“There is no change from our earlier stand,” Clarence Albright, Under Secretary in the US Department of Energy, told reporters when asked whether there was any consensus on transfer of clean coal technology under the FutureGen project.
FutureGen is a global initiative of the US government to generate power from coal using technologies that reduce emissions substantially through carbon capture.
However, Albright did not rule out technology transfer at a future date.
“We are still working on it to figure out how we are going to do that transfer (of technology),” he said.
Coal accounts for 60 per cent of the total power India produces now, while nuclear energy just three per cent. If the civil nuclear deal goes through, India would be able to access American nuclear fuel and equipment that would help it raise nuclear power’s total share to 10 per cent.
Asked whether he discussed the fate of the deal during his meeting with Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon, he said: “We talked about all sorts of energy matters, not directly nuclear. Mostly, the discussions were fairly general.”
Expressing concern over the impact of the rising crude oil prices on the troubled American economy, Albright said the US was working on “renaissance” in nuclear power as a cost- effective, clean source of energy.
The US has launched an international initiative to harness atomic energy -- Global Nuclear Energy Partnership to reprocess spent fuel in a way that renders the plutonium in it usable for nuclear fuel and not for nuclear weapon.