The nuclear energy issue

I'm the worst environmentalist around. I can perfectly understand the science of it but, beyond that, I find things to be uncharacteristically slippery. One of the causes I attribute this disorientation to is that environmentalism today has assumed a mostly reactionary nature. I agree that it is completely justified: if we don't work against the ruthless developers today, we won't have greenery to appreciate tomorrow. But I'm not passing judgment, I'm only observing that it has become purely reactionary and that is something I can't tackle very well.

In this context, when some scientist who used to work for the Atomic Energy Commission speaks up that India doesn't really need nuclear power but could make do with solar power, the suggestion itself becomes appropriated as defense against the government's push to establish an NPP in Koodankulam. The principles behind the suggestion, however, are left for the scientists and engineers to deliberate upon. Although the government will consider the advantages and disadvantages of such an installation, the most relevant question is whether such solar farms can withstand the growing energy requirements.

1. Given Tamil Nadu's energy needs and the cost of producing 1 watt of energy from 1 solar cell, the investment will have to be somewhere close to Rs. 17,000 crores (and this excludes all of the costs to follow). However, in order to produce 2 gigawatt of energy in a continuous manner, high-efficiency solar cells will have to be used, with said number hovering somewhere around 40%. This, in turn, places a great stress on the cadmium, mercury and sulfuric acid industries, which are essential components of a solar farm.
2. Given the intermittent nature of solar electricity generation, batteries will have to be integrated with the farming grid in order store energy for later use, and as all engineers are aware, there is a conversion from electrical to chemical energy that occurs with a loss of close to 12%.
3. In each photovoltaic cell, during operation, a photon with a frequency in the visible spectrum of Em radiation knocks out an electron from the valence band to the conduction band, generating a small potential difference that gives rise to a current. The problem is that a single good cell creates only 1.5 volts across its electrodes.
4. Solar cells produce only direct current (DC), which cannot be used for powering appliances before it has been converted to alternating current (AC). Such additions add significantly to the cost of installing a solar farm; at this juncture, being aware of the "money is not a problem" train of thought...
5. Solar electricity is "understood" by policy-makers in terms of its feasibility and grid parity. Feasibility takes into account the amount of solar energy an area receives across the span of one year and, at the given efficiencies, if the solar cells will produce enough energy to achieve parity. Subsequently, grid parity is a determination of whether the cost of electricity generated by other means is less than the cost of electricity generated via solar cells. With twenty-two nuclear power plants in various stages of operation in India, grid parity cannot be hit without installing solar farms that generate tens of gigawatts of energy. Now, return to point #1. 

At the most fundamental level, solar farms can be grid-connected to reduce the load on existing coal-fired and nuclear-powered plants; this essentially means that an installed solar farm can make up for an extant shortage. The principle reason due to which the Indian government is pushing for an NPP is that it wants to define industrial growth rates for the future, and the current status of research and developments on solar cells is insufficient to handle such growth rates. Now, this is purely an indictment of the government's ambitious visions that, more often than not, disregard regional issues, but at the same time, it is definitely something that environmentalists must make a note of before they (or we?) begin to campaign for it.

Such a consideration is important because it characterizes an attitude. The ongoing protest at Koodankulam by its inhabitants is completely justified because it will impact their livelihoods. When a firebrand environmentalist jumps in, however, and calls for solar farms to be installed instead, he is not making a good case for himself; what he should've called for instead is that the government reexamine its development policies. He should've protested against the government's attempts to maintain a "sustainable" growth rate by effecting drastic projects instead of providing alternate solutions that will only continue to sustain such unreasonable expansion. And for as long as reactionary environmentalists campaign against a particular thing, they will not have campaigned for the right reasons.

(What are the right reasons? Against crazy growth rates? How is a crazy growth rate defined when there is no notion of a fixed quota? Where do we draw the line? I'll save that for another day and another post.)

On a final note: why the Indian government insists on installing an NPP along the coast is beyond me. Many of the lessons of Fukushima have been learnt too literally by other countries - the safeguards that were missing there aren't missing everywhere else - but what a natural disaster did was shift the focus away from having a copious source of radiation established along the seashore. At the least, the government could have assuaged opposition from such quarters by planning for the NPP to be installed further inland.