India will have uninterrupted supply of Nuclear Fuel for its US-made nuclear reactors. India and the US will agree to transfer nuclear material, non-nuclear material, equipment and components. US will support/help India in developing strategic reserves of nuclear fuel to guard against future disruption of nuclear supply using the its international 'Big Brother' role . In case of disruption, US and India will jointly convene a group of friendly supplier countries (NSG) to include nations like Russia, France and the UK to pursue such measures to restore fuel supply.
Side-effects of Npowerment
IT and software
These sectors will be the biggest beneficiaries as a relaxation in global technology rules gives India access to much more advanced tech, spelling a quantum leap for the Infosys, TCS and Wipros of the country. Indian companies now have to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, before they can jump to the next level. For instance, access to high-performance computing systems — a lot of which are currently denied to India under various export control regimes — will put Indian software and IT R&D in a different league.
HPC systems have contributed to leading-edge developments in such diverse applications as weapons design, integrated-circuit simulation, automobile crash simulation, seismic prospecting, and drug design.
Oil and electronics
This includes technology used in weather analysis and forecasting. As it also has nuclear applications, it has thus far been denied to India. Digital phosphor oscilloscopes, which are indispensable for oil refineries and electronics industry, also have a nuclear role and are currently barred — but will now be available. Filamentary poles, important for making tennis rackets, golf clubs and fishing poles, are also inaccessible because they can be used for uranium enrichment.
Mining and power
Compressors, testing systems, furnaces for power generation, mining equipment, high-voltage power supplies, industrial and scientific equipment like heat exchangers, pipings, fittings, valves, measuring and calibrating equipment... Many of these have applications in different sectors and access to them would give Indian manufacturing a huge boost.
Medicine and industry
There is also technology and scientific research that relates to civilian applications in medicine, radiology and industry. Communications switching equipment, certain types of electronic equipment, lower speed photography equipment, pressure-measuring instruments, and numerically controlled machine tools — much of all this is currently out of bounds for India's knowledge economy.
In the field of medicine, X-ray imagers that use cobalt-60 may soon become accessible. So will specialised equipment for oil and gas exploration. Nuclear well-logging is used by advanced countries to help predict the commercial viability of new and existing oil and gas wells, and it could become available in India as well.
Defence and space
India's choices could improve considerably once it gets a free hand to purchase previously restricted conventional weapons, most notably Israel's Arrow missile defence system, a partially US-funded programme.
India wants the Arrow to complete its triad of the Green Pine radar and Phalcon but has thus far been denied because the Arrow interceptor is a Category I missile capable of delivering a 500-kg payload to a range of 300 km. Also denied to India are ocean surveillance systems and satellite systems for electronic reconnaissance, navigation, military meteorology, and nuclear explosion detection. But the doors are slowly opening.
Components biz
According to Anupam Srivastava, technology and nuclear expert at the University of Georgia, US, when other countries want to build nuclear reactors in India, it will be Indian companies like L&T and BHEL that will get the contracts for the components. "Indian companies will become component providers and vendors to these projects. We are looking at India becoming a nuclear energy components provider in the next few years. India will become a supplier country, no longer merely a recipient country." The US, having accepted that the PSLV is a civilian rocket, will now make it easier to access hi-tech cooperation in civil space dual-use and advanced aerospace technology (including lasers), he says.
R P Singh says Indian companies or research entities would like to participate in global projects like Eureka in the EU for market-oriented R&D in robotics, environment technology, agriculture, bio-sciences etc, but a lot of those technologies are currently denied to India. When the denial veil is lifted in one sector it also has a ripple effect in other sectors.
The possibilities are immense in emerging scientific disciplines like nanotechnology and synthetic biology that draw upon many other branches of science, all of which are controlled technologies. The nuclear deal will not suddenly land all these technologies on India's doorstep, but what is important is that people will not turn away Indians automatically. The playing field will become a little less skewed against India.
LASTLY
It is strange, why is this government ignoring all negatives of the deal? Why are they looking more as brokers of USA? USA is giving us obsolete uranium technology ,which is unsuitable and unreliable for India. Thorium technology is much better for India with lesser side effects; moreover. India will not dependent on USA for fuel in future, There are two competing thorium designs. One that is a multi step process where thorium is bred to U233, which is then extracted and burned in a second reactor, its at least a decade off and India is perfecting it. Then there is a design that one that an American company has worked on for 13+ years and is to the point of commercialization, it would easily power the VVER-1000 reactors India is building on Indian thorium in very short order. The technology can't be transferred in the absence of the 123 agreement. Thorium is safer to burn than Uranium on several fronts, its waste has an extremely short half-life, it melts at 500 degrees higher than uranium, it stays in the reactor for much longer between re-fueling resulting in much less waste by mass per unit output. Thorium is a great energy source, but India will have to wait until they have their own overly complicated system up and running.
