A companion essay. This piece continues an argument begun in “Build, Innovate, Grow: What America’s New Fusion Roadmap Means for India.”
In my last essay I argued that the deepest lesson of America’s new fusion roadmap is a change of posture — the state stepping back from building the first power plant, and instead building the shared infrastructure that lets private companies build it. That argument invites an obvious question for India: if our public institutions are to enable a private fusion industry, what exactly should they build?
After some months of looking closely, I think the more urgent question is what they should open. A great deal of what India needs already exists, scattered across the units of the Department of Atomic Energy. The fastest and cheapest way to accelerate fusion here is not a greenfield campaign of new institutes; it is to upgrade, repurpose, and — above all — open a defined slice of the capability the DAE has spent six decades building.
I do not write this from the outside. I carried out my own doctoral fusion research at Berkeley; spent nine years as a scientist at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, where I worked on India’s first tokamak, commissioned in 1987; and later led the ADITYA tokamak at the Institute for Plasma Research, along with the operation and control group of its SST-1 superconducting tokamak. Several of the units I describe below I have worked inside, and I have watched this establishment’s plasma capability grow from a single small tokamak into a national programme. What follows is, in part, an argument that India underestimates what it already owns.
A platform, not a building
The American roadmap calls its shared infrastructure the Tritium-Blanket Development Platform — a distributed network of test stands and loops, public and private, that any developer can draw on because no single company can justify building them alone. India can assemble an equivalent almost entirely from assets it already holds. The right unit of thinking is not a new national laboratory but a platform — a coordinated set of shared user facilities, each anchored in an existing DAE unit and opened, under clear rules, to vetted private developers. Let me walk through fusion’s hardest gaps and where, in the DAE, each could be addressed.
Materials that survive the neutron environment
The single largest factor limiting the economics of fusion is what fusion neutrons do to materials — swelling, embrittlement, transmutation. The honest near-term path everywhere, including in the American plan, is surrogate irradiation in fission reactors and accelerators while a true fusion neutron source is developed. Here India is unusually well placed.
BARC’s Dhruva reactor provides a high thermal-neutron flux for materials irradiation. More valuable still, IGCAR’s Fast Breeder Test Reactor at Kalpakkam offers something rarer — a fast-neutron spectrum far closer to fusion’s than any thermal reactor can give, precisely the regime in which the worst damage mechanisms must be studied. The cyclotrons at the Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre in Kolkata, together with accelerator capability at BARC, can deliver proton and ion irradiation for the rapid, high-throughput surrogate damage studies the Americans are now scaling up. And BARC and IGCAR already operate the hot cells and post-irradiation examination facilities without which none of this data is usable.
India even has its own reduced-activation steel — Indian RAFMS, developed at BARC — which is exactly the structural-material class the global programme is racing to qualify. A shared materials-irradiation-and-examination programme stitched across Dhruva, the FBTR, the Kolkata cyclotrons and BARC’s hot cells, and opened to private developers, would close one of fusion’s hardest gaps using infrastructure that is already running today.
The neutron source: one we can build soon, one we must build patiently
Honesty requires naming what India does not yet have, because the American plan is candid about the same lack. But it helps to separate two very different ambitions that are too often conflated.
The first is achievable in the near term. Compact accelerator-based neutron sources — typically a few-MeV deuteron or proton beam striking a lithium or beryllium target — already produce intense fast-neutron fields used to radiation-test fusion and accelerator components, detectors, and electronics, including hardware developed for international projects such as ITER. The same machines measure the nuclear cross-sections on which all fusion neutronics depends — a quiet but real gap, since blanket and shielding design is only as good as the underlying nuclear data. India is well placed to build such a source quickly: the accelerator expertise at VECC and BARC, including our high-intensity proton accelerator programme, is precisely the base required. A facility of this kind would not qualify bulk structural materials — its fluence is far too low for that — but it would give Indian developers a shared, near-term capability for component testing, diagnostic qualification, and nuclear-data measurement that no single company could justify building alone.
The second is the hard, patient build. No country yet possesses a fusion-prototypic neutron source — a high-flux facility reproducing fusion’s 14 MeV spectrum and the damage rates, tens of displacements per atom, needed to truly qualify structural materials. It is the single most important piece of materials infrastructure still missing anywhere in the world, and the Americans are pursuing accelerator-based routes toward it, including deuteron acceleration on lithium. This will take the longest and cost the most. Committing to it now, as a national shared asset rather than any one company’s captive tool, would place India among the very few countries pursuing the capability at all.
The discipline is to pursue both on their proper timescales — and not to let the difficulty of the second postpone the obvious, affordable value of the first.
Blankets, breeders, and the fuel cycle
Breeding tritium and extracting it safely is the circulatory system of a deuterium-tritium plant, and it is an area where India has quietly accumulated rare assets. We designed, and are responsible for, the Lead-Lithium Ceramic Breeder Test Blanket Module for ITER — a complete tritium-breeding blanket concept, led from IPR with BARC. That means India already holds hard-won design and engineering experience in the very subsystem the world has yet to validate anywhere.
