China makes America lose sleep in the thermonuclear race

In Shanghai, China’s financial hub, scientists and engineers work around the clock to pursue breakthroughs in the global technology sector, from 6G internet and advanced AI to next-generation robotics. Also here, a small startup called Energy Singularity is looking to harness fusion energy.

While American companies and experts worry that the country is losing its lead in the race to master that nearly limitless source of clean energy, new fusion companies like Energy Singularity are springing up across China.

Fusion, the process that powers the sun and other stars, is difficult to replicate on Earth. Many countries have achieved thermonuclear reactions, but sustaining them long enough for practical applications remains very difficult.

Any country that masters this technology first will gain a huge advantage and have global influence.

Controlled fusion releases about four million times more energy than burning coal, oil or gas, and four times more than fission, the type of nuclear energy most commonly used today.

Researchers will not be able to develop a fusion reaction in time to cope with climate change this decade, but it could be a solution to global warming in the future.

Jean Paul Allain, head of the US Department of Energy’s Office of Fusion Energy Science, said the Chinese government each year pours about $1 billion to $1.5 billion into fusion energy. Meanwhile, US President Joe Biden’s administration spends about 800 million USD each year.

Private businesses in both countries are optimistic that they could bring fusion power to the grid by the mid-2030s, despite the huge technical challenges facing them.

The US was one of the first countries in the world to begin researching fusion energy in the 1950s. China started a few decades later but has accelerated rapidly in recent years. Since 2015, China’s number of fusion energy patents has skyrocketed and is now more than any other country.

Energy Singularity, a Shanghai-based startup, is just one example of China’s breakneck pace of development. The company built its own tokamak reactor in three years since its founding, faster than any similar reactor ever built.

The Tokamak is a complex, cylindrical or doughnut-shaped machine that heats hydrogen to extremely high temperatures, creating plasma for the fusion reaction.

For a young company looking to solve one of the world’s most difficult physics puzzles, Energy Singularity remains extremely optimistic. The company received more than $112 million in private investment and is currently the only company that owns a tokamak furnace that uses advanced magnets in plasma experiments.

Called a high-temperature superconductor, this magnet is stronger than the copper magnets used in old tokamak. According to MIT scientists working on the same technology, they allow smaller tokamak reactors to produce as much fusion energy as larger reactors and can better contain the plasma.

Energy Singularity said it plans to build a second-generation tokamak to prove its method is commercially viable by 2027. The company hopes the third-generation device could supply electricity to the grid before 2035.

By contrast, tokamak reactors in the United States are becoming obsolete, said Andrew Holland, executive director of the Fusion Industries Association in Washington. Therefore, the US must rely on machines from allies in Europe, Japan and Britain to promote research.

Mr. Holland pointed to a new $570 million fusion research park under construction in eastern China, called the Comprehensive Research Base for Fusion Technology (CRAFT), expected to be completed next year.

“We don’t have anything like that.” he told CNN . “The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory has been upgrading its tokamak for the past 10 years. While the other tokamak operating in the US, DIII-D, is 30 years old. There are no modern fusion facilities at US national laboratories.”

New direction of America

Thermonuclear reaction is an extremely complex process that forces two nuclei that would naturally repel each other to come closer together. One way to accomplish the reaction is to increase the temperature in the tokamak furnace to 150 million degrees Celsius, 10 times the temperature of the Sun’s core. When nuclei combine, they release large amounts of energy in the form of heat, which can be used to turn turbines and generate electricity.

Maintaining a fusion reaction over a long period of time is much more difficult. While China is trying to advance with tokamak furnaces, the US is finding an advantage in another technology, lasers.

At the end of 2022, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California shined nearly 200 lasers into a cylinder containing a fuel pellet the size of a pepper. This is the world’s first successful experiment to produce net fusion energy, meaning more energy is produced from the process than is used to heat the fuel.

There are still many other ways to achieve fusion, and the US is betting on many different technologies.

Melanie Windridge, a plasma physicist and executive director of Fusion Energy Insights, an organization that tracks fusion energy, says: “We don’t know exactly what the best approach is. There may be many possible approaches to fusion energy, depending on cost and other factors in the long term.”

Ms. Windridge believes that the tokamak oven is still the best method today. “The tokamak furnace is the most researched over time and the most physically advanced. Many private companies are building this type of furnace.”

With the amount of money China invests in research, tokamak reactor technology is developing rapidly. China’s Tokamak EAST at Hefei kept the plasma stable at 70 million degrees Celsius – five times hotter than the sun’s core – for more than 17 minutes, a world record and an incredible breakthrough.

Expert Mikhail Maslov at the British Atomic Energy Agency described this as an important milestone towards the commercialization of fusion energy.

According to expert Jean Paul Allain of the US Department of Energy, while the Chinese government pours money into fusion energy, the US attracts more private investment. Globally, the private sector has spent $7 billion on fusion in the past 3-4 years, of which about 80% is from US companies.

“However, if the Chinese government continues to pour more than $1 billion a year into fusion energy, the country could soon overtake the US, even in the private sector.” Allain said.