Pakistan Invests In Nuclear Power

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31085, 14 June 1966, Page 24

Pakistan Invests In Nuclear Power

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter)

KARACHI. Pakistan is backing nuclear energy as the best, and cheapest, way of beating down the barriers to industrial progress.

Work began this month on the country’s first nuclear power station, which should start to feed 137 megawatts of electricity into factories and homse in Karachi by 1970.

Plans are already advanced for another station at Rooppur, in East Pakistan, to help rescue a province suffering from a crippling shortage of energy. Both will be built under Pakistan's third five-year plan, which began on July, 1965. A third nuclear power staition, in East Pakistan, and a dual-purpose power and water-desalinisation plant on the Makran coast of West Pakistan, are being planned for the 1970’5. Pakistan's nuclear programme is guided by Dr. I. H. Usmani, the chairman of the country’s Atomic Energy Commission. He is pushing Pakistan into the nuclear age as fast as possible. As a scientist and Government official, he is dedicated to the future of nuclear power, while at the same time aware of its potential misuses.

“I want to make Pakistan full of power, not powerful,” this former chairman of the International Atomic Energy Agency said in an interview. The Karachi plant, situated at Buleji, 15 miles from the city, and drawing cooling water from the Arabian Sea, will cost Pakistan nearly 60 million dollars (over £2O million). It will be built by Canada, which is installing a similar heavy-water plant in the Rajastan area of India.

Canada is providing over 46 million dollars (about £l6 million) in foreign exchange for the Karachi plant. Pakistan entered the field of nuclear energy last autumn when scientists at the research reactor in Islamabad, the new capital near Rawalpindi, announced that they had split the atom and that their reactor had “gone critical.” “Hard Economics” Asked how a developing country like Pakistan, where almost every dollar and rupee is spent before it is obtained, can afford an ambitious nuclear power programme, Dr. Usmani replied: “Nuclear power in Pakistan is not a matter of prestige. We have been studying the prospects for years. It is a matter of hard economics.” Pakistan needs more and more power for its programme of industrial expansion. While statistics show that per capita consumption of power in the world as a whole has been doubling every ten years, in Pakistan the rate has been far higher. Karachi itself will soon have added to its energy consumers a big new steel mill to be set up, probably with West German assistance. Dr. Usmani’s figures prove that in the long run it will be cheaper for Pakistan to produce nuclear power than conventional power from oil, coal or gas. Pakistan has to import nearly all her oil and coal and pay for them in foreign exchange. Gas is piped from large natural gas fields at Sui, in Baluchistan, to Karachi and other centres.

About 45 per cent of the gas delivered to Karachi is already being burned by

power generators. Gas could only cope with galloping power demands if an expensive new pipeline was built. Pakistan considers it important to preserve her gas resources for producing vitally-needed chemicals. So the choice was nuclear power. Although the initial cost of building the Karachi station will be almost twice as much as for a conventional station, it will pay for itself in its life-time of about 35 years by saving 3 million dollars (about £1 million) a year in fuel and operating costs. In East Pakistan, 1000 miles away, on the other side of India, nuclear power is being given top priority alongside conventional power stations. One hydro-electric plant, four gas-fired and two oil-fired, are under construction or projected in the third five-year plan. France and West Germany are being approached to set up a 140 megawatt nuclear plant at Rooppur, 100 miles East of the provincial capital of Dacca. It would draw its cooling water from the River Ganges. East Pakistan needs power more desperately than the Western province. It produces 75 per cent of the world’s supply of raw jute, by far Pakistan’s biggest export earner, and must somehow find more power to boost growth and industrial processing.

The thickly-populated province has more water per square mile than most other countries in the world, since it is split in two by the river Brahmaputra and dissected by the Ganges. But the whole area is flat and its wide, slowflowing rivers cannot be harnessed for power. Filling Gap

The province has no oil and little gas or coal. Annual imports of coal alone into East Pakistan cost about £5.5 million. Rooppur nuclear power station, planned to begin operating by 1971-72, was conceived to fill the gap. Pakistan’s nuclear programme is being implemented by about 400 scientists, most of them trained abroad, especially in Britain.

Dr Usmani said it was intended to use locally-pro-duced plutonium as fuel for future reactors, and perhaps in the Makran coast plant. Other uses of atomic energy already being tried in Pakistan include experiments on a Government farm at Tando Jam, in West Pakistan, aimed at improving the genetic qualities of seeds by radiation.

Seeds thus treated are reported to have shown a greater resistance to salt—and soil salinity, coupled with waterlogging, is one of the greatest scourges of West Pakistani farmers.