New Delhi: The Jaitapur Nuclear Power Plant, which was envisioned as the world’s largest nuclear energy facility, remains “very much on the table”, French Ambassador to India Thierry Mathiou said Wednesday.
Speaking during an interaction at ThePrint office, Thierry Mathiou pushed back against suggestions that the Indo-French nuclear partnership had stalled.
“I wouldn’t say it’s stuck, but it’s a very complicated dossier to deal with. We have created several working groups to move forward; as such, a huge project requires amendments to the law. It also means dealing with the price of energy, technology, and now, Make in India,” Thierry Mathiou said.
The Jaitapur project, a collaboration between France’s EDF (Électricité de France) and India’s Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL), is set to be built in Ratnagiri, Maharashtra, under a 2008 civil nuclear cooperation agreement. The plan involves constructing six 1,650 MW European Pressurised Reactors (EPRs), giving the plant a total installed capacity of 9.6 GWe. Once operational, it could supply clean energy to 70 million Indian homes and prevent 80 million tonnes of CO₂ emissions annually.
Thierry Mathiou acknowledged that the scale of the project demanded “time, legal amendments, and industrial coordination” and that localisation is key to reducing costs.
“To reduce the cost of a kilowatt, we have to integrate the fact that part of Jaitapur will be manufactured here in India,” he said.
“So we have to find the good stakeholders on the industrial side. Through the years, the project has to some extent transformed itself, but it’s still on the table.”
Thierry Mathiou added that discussions on the project are ongoing at multiple levels. “Just yesterday, we had a technical discussion about this,” he revealed.
The ambassador’s remarks come months after French President Emmanuel Macron and Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed their intent in February to deepen cooperation in civil nuclear energy.
During Modi’s visit to France this year in February, on the occasion of the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit, the two sides signed a ‘Declaration of Intent’ on developing advanced and small modular reactors (SMRs and AMRs) and renewed a memorandum of understanding between India’s Department of Atomic Energy and France’s Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique et aux Énergies Alternatives (CEA).
A joint statement issued after their talks emphasised that “nuclear energy is an essential part of the energy mix for strengthening energy security and transitioning towards a low-carbon economy”. Both leaders also “acknowledged the India-France civil nuclear ties and efforts in cooperation on the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, notably in relation to the Jaitapur Nuclear Power Plant Project.”
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)