India's leading private-sector engineering-and-power interests are currently looking at the nuclear power push as a tantalising new income stream. Following the contentious 2008 US-India nuclear deal, international trade restrictions were lifted for India on accessing nuclear supplies despite the fact that it remained outside of the purview of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. Since then, a host of interests have begun fervently planning for investment in manufacturing for the nuclear-energy sector. These include the Indian private sector (Larsen and Toubro, Reliance Power, GVK Power and Infrastructure, and GMR Energy), the public sector (Bharat Heavy Electricals, the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited and the National Thermal Power Corporation), as well as international groups (including Areva, GE-Hitachi, Westinghouse and Atomstroyexport). Indeed, the India-US nuclear deal has done much to re-energise the nuclear-power debate the world over. India (along with China) subsequently finds itself at the centre of very ambitious plans for an international nuclear-power revival, meant to satiate their respective demands for power. Ten of the 14 new nuclear reactors are in Asia, as are 19 of the 35 units under construction worldwide.
The international nuclear industry, quite naturally, is using every opportunity to make optimistic announcements about this 'nuclear renaissance'. The World Nuclear Association, a suppliers' group, said in late 2008:
It is noteworthy that in the 1980s, 218 power reactors started up, an average of one every 17 days. So it is not hard to imagine a similar number being commissioned in a decade after about 2015. But with China and India getting up to speed with nuclear energy and a world energy demand double the 1980 level in 2015, a realistic estimate of what is possible might be the equivalent of one 1,000 megawatt unit worldwide every five days.
In fact, such an estimate is a pipe dream. The world in the upcoming decade will be a radically different place from that of the 1980s, when the heavy early investments in nuclear power finally began to pay off. At that time, nuclear waste was treated simply as a problem that could be contained and deferred, the costs of reactor decommissioning were kept off balance sheets, and the nuclear industry was considered a 'sunrise' industry – almost glamorous, and a magnet for the world's young scientific talent. That world is today long gone, due particularly to the triple crises of climate change, the failure of a dominant economic model, and the shocks to agriculture and water systems. Besides, the energy sector now has new players, methods and sources beyond the old coal, hydro and petroleum-based plants – modern natural gas, combined heat and power (also called cogeneration, it is the simultaneous production of electricity and heat from a single fuel input, which steeply raises the efficiency of fuel use) and a host of renewable energy technologies. New sources and technologies, excluding hydro, can supply power quickly, be scaled to need and be built close to demand points, factors that nuclear energy cannot match.