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.
The argument begins with the physics
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.
That mismatch — applying high-hazard rules to a low-hazard technology — is precisely what the world’s leading jurisdictions have now moved to correct.
What the rest of the world decided
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.
Continue reading “Regulating Fusion for What It Is”