India's First Fusion Startup Builds PRAGYA, a Mini Star Machine

A Bengaluru startup called Pranos Fusion has built a small machine named PRAGYA. It is a step towards India's first privately built fusion reactor. Fusion could one day give clean energy without using uranium, so it is worth understanding.

What happened

Pranos Fusion has built PRAGYA, a small doughnut-shaped machine called a tokamak. A tokamak is a reactor designed to produce energy by fusion. PRAGYA is used to test two things: how to control plasma, and how superconducting magnets behave.

PRAGYA is a gateway to a much larger machine called PRANIK. The company's CEO, Shaurya Kaushal, says it hopes to finalise the PRANIK blueprint by 2027. He also says that actually producing electricity from fusion is "a further step away".

Here are some more facts from the report:

• The company is incubated at the Institute of Plasma Research (IPR). IPR is linked to the Department of Atomic Energy.
• It is also linked to JNCASR, Bengaluru, which comes under the Department of Science and Technology.
• It has raised $7.2 million. Its backers are Ankur Capital, pi Ventures and Industrial47.
• It has two platforms. JENGA is software that works as a "digital twin" of the machine, which means a computer copy used for simulation, design and control. MAGGA is its magnet programme.

The co-founders are honest that fusion electricity is still far away and would be expensive today.

The science behind it

To see why fusion is special, compare it with fission.

1. Fission is used in nuclear plants everywhere. A chain reaction splits uranium nuclei and gives heat. That heat makes electricity.
2. Fusion works the other way round. Light nuclei merge and release energy. Usually, two forms of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium, join to make helium and a fast neutron.

There is a big problem. The fuel must be heated to around 100 million degrees Celsius. No solid wall can survive that. So a tokamak uses powerful magnets to hold the super-hot plasma away from the walls. Plasma is the extremely hot state the fuel is in. The magnets keep it hot enough for fusion to continue.

Pranos Fusion wants to use HTS (high-temperature superconducting) magnets. These are wound from materials that carry electric current with no resistance once they are cooled below a critical temperature. HTS magnets have reached fields of around 20 tesla in tests. Tesla is a unit of magnetic strength. Such strong magnets make smaller machines possible.

Co-founder Roshan George gives some advantages of fusion:

• It does not need radioactive material like uranium.
• India already produces plenty of deuterium.
• Fusion is not a chain reaction, so the risk of a runaway reaction is almost absent.

The world's progress so far is mixed:

• Britain's JET tokamak made a record 69 megajoules of fusion energy in 2023, but this was less than the heating power supplied.
• In December 2022, the US National Ignition Facility used lasers, not magnets, and released more fusion energy than the laser light delivered. This did not count the electricity needed to run the lasers.
• The giant ITER machine in France, a project involving India and six other partners, is designed to produce about 10 times the heating power fed into its plasma. After delays, research is now planned for 2034 and full deuterium-tritium operation for 2039.

Where you meet this in school

• Read how fusion works and how close we are in Green Energy - Advance 2, Chapter 7: What Is Fusion, and How Close Are We?.
• Compare fusion with fission in Green Energy - Advance 1, Chapter 6: What Is Nuclear Energy, and Is It Clean?.
• Practise atoms, magnets and energy questions in Class 10 Science practice. Classes 7 to 9 can use the same page for their own class, such as Class 8 Science practice.

Try this

Take two small bar magnets, or fridge magnets. Bring them close and feel the push or pull. Notice that the force acts across a gap, without touching. A tokamak uses much stronger magnets in a similar way to keep plasma away from its walls.

Then try a quick calculation. ITER's research is planned for 2034 and full deuterium-tritium operation for 2039. How many years apart are they? Next, imagine a machine gets 3 units of heating power and gives out 30 units of fusion energy. How many times more is that? (This is an imaginary example, not real data.)

Frequently asked questions

Does fusion make electricity in India today?

No. The company says producing electricity from fusion is still a further step away. For now, it is building and testing machines.

Why is fusion called safer than fission?

Fusion does not need radioactive material like uranium. It is also not a chain reaction, so the risk of a runaway reaction is almost absent, according to co-founder Roshan George.

Why can't a normal wall hold the fuel?

The fuel must be heated to around 100 million degrees Celsius. That is far hotter than any solid wall can withstand. So strong magnets hold the plasma in place instead.

Source

Read the original news: The Hindu · Science: India’s first fusion power company takes key steps