Thermo-nuclear Fusion: a unique energy alternative

There is a growing gap between demand and supply of energy for the world. Any attempt to develop new and cleaner sources of energy to meet the future global requirement is welcome. Therefore, it is attractive to think of having fusion as an alternate clean source of energy to contribute in the energy mix towards the second half of the century, with a virtually inexhaustible fuel supply. The environmental impact of fusion would be acceptable and relatively safe. These advantages have driven the world fusion research programme since its inception. To keep pace with the international advancement, the Indian national magnetic fusion programme is also being accelerated. Institute for Plasma Research (IPR) indigenously developed the first Indian Tokamak, ADITYA and was successfully commissioned in 1989 and has been generating interesting scientific results on various topics. The next major program at the Institute for Plasma Research has been to construct a Steady State Superconducting Tokamak (SST-1) by mix of import and indigenous development. After successful engineering validation of the subsystems in integrated operations, successful first plasma was achieved in June, 2013. Successful ECR aided ohmic discharges at 1.5T toroidal field with 75 kamp plasma current have been achieved in the first phase of operation. As a strategy towards leapfrogging to save time, IPR and Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) decided on India’s participation in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) as a full partner (will not be discussed in this talk). During the last two five year plans, the gap areas, with respect to ITER in-kind procurement, related to fusion reactor design and technology have been initiated in the country. There are immediate possible applications which can be built with currently established fusion devices (tokamaks), which could help the country accelerating deployment of nuclear power further. Indian progress in Fusion science and technology will be discussed during the talk.