Atoms for India

Dr. Homi Jehangir Bhabha, 43, is a handsome, stocky physicist from Bombay, India. He speaks precise English with a Cambridge accent, and is an accomplished painter and violinist. At 31 he became a fellow of the Britain's Royal Society, and he is now the chairman of India's Atomic Energy Comission. In new York last week week, Dr Bhabha explained how India intends to lift itself by its atomic bootstraps.

An important asset, Physicist Bhabha believes, is India's tradition of learning, "Those Brahmans who sit on their bottoms all day," he says, "are not just siting. They are thinking, and they have been doing it for thousands of years. When the young ones turn their thinking to physics, they quickly get rather good at it."

Push of Need. Another Indian asset is it's need for power. If India is to develop its mineral deposits, increase it's food productions and industrialize its economy, it will need more energy than can come from all its badly distributed coal and water power. Dr. Bhabha believes that atomic energy is India's best bet, and that the country's need will force India to put atomic energy to work quickly.

No uranium bonanzas have been found in India yet, but there is plenty of low-grade ore that can be mined economically by cheap hand labor. Probably more important are India's thorium deposits, the richest in the world. Thorium cannot be used directly as nuclear fuel. It must be turned into uranium 233 in a reactor, just as uranium 238 is turned into plutonium. Dr. Bhabha thinks that this conversion may be standard practice a few years from now. Uranium 233 derived from thorium is in many important respects the most desirable of all the nuclear fuels.

The Indian atomic timetable calls for a small research reactor to be finished this year; its instruments and control system are already well advanced. Next year will come a much bigger reactor for producing radioactive isotopes and testing materials.

No Bombs. In about five years, India hopes to have a large atomic power plant in operation in Rajputana, where power is scarce. Fueled with natural uranium, it will produce plutonium as well as energy.

The plutonium could be made into atom bombs, but Dr. Bhabha is sure that India will never make a bomb. He wants to use all the plutonium in breeder reactors to turn India's thorium into ever-growing amounts of nuclear fuel.

This plan is no pipe dream, Dr. Bhabha insists. India is already producing most of the instruments and electronic components that are needed in nuclear energy development. The country has a rapidly growing body of scientists and technicians. Already, in his opinion, India is approaching France in nuclear knowledge.

Progress would be much faster if the U.S. would release more details of non-military technology. Dr. Bhabha believes that Indian physicists can solve eventually all the practical problems of building and operating power reactors, but he does not see why they should have to. In most cases American researchers have been over the ground. Keeping their findings secret will only delay the Indians for a few years. Sooner or later, he is convinced, India will be dotted with nuclear power stations doing the duty of the oil, coal and water power that nature did not provide.

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