The Department of Atomic Energy's work reaches well past electricity generation, and the four Parliament replies of the day map that spread. In medicine, three reactor-produced isotopes — molybdenum-99 (which decays to technetium-99m), iodine-131 and lutetium-177 — account for nearly 90% of nuclear medicine applications. Because their half-lives are short they must be produced continuously, on a weekly or fortnightly cycle in the Dhruva reactor at BARC, and when the reactor or the radiochemical processing facility shuts down for maintenance the supply has to be imported: 2025-26 saw 516 Ci of Mo-99, 421 Ci of I-131 and 136 Ci of Lu-177 bought in from Russia, Belgium, South Africa and elsewhere. The Isotope Production Reactor now sanctioned, with 0.5 MCi capacity and production expected around 2035, is the structural answer to that dependence. In agriculture, radiation is used not to irradiate the crop in the field but to induce mutations in seed, which are then screened and cross-bred: 72 'Trombay' varieties have been notified for commercial cultivation with ICAR and State Agricultural Universities, led by 17 groundnut and 10 rice varieties. A separate line of work uses radiation to preserve food after harvest, now incentivised under the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Sampada Yojana. And in minerals, the Atomic Minerals Directorate's beach sand work sits at the intersection of atomic energy and the critical minerals debate: monazite is the carrier of thorium and of rare earths, which is why its threshold in beach sand deposits was set at 0.00% in 2019, effectively reserving those deposits for Government companies, and why exports are canalised through a single DAE public sector undertaking.

Three shifts sit inside these replies. The first is institutional: for six decades the nuclear sector was a closed public monopoly under the Atomic Energy Act, 1962, and the SHANTI Act, 2025 replaces that framework with one that admits private manufacturing, engineering and supply chains while giving the regulator statutory footing rather than executive-order status. The second is technological: Small Modular Reactors reframe nuclear power from a mega-project sited on the coast to a plant that can be dropped onto the land and grid connections of a retiring coal station, which matters for a decarbonisation pathway that must reuse existing infrastructure. The third is about self-reliance in inputs rather than outputs — a dedicated Isotope Production Reactor for medical isotopes, domestic realisation of critical components such as low-alloy steel forgings for reactor pressure vessels and reactivity control drive mechanisms, and tight control over monazite-bearing beach sands that carry both thorium and rare earths. Read together, they describe an attempt to make nuclear energy an industrial ecosystem rather than a single-department programme.