Nuclear Energy

Secretary to the DAE. The 1958 Resolution made the Chairman responsible only to the Prime
Minister, and he was empowered to overrule all the other members of the AEC (except in financial
matters). ccclxxxiv
Bhabha thus became the moghul of the nuclear establishment of India. He had total power to
initiate and regulate plans, formulate and execute his own procedure and rules, and had an open
ended budget.
In 1962, the government granted yet more powers to the AEC by passing the totally
undemocratic Atomic Energy Act of 1962, which replaced the weaker Act of 1948. No democratic
country has given such authoritarian powers to its atomic energy establishment. The Act of 1962
grants absolute powers to initiate, execute, and control exploration, planning and manufacture of
atomic material and its related hardware and all nuclear research and developmental activities to the
sole authority of the Chairman of the AEC. . Despite having such immense powers, the AEC does
not report to the Cabinet, but directly to the Prime Minister. ccclxxxv
The Act also empowers the AEC to restrict disclosure of any information related to nuclear
issues. ccclxxxvi Eminent jurists like Justice Krishna Iyer have termed this unconstitutional and
undemocratic. ccclxxxvii
Dr. Bhabha's Ambitious Plans
From the very beginning, plans for the Indian nuclear program were ambitious and
envisaged covering the entire nuclear fuel cycle. Bhabha initiated the development of India’s first
research reactors at BARC (Trombay, near Mumbai): Apsara, a swimming pool research reactor,
was set up in 1956, and Cirus, a 40 MW heavy water moderated, light water cooled, natural
uranium fuelled reactor, was set up in 1960. India also developed facilities for mining uranium,
fabricating fuel, manufacturing heavy water, reprocessing spent fuel to extract plutonium and, on a
somewhat limited scale, enriching uranium. For executing these plans, the DAE set up a number of
subsidiary organizations: the Nuclear Power Corporation, which is responsible for designing,
constructing, and operating nuclear power plants; the Uranium Corporation of India Limited which
is in charge of mining and milling of uranium; the Heavy Water Board, which is in charge of the
many plants that produce heavy water; and the Nuclear Fuel Complex, which manufactures fuel for
the nuclear reactors. ccclxxxviii
Three Stage Program
Simultaneously, Bhabha in 1954 also announced a grand three stage program for the
development of nuclear energy in the country. The logic behind this was that India has very little
uranium, and the little it has is of poor quality. What India does have is plenty of the element
thorium, about 32 percent of the world’s deposits. The trouble is thorium cannot fuel a nuclear
reactor by itself; it takes a running uranium or plutonium fuelled reactor to convert thorium-232 into
fissionable uranium-233. To ultimately make use of India's thorium reserves to create fissionable
uranium-233 and generate electricity from this, Bhabha announced a three phase strategy for the
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