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SHANTI Bill, SMRs and now Australian uranium—why India’s nuclear pieces are falling into place

Russia and France remain important nuclear partners. Canada has long been supplying uranium to India. Australia could now become another reliable long-term supplier of uranium.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s latest visit to Australia has produced an outcome, among others, of considerable strategic consequence: arrangements have now been ironed out to enable Australian uranium exports to India. Australia holds the world’s largest known uranium resources and India has set an ambitious target of achieving 100 GW of nuclear power capacity by 2047. The complementarities are obvious.

Yet the importance of this agreement goes beyond simply purchasing uranium from yet another source. It should also serve as a trigger for understanding the pivotal moment in India’s civil nuclear aspirations, its painstakingly built ecosystem and the government’s seriousness to deliver.

India has understood the costs of energy dependence the hard way. Sanctions on oil-exporting countries and more recently continued disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz have left little to the imagination. New Delhi realises the strategic cost of dependence on imported hydrocarbons passing through narrow maritime chokepoints. Part of India’s response has been to diversify suppliers. Another has been to extract greater value from its own coal reserves by encouraging private participation in mining and coal gasification, which converts low-calorific-value Indian coal into syngas that can partly substitute for natural gas. But alongside, India is now also doubling down on nuclear power—a genuine gamechanger.

Like most strategic sectors, nuclear power is shaped by supply-chain geopolitics: who possesses uranium, who dominates reactor technology, who can finance and construct nuclear plants and who wins the race for Small Modular Reactors, or SMRs. The digital revolution has only sharpened this urgency further. Nuclear power is no longer only about electricity for homes and industries. It is increasingly about reliable, low-carbon baseload power for data centres, artificial intelligence infrastructure and future industrialisation. The IEA describes nuclear as the world’s second-largest source of low-emissions electricity after hydropower. There is renewed global interest in nuclear power as countries look for energy security and decarbonisation together.

The global nuclear landscape remains dominated by a handful of countries. The US is still the largest producer of nuclear electricity. France remains the most nuclear-dependent major economy, generating about 67 per cent of its electricity from nuclear power in 2024. Russia’s state-owned Rosatom continues to be a major global pioneer of reactors and uses civil nuclear cooperation as a potent........

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