New Delhi, Mar. 2(IRNA) India's Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) has said that reprocessing rights of plutonium was crucial as it would help in dealing with problems of proliferation as well as nuclear waste.

Present nuclear power plants utilise only 0.7 per cent of uranium and the remaining 99.3 per cent is the spent fuel Plutonium, which remains highly radioactive for over 10,000 years in the storage.

This Plutonium can be reprocessed to generate power, PTI reported here quoting BARC director Dr S Banerjee.

It was this consideration that led India to take up a three-stage nuclear power program where in the stage II--fast breeder programme- - uses the spent fuel from pressurised heavy water reactor (thermal).

The fast breeder reactor which uses highly radioactive plutonium generates manageable waste and most plutonium is converted into useful energy, said Banerjee.

It was this reason that India has been insisting on right to reprocess in the current Indo-US civilian nuclear deal.

If plutonium is not reprocessed, "then we will be doing injustice to mother earth by storing highly radioactive spent fuel in underground water storage."
That is, plutonium which is a proliferation material is made into an almost non-proliferating one.

This process is known as the "closed" nuclear fuel cycle and has been adopted by a number of countries, the United Kingdom, Japan and France among them.

The energy tapped from plutonium in fast breeder reactors is several times than the thermal reactors and even US wants to enter into it with a realisation after three decades.

Banerjee said, 97 per cent of spent fuel can be re-used.

India has already established its capability on fast breeder technology by running a fast breeder test reactor for almost two decades and began constructing the Prototype Fast Breeder Reactors (FBR) of 500 MWe at Kalpakkam in Tamil Nadu, Banerjee said.

FBR requires large quantity of plutonium and therefore there should be no restrictions on reprocessing of plutonium generated from thermal n-plants.

By 2050, India has to increase its energy needs atleast 10 times the current production to take the per capita availability of 600 kwh (kilowatt per hour) per person to 6000 kwh.

To meet Indian nuclear industry's ambitious projected target of 40,000 MW clean energy by 2020, "we need to import from outside but at the same time it should not be attached with any strings, as India is also committed to its agenda of closed fuel cycle (converting plutonium into useful energy)," Banerjee said.

The choice of closed fuel cycle adpoted by founding father of Indian nuclear program was with a clear mandate not to give back highly radioactive waste to mother earth and if reprocessing is not allowed (as per the recent US Hyde Act), it is unethical, he warned.

Technology denial to India by US has been continuous since 1974 (after Pokhran Nuke test I) and not just from 1998 after Nuke-test II.

According to Banerjee, if the US wishes to assist India, then the technology denial, in place since seventies, should be lifted.