New Delhi, March 9: Academic exchange and research collaboration between India’s civilian and strategic nuclear facilities will continue despite the separation plan, top nuclear scientists said today.

While the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) has listed nine research centres as “civilian”, there will be “no firewalls” against academic exchange or the flow of people between these institutions and the strategic facilities, they said.

The separation of DAE’s research institutions had sparked concerns in some quarters that the government would be creating a wall that could prevent the movement of academic ideas and people across institutions.

But DAE officials asserted that it would be “business-as-usual” for collaborative research between civilian and strategic institutions. “There will be no firewalls,” said Anil Kakodkar, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.

In the separation plan, the government has listed the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai, the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics and the Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre (VECC) in Calcutta, and six other institutions as “civilian”. It has described these institutions as “safeguard irrelevant” ? implying that they do not handle nuclear material such as uranium or plutonium.

“They are doing completely open domain research. There is no strategic component,” Kakodkar said. “There’s nothing safeguardable in these institutions,” he said. In other words, nothing to inspect.

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards are intended to detect diversion of nuclear materials for weapons, and demand that nuclear facilities maintain records of the flow of materials such as uranium and plutonium into and out of the facilities.

“The safeguards today do not deal with anything other than the accounting of nuclear materials,” said a senior scientist involved in preparing the separation plan.

Under the Indo-US nuclear deal, New Delhi is expected to negotiate India-specific safeguards with the IAEA.

Scientists from DAE research centres have long been collaborating on joint projects. For instance, Calcutta’s VECC has been collaborating with TIFR and the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre on a project.

Since the late-1990s an atomic particle accelerator (used to study basic nuclear physics) on the TIFR campus has been used by scientists at Barc. “Such joint work will continue,” a senior scientist said.

Indian scientists point out that while the nine institutions have not been involved in strategic programmes, they have suffered sanctions. In designating the nine as “civilian” facilities, DAE officials hope that opportunities for international collaboration will expand for these institutions.