Tag: aneutronic fusion

India is writing the rulebook for fusion

Two draft instruments will decide, far more concretely than any policy statement, whether fusion energy has a path in India. Having read them line by line, I want to explain what I found — because the most important issue turns on one word.

On 14 August the Department of Atomic Energy and the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board placed two draft instruments in the public domain: the SHANTI Rules, 2026 and the SHANTI Regulations, 2026, made under the Act passed last year. Comments close on 4 September. Anyone may file them.

These are not glamorous documents. They are long, technical, and written in the flat register that subordinate legislation demands. But they will determine, far more concretely than any policy statement, whether fusion energy has a path in India. I have spent the past fortnight reading them line by line, and I want to explain what I found — because the single most important issue turns on one word.

A note on where I stand, before you read any further. I am Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of ASPL Fusion Pvt. Ltd., a private company that would be a potential applicant under the rules I am about to discuss. I also chair the committee constituted by the Central Electricity Authority to prepare a national roadmap for fusion-based power generation. What follows is written in my personal and professional capacity and not on behalf of that committee. Some of what I argue for would benefit companies like mine. I have tried throughout to argue on grounds that are neutral as between technologies and as between companies, and you should judge whether I have succeeded.

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The Turbine and the Loss Cone: What Direct Energy Conversion Means for Fusion’s Endgame

On 19 June 2026 Realta Fusion drew real current straight from a fusion plasma, no turbine involved. Prof. Prabhat Ranjan on direct energy conversion versus the steam turbine — what it changes for deuterium–tritium, why it is a magnetic-mirror story, and where it points for advanced, low-neutron fuels.

On 19 June 2026, Realta Fusion, working with the University of Wisconsin–Madison, drew a few amperes of current at around a hundred volts from charged particles streaming out of the ends of their WHAM mirror device — enough, in their own words, to light a few bulbs. It is worth pausing on how modest that sounds, and how significant it actually is.

This was the first time a private fusion company has converted the kinetic energy of a fusion-relevant plasma directly into electricity, without first turning it into heat. The team has been careful to say what it is not: it is neither net-electric production nor large-scale conversion of fusion-born power. That restraint is exactly why the result deserves attention. A real current in a real circuit is a physical fact, not a press release.

I want to use the occasion to discuss something the fusion community does not talk about often enough — the rather nineteenth-century machine sitting at the heart of almost every twenty-first-century power plant we propose to build.

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