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Atomic Power Stations in India (
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Active plants
Under construction plants
India is a quickly advancing and active nuclear power program. It is expected to have 20 GW of nuclear capacity by 2020, though they currently stand as the 9th in the world in terms of nuclear capacity.
An Achilles' heel of the Indian nuclear power program, however, is the fact that they are not signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. This has many times in their history prevented them from obtaining nuclear technology vital to expanding their use of nuclear industry. Therefore, much of their program has been domestically developed, much like their nuclear weapons program. The United States-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act seems to be a way to get access to advanced nuclear technologies for India. Another way is through its membership in the ITER project.
The 2000s saw progress in co-operation with other countries. The United States-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act, along with other bilateral agreements, should allow US technology to be exported to India, but the issue remains hotly debated in American and Indian politics.
India has been using imported enriched uranium and are currently under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards, but it has developed various aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle to support its reactors. Development of select technologies has been strongly affected by limited imports. Use of heavy water reactors has been particularly attractive for the nation because it allows Uranium to be burnt with little to no enrichment capabilities. India has also done a great amount of work in the development of a Thorium centered fuel cycle. While Uranium deposits in the nation are extremely limited, there are much greater reserves of Thorium and it could provide hundreds of times the energy with the same mass of fuel. The fact that Thorium can theoretically be utilized in heavy water reactors has tied the development of the two. A prototype reactor that would burn Uranium-Plutonium fuel while irradiating a Thorium blanket is under construction at the Madras/Kalpakkam Atomic Power Station.
Uranium used for the weapons program has been separate from the power program, using Uranium from scant indigenous reserves.
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