New Delhi, July 11: India’s domestic uranium production could rise significantly within five years and ease the current scarcity forcing nuclear power reactors to operate at low capacity, government figures indicate.

Technical details of India’s uranium production provided by the government to the International Atomic Energy Agency reveal the extent of the gap between demand and supply of uranium for the 15 indigenous pressurised heavy water reactors.

India’s installed nuclear capacity of 4,120MW would demand on average about 600 tonnes of uranium. But production at the nation’s sole uranium ore processing mill at Jaduguda, Jharkhand, is slightly above 175 tonnes, according to the documents that provide information about capacities of existing as well as planned uranium mines and future processing plants.

The India-US nuclear deal will allow India to import uranium and alleviate the shortage which, according to sources in the Nuclear Power Corporation, has contributed to the low capacity factors of some nuclear power reactors.

India’s average capacity factor was 90 per cent in 2002-03, which dropped to 74 per cent in 2005-06. During 2007-08, according to figures from the Nuclear Power Corporation, the two 540MW reactors at Tarapur had capacity factors of 45 per cent and 56 per cent.

The Uranium Corporation of India mines uranium at Jaduguda, Bhatin, Narwapahar and Bagjata in the east Singhbhum region of Jharkhand, but all the ore from these mines is processed at Jaduguda.

Two other uranium mines at Turamdih and Banduhurang in Jharkhand are under expansion and the government hopes to have an ore-processing plant at Turamdih to add 190 tonnes of domestic uranium a year.

But additional mines and plants in Andhra Pradesh and Meghalaya are expected to add 687 tonnes to production capacity between 2010 and 2012.

By 2012, the uranium corporation hopes to get 130 tonnes from a plant at Seripally processing ore from Lambapur-Peddagattu (Andhra), 217 tonnes from a plant and mine at Tummalapalle (Andhra), and 340 tonnes from Meghalaya.

But a court petition and lack of approval from local communities have delayed some of these proposed projects.

If the uranium corporation can get past these hurdles, India could have a production capacity of about 1,045 tonnes of domestic uranium by 2012 — compared with under 200 tonnes today.

Some analysts believe India is also getting a significant proportion of its uranium from secondary sources — such as phosphate-bearing rock.

A technical paper titled India’s Worsening Uranium Shortage prepared for the US department of energy last year had estimated that nearly half of domestic uranium comes from such sources, but had cautioned that such sources are “close to exhaustion”.