Originally published in 1983. The Indian nuclear power programme, both the earliest in the Third World and also one of the most comprehensive, is an important and instructive subject for a wide-ranging and detailed study. This book examines the origins and rationale of the Indian programme in the context of energy resources and consumption. It traces the progress of its historical development and leads up to an evaluation of its performance, in both technical and economic terms of both individual reactors and the programme as a whole. In addition, the book discusses India's nuclear explosion of 1974 and the possibilities for novel developments in nuclear power and other energy sources, such as coal, biogas, hydro and solar power. The author then sets the Indian programme into the world picture by comparing developments in India with those of the Third World (including developments in China and South Africa) and discusses the overall prospects for the Third World. This extremely informative account will appeal to readers with interest in energy, science, technology and Third World developments.

Publisher Fact Sheet The definitive history of India's long flirtation with nuclear capability, culminating in the nuclear tests that surprised the world in May 1998.

Nuclear power has been held out as possibly the most important source of energy for India. And the dream of a nuclear-powered India has been supported by huge financial budgets and high-level political commitment for over six decades. Nuclear power has also been presented as safe, environmentally benign and cheap. Physicist and writer M.V. Ramana offers a detailed narrative of the evolution of India’s nuclear energy programme, examining different aspects of it and the claims of success made on its behalf. In The Power of Promise he makes a historically nuanced and compelling argument as to why the nuclear energy programme has failed in the past and why its future is dubious. Ramana shows that nuclear power has been more expensive than conventional forms of electricity generation, that the ever-present risk of catastrophic accidents is heightened by observed organizational inadequacies at nuclear facilities, and that existing nuclear fuel cycle facilities have been correlated with impacts on public health and the environment. He offers detailed information and analysis that should serve to deepen the debate on whether India should indeed embark on a massive nuclear programme.

India has come a long way from being a nuclear pariah to a de facto member of the nuclear club. The transition in its nuclear identity has been accompanied by its transformation into a major economic power and underlines a pragmatic turn in its foreign-policy thinking. This book provides a historical narrative of the evolution of India’s nuclear policy since 1947, as the country continues its pursuit for complete integration into the global nuclear order. Situating India’s nuclear behaviour in this context, the book explains how India’s engagement with the atom is unique in international nuclear history and politics. Aided by declassified archival documents and oral history interviews, it focuses on how status, security, domestic politics, and the role of individuals have played a key role in defining and shaping India’s nuclear trajectory, policy choices, and their consequences.

The U.S. government has made safeguarding of weapons-grade plutonium and highly enriched uranium an international policy priority, and convened The 2010 Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, D.C., on April 12 and 13, 2010. Forty six governments sent delegations to the summit and twenty nine of them made national commitments to support nuclear security. During the Summit, India announced its commitment to establish a Global Centre for Nuclear Energy Partnership. The Centre is to be open to international participation through academic0 exchanges, training, and research and development efforts. India-United States Cooperation on Global Security is the summary of a workshop held by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) together with its partner of more than 15 years, the National Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS) in Bangalore, India. The workshop identified and examined potential areas for substantive scientific and technical cooperation between the two countries on issues related to nuclear material security. Technical experts from India and the United States focused on topics of nuclear material security and promising opportunities for India and the United States to learn from each other and cooperate. This report discusses nuclear materials management issues such as nuclear materials accounting, cyber security, physical security, and nuclear forensics.

Since the 1980s, the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu has faced multiple forms of resistance. Women and men from different walks of life—fishers, farmers, environmentalists, activists, writers, scholars, teachers, journalists, doctors, and lawyers among many others—have come together to combat the deadly radioactive repercussions and repression that come with the development of a high-security nuclear installation. Drawing upon their experiences, this historical and ethnographic study accounts for the anti-nuclear campaign’s part in ‘right-to-lives’ movements while engaging with the (re)production of knowledge and ignorance in the understanding of radiation, and efforts to create an evidence base in response to the otherwise unavailable or insufficient data on the environment and public health in India. Tracing the grassroots struggle for ‘energy justice’ off- and on-line, the author looks into the larger questions of development, democracy, and nationalism. These have marked not just parts of India identified for large-scale constructions, but also other regions of the world where state functionaries have much to gain from corporate collaborations at the cost of local residents who lose their livelihoods, and are forcibly displaced, persecuted, or even killed in order to execute governmental designs in the name of the nation.

In 1974 India joined the elite roster of nuclear world powers when it exploded its first nuclear bomb. But the technological progress that facilitated that feat was set in motion many decades before, as India sought both independence from the British and respect from the larger world. Over the course of the twentieth century, India metamorphosed from a marginal place to a serious hub of technological and scientific innovation. It is this tale of transformation that Robert S. Anderson recounts in Nucleus and Nation. Tracing the long institutional and individual preparations for India’s first nuclear test and its consequences, Anderson begins with the careers of India’s renowned scientists—Meghnad Saha, Shanti Bhatnagar, Homi Bhabha, and their patron Jawaharlal Nehru—in the first half of the twentieth century before focusing on the evolution of the large and complex scientific community—especially Vikram Sarabhi—in the later part of the era. By contextualizing Indian debates over nuclear power within the larger conversation about modernization and industrialization, Anderson hones in on the thorny issue of the integration of science into the framework and self-reliant ideals of Indian nationalism. In this way, Nucleus and Nation is more than a history of nuclear science and engineering and the Indian Atomic Energy Commission; it is a unique perspective on the history of Indian nationhood and the politics of its scientific community.