Nuclear fusion is generally thought of as a big boys’ game; one does not relate a startup with this holy grail of energy. But Anubal Fusion, a company set up a few months ago, wants to take a crack at it.

In the last half a century, attempts to produce more output energy and input through nuclear fusion have been by trying to fuse atoms of two isotopes of hydrogen, viz., deuterium and tritium. The fusion produces one helium atom and energy. Deuterium and tritium (indeed, any two atoms) don’t easily merge into one without the aid of sun-level temperatures. However, to achieve this, scientists have taken one of the two approaches—magnetic confinement and inertial confinement. The former is the approach taken by the multi-country ITER project in France. As for the latter, the Lawrence Livermore National Lab of the US was in the news last year for achieving a tiny surplus energy. It did by crushing a pellet containing hydrogen with 200 lasers from all around. The drawback with this is, it also produces flying neutrons, which is a problem. 

Anubal Fusion is taking an entirely new approach towards fusion, trying to bombard protons into an isotope of boron (boron-11), to achieve fusion. “This reaction also produces helium and energy but no neutrons, the founder of the startup, Dr Pravin Kini, told Quantum. However, to shoot protons into boron-11 at the required high energy levels, very powerful lasers are needed—a regular particle accelerator won’t do. Fortunately, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), is installing a 1 peta-watt laser, costing about Rs 1,000 crore. TIFR, as a partner of Anubal, will let the startup use the laser to do experiments. 

TIFR’s PW-scale laser will be ready next year and till then Anubal will do simulations on supercomputers. The startup recently received pre-seed funding from Speciale Invest, a VC firm that invests in DeepTech startups, but within a year, the company expects to raise Rs 1,000 crore, Kini said.

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