The government’s plan to scale nuclear capacity from single digits today to a much larger number by the middle of the century has turned into one of the more closely watched themes on Dalal Street. While headlines tend to focus on power utilities, the real early movers are often the equipment makers and construction companies working quietly in the background, building the physical infrastructure years before a reactor ever goes critical.
KSB Limited
Nuclear Pumps Business Built Over Five Decades: KSB’s nuclear story goes back to 1977, when a tripartite agreement between KSB Germany, KSB India and the Department of Atomic Energy set out to localise pumps for the country’s pressurised heavy water reactors. What started with imported components has, over the decades, become a fully indigenised operation.
Every PHWR (Pressurized Heavy Water Reactor) built in India after Narora in 1978 runs on KSB’s main coolant pumps, and in 2021 the company became the first local player to fully localise the boiler feed pump for 700 megawatt units, a product that earlier had to come from Germany.
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The company’s dedicated nuclear facility at Shirwal spans 115,000 square metres and holds ISO-19443 certification, a nuclear-industry quality standard that KSB was the first pump company to receive. It’s also platinum rated under the IGBC green building framework. A new 7,000 square metre shed added recently on adjoining land should lift overall plant capacity by about 20%, taking utilisation levels close to 80-90%.
On execution, the company’s first fully indigenous nuclear pump was manufactured in 2025 and is now going through testing at an NPCIL facility, a process that typically runs around 500 hours spread over two to three months. Testing had been paused briefly due to issues at the test bed itself, unrelated to KSB’s equipment, and is expected to resume through September. Once cleared, dispatches can scale up to roughly six pumps a year, with testing for the Kaiga units to follow after GHAVP.
Order Book and What’s Coming Next: KSB’s current nuclear order book stands at around ₹1,235 crore, covering GHAVP units 1 and 2, Kaiga 5 and 6, and a safety package for Kudankulam. Management expects a fresh tender covering around eight reactors, likely tied to the NTPC-NPCIL joint venture project at Mahi Banswara, to be floated in the coming months. The typical delivery cycle for NPCIL orders runs close to 48 months from the date of order, so today’s tender activity is really a read on revenue several years out rather than an immediate trigger.
About KSB Limited
KSB Limited manufactures pumps and valves used across energy, water, building services, petrochemical, mining and industrial segments in India. It runs six manufacturing plants including a dedicated nuclear-grade facility at Shirwal, along with a foundry, a technology centre and an aftermarket service network. The company also has a growing presence in data centre cooling, marine and green hydrogen applications.
HCC Ltd
Civil Construction Legacy in Nuclear Plants: Where KSB builds the equipment, HCC has historically built the plant itself. The company has constructed close to 55-60% of India’s existing nuclear power capacity, largely on the civil side, covering the main plant building, ancillary structures and associated fabrication work. That legacy gives HCC a head start as India’s nuclear pipeline widens beyond the traditional PHWR programme to include private developers exploring newer reactor technologies.
Management pegged the broad cost of building nuclear capacity at roughly ₹18-22 crore per megawatt, a figure that scales up quickly against the government’s long-term target of taking capacity from around 9 gigawatts today toward 100 gigawatts by 2047.
HCC is in discussions with both public sector and private entities on how it can expand beyond civil work into slightly larger scopes, potentially by partnering with other specialist players. A meaningful pickup in order inflow, though, is contingent on rules under the newly passed nuclear sector legislation being notified, something the company expects around the end of the current parliament session or the winter session.
Order Book and Balance Sheet Repair: Of HCC’s overall order backlog of ₹12,976 crore as of the June quarter, transport makes up the bulk at 64%, followed by hydro at 17% and water at 16%. Nuclear and buildings together account for just 3%, a reminder that nuclear is still an early, developing piece of the order book rather than a meaningful contributor today.
Around ₹8,000 crore of this has been won in the past 15 months and is still in early mobilisation, which explains why the quarter’s EBITDA margin came in lower at 10.7%, against 14.9% a year earlier.
Management maintained its guidance of 13-14% EBITDA margin as these projects mature and said the company remains confident of hitting its full-year order intake target, aided by close to ₹10,000 crore worth of bids currently under evaluation. Separately, HCC is working through a debt reduction plan, with a ₹100 crore prepayment lined up and a broader deleveraging push meant to eventually make the balance sheet largely debt-free.
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About HCC Ltd
Hindustan Construction Company is an infrastructure and EPC player with a long track record in hydropower, transport, tunnelling and heavy civil construction. Its order book spans metro rail, hydroelectric projects, marine works and industrial process plants, alongside a legacy portfolio of nuclear power plant construction going back decades.
Bottom Line
Both companies sit on opposite ends of the same nuclear build-out, one supplying the critical equipment, the other laying the physical foundation. Near-term triggers look similar too, both are waiting on policy clarity and fresh tenders before order inflows accelerate meaningfully. For investors, the nuclear opportunity here plays out less as a quarterly number and more as a multi-year capacity build that’s only just getting started.