Prof. Prabhat Ranjan CEO and Co-founder of a nuclear fusion company called ASPL Fusion. He is former Vice Chancellor of D Y Patil International University, Akurdi, Pune
This blog tries to summarize my research journey from Universe to Sun to Moon to Earth to Body to Brain.
[ This blog tries to summarize my research journey from Universe to Sun to Moon to Earth to Body to Brain. Some of this is covered in a talk I gave at IIASA, Vienna – https://youtu.be/327A01oYqdo ]
Continue reading “My Research Journey to Brain”She filled in the form honestly. Her details were sold before anyone read it. She was called by someone who sounded official and steered somewhere she had not chosen. At no point did her family attempt anything dishonest — and at no point did the system protect them.
In my last piece I wrote about parents who go looking for a shortcut, and about the ecosystem that has grown up to sell them one. There is a fair objection to that piece: most parents never make that call. What about them?
Continue reading “Your Child Is a Lead: The Trade in Honest Applicants”Every admission season, my phone begins to ring — polite requests, quietly confident that everything is negotiable. But buying a seat is not a single act of wrongdoing. It is a subscription to an ecosystem of agents, fixers and gatekeepers that does not end on admission day. It waits for the inspectors.
Every year, as admission season approaches, my phone begins to ring. Old acquaintances, distant relatives, friends of friends — all with the same carefully worded request. Could I “just have a word” with someone? Is there a “management quota”? What is the “arrangement”? The tone is always polite, often apologetic, and quietly confident that everything, in the end, is negotiable.
I understand the anxiety behind those calls. Parents are not villains. They love their children and they are terrified of a system that seems to offer very few seats and even fewer second chances. But somewhere between that love and that fear, a line gets crossed — and once enough people cross it, something worse than individual wrongdoing takes shape. An entire ecosystem grows around the crossing.
A single act of corruption is an event. What we have built in Indian education is an industry — and industries need supply chains. Around every competitive admission process, a service economy has quietly assembled itself: consultants who promise “guaranteed seats” for a fee, agents who know exactly whom to call, operators who manufacture domicile papers, sports certificates, disability certificates and community certificates on demand. There are people who arrange proxies for entrance examinations, people who leak question papers, and people whose entire business is knowing which official can be reached and at what price.
Each participant takes a modest cut and tells themselves a comfortable story. The consultant is only “guiding families.” The clerk is only “expediting a file.” The official is only “using discretion he is entitled to.” No one in the chain feels like a criminal, because the wrongdoing has been sliced thin enough that every individual slice looks almost respectable. This is precisely what makes an ecosystem so much harder to dismantle than a single scandal — there is no villain to arrest, only a habit to break.
Here is the part we speak about far less, and it is the part that troubles me most. The parent who paid to get a child in usually believes the transaction is over. It is not. The child has been admitted into an institution that has learned the same habit — and that institution must now face its own inspectors.
Anyone who has served in academic administration knows the ritual. Word arrives that a committee is coming. What follows has almost nothing to do with education. Laboratories that stood locked all year are opened and stocked overnight. Faculty are borrowed from neighbouring colleges for the day so that student-teacher ratios look respectable on paper. Attendance registers are reconstructed. Library invoices appear for books nobody has ever seen on a shelf. Hospitality is arranged with a generosity that no genuine academic visit could ever require. And in too many cases, the committee’s report is negotiated long before the committee has finished walking the corridors.
The same architecture appears at every level — affiliation, accreditation, ranking, approval for new programmes, renewal of existing ones. Wherever a stamp of approval carries value, a market forms to sell it. The people who benefit are rarely the students. They are the fixers, the facilitators and the gatekeepers who have discovered that in education, as in any regulated sector, the scarcest commodity is not knowledge but permission.
We have created a system where it is often easier to purchase the appearance of quality than to build the substance of it. Until that equation is reversed, nothing else we attempt will hold.
The most obvious casualty is the student who did everything right and lost a seat to someone who did not. That injustice deserves our anger. But the damage runs further.
Consider the student admitted through unfair means. They now sit in a classroom they were not prepared for, quietly struggling, often blamed for a failure that was arranged on their behalf. I have taught such students. Their misery is real, and it was purchased for them by people who loved them.
Consider the institution that passes inspection on the strength of a performance. It now has documentary proof of laboratories it does not run and faculty it does not employ. It has no incentive to build the real thing, because the paper version worked. Its degrees steadily lose meaning, and its honest graduates pay that price in the job market for the rest of their careers.
