70 years of India’s Thorium research, breakthrough comes from US startup, what role did BARC's Anil Kakodkar play at private firm?

The Union government patiently kept on making research on thorium, worked on the projects for almost 70 years, spent billions of rupees, trained hundreds of scientists, but could not make the final breakthrough. Despite the painstaking efforts, success eluded the Babha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), it could not get the world’s first commercially deployable thorium fuel. However, the people and the scientific community were shocked when a little-known firm called Clean Core Thorium Energy (CCTE), established just eight years ago, cracked the riddle. The privately-owned company developed the much-needed fuel, Advanced Nuclear Energy for Enriched Life or the ANEEL. 

Thorium Research

It is also surprising that this energy was developed in a country that had left the thorium research almost fifty years ago. The most important person behind the project was Dr Anil Kakodkar, former Chairman of India’s Atomic Energy Commission. Though he was long celebrated as the intellectual torchbearer of India's thorium programme, he could not do it while in the BARC, but achieved the success soon after he joined the CCTE. Strange, but true. When Dr Kakodkar was the chief of the BARC, he led the project and increased the number of Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors (PHWR). His team refined thorium fuel concepts and worked on the Advanced Heavy Water Reactor as the eventual gateway to large-scale thorium utilisation.

Thorium fuel breakthrough

The BARC team fabricated the thorium-based fuel bundles and loaded them into PHWRs for initial core flux-flattening and experimental irradiation. The research institute also used the thorium oxide or thoria pellets in early PHWR cores. The scientists also irradiated the thorium fuel in research reactors such as CIRUS and Dhruva. The Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) and the BARC demonstrated broader thorium fuel-cycle capabilities and used it in KAMINI, a functioning reactor that validates the thorium cycle in practice.

Clean Core Thorium Energy

Despite all of these painstaking efforts, the success went not to the BARC but to a private foreign company with Kakodkar as an advisory board member. The name ANEEL, too, is an acronym built around Advanced Nuclear Energy, echoes the conceptual vocabulary of India’s own thorium discourse. A scientist of the caliber of Anil Kakodkar was once closely identified with a national programme’s vision; he gets  associated with the commercial success of the same vision outside the national programme itself. The credit, the financial and scientific benefits go not to the BARC, but to the little known US-based private company. 

Anil Kakodkar thorium programme, CCTE, BARC

Mehul Shah founded the CCTE in 2017, he continues to be its CEO. Sumant Sinha, founder of ReNew and son of India's former Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha, Lakshmi Narayanan, former CEO of Cognizant, and Deepak Parekh, former Chairman of HDFC, are among the prominent strategic investors linked to the early financing of the project. M.K. Narayanan, former National Security Adviser to India, is also associated in an advisory capacity. Soon, India may buy the thorium-enriched fuel developed from Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors, the very reactor class India perfected and operates in greater numbers than any other country. What a travesty!