Atomic energy infrastructure

Story hook

It is 4 August 1956. At a fenced compound in Trombay on the north-eastern shore of Mumbai's salt-pan creeks, a 1 MW pool-type reactor reaches first criticality. Apsara — designed and built entirely in India, fuelled with British-supplied enriched uranium — is now Asia's first operating nuclear reactor. Its principal designer is a 47-year-old physicist named Homi Jehangir Bhabha.

Twelve years earlier, in March 1944, Bhabha had written from the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru to the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust:

"There is at the moment in India no big school of research in the fundamental problems of physics… The lack of proper conditions and intelligent financial support hampers the development of science in India at the pace which the talent in the country would warrant."

That letter founded the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR). Four years later, in August 1948, Bhabha persuaded Nehru to set up the Atomic Energy Commission. Six months after that, in April 1954, the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) was created. Apsara followed two years later.

Today, DAE oversees 22 operating power reactors generating ~7,480 MWe, plus a 500 MWe prototype fast breeder reactor at Kalpakkam that went critical in March 2024. India's nuclear establishment is the world's only one outside the P5 + Israel + Pakistan + DPRK to have been built entirely outside the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Why this matters for UPSC

DAE infrastructure has been asked every Prelims since 2014 — usually "location of X reactor" or "which DAE unit does Y". Mains GS-III tests the three-stage nuclear programme and the Indo-US 123 Agreement (2008). Interview boards probe small modular reactors (SMRs), the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act 2010, and India's non-NPT signatory stance.