New Delhi, Oct. 7 -- Reliance Industries proposed a nuclear power plant in Bengal at a recent meeting with the chief minister, Suvendu Adhikari, and Chief Secretary Manoj Agarwal, in addition to developing hotels, a modern data centre and a coal gasification facility. News reports suggest that the proposed power plant can bring in investment worth about Rs 2 lakh crore over a period of six to seven years. Reliance had suggested the plant at Haripur, a coastal village near Contai in East Midnapore, where a Nuclear Power Corporation of India (NPCIL) plan for a similar 1,000 MW project was buried 15 years ago. Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari's ancestral home is a few miles away from the proposed site. He was one of the major local leaders who opposed the construction of the nuclear plant.
In 2007, anti-nuke protesters raised concerns that a nuclear plant, requiring millions of tonnes of fresh water to cool its reactors, would deplete the water table and destroy this agrarian economy. Also, the location of Haripur - along a cyclone-prone coast - made setting up a nuclear plant there dangerous. Moreover, hot water from the reactors released into the sea would affect marine life in the Bay of Bengal.
Considering all these factors, Suvendu Adhikari, then a local Trinamool MLA, objected. In 2011, the nuclear project was scrapped. By now, Haripur is more densely populated and houses a large number of fishermen's families.
Reliance Industries' proposal for establishing a nuclear plant in Bengal assumes significance as, in December 2025, the Indian Parliament passed a major reform of the country's nuclear energy sector. The Sustainable Harnessing and Advancement of Nuclear Energy for Transforming India Bill, also known as the SHANTI Bill, repeals two earlier laws governing India's nuclear sector and replaces them with a single consolidated legal framework. The new law opens the nuclear sector to private and foreign participation on an unprecedented scale and removes the operational monopoly of the Nuclear Power Corporation of India.
India's Parliament enacted the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act in 2010. The law established strict operator liability under the "polluter pays" principle and allowed operators to seek a right of recourse from suppliers in cases involving defective equipment or gross negligence. The new Bill significantly restructures the liability regime governing nuclear accidents. It sharply limits the civil liability of nuclear plant operators and weakens references to supplier liability - an issue that foreign reactor manufacturers have long raised in negotiations with India. Compensation for nuclear accidents is capped according to the installed capacity of nuclear plants. Even for the largest power plants, operator liability is capped at '3,000 crore (approximately $319 million).
Critics argue that the liability caps fall dramatically short of the cost of historical nuclear disasters. Cleanup costs from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster have exceeded $180 billion, while the long-term economic consequences of the Chornobyl disaster continue to run into hundreds of billions of dollars. Also, the SHANTI Bill remains largely silent on criminal liability in the event of nuclear accidents. By failing to define criminal accountability, the legislation risks insulating corporate actors from legal scrutiny, observes the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
India has planned to boost nuclear energy at a time when its share as an energy source is declining worldwide. In 2025, nuclear power accounted for just 8.8 per cent of electricity flowing through the world's grids, roughly half of what it was 30 years ago. In contrast, 19.5 per cent came from fast-growing renewables such as solar and wind power. In the United States, each unit of electrical energy from a new nuclear reactor costs about three times the corresponding energy from a solar or wind power plant.
Nevertheless, recent talks of the "renaissance" and "revival" of nuclear power centre around the growth of gigantic data centres, which require a massive supply of electricity and water for 24/7 operation. Big tech companies have signed major contracts for nuclear energy. Google signed a deal with Kairos Power to buy power from a new fleet of advanced reactors to supply its data centres, while Microsoft committed to a 20-year deal to restart Unit 1 of Three Mile Island. On October 6, 2026, Google contracted for 3,590 megawatts of power from Constellation Energy, with new nuclear energy accounting for about a quarter of that supply.
As citizens' resistance against data centres is also rising in developed countries, big tech companies are relocating data centres to India. There is a massive push for data centre construction despite water, land and energy pressures. Capacity has surged more than fourfold in the past five years to reach 1,575 MW by 2025, and electricity consumption is projected to quadruple by 2030. It may be noted that, along with a nuclear plant, Reliance Industries also proposed to construct a 'modern data centre' in West Bengal. The intersection of nuclear energy and artificial intelligence data centres presents a double threat to the local people and the ecosystem.
Views expressed are personal. The writer is a professor of Business Administration
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.