Chennai, April 7 -- How a reactor battered by nature and delays finally came alive.
On December 26, 2004, the sea came rushing in.
At Kalpakkam, on India's southeastern coast, waves from the Indian Ocean tsunami surged into a construction site that was meant to house one of the country's most ambitious scientific projects, the Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR). The huge foundation pit flooded. Structures were damaged. Work came to a sudden halt.
For a project that had only just begun, it was a brutal start. More than two decades later, that same site witnessed a very different moment.
At 8:26 pm on Monday, the PFBR achieved criticality, the point at which a controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction begins.
What was once a ...