Daybreak - A thorium fuel made for India's nuclear reactors is here. India didn't make it

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

Seventy years ago, Homi Bhabha designed a three-stage nuclear plan built around one idea: that India's future was thorium, not uranium. The science was proven, the reactors were built, and by 1996, India had already demonstrated a thorium fuel cycle at an experimental reactor in Kalpakkam.What it never did was take it to commercial scale. In 2025, an eight-year-old American startup did exactly that — with a fuel designed specifically for Indian reactors, and a former chairman of India's Atomic Energy Commission on its board of advisors. So what happened in between?Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business 🚨The Ken's Zero Shot podcast is hosting a live event! This is a speculative yet realistic discussion built around one premise: what happens when AI agents take off in India? How will they rewire existing habits, business models and profit pools? Since nobody knows for sure, we won't pretend to have all the answers. Instead we are going to break the narrative. Click here for details. 

I venture to predict that a method will be found for liberating fusion energy in a controlled manner within the next two decades. When that happens, the energy problems of the world will truly have been solved forever. Who you just heard is Homi J. Bhabha, the man who is widely regarded as the father of India's nuclear program. Here, he was speaking at the 195 Geneva International Conference on the peaceful uses of atomic energy. The UN-sponsored conference, which was presided over by Bhabha himself, was attended by many countries. The United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, India, they all took part. The purpose was to discuss civilian uses and developments in nuclear energy and the engineering related to it. Now, this happened during the Cold War, a time when each country was guarding their nuclear plants with great secrecy.

And it was pretty much a landmark event. Because, you see, countries had, however momentarily, eased up their intellectual borders for the first time in a while and at scale, because they were exchanging huge amounts of unclassified information. Fast forward to 2025 and 26. And a whole new era of India's nuclear program is unfolding. In December last year, the Lok Sabha passed the Shanti or Sustainable Harnessing and advancement of nuclear energy for transforming India bill. What it did was open up the nuclear sector for private players after having been exclusively

operated and controlled by the government since its inception. Last month, Adani Power, India's largest private thermal power producer, said that it would face out coal from its portfolio and replace it with 30 gigawatts of nuclear capacity over the next few years. The plan is 18 gigawatts across eight states to start with through a wholly owned subsidiary called Adani Atomic Energy Limited. But before Adani, there were actually two other companies that entered India's nuclear energy scene. One came with a thorium fuel that was specifically designed for Indian reactors. Another came with a plan to set up 200 small reactors across India.

They're both set to revolutionize the nuclear sector here. But the thing is, neither is from India. They're both American. And that stands out, especially, the company that unveiled the thorium fuel. It's called CCPE or Clean Core Thorium Energy. Because you see, India has known for a while that it has a far richer thorium reserve than uranium, which is the element that's probably the most recognizable for you when you think nuclear. In fact, India is believed to have the largest thorium deposit in the world at about 25%. And interestingly, about 70 years ago, when Homi Bhabha was first working on India's nuclear plan, he developed a three-stage one specifically designed for thorium so that India

could achieve energy independence eventually. Ever since, for decades, India has been researching and experimenting with thorium. And here's where it gets even more interesting. The fuel that CCTV developed wasn't even exactly news to Indian researchers. Nearly 30 years ago, in In 1996, India had tested thorium-based fuel in an experimental mini-reactor. It had successfully bred uranium 233 from thorium to run the Kamini, a research reactor at Kalpakam in Tamil Nadu. It completed the entire cycle from fabrication to reprocessing. But what never ended up following was reproduction at scale, a version that could be commercially

deployed. So how did an American startup that's only about 8 years old? managed to overtake India in a race the country began 70 years ago. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Tricia Virgis, and every day of the week, my co-host, Sinkajarama and I, will bring you one new story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Wednesday, the 25th of March.

Since thorium, we have got abandoned. We are one of the large deposits, we have got thorium. Our scientists, nuclear scientists, started working on thorium-based reactor. It's a very top area or research and development because thorium is not a fissile material. You have to convert into a fissile material. That means you need a fast-breeder reactor.

