As for uranium, India, doesn't need to follow western example, but go straight to far safer Pebble reactors, which besides being virtually meltdown proof, are able to be mass produced and trucked on site, to be producing power in just weeks, rather than the twenty year lead time, the greens always spout, as one of the reasons for not preferring nuclear power.
Why, I'd venture, that small pebble reactors would cost a lot less than diesel, to install and run, as a preferred power source for really big freight forwarding shipping!
Which we as an Island nation are absolutely dependent on, for all our imports and economic life blood exports.
Were led by leaders with vision, they would build just such a fleet, and made it submersible!
We have some recently acquired expertise in this very area, and given CAD and CAC, could build them as cheaply here as anywhere, but particularly, if we used locally produced superior steel!
Instead, we use costly foreign shipping to deliver all our bulk freight!
And given that is one of the most profitable enterprises in the world, perhaps we should be doing it, and keeping the annual billions in price gouged profits right here?
Or, forward our trade goods at cost, if only to ensure, we virtually outperform all other trade dependent nations.
But only if we were led by pragmatists, instead of blinkered Ideologues, with their monosyllabic repetition of moronic mantras; like that old hoary chestnut, the government has no business in business!
And whose only real claim to fame is, they've sold almost everything of value, [or wasn't nailed down,] along with our patently purloined economic sovereignty!?
And as pragmatists like Lee Kwan Yu predicted, hell bent on becoming the poor white trash of Asia?
As sure as chickens lay eggs, if we had a pragmatic Lee Kwan Yu in charge here, [and with all our resources and natural advantages,] we wouldn't be debating whether or not we should have a nuclear powered national shipping line, we would already have one; shipping our trade goods to India!
Rhrosty

Well argued Mr Russell. The Government of India, led by Narendra Modi, is determined to improve the lives of its poorest citizens, and one key to that is nuclear power. The Government is also looking at renewables, but these can never be anything other than a small contribution to solving the problem in a nation of more than a billion people. The Modi Government wants to bring electricity to every village in the country over the next decade. It's an ambitious target, but one it is determined to meet.

Wood and other renewable combustibles burned in efficient stoves have very much less impact than when burned in open fires such as are typically used in Indian villages.
Proper ventilation is also a factor that in many cases is achievable through education.

Simple solar cookers are an alternative, especially in India where much of village lifestyle, lends itself to their use.

See,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cooker, which is only one of many references available.

Replacing wood fired cooking by a less polluting fuel?
How about biogas from animal and human waste? (this is already done in India successfully and they could show us a thing to two about it)

"generate about one terawatt hour of energy per year, but only during the day time" There is a thing called molten salt storage which will keep a solar plant going during the hours of darkness.

"To generate as much electrical energy as the Jaitapur project you'd need to build 77 Desert Sunlights plants and cover 123,200 hectares in concrete, steel and panels displacing god knows how many villagers. "
India is a huge Continent and 123,200 acres would be lost in it.

"How do you get stuff to those 123,200 hectares? In big trucks. In small trucks. In every kind of bloody truck."
And how do you propose to cart the material for a nuke plant plus the fuel and remove the nuke waste, by airship?

"the Fukushima evacuation"
The whole of the North of Japan is now radio active with enough to cause health problems but it is hidden from the public as is the slowly increasing radiation on the eastern seaboard of the Americas.

How do you propose to dispose of the waste?

@roses1: "Only 67,000 hectares"? At 2,300 displaced people per 1000 hectares, that's only 154,000 people to move ... or wildlife or croplands. So sure, solar can be more land-efficient by a factor of 2 (or even more), but it's fundamentally limited. Have you wondered why more people aren't building salt storage? Typically the mix is 60/40 sodium and potassium nitrate. Now, getting the tonnage of the latter isn't such a big deal, but sodium nitrate is very different. Last I looked the global production was 63,000 tonnes annually with most being mined in Chile. Of course you can make it, just build more really BIG chemical plants and get a lot more trucks to cart it from those plants to your solar farm. To replicate Australia's current electricity supply with salt storage solar farms, you'd need about 2,200 Gemasola plants and about 11 million tonnes of sodium nitrate. And that's just for Australia. Of course it's not impossible to make the stuff, like it's not impossible to cover vast areas of wildlife habitat or crop lands with concrete, steel and silicon or mirrors. It's just incredibly and unnecessarily environmentally destructive and wasteful.

@robertlepage: You didn't read the article did you? Go back and please actually read it ... and go and visit the Guarapari link ... which is to an area much more radioactive than around Fukushima. It's a tourist destination. Anybody can stroll down to the beach with their geiger counter and measure far more radiation than around Fukushima. When I told this to a so-called green-left person in Adelaide recently he just flatly said "I don't believe you". Go figure. There's youtube clips, academic papers, feature films (Pandora's Promise). What a massive conspiracy! Anti-nukes and climate change deniers are cut from the same cloth ... whenever their world view is challenged by facts, they assert a conspiracy.

@roses1: Sorry I forgot a few of your claims. 60 years? That's the design life of the AP1000 reactor (and most others). 80 is quite likely. Do you need water? Not really, but you lose a few percent with air cooling and the water requirement is true of any thermal power plant. Shoreham? It's the opening feature of GreenJacked. There were no safety problems with Shoreham, just a good legal challenge based on obsolete science, long since discredited.