Nuclear rebound leaves India with challenges

The global momentum for nuclear energy is gathering steam amid a push for net zero. India too has drawn up plans, but it has to deal with several tasks, including rolling out legislative reforms and securing uranium supplies

- S DINAKAR

After the disasters at Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011, nuclear power is enjoying a bit of a renaissance.

The Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA), the holy grail of energy forecasters, makes no fewer than 278 mentions of the word ‘nuclear’ in its World Energy Outlook (WEO) 2025, nearly twice the number in the 2024 edition.

And, for the first time since the UN’s annual climate summit (COP) commenced in 1995, “nuclear energy” was included in the Global Stocktake — an agreement that assesses where the world stands on its climate objectives — at COP28 in Dubai in 2023. COP30 is underway in Belem, Brazil.

There is more than 70 Gw of new nuclear capacity under construction globally, one of the highest in the last 30 years, the IEA says, with new business models emerging to kickstart 30 Gw of additional capacity for small modular reactors (SMRs), a nascent technology. In India, nuclear power may provide 190 terawatt hours (TWh) of additional electricity for data centres by 2035, equivalent to a tenth of the country’s overall annual power consumption.

“In the long term, without nuclear and hydro, it is difficult to achieve 100 per cent carbon neutrality,” said R R Rashmi, distinguished fellow at the thinktank, the Energy and Resources Institute (Teri). But the process is tortuous, senior industry officials said, and can take over a decade.

Barring China, nuclear is a tough sell and a risky business globally—an American nuclear reactor project called Vogtle was delayed by over 7 years, as costs doubled to $35 billion and technology provider Westinghouse went bankrupt.

“Several nuclear energy projects in the United States and Europe face project delays and cost overruns, and the industry is still grappling with public concerns,” the IEA said in WEO 2025. “Yet momentum for nuclear power is building, driven by concerns about rising carbon dioxide emissions or energy security.”

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