The much-hyped  Indo-US N-deal is unlikely to go through at all, judging from media reports.


But let's not blame the Left and the NDA for it. The point is, China, as a key NSG member, has first to approve the draft agreement between India and the IAEA (even now under negotiation) before India can approach the US. China's approval is an extremely unlikely prospect, considering the way China has recently been badgering India over Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh. Indeed, it makes one wonder whether the Indian government is bending over backwards to please China merely because it is so desperate for a Chinese 'aye' to the IAEA draft. (Even as this is being written, on 10 March, India has banned peaceful protest marches by Tibetans from Dharamsala to the Indo-Tibet border! The Dragon is watching!!)

 
In any case, who exactly will benefit from the N-deal?  The government says the  20,000 MW of additional N-energy promised by the deal by 2020 will help irrigate fields and illumine the lives of the rural poor. Now, the AC market in India is growing at an amazing 30% per annum, with 1.05 million new ACs sold in 2006/07 alone. Back-of envelope calculations indicate that a 1.5 tonne AC consumes 0.002 MW energy every hour. This translates into an additional energy demand of 2000 MW per year just to run new ACs. So, assuming that the AC market grows at its present rate, new ACs will consume all the 20,000 MW of power brought by the N-deal by the year 2015!  The rural poor can of course continue to burn fuelwood and cowdung...
 

Seriously, there is also a larger issue here…the safety of coming generations. Nuclear reactors produce enormous quantities of lethal radioactive wastes. And despite what the spinmeisters may say, in truth there is no safe way to dispose of these long-lived wastes. The US knows this better than any other nation. For instance, it has spent an incredible 11.3 billion dollars already on trying (without much success) to clean up the colossal wastes from its Hanford N-facility alone. Across the world (including India), N-wastes are being vitrified and buried deep underground as a 'temporary' measure; no-one knows what else to do with them. This is the sole reason why the US has not built any new N-reactors on its own soil since 1979, this is why all European nations, barring France, have turned away from N-power plants as an energy source.

 
But the US, Britain,and Russia together also have thousands of tonnes of fissile, weapons-grade uranium and plutonium from dismantled N-weapons lying in their moribund, billion-dollar N-facilities.  These materials pose a constant and terrifying threat to these nations: of accidental leakage, contamination, explosion, pilferage by criminals and terrorists. The only way to get rid of them is by 'burning' them away in N-power reactors; but these reactors will in turn only generate even more wastes...beginning a nuclear Red Queen's Race that is  never-ending and gets ever-deadlier.

US and British citizenry are far more aware than us of these dangers, and simply will not allow new N-power plants to come up in their own countries. In their desperation to rid themselves of their accumulated stocks of fissile materials, these nations therefore hit upon a wonderful and utterly cold-blooded solution around the time of the Rio Summit in 1992;  to advertise N-energy as a 'clean, green, eco-friendly energy source; 'dilute' their N-materials to convert them to reactor fuels such as MOX; and then sell the N-fuels to energy-starved countries like Japan, South Korea…and now, India. Safety for their own countries…and paisa vasool for their N-industries too!

 
India already has the dubious distinction of being the most polluted nation on earth and the biggest buyer and recycler of the world's junk. We import used batteries and discarded computer scrap to extract mercury, lead, silver and copper in backyard industries; we merrily import asbestos by the shipload, our businessmen even buy live artillery shells in the name of metal scrap from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan!  We've contaminated every single river and lake in our country, we drink water laced with poisons that would knock out most Westerners...yet we survive.  Koodawallas of the globe we might pride ourselves on being; but alas, even we Indians cannot recycle plutonium and survive…