Dr Suman Bery, Vice Chairman of Niti Aayog, which is the government of India’s think tank, on Tuesday hinted at the possibility of nuclear energy being brought under the Ministry of Power. Delivering the 11th G Ramachandran Memorial Lecture, Bery noted that to meet its emission reduction and net-zero goals, India would need a stable base load supply of green energy. While some of it could come from batteries, “we are going to need nuclear power”.
He said that the “energy hunger” of artificial intelligence (through data centres) was making companies look at nuclear energy, particularly the small modular reactors. The companies are willing to put risk capital into nuclear energy, he said.
“This might possibly require nuclear plants to be brought under the Ministry of Power, just as other fuels,” he said.
AI business opportunities
Responding to a question on Niti Aayog’s view on India getting into thorium cycle, as India has thorium resources in abundance, Bery observed that India was no longer subjected to “nuclear apartheid” and there was “leniency” from nuclear suppliers to provide Uranium to India. “Uranium is available,” he said, adding, however, that he could not say whether this would mean that India need not rush into using thorium.
Responding to a question on AI, Bery said that not using AI was not an option. He noted that for adopting large language models (LLM) to India, a large amount of Indian data would be needed and highlighted big business opportunity in preparing data for training LLM.
China and climate
In his lecture on India’s growth, Bery said that two factors distinguished and shaped India’s current growth phase—China and climate. He called for more attention to ‘adaptation’ part of climate action (which refers to measures taken to cope up with effects of climate change that are no longer avoidable—such as early warning systems for cyclones).
Bery noted that there was a need to “fundamentally rethink” the relationship between the citizens and public service.