That's why a fast-breed reactor reactor. A number of them you need to come in. So I believe in five to seven years time, seven years' time, India will have a nuclear, the thorium-based nuclear reaction. actors for power generation. That was Dr. APJ Abdul Kalamp,

former president of India, talking about the way Thorium works and why it's an important resource for India. This quote is actually from an interview he gave when the 2008 India-United States civil nuclear agreement was in the works. I'll get into the details of the deal in a bit. But first, let me break down for you

what Homie Bhaba's three-stage plan is and what Kalam means when he says things like Fisile and Breeder. Like I mentioned earlier, Homi Bawa designed India's long-term nuclear plan to work in a way that suits the country best. Here's how he puts the idea behind the plan in his own words. The total reserves of thorium in India

amount to over 500,000 tons in the readily extractable form, while the known reserves of uranium are less than a tenth of this. The aim of a long-range atomic power program in India must therefore be to base the nuclear power generation as soon as possible on thorium rather than uranium. And the reason why he came up with a three-phase plan is because, as Kalam explains in his quote, thorium by itself is not fissile. Now, yes, this is a bit of a science lesson, but stick with me while I break it down for you.

A fissile material is one that will undergo fission in a nuclear reactor. Fission is essentially a process where the atoms of a material split, and that splitting is what releases enormous amounts of energy. Materials like Uranium 235 and Plutonium 239 are fissile, which is what makes them usable as reactor fuel directly. Thorium, on the other hand, is not fissile. Putting it in a reactor by itself does absolutely nothing. What it is, though, is fertile. And that pretty much means exactly what you might think. It can be converted into a fissile material when it's placed in or around a reactor that's running on something else.

Then it can produce fuel that can then be used in the next generation of reactors. And that's where the different stages come in. The first stage involves using pressurized heavy water reactors or pHWRs to generate electricity by burning natural uranium. The byproduct of this process is a spent fuel that contains plutonium 239. This stage is actually fully operational right now with India running several of these reactors in Rajasthan, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu. Now, in stage 2, the plutonium byproduct from stage 1

fuels a different kind of a reactor. It's called a fast-breeder reactor, which essentially breeds and creates more fissile material. During this stage, thorium is converted into uranium, and that is a uranium that can finally undergo fission in the last stage. And where are we with stage 2? Well, there's a single prototype fast-breeder reactor reactor reactor. in Kalapakam. It's been in development for decades and it's the only stage to

reactor we currently have. And it's also supposed to be completed only by September this year, which brings us to the third and final stage. This one involves yet another type of reactor called an advanced heavy water reactor. These are designed to run mainly on thorium and once the process has begun, these reactors are designed to be self-sustaining, which means the thorium in this reactor can basically just keep breeding more and more uranium. But here's the thing. We are still a long, long way off from stage three. India has been leading the research on thorium-based nuclear power globally. And the kind of reactor that stage three needs has no precedent anywhere in the world,

mainly because all of this is a complex and expensive process. And to get to stage three, you require a fully operational stage two that has been running for years and which has created the amount of uranium necessary to kickstart state three. So, while other countries found using uranium and plutonium easier and cheaper, thorium dropped as a priority for them. But India doesn't have that same option. Like I mentioned earlier, the uranium reserves we have are minuscule and we just can't keep importing it forever. For a long-term solution, thorium is the only option that makes sense. Because the Indian nuclear establishment has estimated that the country could produce 500 gigawatts of electricity for at least 4 centuries.

And that's just by using the country's easily extractable thorium reserves. Even then, the urgency has faded over time. The stage 3 reactor has existed as a concept for 30 years. Still, even after the design was confirmed, no site for construction has been chosen, no licenses have been issued, and no ground has been broken. The NPCIL or Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited had said that construction on the AHWR would start in 2014 with expected operation in 2019.

So why has a plan that was set in motion decades ago been stalling for so long? More on this in the next segment. For 34 years, India has suffered from a nuclear apartheid. That was Dr. Manmohan Singh, the former Prime Minister of India. He's talking about what prompted his decision to initiate the 2008 deal with the US I mentioned earlier. The apartheid he's talking about was essentially a slew of sanctions that were placed on India by the US. The first time was in the 1970s, when India first carried out an experimental explosion. The idea was to essentially stop India from developing nuclear weaponry.

Then, again, in the late 1990s, when the Vajpa government was in power, India tested five more devices. This triggered an even more dramatic response from the US. It suspended aid. It banned defence exports to the country. It also halted export-import bank credit and opposed World Bank and IMF loans. More than 200 Indian institutions were blacklisted. Still, India held its ground against the sanctions until the 2000s,

running its initial stage 1 fleet of pHWRs on domestically mined uranium. But soon, by the mid-2000s, the supply started to falter and the reactors were running at reduced capacity. And this was when the 2008 deal was struck. The Bush administration started easing sanctions and soon India was allowed to start importing uranium from Russia, Kazakhstan, France, Australia and others. This is what helped India scale its stage-one fleet enough to start creating the amount of plutonium that would be necessary to initiate. to initiate stage two. But this momentary relief came at a cost. The thing is, the deal was actually kind of unpopular even within India.

