India has pledged to increase its nuclear power capability from 8.8 GigaWatt today to 100 GigaWatt by 2047. When the attention of scientists turned towards harnessing the power of an atom and converting the heat generated into electricity in the 1950s, the concern of accidents was foremost in their minds. The accidents over a period of nearly a century in civil aviation, chemical and oil and gas industries have made the design and operations more safe and secure. Nuclear power has very high energy density and can be more hazardous, but the design of the plant is meticulous and addresses all concerns. In the 60 years’ history of civil nuclear power generation, there have been three accidents; Three Mile Island, USA, 1979; Chernobyl, Ukraine, 1986, and Fukushima Daiichi, Japan, 2011.

The Fukushima accident caused radiation exposure to workers, while the Chernobyl accident impacted the health of the workers. The Three Miles accident did not cause any harm. There has not been any accident in India so far. Bengaluru’s tech park and Chennai’s automobile industries face peak-hour power deficit, despite Kaiga and Kudankulam generating 2000 MW. Our dependency on fossil fuel must be cut to arrest the warming of the planet. Transitioning towards green energy like solar and wind is going to take decades to achieve scale and speed. Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Chennai are emerging hubs for Microsoft, Google and Amazon and a data centre boom leads to surge in power demand.

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A single large data centre requires 50 to 100 MW of uninterrupted power and with the growing workloads of AI in India, we must step up generation of clean energy quickly. Sustainable harnessing and advancement of nuclear energy for transforming India (SHANTI) bill has been passed by Parliament and the sector has been........

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