On a cold February morning in Hefei, the snow-blanketed grounds of the Chinese Academy of Science’s Institute of Plasma Physics (ASIPP) are unusually quiet. China’s New Year is approaching, and most people in the city are preparing for days of dragon-themed celebrations. But inside the institute, researchers are still hard at work. In a vast control room under a ceiling studded with red neon-lit stars, plasma physicist Xianzu Gong is taming a different kind of fiery beast.
Gong’s dragon is a fusion research reactor: the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST). Tokamaks are doughnut-shaped machines that generate the same nuclear reactions that power the stars. They use magnetic fields to confine heated loops of plasma — a fluid-like state of matter containing ions and electrons — at temperatures hotter than the Sun’s core. The aim is to force atomic nuclei to fuse, releasing energy.
This could be harnessed as a source of almost limitless clean power, if the scorching, unstable plasma can be maintained and controlled for long enough — a feat yet to be accomplished.
Corralling the unruly plasma is gruelling work. Every day, Gong and his colleagues fire up around 100 shots of plasma from early morning until around midnight. By comparison, the Joint European Torus (JET) in Culham, UK, which was the world’s largest fusion-research facility before it closed last year, achieved 20–30 shots each day.
“Almost no weekends, no holidays for us,” says Gong, who heads EAST’s physics and experimental operations. Although only a stepping stone to anticipated fusion power plants, EAST is one of the facilities that’s putting China on the map in the global race for nuclear fusion.
The world’s most well-known fusion experiment is the US$22-billion International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), a giant tokamak being constructed in southern France, to which China is contributing. And in recent years, ambitious firms in the United States and elsewhere have raised billions of dollars to build their own reactors, which they say will demonstrate practical fusion power before state-led programmes do.
China is fast pouring resources into its fusion efforts
At the same time, China is fast pouring resources into its fusion efforts. The Chinese government’s current five-year plan makes comprehensive research facilities for crucial fusion projects a major priority for the country’s national science and technology infrastructure.
As a rough estimate, China could now be spending $1.5 billion each year on fusion — almost double what the US government allocated this year for this research, says Jean Paul Allain, associate director of the US Department of Energy’s Office of Fusion Energy Sciences in Washington DC. “Even more important than the total value is the speed at which they’re doing it,” says Allain.
“China has built itself up from being a non-player 25 years ago to having world-class capabilities,” says Dennis Whyte, a nuclear scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge.
Although no one yet knows whether fusion power plants are possible, Chinese scientists have ambitious timelines. In the 2030s, before ITER will have begun its main experiments, the country aims to build the China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR), with the goal of producing up to 1 gigawatt of fusion power. If China’s plans work out, a prototype fusion power plant could follow in the next few decades, according to a 2022 road map.
China is taking a strategic approach for fusion energy programme
“China is taking a strategic approach to invest in and develop its fusion energy programme, with a view of long-term leadership in the global field,” says Yasmin Andrew, a plasma physicist at Imperial College London.
In EAST’s control room, Gong prepares to fire another pulse of plasma with a click of his mouse. The plasma itself lies behind the control room’s wall of monitors, confined in a vacuum chamber that has the Chinese flag mounted on its roof. “Every shot could be in support for the future of fusion energy,” Gong says.
China’s involvement in fusion began with building several small and medium-sized tokamaks using components from devices in Russia and Germany. In 2003, it joined the international ITER experiment, alongside the European Union, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and the United States.
Energy Singularity is planning to produce ten times more energy
Energy Singularity is planning a next-generation device, HH170, which aims to produce ten times more energy than the heat needed to fuel the plasma. Just as optimistically as the US firms, Yang estimates that the small tokamak will take only three to four years to build, instead of decades.
One of the big questions in fusion surrounds the availability of fuel. For tokamaks, a mixture of deuterium and tritium (D–T) isotopes is considered one of the most efficient fuels. But tritium occurs in minuscule traces in nature, so will need to be produced in fusion facilities, through a reaction between the neutrons produced during fusion reactions and a blanket of lithium in the tokamak wall. Whether such ‘tritium breeding’ can actually work is unclear.
ITER is one of the largest research efforts that will explore this question. But China has speedier plans: its Burning Plasma Experimental Tokamak (BEST), built next to CRAFT and due to be completed in 2027, will also run D–T experiments and explore whether tritium can be bred, says ASIPP director Song.
It’s all part of a long-term push to develop what many see as a key solution to the world’s energy problems. Back at EAST, in contrast to the bullish claims of private firms, Gong sees the race for fusion energy more as a marathon than a sprint. He has thousands of plasma shots ahead of him. “There’s still a lot of work we need to do,” he says.
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