Consider the honest administrator — and there are many — who refuses to play. They watch neighbouring institutions climb rankings they do not deserve and attract students on reputations they have not earned. Over time, integrity begins to feel less like a principle and more like a competitive disadvantage. That, more than any single scam, is how a system rots: not when dishonest people prosper, but when honest people conclude that honesty is naive.
I have no interest in offering easy prescriptions for a problem this old. But four things seem to me worth insisting on.
Reduce discretion, and the market shrinks. Corruption lives wherever a human being can quietly say yes or no without explaining why. Centralised counselling, published cut-offs, machine-allocated seats and open waitlists have already cleaned up admissions wherever they have been implemented seriously. The lesson generalises.
Change how we inspect. A scheduled visit measures how well an institution prepares for visits. Unannounced inspections, randomised committee composition, continuous digital reporting of attendance and appointments, and verification against payroll and provident fund records would tell us far more about an institution than any two-day tour ever could.
Make the inspectors accountable too. Reports should be published. Committee members should be identifiable and rotated. A committee that certifies a facility later found not to exist should face consequences, not quiet reassignment. Accountability that stops at the institution’s gate is not accountability.
And, hardest of all, we must widen the definition of a good life. This entire ecosystem is fed by a national belief that a handful of institutions constitute the only doorway to a worthwhile future. It is not true, and it has never been true. In my own career I have worked alongside outstanding scientists and engineers from institutions no one would call famous, and I have met graduates of celebrated ones who never quite recovered from getting in the wrong way. As long as parents believe that a particular seat is the difference between their child’s success and ruin, some of them will pay for it. The demand side of corruption is built inside our heads.
I want to say this plainly, and without judgement. When you arrange a shortcut for your child, you are not only taking a seat from another family’s child. You are teaching your own child, in the most vivid way available to you, that rules apply to other people and that the right payment moves any obstacle. That lesson does not stay in the admission office. It follows them into their examinations, their workplaces and eventually into the decisions they will make about your grandchildren.
The seat you buy will be forgotten in a decade. The lesson will not.
I have spent my working life in laboratories and in universities, and I remain stubbornly optimistic about young Indians. They are capable of far more than the system currently asks of them. But they will only get an education system worth having if the adults around them — parents, teachers, administrators, inspectors and policymakers alike — decide that we would rather build something real than keep paying, in instalments, for its appearance.
After my NSRTC 2026 talk, one thought stayed with me: between the Nobel Prize and the Queen Elizabeth Prize lies a third kind of work — the solution built for a single person. It changes a life, never scales, and in the disability sector it may be the most important engineering of all.
Private fusion drew $4.5 billion in the last twelve months alone — more than any government’s fusion budget over the same period. India has the scientific base and now the legal opening. What it does not have is the capital.
For most of my working life, fusion was something that happened inside national laboratories. It was funded by governments, measured in decades, and defended — when it needed defending — on the grounds that the physics was worth knowing. I spent those years on ADITYA and on SST-1 at the Institute for Plasma Research, and before that at Saha Institute, on India’s first tokamak. Nobody in that world used the word “market.”
That world has changed, and the Fusion Industry Association’s 2026 survey documents the change with unusual clarity. It is worth reading carefully, and it is worth reading in India.
The FIA’s 2026 report counts 56 private fusion companies worldwide and $14.24 billion in cumulative declared funding. Of that, $4.48 billion arrived in the last twelve months alone — more than any single government’s fusion budget over the same period.
Continue reading “Fusion Has Become an Investment Class : India Now Has to Decide What Part It Wants to Play!”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.
The SHANTI Act ended a six-decade monopoly and opened India’s nuclear sector to private enterprise — but its framework was written for fission. Drawing on how the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan now regulate fusion for its actual hazard, here is what India should change next, and where the lighter touch must not apply.
When the SHANTI Act took effect in December 2025, it ended a monopoly that had defined Indian nuclear policy since 1962. For the first time, an Indian private company can hold a licence to build and operate facilities that involve nuclear materials and ionising radiation, under the oversight of a regulator — the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board — that the same Act finally placed on a statutory footing. This is a structural reset, and it deserves the praise it has received.
But a law written principally for fission power generation cannot, on its own, settle how fusion should be governed. That is the next question, and it is a narrower and more technical one than the debate that produced SHANTI. It is also one the rest of the world has spent the last three years answering. India now has the rare advantage of being able to learn from settled precedent rather than improvise.
