The safety imperative: Regulatory capture in the nuclear energy sector could lead the country to grief

But all that political capital was wasted in the years that followed. Investment didn’t flow in. No new plants that used world-class technology or private-sector expertise got built.

That might finally be about to change. In December, India’s Parliament passed a new bill that is supposed to make it easier for private companies, including foreign ones, to build and operate nuclear power plants. It ends a de-facto state monopoly on this source of energy—and, even more importantly, aligns India’s legal framework with global norms, so investors know what they’re getting into.

Hopefully, this hasn’t come too late for power-hungry India. Nuclear contributes only about 3% of its electricity. As renewable energy scales up across the country, many worry that its intermittent nature will keep dirty coal plants in business longer than necessary. But New Delhi has finally accepted that the base load power demand of the future will need supplementary capacity and nuclear plants are one way to go about it.

These ambitions are small compared to India’s size—but vast by any other standards. The government plans for 100 gigawatts of nuclear-energy capacity by 2047, the 100th anniversary of independence, up from less than nine gigawatts today. In other words, it intends to build the equivalent of America’s entire reactor fleet over the next generation.

This is one of the biggest opportunities in India’s energy sector in years. Unsurprisingly, there are a few companies that are already interested.

Bloomberg News has reported that Adani Group intends to kick things off with small modular reactors in the most populous state, Uttar Pradesh. Several other large conglomerates are also apparently keen. But that won’t be enough. Officials have estimated a build-out of this scale will cost $217 billion. Domestic capital can’t do that alone; foreign companies will need to get involved.

This is where the second part of the December law comes in. The rules have been changed to reflect global liability standards, removing the biggest reason that the 2008 nuclear deal underperformed.

This has been a political landmine for a very long time. In 1984, a pesticide plant in the central Indian town of Bhopal leaked a highly toxic gas. Thousands died. We still don’t know exactly how many—but enough to make it the world’s deadliest industrial disaster. Many Indians still believe the plant’s operator, the US company Union Carbide, got off too lightly. The shadow of Bhopal has meant that the Indian state has always wanted to ensure it could go after suppliers of industrial equipment if needed; but, across the world, the liability for nuclear accidents is usually shouldered by a plant’s operator, not those who provide the technology and equipment.

Moving beyond this was essential to finally make nuclear energy projects financeable. But the government shouldn’t skip out on the other half of the bargain: Regulation.

The controls that India’s new law proposes appear strong enough—on paper. But unless the government is very careful, things might be different in practice. This is particularly true once well-connected business groups get involved.

In sectors from coal to airports to telecom, apparently independent regulators have been accused of being too weak on politically influential Indian corporations. That’s bad anywhere. In the nuclear sector, it could be disastrous. The problem of information asymmetry is unusually severe, the care required unusually high and the damage that an accident could cause uniquely irreversible. Regulators thus have to believe that they can delay projects, shut down plants and even embarrass tycoons in public if need be.

India tends to build sectors first and regulate them later. With nuclear power, it must do both together. It will save billions by allowing the private sector in, but it must also spend billions on independent laboratories, well-paid inspectors and real-time monitoring.

The government is right to hope that private capital will help manage the awesome upfront cost of building the world’s second-largest fleet of reactors. But it has a startup cost of its own to pay as well: The creation of regulatory expertise and governance capacity. ©Bloomberg

The author is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist.