Areva In Talks With Bharat Forge For A JV

French Areva SA is in talks with Bharat Forge Ltd for a JV to manufacture heavy water reactors, as the European company seeks to gain a share of India's potential atomic energy market. The JV will involve an investment of about Rs 1,000 cr.

Pune based Bharat Forge already has a JV with the world's largest supplier of nuclear reactors Areva for nuclear forgings. It has shortlisted two locations at Dahej and Mundra in Gujarat for the nuclear forgings JV and if the new deal goes through, it will also be housed at the same location.

Private sector power firms such as Tata Power Co. Ltd, GMR Energy Ltd, Jindal Steel and Power Ltd, JSW group, Vedanta Resources Plc and Reliance Power Ltd have shown interest in setting up nuclear power plants once this takes place.

Areva is also setting up the Jaitapur nuclear park in Maharashtra for Nuclear Power Corp. of India Ltd (NPCIL), which will have six reactors of 1,650MW each. It also has a JV in India with Alstom SA for the manufacturing of supercritical power generation equipment such as turbines and generators.

Founded in 1961, Bharat Forge manufactures forged and machined components for the automotive and non-automotive sectors primarily in Europe, India, the United States, and the Asia Pacific.

Current policy guidelines in India make atomic energy an exclusive reserve of the Union government. Nuclear power plants can be set up only by state-run NPCIL.

Out of India’s installed power generation capacity of at least 150,000MW, nuclear energy accounts for only 4,120MW. NPCIL plans to create an additional generating capacity of 3,160MW by 2012 and achieve 20,000MW of installed nuclear power capacity by 2020.

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