Even as the debate on nuclear energy qualifying as clean energy rages on, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development has joined the naysayers' camp.

"The World Investment Report still doubts whether nuclear energy is a low-carbon foreign investment," Rashmi Banga, the senior economist with UNCTAD, told Governance Now on the sidelines of the release of the World Investment Report 2010 on Thursday.

"Doubts have been raised on the nuclear energy sector; so we are not very sure (whether) a nuclear reactor would be a low-carbon product or FDI option,” she added.

The World Investment Report, whose this year's theme is ‘investing in a low-carbon economy’, estimates that FDI flows into three key low-carbon business areas -- renewables, recycling, and low-carbon technology -- will amount to roughly $90 billion.

The report gives no country-specific data.

Interestingly, UNCTAD's confusion over nuclear energy's low-carbon status and, by corollary, the desirability of promoting this option, is not shared by International Energy Agency (IEA), which is not a UN body and primarily represents the interests of rich countries like US, France, Germany and UK; each of these four OECD countries are also nuclear powers and participate in nuclear trade.

Last month, IEA Executive Director Nobuo Tanaka had said, “Nuclear energy is one of the key low-carbon energy technologies that can contribute, alongside energy efficiency, renewable energies and carbon capture and storage, to the decarbonisation of electricity supply by 2050.”

Since signing the civil nuclear energy agreement with the US, which ended its isolation from global nuclear commerce, India has been trying hard to achieve its targeted generation targets in this area. Last month, India signed civil nuclear energy agreement with Canada, which took the number of such pacts to nine.

India currently has 19 nuclear reactors as per data available with the atomic energy department, with a capacity to produce 4,560 MW of electricity. India plans to increase this capacity to 21,180 MW by 2020, from around 3 percent of total capacity to produce energy to a little over 10 percent.

The government has also introduced a civil nuclear liability bill whose provision capping the financial liability of project participants in case of an accident has been strongly opposed by the political parties in the opposition and citizen groups.   

Meanwhile, the  world investment report expects global FDI flows to recover slightly this year to be $1.2 trillion.

It also said that “India remained in the list of top ten countries in 2009 to have the highest FDIs in the world.”.