An end to 40 years of mistrust over nuclear aspirations

For years, the iconic symbol of India’s nuclear prowess was the dome-shaped reactor at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Trombay. Some say the reactor’s name, CIRUS, is a variation for Cyrus, the founder of a great Persian empire. Others deduce it as an acronym of a curious cooperation between Canada, India and the US in the 1950s, and claim CIRUS stands for Canadian-Indian Reactor, United States. That cooperation  ended in recriminations after India conducted its first nuclear explosion in 1974.
When Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Canadian counterpart Stephen Harper announced in Ottawa last week that they had reached an agreement for Canada to supply uranium to Indian nuclear power reactors, the deal brought to an end 40 years of acrimony and mistrust between the two countries. “It allowed us to turn the page on what has been in our judgment an unnecessarily frosty relationship for far too long,” Harper said soon after the deal was inked.
That was because when India conducted the 1974 nuclear test, it was Canada that felt the most betrayed. It had helped India build the CIRUS reactor with the express commitment that it would be used only for peaceful purposes. The US had also agreed to supply heavy water, an essential component for operating the reactor. So, after the test, the two countries charged India with using the reactor to produce the plutonium required for the explosion. They angrily cut off all nuclear ties and got the world to put in place a tough nuclear restraint regime to thwart our nuclear ambitions.
Relations between India and Canada began to thaw after the Indo-US nuclear deal in 2008 lifted the international ban to supply nuclear fuel and technology to India. In 2010, when Manmohan Singh was Prime Minister, India and Canada agreed to resume nuclear cooperation between the two countries after a hiatus of three-and-a-half decades. It took several years of negotiation to hammer out the deal to supply uranium. That fructified during Modi’s visit, making it a significant turning point in relations between the two countries. As Modi remarked, “Canada providing uranium is a mark of its trust and confidence in India.”  
So why is the agreement such a big deal for India? Ratan Kumar Sinha, Chairman of India’s Atomic Energy Commission, explained to me: “Apart from obtaining a reliable supply of uranium which offers a great deal of security for our nuclear power programme, the agreement provides a major platform for the two countries to resume civil nuclear technology cooperation.” It will without doubt boost India’s nuclear power programme that had been stymied for decades because of a lack of fuel and technology upgrades.
A majority of India’s 21 operational reactors are built on Pressurised Heavy Water Reactor (PHWR) technology that had been acquired from Canada prior to 1974. After Canada cut off all nuclear ties, Indian scientists for years struggled to master the complex technology and build reactors indigenously. To their credit, they were not only able to replicate these reactors, but also improve on their design and capacity considerably. Sinha believes that India and Canada are now “on an equal footing” where such reactor technology is concerned. It would no more be a one-way traffic when the two countries resume cooperation on nuclear hardware technology.
Also, as Sinha points out, the agreement to supply 3,000 tonnes of uranium over five years would provide the much-needed fuel guarantee to ensure India’s existing power plants function at optimal levels. It would meet some of the requirements for India’s ambitious plans to expand the current nuclear power generation of 6,000 MW to 45,000 MW by 2032. Currently, India’s fuel requirements are around 900 tonnes of uranium annually, half of which it imports from countries such as Russia, Kazakhstan and France. India’s uranium requirement is expected to treble in the next 10 years and with indigenous production limited, it would require an assured supply from a host of countries.
The good sign is that since Modi took over as Prime Minister in May last year, he has moved swiftly to build on the nuclear breakthrough that Manmohan Singh had achieved with the Indo-US deal. Apart from the deal with Canada, Modi also signed a nuclear agreement with Australia on his visit to that country in November that included supplying uranium to India. Then when US President Barack Obama visited India in January, Modi worked hard to remove differences over the nuclear liability issue that had stalled the purchase of nuclear plants from American entities.
Modi sees nuclear power as an important source of clean energy and after the Canadian deal said, “For us, uranium is not just a mineral but an article of faith and an effort to save the world from climate change.” The Prime Minister deserves all praise for giving a fresh impetus to India’s nuclear aspirations.
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