Thorium-based energy our next challenge: Kakodkar

Anil Kakodkar,former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission,on Thursday said the development of...

Anil Kakodkar,former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, on Thursday said the development of thorium-based energy would be the next challenge before the country to meet its growing power requirement.

Addressing the energy session at the Indian Science Congress,Kakodkar said thorium as a source of energy was being aggressively pursued. In the case of hydro-carbons,India might face a shortage much before other nations did while a thorium-based reactor could generate power at a particular sustained capacity for a long period of time.

R K Sinha,director,Bhabha Atomic Research Centre,Mumbai,said tests had been conducted on thorium-based reactors as the country could shift focus on thorium after achieving enough nuclear capacity.

In the nuclear energy sector,Sinha said finding locations for constructing the reactors would be an uphill task.

Kakodkar said the concern in the energy sector boiled down to reducing the gap between innovation and their commercial deployment. The growing environmental concerns made such attempts to exploration difficult. Hence,new technology had to be developed for explorations to reduce the damage to nature.

Although renewable hydrogen was reckoned as the fuel of future,its storage would be an area to be addressed,he said.

To augment the power supply in the country,power secretary H S Brahma said energy generation could be increased only through deploying super critical technology. We have to develop turbines which would have the capacity to generate power above 660 mw. By 2012,the country should be able to produce 2.4 lakh mw power, he added.

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The five-day Congress,which ended on Thursday,had witnessed presentation of 2,000 research papers on science and technology. A dozen plenary sessions were also held to discuss mainly food,water,energy and health.