India's first private fusion company sets 2027 target for reactor blueprint

Bengaluru-based startup Pranos Fusion, which describes itself as India's first private fusion energy company, has built a small doughnut-shaped tokamak named PRAGYA to test plasma control and superconducting magnets. The machine is meant as a stepping stone towards PRANIK, a much larger tokamak designed to heat plasma to millions of degrees Celsius — hotter than the interior of the Sun — the conditions needed to fuse hydrogen atoms and release energy.

If the plan holds, the company expects to firm up the design for PRANIK by 2027. "By 2027, we expect to finalise the blueprint for PRANIK and be on our way to building a practical reactor that can produce energy. To be able to actually produce electricity from fusion is a further step away," said Shaurya Kaushal, co-founder and chief executive of Pranos Fusion.

Nuclear power plants everywhere rely on fission — a chain reaction in which uranium nuclei split, producing heat that is used to generate electricity. Fusion works the other way: energy is released when light atomic nuclei merge, usually joining two forms of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium, into helium and a fast neutron. The fuel, however, must be heated to around 100 million degrees Celsius, far hotter than any solid wall could withstand. In tokamaks, powerful magnets hold this superheated plasma away from the walls, keeping it hot enough for fusion to continue.

Pranos Fusion was among the deeptech startups showcased at the Emerging Science Technology and Innovation Conclave held last week.

Roshan George, co-founder and a computer science engineer from the Manipal Institute of Technology, said electricity from a fusion reactor remains some distance away and would be expensive at present, but the need for energy will only grow. Fusion's advantage, he said, is that while it is nuclear power, it does not require radioactive material such as uranium, and India already produces substantial quantities of deuterium. Fusion reactions are also not chain reactions, so the risk of a runaway reaction, as in a fission reactor, is almost absent.

The company is currently incubated at the Institute of Plasma Research (IPR), a body affiliated to the Department of Atomic Energy, and at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR) in Bengaluru, which functions under the Department of Science and Technology.

Globally, the largest tokamak under construction is the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in southern France, a collaboration between China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States. It is designed to produce about ten times the heating power fed into its plasma. Bogged by delays, a 2024 revision moved the start of research operations to 2034 and full deuterium-tritium operation to 2039, adding about €5 billion to the cost. IPR operates India's home-grown tokamaks, including ADITYA and the Steady State Tokamak (SST-1), and is the nodal domestic agency managing India's contribution to ITER.

The cost of a private tokamak depends on scale, said Mr. Kaushal, who holds a doctorate from JNCASR and a mechanical engineering degree from BITS Pilani. A compact research machine such as PRAGYA is "a comparatively modest investment", while one designed to reach net energy gain is far larger. Private fusion companies worldwide have raised over $13 billion, he said, and the leading net-gain programmes have each raised hundreds of millions of dollars or more.

Pranos Fusion says compact machines, high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets and India's manufacturing base can bring costs down substantially. HTS electromagnets are wound from materials that carry electric current with no resistance when cooled below a critical temperature. The company is backed by Ankur Capital, pi Ventures and Industrial47, and has raised $7.2 million.

Milestones elsewhere show both how far the field has come and how far it has to go. Britain's JET tokamak produced a record 69 megajoules of fusion energy in 2023, though this was less than the heating power supplied to it. In December 2022, a laser-driven experiment at the U.S. National Ignition Facility reported that a fusion reaction had released more energy than the laser energy delivered to its target, a first for the field, though that approach differs from the magnetic confinement used in tokamaks. No fusion device anywhere has yet delivered electricity to a grid.