Helsinki:
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is on a visit to Japan, and India hopes to negotiate a nuclear co-operation agreement. This is important since India will find it hard to buy reactors from French and American companies as some key components are only manufactured by Japanese supplier Mitsubishi.
Japan has so far refused to sign a civil nuclear pact with India, because India refused to say there won't be future Pokhrans.
India and Japan are negotiating hard so that they have an atomic agreement between the two countries but if the agreement does not happen it will be hard for the French company Areva to bring a reactor pressure vessel, which is critical for the functioning of a nuclear reactor, to India.
The trouble is very few companies make nuclear vessels as big as the 1650 MW one made by the Areva, and India needs these because it's looking for large nuclear power plants. So what happens if the Japanese don't agree to supply to India?
"I understand there some negotiations in progress between India and Japan to overcome this issue, if these negotiations unfortunately do not bring a result, then we have a solution to manage it ourselves by investing in industrial capacity to produce this specific component," said Luc Oursel, Chief Operating Officer, Nuclear Operations, Areva.
"We hope for the benefit of the global nuclear industry that there will be an agreement between India and Japan. This will put India in a position to benefit from the capacity of the Japanese supplier," he added.
India is looking at buying nuclear power plants to generate a whopping 10 thousand mega watts of power.