Chennai:
India's rapid nuclear and hydrogen expansion is creating a growing need for new and updated technical standards, according to Madhukar Sharma, President of ASME India Private Limited, the US body whose codes underpin safety regulation for pressure vessels, piping and boilers worldwide.
India's atomic energy regulator relies on ASME Section III as the baseline code for Class 1 reactor components — the safety-critical parts of the country's pressurised heavy water reactors, a design lineage traced to CANDU (Canadian Deuterium Uranium) technology but substantially indigenised since, Sharma said on Friday on the sidelines of the second day of the International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition India, held in Chennai.
He said India’s indigenously designed Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor used the French RCC-MR code. The code is used for the design and construction of mechanical components in nuclear power plants for relevant high-temperature mechanical components.
India has no Small modular reactor (SMR) specific code, and companies are operating on proprietary in-house standards while global codes — a joint effort between ASME and the Japanese Society of Mechanical Engineers covering both fission and fusion — remain in draft, expected within a couple of years, Sharma added.
He said that India has published draft rules this week opening the nuclear sector to greater private participation, which ASME expects could accelerate the standards pipeline within six to twelve months. The absence of settled codes is compounding a separate supply-side constraint: India has just four or five qualified suppliers of nuclear-grade materials, against an estimated need for 50 to meet the country's target of 100 gigawatts of nuclear capacity by 2047, ASME said.
Sharma said that Light water reactors (LWR) are now gaining ground, and that's arguably where India should be investing next, much as it once invested in Pressurised Heavy Water Reactor technology — a choice partly shaped by India being excluded from LWR technology transfer in earlier decades. That constraint has eased considerably, and LWRs offer scalability into SMRs and even smaller, mobile reactor formats.
India has begun expanding nuclear engineering education at institutions including IIT Bombay and IIT Madras, while ASME is working with faculty at institutions such as the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institute of Science on curricula, he said.
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India's rapid nuclear and hydrogen expansion is creating a growing need for new and updated technical standards, according to Madhukar Sharma, President of ASME India Private Limited, the US body whose codes underpin safety regulation for pressure vessels, piping and boilers worldwide.
India's atomic energy regulator relies on ASME Section III as the baseline code for Class 1 reactor components — the safety-critical parts of the country's pressurised heavy water reactors, a design lineage traced to CANDU (Canadian Deuterium Uranium) technology but substantially indigenised since, Sharma said on Friday on the sidelines of the second day of the International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition India, held in Chennai.
He said India’s indigenously designed Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor used the French RCC-MR code. The code is used for the design and construction of mechanical components in nuclear power plants for relevant high-temperature mechanical components.
India has no Small modular reactor (SMR) specific code, and companies are operating on proprietary in-house standards while global codes — a joint effort between ASME and the Japanese Society of Mechanical Engineers covering both fission and fusion — remain in draft, expected within a couple of years, Sharma added.
He said that India has published draft rules this week opening the nuclear sector to greater private participation, which ASME expects could accelerate the standards pipeline within six to twelve months. The absence of settled codes is compounding a separate supply-side constraint: India has just four or five qualified suppliers of nuclear-grade materials, against an estimated need for 50 to meet the country's target of 100 gigawatts of nuclear capacity by 2047, ASME said.
Sharma said that Light water reactors (LWR) are now gaining ground, and that's arguably where India should be investing next, much as it once invested in Pressurised Heavy Water Reactor technology — a choice partly shaped by India being excluded from LWR technology transfer in earlier decades. That constraint has eased considerably, and LWRs offer scalability into SMRs and even smaller, mobile reactor formats.
India has begun expanding nuclear engineering education at institutions including IIT Bombay and IIT Madras, while ASME is working with faculty at institutions such as the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institute of Science on curricula, he said.
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