India

Like all world economies, India does not today have particularly good options regarding its energy needs. In the short term, it has little choice but to ramp up purchasing of fossil fuels. And while India would like to increase its use of renewable energy sources – like virtually everyone else except for the oil companies and their scurrilous supporters in the Republican Party and amongst lobbyists (who have resorted to outright lies in TV ads claiming that CO2 is green) – there is a dearth of proven options that can scale in the way that India needs it.

Facing similar challenges, China is looking to establish industrial leadership in a number of new areas such as clean coal/ carbon capture technology and solar power, as well as increasing use of nuclear power. With its lack of manufacturing capability, the former are not viable Indian options. But in the latter area, the two emerging giants have similar ambitions.

China today has 11 nuclear reactors producing 8GW of power, but plans to scale that up 10-fold by 2020.

But India plans to go even further. Today it has 4.7GW of power from 17 reactors, but it plans to increase that 100-fold, to 470GW of nuclear power by 2050. That would make it the largest nuclear energy producer in the world by a considerable margin. The largest nuclear power today, the US, produces just 101GW of nuclear energy.

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