I am an Indian National and my interest in Nuclear Fusion made me come to Europe. I am a Master student from Aix-Marseille University , Marseille , France.

I have interests in Entrepreneurship and aim to contribute to the development of Fusion Industry in my country. And as part of my Master thesis, I opted to work in the group “Socio-Economic Aspects of the deployment of Fusion Energy” at Eindhoven University of Technology under Prof. Niek Lopez Cardozo.

I wanted to explore the market of Nuclear Fusion which would help me in my future goals.

My work involved studying about DEMO reactors , Fusion timeline under various scenarios and tritium fuel requirements. The Fuel needed for Fusion in the form of Lithium interested me.

The Deuterium-Tritium DEMO reactors which are being planned to produce electrical power from fusion in the 2040’s-2050’s will require high quantities of enriched lithium for fueling the reactions.

At present, no facility is present in the world which can provide Lithium to the projected demand needed by fusion. For this reason, several isotope separation processes have already been proposed. During my internship a variety of lithium enrichment, production and recycling processes were reviewed to assess their feasibility in contributing to fusion fuel supply.

I was successful in making a conclusion that we lack the mercury resources for using mercury based isotope separation on a global scale.

Eindhoven is a beautiful student city and is known as the Silicon valley of Europe. I was able to attend several start-up conferences in the city and I met with investors and entrepreneurs. I faced few issues regarding housing. There is a serious shortage of housing in the Netherlands. I wasn’t aware of this issue and had to work remotely for 2 months till I could find a place to live. The people are very friendly and overall my time there has been amazing !