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India's three-stage nuclear power programme was formulated by Homi Bhabha in the 1950s to secure the country’s long term energy independence, through the use of uranium and thorium reserves found in the monazite sands of coastal regions of South India. The ultimate focus of the programme is on enabling the thorium reserves of India to be utilised in meeting the country's energy requirements. Thorium is particularly attractive for India, as it has only around 1–2% of the global uranium reserves, but one of the largest shares of global thorium reserves at about 25% of the world's known thorium reserves. However, thorium is not economically viable because global uranium prices are much lower. The country published about twice the number of papers on thorium as its nearest competitors, during each of the years from 2002 to 2006. The Indian nuclear establishment estimates that the country could produce 500 GWe for at least four centuries using just the country’s economically extractable thorium reserves. , India's first Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor had been delayed - with first criticality expected in 2015 - and India continued to import thousands of tonnes of uranium from Russia, Kazakhstan, France, and Uzbekistan. The recent Indo-US Nuclear Deal and the NSG waiver, which ended more than three decades of international isolation of the Indian civil nuclear programme, have created many hitherto unexplored alternatives for the success of the three-stage nuclear power programme. ==Origin and rationale== Homi Bhabha conceived of the three-stage nuclear programme as a way to develop nuclear energy by working around India's limited uranium resources. Thorium itself is not a fissile material, and thus cannot undergo fission to produce energy.Instead, it must be transmuted to uranium-233 in a reactor fueled by other fissile materials.The first two stages, natural uranium-fueled heavy water reactors and plutonium-fueled fast breeder reactors, are intended to generate sufficient fissile material from India's limited uranium resources, so that all its vast thorium reserves can be fully utilised in the third stage of thermal breeder reactors. Bhabha summarised the rationale for the three-stage approach as follows: In November 1954, Bhabha presented the three-stage plan for national development, at the conference on "Development of Atomic Energy for Peaceful Purposes" which was also attended by India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Four years later in 1958, the Indian government formally adopted the three-stage plan. Indian energy resource base was estimated to be capable of yielding a total electric power output of the order shown in the table below. Indian government recognised that thorium was a source that could provide power to the Indian people for the long term. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「India's three-stage nuclear power programme」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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