Prime Minister Narendra Modi met top French business leaders with an aim of bringing French investment and technologies to India.
The agreement will form the basis of wide-ranging bilateral cooperation from basic and applied research to full civil nuclear cooperation, including reactors, nuclear fuel supply, nuclear safety, radiation and environment protection and nuclear fuel cycle management, officials said. The nuclear agreement and the social security pacts were signed after the Summit meeting between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and French President Nicholas Sarkozy at the Elysee Palace in Paris.
The agreement to be inked later in the day after summit talks between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and French President Nicolas Sarkozy will form the basis of wide ranging bilateral cooperation from basic and applied research to full civil nuclear cooperation, including reactors and fuel supplies, nuclear safety, radiation and environment protection and nuclear fuel cycle management.
With the launch of the first indigenous aircraft today, India will join a club of nations like the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom and France that possess nuclear-powered submarines
Indian policymakers must incorporate in their nuclear doctrine a realistic response to tactical nuclear warheads, says Ajai Shukla.
About 4 GW of new nuclear power capacity is under construction in India
How on earth did Dr Manmohan Singh and his ministers conclude that the casualties of a disaster in a nuclear plant would be fewer than the deaths and injuries caused by the Bhopal gas tragedy? And that the compensation could, therefore, be capped at a smaller amount, asks T V R Shenoy.
As Japan's earthquake and tsunami triggers the global nuclear industry's worst crisis, it is time for India to rethink it ambitious nuclear power programme, says Praful Bidwai
China's assistance to build new nuclear plants in Pakistan are "inconsistent" with its commitments to Nuclear Suppliers Group, a top United States official has said.
He was addressing the Indian diaspora at the Ricoh Coliseum in Toronto on Wednesday.
From the resurrected cash-for-votes scandal to a rigged process favouring four foreign vendors -- and from new safety concerns to the special legislation that caps the foreign suppliers' accident liability by burdening the Indian taxpayer -- the nuclear deal's future looks more troubled than ever, says Brahma Chellaney.
China has more than 500 nuclear bombs in its arsenal and is developing new Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) that will significantly improve its nuclear-capable missile forces, the Pentagon said on Thursday.
The Nuclear Power Corporation has said it would revisit safety standards at all atomic power plants in the country in the wake of the nuclear crisis in tsunami-struck Japan."We will sincerely revisit (all the nuclear power plants) and decide whether there was any need for augmentation," NPCIL Chairman and Managing Director S K Jain told reporters. Indian reactors have 'successfully' withstood the Bhuj earthquake and the tsunami in south India, he said.
India on Monday signed a path-breaking broad-based agreement in the civil nuclear field with Russia, which will ensure transfer of technology and uninterrupted uranium fuel supplies to its nuclear reactors, and inked three pacts in the defence sector. The agreements were signed after talks between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev at the Kremlin in Moscow, during which they discussed a whole range of issues.
State Bank of India, the nation's largest lender, has stopped processing transactions of Russian entities that have been sanctioned by the West over Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, sources said. To effect this, SBI has issued a circular as it fears that any transaction with entities or sectors under sanction will invite sanction on it as well, sources said. No transactions involving entities, banks, ports or vessels appearing on a US, European Union or United Nations sanctions list would be processed irrespective of the currency of the transaction, they said. Payments due to such entities have to be processed by other mechanism rather than through the banking channel, sources added.
Beijing is brazenly thumbing its nose at the international non-proliferation regime it signed up to less than a decade ago, says Nitin Pai
Today nearly 440 nuclear reactors produce electricity around the world. More than 15 countries rely on nuclear power for 25 per cent or more of their electricity. In Europe and Japan, the nuclear share of electricity is over 30 per cent. In the US, nuclear power creates 20 per cent of electricity.
'The lessons learnt from the triple disaster have put Japan's energy future On the right path,' notes Dr Rajaram Panda.
'Modi knows the people here are opposed to this project, but he is using the might of government to push this port down our throats.'
At present, India imports one-third of its domestic power needs.
Nuclear power forms a big part of energy production in some countries.
India's target of nuclear power generation of 20,000 megawatt by 2020 has been quietly lowered by the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL), the only government agency setting up the nuclear power plants in the country, to 11,080 MW.
"It is not going to be replicated to other countries," US Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns said.
'With Pakistan's 'first use doctrine' threatening the use of nuclear weapons early in a war with India, the S-400 will shield vulnerable targets like Delhi and Mumbai, complicating Pakistan's targeting calculations.'
'Even before the wave hits the shore, the reactors were shut down,' says nuclear expert L V Krishnan.
Hydrography (underwater geography) prevents the Indian Navy for opting for an all-conventional, or all-nuclear submarine fleet.
He said there is a need to pave the way for India to benefit from nuclear power without restrictions.
"And in this overall context," he added, "it is against India's own national security interests to have another nuclear weapons state in our region."
Residents of Surat, who fear for their lives after the heavy leakage at the nuclear plant, have started an online campaign to know about the incident.
Power equipment supplier Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd plans five joint ventures in the nuclear sector and locomotive manufacturing. The company has decided to invest Rs 1,000 crore in a castings and forgings joint venture, Chairman and Managing Director K Ravi Kumar said.
Shipments from Russia rose nearly 33 per cent to $1.1 billion in March from $831.17 million in the previous month, which was when the country mounted aggression on Ukraine and faced sanctions from Western nations, the data accessed by Business Standard shows. Growth in imports was largely on account of oil, people aware of the matter said. The Department of Commerce is learnt to have written to the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas (MoPNG), seeking details of imports, including the payment mechanism, which India has not made public.
According to officials, the leakage of heavy water that is used in cooling off the nuclear reactor core was detected around 9 am and it was fixed in some time and the temporary emergency was lifted shortly afterwards.
20 years ago this day, May 11, 1998, India conducted its second nuclear test at Pokharan in Rajasthan. In a fascinating interview on Rediff.com, K Subrahmanyam revealed how Indian PMs reacted to nuclear ambitions.
Noted nuclear scientist P K Iyengar, who played a key role in India's first atomic test in 1974 and pioneered experiments in cold fusion died in Mumbai on Wednesday afternoon after a brief illness. He was 80.
Japan's nuclear nightmare worsened on Wednesday with radiation levels surging at a quake-crippled reactor at Fukushima plant, forcing authorities to briefly pull out emergency workers even as another fire erupted slowing desperate efforts to avert a meltdown.
The weapons are mostly relatively simple uranium arms with "modest" yields around the size of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The first pour of concrete for units three and four was scheduled for December 2007 but failure to sign the agreement for the additional reactors during Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit to Moscow last month put a huge question mark over NPCIL's expectation of touching a generating capacity of 20,000 MWe by 2020. Kudamkulam is critical to its calculations.
Workers were evacuated from the tsunami-damaged Fukushima nuclear plant on Sunday after radiation levels surged 10 million times higher than usual, dealing a major blow to efforts to avoid a meltdown of the reactors. The radiation in the water is 10 million times higher than that seen usually in the No 2 reactor complex, according Tokyo Electric Power Co, the operator of the plant, 250-km northeast of capital Tokyo.
