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How Nuclear Energy Mission will fuel India’s ‘Viksit Bharat’ vision – Firstpost

How Nuclear Energy Mission will fuel India’s ‘Viksit Bharat’ vision – Firstpost



In this year’s budget, all the headlines have been grabbed by the income tax exemption up to ₹12 lakhs as announced by the government, and while this is definitely worth all the focus, another initiative that deserves its due share of attention is the announcement of a Nuclear Energy Mission worth ₹20,000 crore. As a country that has committed to a net zero carbon emission goal by 2070, this mission has the ability to transform the country’s energy landscape in a big way. Right now India is still dependent on conventional sources such as coal for as much as 75 per cent of its needs, which means nuclear power remains a significantly untapped source of energy.

As part of this mission, the government is going to focus on generating nuclear energy by promoting research and development of small modular reactors, creating five of them indigenously. These reactors will be operational by the year 2033, where the goal is to generate at least 100 gigawatts of nuclear energy. It is expected that this goal will be met by the year 2047, when PM Modi’s vision of ‘Viksit Bharat’ comes to fruition.

At just under 8 GW, India’s current capacity of nuclear power is quite low in comparison to other major countries. The world leader in nuclear power is the United States, whose operational capacity is already 100 GW. China and France come second with a capacity of 58 GW and 64 GW each. As for India, despite a great focus on civil nuclear energy since the very beginning, the country has still remained a laggard because of multiple reasons.

One of the major reasons is the prohibitively high cost of setting up a large-scale nuclear power plant, which only increases due to the complexities of acquiring land, environmental lobbying, and other such hurdles in India. A case in point is the Kudankulam nuclear power plant, whose units 3 and 4 not only have a cost overrun of 73 per cent but the projects are also over-delayed by 72 months.

This reminds one of Homi Bhabha’s dream that nuclear power would contribute 8 GW of electricity to India by the 1980s, something that has hardly turned to reality even in this decade. While a regime of denial imposed on India after its 1974 test is definitely responsible for the slow progress on the nuclear front, since the beginning of the century, there has been an attitudinal change in countries such as the United States, which are willing to share nuclear know-how with India.

Although the international policy environment regarding India’s access to nuclear power has changed considerably in the last two decades, the country’s own laws have prevented meaningful cooperation to date. For instance, India signed the civil nuclear agreement with the US in 2008, but the cooperation was hindered by certain legal hurdles, especially the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act, which holds suppliers responsible for nuclear accidents, deterring vendors such as Westinghouse and GE-Hitachi from investing in the country. However, the good news is that along with the nuclear energy mission, the Modi government has also announced its decision to amend the civil liability act as well as the 1962 Atomic Energy Act in order to open the nuclear sector to participation from the private sector as well.

The willingness to overhaul India’s legal framework to encourage foreign and private participation stems from the country’s hope of leveraging the SMR technology for nuclear power. SMRs, or small modular reactors, are currently a rage in the nuclear energy sector due to their massive advantage over traditional reactors. They are much smaller in size than the conventional reactors and thus less costly as well as more time-effective to build. Unlike the large nuclear power plants that require massive effort from the state towards land acquisition, SMRs can be factory-built and installed in a much lesser space. In fact, this is the advantage that India is trying to leverage by using SMRs as a substitute for its decommissioned coal plants.

SMR is still a very nascent technology, with efforts to adopt it on a commercial level still going on. China has emerged as a leader in this, with the world’s first onshore small modular reactor facility, ‘Linglong One’, all set to be unveiled in 2026 in its Hainan province. Around 80 commercial SMR designs are currently in the works globally, which interestingly also includes India’s own Bharat Small Modular Reactor, or BSMR. The current government has laid out a vision to deploy around 40-50 of these nuclear reactors in the next decade, where a partnership with the private sector would also play a key role.

India’s early intent to invest in this nascent technology has great strategic implications as well. Any breakthrough by a country in this domain has the potential to make it a part of the global SMR supply chain, where their demand is only going to increase in the future as countries shift towards more environmental friendly sources of energy. The impetus to become net zero in carbon emissions means that SMR is the technology of the future. Experts across the world anyway agree that only nuclear energy has the potential to replace conventional sources of energy to realise a net zero goal.

In the case of India, the nuclear energy mission gains even more gravitas provided its aim is to become a developed country (Viksit Bharat) by 2047. Unlike other major players that industrialised in a world where climate consciousness was ridiculously absent, India is facing massive headwinds in the form of environmental concerns. The same European countries that first colonised the entire world, made its population abandon sustainable practices, and later flouted every single pollution norm to become industry powerhouses have now become some of the biggest activists for the environment.

These countries enjoy a much higher per capita income, whereas India has just embarked on a journey to ensure rapid development and good quality of life for its citizens. In such a scenario, India’s dependence on fossil fuels makes it vulnerable not only in the domain of energy security but also threatens its dream to become a developed country. Despite all the efforts of the past, nuclear energy still contributes to just 3 per cent of the country’s energy mix. However, the Nuclear Energy Mission, along with the current government’s willingness to liberalise nuclear laws, is giving a lot of hope that this may finally change.

The author is a New Delhi-based commentator on geopolitics and foreign policy. She holds a PhD from the Department of International Relations, South Asian University. She tweets @TrulyMonica. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.



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