The imperatives of climate change have accelerated the importance of technologies focused on the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) has been recognised by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as an essential part of cost-effectively reducing the GHG emissions connected with fossil fuel energy production. Captured carbon is transported, by ship or pipeline, to its storage location deep underground within naturally occurring geological formations. Domestically, CCS has gained increasing support. Currently, the only commercial CCS facility in Australia is the Gorgon Project in Western Australia. More are expected to follow after the implementation of the Climate Change Act 2022 (Cth), entered into between Australia and the United States with the aim of promoting the joint development of low-emissions technology solutions such as CCS via collaboration with industry and the private sector.

India is the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, and its coal-dominated electricity sector contributes approximately half of these. In addition, air pollution from burning coal is a serious challenge for public health. India also has approximately 200 million people without access to electricity and therefore has low per capita electricity consumption. These are unflattering realities when India is also expected to be among the fastest-growing economies in the world for the next few decades.

At the Paris summit in 2015, India committed to increasing the share of non-fossil electric generation capacity to 40% by 2030. The recent decline in the cost of solar photovoltaic systems and wind generation, and strong policy support for renewables-based distributed generation and micro-grids, make this target achievable. While the role of nuclear power in meeting this goal is uncertain, India’s re-entry in global nuclear trade and commerce following the 2008 civilian nuclear agreement with the United States and negotiation of a partial safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have revived interest in a major expansion programme. Reducing coal’s share in the Indian electricity sector, expanding electrification of transport, and improving efficiency can reduce India’s urban air pollution problems. At the same time, improving access and quality of service are key components of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). In this chapter, we analyse the challenges and benefits of increasing the share of renewables and nuclear power in India’s electricity system.

It is not just economics and technology but stakeholder interests which have shaped the evolution of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology as an option with a portfolio of low-carbon technologies. We trace how over the course of the 2000s, CCS went from largely unknown to being seen as a flexible, dispatchable technology applicable to coal, gas or biomass, which could address concerns over security of supply with minimal disruption to the existing power system and business models while addressing hard-to-abate sectors including heat and process industries. Four general themes are identified as explaining why the politics of CCS has been so difficult: (i) there is no pressure for politicians or other stakeholders to seek more efficient solutions; (ii) the lack of a coherent logic or overarching industrial policy narrative for supporting CCS, except perhaps in a few isolated locations; (iii) the nature of CCS requires a much larger initial investment and greater systems integration than other low-carbon options; and (iv) changing energy industry business models, which, over the past decade, had eroded some of the factors that had worked in favour of CCS.

In this chapter, we discuss the evolution of the field of ‘ethics of nuclear energy’, regarding its past, present and future. We will first review the history of this field in the previous four decades, focusing on new and emerging challenges of nuclear energy production and waste disposal, in light of several important developments. Four of the most pressing ethical challenges will be further reviewed in the chapter. First, what is a morally ‘acceptable’ nuclear energy production method, if we consider the existing and possible new technologies? Second, provided a new tendency to consider nuclear waste disposal with several countries, what would be the new ethical and governance challenges of these multinational collaborations? Third, how should we deal with the (safety) challenges of the new geographic distribution of nuclear energy, tilting towards emerging economies with less experience with nuclear technology? Fourth, nuclear energy projects engender highly emotional controversies. Neither ignoring the emotions of the public nor taking them as a reason to prohibit or restrict a technology – we call them technocratic populist pitfalls respectively – seem to be able to guide responsible policy making.