major policy decision would mean that nations which have been accumulating spent fuel could ship this material to India and have the plutonium separated. Plutonium is a valuable nuclear fuel and can also be used in a bomb.

According to Dr Lyengar India has sufficient reprocessing capacity that can be utilized to earn foreign exchange.

He has however made it clear that the Indian offer is for spent fuel from research reactors of countries that agree to take back the wastes after reprocessing.

AEC’s decision to reprocess other countries’ spent fuel is not expected to pose any risk to India’s environment as the nuclear wastes would be shipped back to the country of origin.

According to Dr Iyengar there are about 125 research reactors in the world whose spent fuel could be available for processing.

India’s nuclear export potential is being increasingly recognized by the IAEA Dr Iyengar said. India’s first fuel reprocessing plant was commissioned at Trombay in 1964. A bigger plant has been built at Tarapur and a third plant is nearing completion at Kalpakkam near Madras.

India is using the Trombay plant exclusively for reprocessing spent fuel from research reactors and this may be used for handling foreign spent fuel. The plants at Tarapur and Kalpakkam are meant for reprocessing spent fuel for power reactors.

India’s decision was conveyed to the IAEA by Dr lyengar late last year. He told the IAEA that India would “take up operations like reprocessing which are manpower intensive and hence can be done more inexpensively in developing countries”.

Repossessing foreign fuel is just one aspect of AEC’s aggressive strategy to capture a share of the international nuclear market hitherto mon-polished by the West.

According to Dr Iyengar AEC also plans to export research reactors consultancy services and related nuclear technologies like isotope production that are not sensitive from the point of nuclear proliferation.

It is however not clear whether or not India’s offer to separate plutonium from spent fuel would lead to proliferation considering that the plutonium for India’s nuclear test in Pokran in 1974 came from reprocessing the spent fuel from one of India’s own research reactors.

Article extracted from this publication >> May 24, 1991