Nuclear Power, Railway Budget

RAILWAY BUDGET - no hike in passenger fares
No increase in Freight Tariff also.

NUCLEAR power

Macquarie's Inderjeet Bhatia and Somesh Agarwal have written a cool report on Nuclear sector opportunities in indian stocks.

Nuclear Power Corporation India Limited ('NPCIL') is the nodal agency for nuclear power generation in INdia just as PowerGrid is the nodal agency for power transmission across the national grid.

NPCIL has 17 running power plants of mostly 220MW each, aggregating 4,100MW and 5 more under construction with 2,660MW capacity in total, mostly at Kudankulam.

The 1st 2 plants had boiler water reactor (BWR) while the rest are all Pressurised Heavy Water Reactor ('PHWR') Technology based.

all reactors operate on natural Uranium (99.3% U238 and 0.7% U235). The Dept of Atomic Energy ('DAE') refines Uranium and converts

This creates order opportunity for project players like L&T, BHEL. HCC, Siemens, Gammon.

post Agreement 123 and the Nuclear Supplies Group (NSG) waiver, India has recently signed fuel supply agreements with USA, France, Russia, Kazakastan and Mongolia.

Today, only 4% of India's Power Generation comes from Nuclear power, vis-a-vis
EU,Japan, S.Korea - 30%; USA - 20%. China is increasing from 9,000MW to 70,000MW by 2020, with 37 new reactors planned of which 20 are under construction.