India's Future Sunshine Industry

Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd. (NPCIL) seems determined to take India's nuclear dreams down the road to success. It is in talks with companies and representatives from countries such as Kazakhstan, Canada, France, Russia and US to make this a reality. It recently signed a deal with Areva of France for 6 new reactors worth $12.3 billion. This is not shocking when you take into account that India has a target of building 22 reactors by 2014. Its also the reason why on this year's Republic Day function, the chief guest was Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev, a country which India has not had good relations with. Two days later, Mukhtar Dzhakishev, president of Kazatomprom, the state-owned nuclear holding company, said that new Indian atomic power plants would use Kazakh uranium as fuel.

So what's this gonna do for the country? Imagine this. The power plants of today at a mega scale have a 4000MW capacity. As compared to this, each nuclear reactor on an average costs $2.4 billion and provides a capacity of .78GW so it makes more sense to invest more in nuclear technology in the long run.

The country's total power requirement stands at 137000MW and today nuclear power constitutes to only about 3% of this due to difficulty in sourcing of uranium, technology disparity and safety concerns. But by 2032, India will increase this to 63000MW at least, at a cost of $80 billion and 40 new reactors. Moreover, this is expected to be at least a$200 billion business from India over the next 35 years. That gives more than 50 of the world's top nuclear engineering companies a reason to get into a brawl. Add to this list names such as Heavy Engineering Limited, Tata Power and L&T and you can count on the future sunshine industry for India.