India, May 19 -- India's Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR) at Kalpakkam recently achieved criticality. Most western newsrooms filed it as a minor energy story. They missed the point entirely.

I have a particular vantage point here. I grew up in the department of atomic energy (DAE) township in Kalpakkam, Tamil Nadu. My late father worked in the materials science division at IGCAR - the institution that designed and built this reactor. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on nuclear reactor safety and shutdown logic at that same facility. Today, I advise the European Commission on energy and critical materials strategy from Switzerland. I have sat in enough rooms in Brussels, Bern, and New Delhi to know what institutional failure looks lik...