Side-effects of Npowerment
IT and software
These sectors will be the biggest beneficiaries as a relaxation in global technology rules gives India access to much more advanced tech, spelling a quantum leap for the Infosys, TCS and Wipros of the country. Indian companies now have to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, before they can jump to the next level. For instance, access to high-performance computing systems — a lot of which are currently denied to India under various export control regimes — will put Indian software and IT R&D in a different league.
HPC systems have contributed to leading-edge developments in such diverse applications as weapons design, integrated-circuit simulation, automobile crash simulation, seismic prospecting, and drug design.
Oil and electronics
This includes technology used in weather analysis and forecasting. As it also has nuclear applications, it has thus far been denied to India. Digital phosphor oscilloscopes, which are indispensable for oil refineries and electronics industry, also have a nuclear role and are currently barred — but will now be available. Filamentary poles, important for making tennis rackets, golf clubs and fishing poles, are also inaccessible because they can be used for uranium enrichment.
Mining and power
Compressors, testing systems, furnaces for power generation, mining equipment, high-voltage power supplies, industrial and scientific equipment like heat exchangers, pipings, fittings, valves, measuring and calibrating equipment... Many of these have applications in different sectors and access to them would give Indian manufacturing a huge boost.
Medicine and industry
There is also technology and scientific research that relates to civilian applications in medicine, radiology and industry. Communications switching equipment, certain types of electronic equipment, lower speed photography equipment, pressure-measuring instruments, and numerically controlled machine tools — much of all this is currently out of bounds for India's knowledge economy.
In the field of medicine, X-ray imagers that use cobalt-60 may soon become accessible. So will specialised equipment for oil and gas exploration. Nuclear well-logging is used by advanced countries to help predict the commercial viability of new and existing oil and gas wells, and it could become available in India as well.
Defence and space
India's choices could improve considerably once it gets a free hand to purchase previously restricted conventional weapons, most notably Israel's Arrow missile defence system, a partially US-funded programme.
India wants the Arrow to complete its triad of the Green Pine radar and Phalcon but has thus far been denied because the Arrow interceptor is a Category I missile capable of delivering a 500-kg payload to a range of 300 km. Also denied to India are ocean surveillance systems and satellite systems for electronic reconnaissance, navigation, military meteorology, and nuclear explosion detection. But the doors are slowly opening.
Components biz
According to Anupam Srivastava, technology and nuclear expert at the University of Georgia, US, when other countries want to build nuclear reactors in India, it will be Indian companies like L&T and BHEL that will get the contracts for the components. "Indian companies will become component providers and vendors to these projects. We are looking at India becoming a nuclear energy components provider in the next few years. India will become a supplier country, no longer merely a recipient country." The US, having accepted that the PSLV is a civilian rocket, will now make it easier to access hi-tech cooperation in civil space dual-use and advanced aerospace technology (including lasers), he says.
R P Singh says Indian companies or research entities would like to participate in global projects like Eureka in the EU for market-oriented R&D in robotics, environment technology, agriculture, bio-sciences etc, but a lot of those technologies are currently denied to India. When the denial veil is lifted in one sector it also has a ripple effect in other sectors.
The possibilities are immense in emerging scientific disciplines like nanotechnology and synthetic biology that draw upon many other branches of science, all of which are controlled technologies. The nuclear deal will not suddenly land all these technologies on India's doorstep, but what is important is that people will not turn away Indians automatically. The playing field will become a little less skewed against India.
LASTLY
It is strange, why is this government ignoring all negatives of the deal? Why are they looking more as brokers of USA? USA is giving us obsolete uranium technology ,which is unsuitable and unreliable for India. Thorium technology is much better for India with lesser side effects; moreover. India will not dependent on USA for fuel in future, There are two competing thorium designs. One that is a multi step process where thorium is bred to U233, which is then extracted and burned in a second reactor, its at least a decade off and India is perfecting it. Then there is a design that one that an American company has worked on for 13+ years and is to the point of commercialization, it would easily power the VVER-1000 reactors India is building on Indian thorium in very short order. The technology can't be transferred in the absence of the 123 agreement. Thorium is safer to burn than Uranium on several fronts, its waste has an extremely short half-life, it melts at 500 degrees higher than uranium, it stays in the reactor for much longer between re-fueling resulting in much less waste by mass per unit output. Thorium is a great energy source, but India will have to wait until they have their own overly complicated system up and running.
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