Those of us who have spent careers operating India’s experimental tokamaks know that a fusion device and a fission reactor are not variants of the same hazard. A fission reactor sustains a chain reaction in a large inventory of fissile material; its central safety problems are criticality control, the management of decay heat after shutdown, and a very large radioactive source term that must be contained in any conceivable accident. None of these apply to a magnetic-confinement fusion machine. There is no chain reaction to run away. The fuel present in the plasma at any instant is measured in fractions of a gram, and any disturbance — a loss of heating, a loss of vacuum, a magnet trip — causes the reaction to stop within seconds. The plasma cannot melt down because there is nothing sustaining it once conditions are lost.
This does not make fusion free of radiological concern, and no serious person claims it does. There are two real hazards, and they are bounded and well understood: the handling of tritium, a low-energy beta emitter used as fuel; and the neutron activation of the structure surrounding the plasma, which produces radioactive materials in the machine’s own components. These are radiation-safety problems. They are the kind of problem a regulator manages every day for medical accelerators, industrial radiography, and radioisotope production. They are not reactor-safety problems, and a regime designed for reactor safety is the wrong instrument for them.
To say that fusion is not a reactor is not to say it is benign. A fusion device is a large and demanding industrial plant, and several of its hazards are serious — they are simply the hazards that an occupational- and industrial-safety regime exists to manage, not nuclear-accident hazards. Its superconducting magnets store very large amounts of magnetic energy, and an unplanned quench — a sudden loss of superconductivity — must be engineered against so that the energy is released safely. Those magnets are held near absolute zero by substantial inventories of liquid helium and nitrogen, which in an enclosed space are asphyxiation hazards before they are anything else. The plasma heating and current-drive systems operate at extreme high voltages. None of this is unfamiliar to a competent regulator, but all of it is dangerous if managed poorly.
There is a materials hazard as well, and it is chemical rather than radiological. Many magnetic-confinement designs face the plasma with beryllium or tungsten, and the intense plasma–surface interaction generates fine dust inside the vacuum vessel. Beryllium dust is highly toxic: inhaled during maintenance, it can cause berylliosis, a chronic and irreversible lung disease. Controlling it — containment, ventilation, respiratory protection and disciplined access during maintenance — is an industrial-hygiene problem in its own right, entirely separate from radiation protection.
This is precisely why regulating fusion “for what it is” is not the same as regulating it lightly. What it calls for is the right combination: radiation safety for tritium and activated material, conventional industrial and occupational safety for the magnets, cryogenics and high-voltage plant, and hazardous-materials controls for beryllium and tungsten dust. The United Kingdom’s decision to place fusion under the Health and Safety Executive and the environmental regulators is, seen in this light, a choice to govern it through the industrial-safety system — not a choice to go easy on it. For India, the practical implication is that a workable regime must align AERB’s radiation oversight with the country’s conventional industrial-safety authorities, so that an operator meets one coherent set of expectations rather than a fragmented patchwork. The error the world’s leading jurisdictions have now moved to correct is the narrower one: applying the rulebook written for a reactor’s nuclear-accident hazards to a machine that has none of them.
The pattern across countries is strikingly consistent, and it amounts to a single principle: regulate fusion in proportion to the hazard it actually presents, which is the hazard of radioactive materials, and keep it legally distinct from fission.
In the United States, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission decided in 2023 to regulate fusion machines not as power reactors but under its byproduct-material framework — the same regime that governs radioisotopes and particle accelerators. The reasoning was explicit: fusion does not generate the decay heat that requires engineered emergency cooling, so the regulatory focus should sit on tritium, activation products, and activated dust, which existing materials licensing already handles well. Congress wrote that choice into law in the 2024 ADVANCE Act, and the NRC issued its proposed rule in February 2026. The resulting framework is described, in the agency’s own terms, as performance-based, technology-inclusive and risk-informed — deliberately less prescriptive than the rules for fission plants.
The United Kingdom went further in statute. Its Energy Act 2023 confirmed that fusion energy facilities fall outside the Nuclear Installations Act 1965, so they do not require a nuclear site licence and are not overseen by the Office for Nuclear Regulation. Instead they are regulated by the Health and Safety Executive and the environmental regulators, under rules judged proportionate to fusion’s lower hazard. The government’s stated motive was as much economic as scientific: early regulatory clarity, it found, was a decisive factor in where private fusion companies chose to locate.
Japan is moving the same way, with its expert bodies recommending that fusion be regulated under the radioisotope law rather than the law governing fission reactors, expressly to avoid over-regulation. China oversees fusion devices through its radiation-protection and radioisotope-device regulations rather than its reactor regime. Four very different systems, four different legal mechanisms, one shared conclusion.
