The Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) is India's premier nuclear research facility, headquartered in Trombay, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. It was founded by Homi Jehangir Bhabha as the Atomic Energy Establishment, Trombay (AEET) in January 1954 as a multidisciplinary research program essential for India's nuclear program. It operates under the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), which is directly overseen by the Prime Minister of India.
BARC is a multi-disciplinary research centre with extensive infrastructure for advanced research and development covering the entire spectrum of nuclear science, chemical engineering, material sciences and metallurgy, electronic instrumentation, biology and medicine, supercomputing, high-energy physics and plasma physics and associated research for Indian nuclear programme and related areas.
BARC's core mandate is to sustain peaceful applications of nuclear energy. It manages all facets of nuclear power generation, from the theoretical design of reactors to, computer modeling and simulation, risk analysis, development and testing of new reactor fuel, materials, etc. It also researches spent fuel processing and safe disposal of nuclear waste. Its other research focus areas are applications for isotopes in industries, radiation technologies and their application to health, food and medicine, agriculture and environment, accelerator and laser technology, electronics, instrumentation and reactor control and material science, environment and radiation monitoring etc. BARC operates a number of research reactors across the country.
Its primary facilities are located in Trombay, with new facilities also located in Challakere in Chitradurga district of Karnataka. A new Special Mineral Enrichment Facility which focuses on enrichment of uranium fuel is under construction in Atchutapuram near Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh, for supporting India's nuclear submarine program and produce high specific activity radioisotopes for extensive research.
History
When Homi Jehangir Bhabha was working at the Indian Institute of Science, there was no institute in India which had the necessary facilities for original work in nuclear physics, cosmic rays, high energy physics, and other frontiers of knowledge in physics. This prompted him to send a proposal in March 1944 to the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust for establishing "a vigorous school of research in fundamental physics".
When Bhabha realised that technology development for the atomic energy programme could no longer be carried out within TIFR he proposed to the government to build a new laboratory entirely devoted to this purpose. For this purpose, 1200 acres of land was acquired at Trombay from the Bombay Government. Thus the Atomic Energy Establishment Trombay (AEET) started functioning in 1954. The same year the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) was also established.
Bhabha established the BARC Training School to cater to the manpower needs of the expanding atomic energy research and development program. Bhabha emphasized self-reliance in all fields of nuclear science and engineering.
The Government of India created the Atomic Energy Establishment, Trombay (AEET) with Bhabha as the founding director on 3 January 1954. It was established to consolidate all the research and development activities for nuclear reactors and technology under the Atomic Energy Commission. All scientists and engineers engaged in the fields of reactor designing and development, instrumentation, metallurgy, and material science, etc., were transferred with their respective programs from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) to AEET, with TIFR retaining its original focus for fundamental research in the sciences. After Bhabha's death in 1966, the centre was renamed as the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre on 22 January 1967.
The first reactors at BARC and its affiliated power generation centres were imported from the west. India's first power reactors, installed at the Tarapur Atomic Power Station were from the United States.