Tag: BARC

Building on What We Have: How India’s Atomic Energy Establishment Can Launch a Private Fusion Industry

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.

Building on What We Have — Prof. Prabhat Ranjan

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.

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The probe Indian industry has been doing without

For most failure modes that actually matter in modern manufacturing, X-rays cannot see the problem. Neutrons can. After sixty years as a tool of national laboratories, that capability is finally about to become available to Indian industry on commercial terms.

The probe Indian industry has been doing without — Prabhat Ranjan

A friend who runs R&D at a major Indian cell manufacturer told me recently about a warranty problem. Their cells were failing in the field at rates substantially higher than the equivalent imported product. The chemistry was the same. The form factor was the same. The production line was new. They had spent eight months and a great deal of money on X-ray CT, electrochemical impedance, and accelerated cycling, and they still did not know why the failures were happening.

Their problem was that the failure was almost certainly hidden inside the sealed cell can — a gas pocket, perhaps, or a region where the electrolyte had not wet the separator uniformly, or a local lithium plating event during fast charging. A determined X-ray physicist will tell you that phase-contrast and high-resolution micro-CT can sometimes coax these features out under ideal geometry and unlimited time. But the lithium, the electrolyte, and the gas are nearly invisible to electron-density imaging, and the steel-and-aluminium can is exactly what X-rays do see. The contrast you need is buried in the noise. You can occasionally win that fight on a single cell in a research lab; you cannot win it on a sampling cadence that keeps up with a production line. Neutrons give you the same answer in one exposure, with stark and unambiguous contrast, because the physics is working for you instead of against you.

Thirty years of neutron radiography literature would have given them the answer in a day. They knew this. They could not access it. The nearest commercial neutron-imaging facility was in Switzerland.

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