What none of these countries did is lower their safety standards. They removed a category error. A technology whose dominant risk is contained radioactive material should be regulated as such — rigorously, but not under a rulebook written for runaway chain reactions and molten cores.
India does not need to repeat this debate from first principles. It needs to make a small number of specific, well-precedented choices within the framework SHANTI has already given it.
First, define fusion machines and accelerator-based neutron sources distinctly in AERB’s subordinate regulations, and place them on the radiation-safety licensing track rather than the power-reactor track. AERB already operates a mature apparatus for licensing medical accelerators, industrial sources and isotope facilities. The earliest commercial fusion-adjacent devices in India — accelerator-driven neutron sources for medical and industrial use — belong on that track by their physics. The Board should say so explicitly, so that applicants are not left guessing which regime applies.
Second, adopt a graded, risk-informed pathway that scales requirements to the device. A research-scale machine, a demonstration plant, and an eventual power plant present escalating but still bounded hazards. The licensing burden should escalate with them rather than being fixed at the level appropriate to a gigawatt fission station. This is the performance-based logic the United States has now codified, and it is the right fit for a sector that will move through several device generations.
Third, provide predictability. Investors fund certainty at least as much as they fund physics. Published licensing pathways, structured pre-application engagement with AERB, and defined timelines for review do more to enable a private sector than any subsidy. The UK experience is unambiguous on this point: clarity itself was the incentive.
Fourth, make liability proportionate. SHANTI already replaced a single statutory cap with a graded liability framework linked to plant capacity, and it gives the Central Government power to relieve facilities of liability obligations where the risk is judged insignificant. Fusion’s small source term is exactly the case that provision was written for. A fusion liability tier set well below that of a fission station would reflect the real risk and remove a needless barrier to insurance and finance.
Fifth, align with the emerging international consensus. As AERB develops fusion-specific guidance, it should draw on the IAEA’s work and on the converging US, UK and Japanese frameworks, so that a design licensed in India can be recognised abroad and Indian regulators can benefit from the operating experience accumulating elsewhere. For a country that hopes to export this technology, harmonisation is not a courtesy — it is market access.
A credible case for proportionate regulation has to be equally clear about where proportion runs the other way. Not everything that travels under the banner of “fusion” carries fusion’s benign hazard profile.
The clearest example is the fusion–fission hybrid: a device that surrounds a fusion neutron source with a sub-critical fission blanket. Whatever its merits as a route to early net power, such a machine holds bulk fissionable material and breeds fission products. Its hazards are genuinely fission-grade, and it should be regulated as such. The United Kingdom recognised this and deliberately kept hybrids inside its nuclear site licensing regime even as it freed pure fusion from it. India should do the same. SHANTI already reserves the most sensitive parts of the fuel cycle — enrichment, reprocessing, heavy-water production and the management of spent fuel beyond on-site storage — to the Central Government. Any hybrid programme therefore belongs inside the national framework operated by the Department of Atomic Energy and its institutions, in partnership with them, not as a freelance enterprise around them.
This is not a concession reluctantly made. It is the discipline that makes the rest of the argument credible. A sector that asks for proportionate treatment of its low-hazard activities must visibly accept full treatment of its high-hazard ones. That is how a regulator, and a public, come to trust a new industry.
None of this is a request to regulate fusion lightly. It is a request to regulate it accurately. The countries that have separated fusion from fission did not weaken their safety standards; they matched the standard to the science and removed a mismatch that would otherwise have strangled a low-hazard technology under rules built for a high-hazard one.
India has just taken the hardest step. Repealing a six-decade monopoly and giving its nuclear regulator statutory independence was the difficult, structural reform. What remains for fusion is smaller, more technical, and extensively precedented: a clear definition, a proportionate licensing track, predictable timelines, fair liability, and an honest line drawn at the hybrid. Get these right, and India can grow a private fusion sector that does not compete with the national programme that DAE, BARC and IPR have built since the 1950s, but complements it — adding a commercial route, on Indian soil, to capabilities the country has spent two generations learning to master.
Continue reading “Regulating Fusion for What It Is”In his previous blog, Prof. Ranjan argued that America’s new fusion roadmap marks 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. Here he asks the natural follow-up for India: not what our public institutions should build, but what they should open. A surprising share of what a private fusion industry needs already sits inside the Department of Atomic Energy.
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.
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.