BARC’s decades of tritium handling, born of our heavy-water reactor programme, give us a tritium-processing and detritiation base few nations can match. The Heavy Water Board’s mastery of isotope separation is directly transferable to two fusion-critical needs: securing deuterium, and — crucially — separating lithium-6, the isotope from which tritium is bred, a supply question most developers worldwide have not yet confronted. And IGCAR’s deep experience with flowing liquid metals in strong thermal and magnetic fields, built over decades of sodium-cooled fast-reactor work, transfers naturally to the lead-lithium loops and magnetohydrodynamic problems of liquid breeder blankets.
A non-nuclear blanket-and-tritium test platform anchored across BARC, IGCAR and the Heavy Water Board — later coupled to the neutron source described above — would let private developers test breeder and fuel-cycle components they could never build on their own.
Plasma, heating, and the magnet question
On the plasma side, India’s task is to open rather than to build. IPR operates the ADITYA-U and SST-1 tokamaks, and, through ITER-India, has delivered some of the most demanding fusion engineering this country has ever attempted — the ITER cryostat, in-wall shielding, cryolines, and high-power heating sources. That is a reservoir of plasma, vacuum, cryogenic, radio-frequency and neutral-beam expertise that private developers — whether pursuing mirrors, tokamaks, or alternative concepts — could draw on immediately.
The one genuinely new facility India should prioritise here is a high-field magnet test stand for the rare-earth high-temperature superconductors on which compact fusion now depends. The cryogenic and magnet engineering at IPR and RRCAT, combined with conductor development at BARC and in our universities, is the natural foundation for it. India will not lead in compact fusion without the ability to test and qualify high-field HTS magnets at home.
Heat exhaust and the plasma wall — already on the map
Few in India realise that the new American roadmap, in listing the international facilities its programme intends to draw on, names an Indian one: a high-heat-flux test facility. That is worth pausing on. Exhausting fusion’s enormous heat onto a wall that survives is among the field’s hardest problems — and India already operates a facility that the world’s leading programme considers worth using. IPR’s plasma-processing and high-heat-flux capability is a natural anchor for a shared programme on plasma-material interaction and heat exhaust, the Indian counterpart to the linear plasma devices the Americans are now commissioning.
Lasers, computing, and the supply chain
A few further capabilities complete the picture. For any future optionality on inertial fusion, the high-power laser laboratories at RRCAT are India’s natural base. For the artificial-intelligence-and-fusion convergence that I have argued is India’s clearest leapfrog lane, IPR’s ANTYA cluster, BARC’s Anupam systems, and our national high-performance computing assets provide the substrate; the talent we already have in abundance.
And the unglamorous but decisive matter of raw materials — lithium and beryllium for breeders and multipliers, and the rare earths that high-temperature superconducting tape requires — falls within the remit of the Atomic Minerals Directorate, while the Nuclear Fuel Complex’s mastery of special-alloy fabrication speaks directly to manufacturing fusion-grade components at scale. Even the near-term commercial bridge that will finance the long climb to power — neutron-driven medical and industrial isotopes — sits squarely within the established competence of BARC and the Board of Radiation and Isotope Technology.
How private entities plug in
None of this helps unless private developers can actually get through the gate, and so the mechanism matters as much as the facilities. The principle is simple: designate a defined set of these capabilities as shared user facilities, with transparent and published rules for access, time allocation, intellectual-property protection, and cost-sharing — and govern the whole under the framework now emerging for private fusion in India and the oversight of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board.
The incubation of private fusion ventures within IPR’s ecosystem is the natural front door, and a model worth generalising rather than treating as an exception. India can adapt the instruments others have already proven — competitively awarded access vouchers, milestone-based co-funding — to its own institutions. Stitched together, these units become more than a collection of laboratories: they become a distributed national fusion technology platform, an Indian counterpart to the shared development platform the Americans are assembling, built almost entirely from assets the taxpayer has already paid for.
A sequence that respects physics and budgets
This need not happen all at once, and it should not. The sensible order is to open first what already exists and needs mainly access rules and modest upgrades — the surrogate-irradiation, plasma, heat-flux and computing capabilities. Next should come the shared blanket-and-tritium and HTS-magnet test platforms, building directly on the breeder-blanket and ITER experience India already holds — alongside a near-term accelerator-based neutron source for component testing and nuclear data, which the country could stand up relatively quickly. And in parallel, with patience, India should commit to the one genuinely hard new build — a high-flux, fusion-prototypic neutron source — that will take the longest and matter the most.
The doors are already here
The Department of Atomic Energy spent six decades building an establishment of remarkable depth. Its mandate was fission, and that mandate rightly continues. But a surprising share of what a private fusion industry needs already sits inside its gates — and opening a defined slice of it, under clear rules and firm regulatory oversight, is the single most powerful and least expensive thing India could do to bring fusion forward.
The capability is here. What remains is the decision to share it — and, as I argued in writing about America’s roadmap, to set that decision down as a plan the whole ecosystem can see and build toward. The infrastructure is already here. We need only choose to open the doors.