The Manmohan Singh government actually even went through a no-confidence motion because of the deal. And part of the critique from the opposing parties, that the urgency for thorium-based research would suffer. And well, that's exactly what happened. In a piece from January this year, why on you? reported that experts noted a significant slowdown in thorium-based progress after the deal was struck. Once the uranium import started coming in, urgency faded, and funding was not pouring in as quickly as it was before because institutions started to get wary of the complex and expensive process.

And the result? Well, as you know now, the build-out for stage 2 and stage 3 reactors have been lagging behind for years. And the resulting gap is exactly what has opened up the door for other players. Stay tuned. In 2025, a little-known, eight-year-old startup unveiled the world's first commercially deployable thorium fuel. The fuel was specifically made for Indian pHWRs. The company that made it was American. The company's name, as I mentioned before, is Clean Core Thorium Energy or CCPE founded by Mejul Shah. The fuel literally, literally. released is called Anil or Advanced Nuclear Energy for Enriched Life. And fun fact, it's actually named after Dr. Anil Kakodkar, who is the former chairman of

India's Atomic Energy Commission. Another fun fact, Kakodkar was actually the youngest director of BARC or Bhaba Atomic Center since Homie Baba himself. So why did an American company name its product after an Indian scientist? Now, here's where things get interesting. Dr. Kakodkar is actually on the board of advisors at CCTV. And before that, he was pretty much the guy who led the expansion of India's PHWR fleet. The thing is, Anil as a product is not a disruptive one by concept.

B-A-R-C and D-A-E or the Department of Atomic Energy have been experimenting with thorium for a long time. And like I told you earlier, they have even successfully proven the thorium fuel cycle at a small experimental reactor named Kamenei in Kalapattam. That was back in 1996, exactly 30 years ago. Despite the institutional lag and slowdown in urgency, these are still important goals that India had already hit. The only thing left for India to do was to deploy these solutions at commercial scale. But a startup less than a decade old beat India to it.

And Dr. Kakotka's post-retirement shift to a full-year-old. foreign company goes to show exactly what institutional failure does to intellectual drive. When the system slows down, can you really leave behind your life's work? Kakodkar is still passionately advocating for India to double down on its sodium plans. In fact, he was recently reported as saying that India abandoning its sodium future could be suicidal for the country. Now, to backtrack a bit, what does Anil promise to do in India exactly? CCTE claims that when used in existing stage 1 reactors, the thorium in anil turns to uranium that can be used in stage 3 reactors directly.

That could actually mean skipping the decades it would take to have stage 2 running entirely. To test this out, CCTV has announced a strategic partnership with the NTPC or the National Thermal Power Corporation, which is essentially an India-owned energy conglomerate. With this partnership, they intend to explore the development and deployment of Anil fuel for PHWRs. Though, of course, this is still dependent on the approval of the respective governments and the national laws, which means nothing is final yet. We're still at an exploration stage, and that seems like it's for the best, because Anil is far from a magical fix for India's thorium future, because it comes with challenges of its own.

The first challenge is a supply chain vulnerability. Anil uses a uranium component called HALU that India would have to import from Russia, China or the US. The second challenge pretty much undermines what CCTV promised Anil would do. Because a pure-reviewed study found that the uranium derived from using Anil isn't clean enough to be used in stage 3 reactors. Which means that would actually slow down the stage 3 process instead of helping it. Now, that does sound bad, but remember that this is still a study that hasn't been exactly proven right yet. And even if it is, that doesn't mean that Anil has nothing to offer. Using it could actually still mean higher fuel efficiency, far less spent fuel volume, lower refueling frequency,

and even lower running costs. And again, if the study is correct, it seems like Anil is less a way to advance India's future and more a way to improve. the present. And while it does that, what it is also doing is replacing India's dependence on the natural uranium imports we signed the 2008 deal for with Halu imports. And we saw what happens when present needs are prioritized over an independent future. Even if Anil is not the answer to India's thorium future yet, does it risk having the same impact? See, nearly 20 years ago, access to cheaper uranium was worth risking an entire government for. And that same access is what helped us finish stage one.

And finishing stage one was supposed to help us get to stage two with everything we already had. The ambition, the foresight, the science, the concepts and the talent. We have had all the ingredients we need for authoritarian future and more. The thing is, the 2008 deal was about survival. We needed that uranium. But today, the deals happening look like they're more about convenience. So, with Anil in the picture, the question is this.

Could India be sacrificing four centuries of energy independence to sign up for convenience today? Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of our subscriber-only offerings. A full subscription offers daily long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium podcasts. To subscribe, head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the Ken website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague Rachel Vargis and edited by Rajiv Sien.