Andhra set to hand over site for US firm to build nuclear plant

NEW DELHI: Four days before Prime Minister Narendra Modi is to meet US President Barack Obama in Washington on June 7, the site for an American company to set up

Published on: Jun 2, 2016, 07:48:57 IST

By Shishir Gupta

Prefer HTon Google

Share via

Copy link

NEW DELHI: Four days before Prime Minister Narendra Modi is to meet US President Barack Obama in Washington on June 7, the site for an American company to set up a 6,600 MW nuclear power plant in India will be handed over to the Nuclear Power Corporation India Limited (NPCIL). The government of Andhra Pradesh will formally hand over the site at Kowada in Srikakulam district to the NPCIL for Westing house-Toshiba to build the plant.

The decision to allow Westinghouse, in which Toshiba has a majority stake, has been approved by the prime minister, and is the first nuclear power plant to be commissioned after the 2008 India-US civil nuclear agreement.

Kowada was earlier selected for a proposed reactor project by GE-Hitachi but the contractor had issues, though the land was acquired for the purpose.

The Chandrababu Naidu government, a BJP ally, had informed the Centre about the availability of the site some months ago. The unresolved issues with GE-Hitachi’ s reactor project were mentioned too.

As land acquisition for the Westinghouse contract at MithiVirdi in Gujarat got stuck, it was decided that the project should be shifted to Kowada where land is already available. Westinghouse, which submitted its detailed project costs this February, got the Kowada site to match the most ready site with the most ready vendor.

The project will enhance India’s nuclear power capacity substantially over the next decade, with the addition of new reactors at Kudankulam in coastal Tamil Nadu. The Kowada plant will be partly financed by the US Exim Bank and the paperwork is expected to be completed by next month after discussions during Modi’s visit.

The PM is expected to reach the US on June 6 and meet important American business chiefs the next evening, followed by a working dinner with President Obama. He will address a joint session of the US Congress the next day.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

Get the latest India News, breaking headlines and real-time updates from across the country. Stay informed about politics, government policies, crime, weather and major national developments.