NPCI is building two 700MW pressurised heavy water reactors (PHWR), including Units 3 and 4 at Kakrapar, where there are two 220MW power plants. Officials say that in July, the fourth unit recorded 97.56% progress.
Wonder why they’re building these instead of thermal coal plants
It’s interesting that India is building lots of heavy water reactors, because they produce tritium, which would be useful for bootstrapping fusion: https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-power-may-run-fuel-even-gets-started
Makes having a robust nuclear weapons program cheaper too. It’s the primary maintenance cost in maintaining modern nuclear weapons. Due to the short half life of tritium and it turning into neutron absorbing He3 you need to refresh it every 10 years or so for each bomb.
No no, definitely fusion. Not nuclear bombs.
Oh and the plutonium produced will be stored in our super safe facility over here. Please don’t look into it.
A sufficiently-large pile of cash could redirect that tritium from weapons to fusion development when the time comes. Seems better than not having enough supply anywhere.
Truth is if the economics are there, tritium is not a problem. You just put lithium-6 in a reactor with an irradiation channel and breed it that way (its what the soviets did in many reactors including Chernobyl). All lithium-6 is currently used to make fusion bombs, though.