A nuclear plant in Tamil Nadu just got 55% more expensive — and the reason has nothing to do with India.
It's the war in Ukraine.
Here's the story.
Build four more 1-gigawatt Russian-designed reactors at Kudankulam, India's coastal nuclear hub near the country's southern tip.
Two reactors already run there.
Four more were supposed to go live by 2027.
Then Russia invaded Ukraine.
Construction stalled.
Supply chains snapped.
Equipment from Russia — the reactor designer and builder — got tangled in sanctions and disruption.
The delay? Almost three years.
The new commissioning date? Pushed all the way to March 2030.
The first unit now won't fire up until June 2027 — the year all four were once meant to be done.
The bill just jumped from parliament records, confirmed by Atomic Energy Minister Jitendra Singh:
Let that sink in.
That's not a rounding error. That's billions vanishing into delay.
Nuclear projects worldwide keep hitting the same wall.
Georgia's Vogtle plant — America's first new nuclear build in decades — landed years late and more than double its original budget.
The UK. Bangladesh. Now India.
Same pattern, everywhere.
India wants to grow nuclear capacity 11x by 2047.
Right now nuclear is just 3% of the country's power mix.
But every cost blowout like this makes nuclear power pricier — and harder to defend in a market where cheap electricity wins.
As one analyst put it: very high costs only feed the anti-nuclear argument.
Kudankulam was supposed to be proof that nuclear could scale in India.
Instead, it's a warning about how fragile that ambition really is.
That's all for now!
