US falling behind China in race to nuclear fusion
Fusion Industry Association CEO Andrew Holland says private players need more state support if US to lead the fusion energy revolution
China is moving with awesome speed to take the global lead in realizing nuclear fusion as a commercial energy source. With the scheduled completion of the Comprehensive Research Facility for Fusion Technology (CRAFT) in Hefei Province in 2025, China will possess a unique scientific and engineering infrastructure for its fusion effort.
A prototype fusion power plant, the China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor, is on the drawing boards, and a key intermediate step, the Burning Plasma Test Reactor, will go into operation in 2027. China’s EAST fusion reactor holds the record for plasma containment; and other important fusion experiments are in progress in different locations of the country.
Given the stream of positive fusion news from China, one cannot avoid asking: Where is the US? Due largely to the shameful lack of commitment from the Federal government, the US is in danger of losing the world leadership position in fusion which it had occupied for nearly three-quarters of a century.
This is nothing less than a scandal, given all the talk in Washington about maintaining the US edge in technology vis-à-vis China. Fortunately for the US, private sector investments in fusion have grown dramatically, and US private companies are moving ahead with a variety of ambitious and promising projects aimed at achieving commercial power generation by fusion in the not-too-distant future.
We asked Andrew Holland, CEO of the Fusion Industry Association (FIA), for his take on the situation of fusion in the US and China. The FIA has established itself as the voice of the private fusion industry worldwide.
The present interview follows up an earlier one that Asia Times published in January 2021 in three installments, which can be read here, here and here. Asia Times Senior Science correspondent Jonathan Tennenbaum conducted the interview.
JT: In the Fusion Industry Association’s White Paper, “Bringing Fusion to the US Grid”, you wrote about the need for a decisive shift in prioritization of fusion R&D by the US government. And you contrast the lack of sufficient support by the US government to fusion with China’s ambitious fusion program, which is moving ahead rapidly. How would you compare the fusion effort in the US with what’s going on in China?
AH: The US has been a global leader in fusion since the very beginning of fusion research by governments back in the ’50s. The United States, first working with the UK and then with Japan and Europe as well, has always been the leading country in pushing forward research, first in plasma physics, and then concerning how to move towards a fusion energy break-even power plant.
China has not been a player in that until the last 20 years or so. When China joined the ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) program just over 20 years ago, China started to make investments to bring China up to world leader status. Investments in experiments, into infrastructure and also into people – plasma physicists and the institutions that are necessary to train them and to build and run experiments.
This also came at a time of relative openness in the global system. A lot of the leading Chinese scientists have done work in US and European labs and Japanese labs. There is a long history of collaboration, both in ITER and elsewhere.
The US program on fusion has always been ambitious, but perhaps lacking in funding to allow follow through, is what I would say. There are a couple of things I think are important to say.
For seven straight years now, Congress has appropriated more money every year into the Department of Energy’s Fusion Energy Science Program. So there has been a growth in funding into fusion, sometimes in significant jumps, sometimes in relatively small jumps.
Along with that has come new legal authorizations, directing the Department of Energy to create not only a fusion science program but a program that has the mission of delivering fusion energy-delivering a pilot plant. There has been a slow move towards commercialization.
Unfortunately, the US program is pretty heavy on legacy-funded programs. There is an _expression_ here in [Washington] DC that there are certain mortgages that the DOE has to spend on every year and which take up a very significant portion of that funding.
These programs are focused largely on legacy R&D programs, rather than forward-thinking commercially relevant programs. So it’s very hard to say we’re transitioning a DOE program when the vast majority of the program and budget goes to spending on these mortgages.
Spending on these programs may be important for many reasons, like basic science and understanding of plasma physics, but really aren’t that important for the actual commercialization of fusion energy.
At the same time, some new programs have been authorized and started in the Department of Energy. Notable among them are public-private partnerships, like the INFUSE (Innovation Network for Fusion Energy) program and the milestone-based public-private partnership.
There is also a new program called Fusion Innovative Research Engine (FIRE) Collaboratives, which are research centers that are focused on the key problems for commercialization — things like materials and fuel cycle and so forth. But the actual funding for these programs is still a smaller percentage than the legacy programs. So we haven’t yet seen this transition.
Now, China isn’t bound by these legacy programs nearly as much, and has been able to make investments focused towards building a commercialization program.
Basically, if you look at the US in the late 20-10s, there was a request from the then Undersecretary for Science Paul Dabbar to the fusion community, saying, essentially, “give me a community plan for what to do with the fusion program. Everybody should come together, and give us the consensus.” And they did.
The result was a long-range plan, delivered very early in 2021, that laid out the steps and programs and investments that needed to be made, to start to deliver a fusion pilot plant. Shortly thereafter, the US National Academy of Sciences put out their own report saying: okay, this is what you need to do to deliver a pilot plant.
Ironically, in fact, that’s about the same time that the Fusion Industry Association (FIA) was officially formed. We became an independent association in May 2021. Then, in March of 2022, the White House hosted a fusion summit and declared what they call a Bold Decadal Vision for commercial fusion.
So the US fusion community and the US government have a plan for what they need to do to deliver a pilot fusion power plant and bring fusion energy to the stage of commercialization. The challenge is, that the actual budget of the Fusion Energy Science Program has basically not changed at all.
The truth is, we have all the plans we need; we just need to implement them. We need Congress to fund the money. We need the President to request the funds sufficient to do the job. And then you turn around and look across the Pacific to China.
They have almost completed a new facility they are calling CRAFT. This is basically a place where they put all the fusion test stands together. All the projects that are listed in the US’ long-range plan are being built right now or have already been completed, but in China!
Meanwhile, nothing new has come out of the US program. It is difficult to see how this is moving forward. The truth, though, is that the ambition in the United States is not with the US government. The ambition in the United States is with the private companies. The private companies are still moving forward. Funding is flowing into these companies.
There is not much from the US government, but significant funding is flowing into these companies from investors, venture capital, strategic investors. The growing, American-led industry is basically a testament to the power of the American capitalist system that I think we could be on the verge of getting there. We’ve seen this happen before.
JT: In China, the government is evidently committed to a real battle plan for fusion. As you said, this is not only on paper, but the Chinese are building and building and building. That was the way the US used to do things in the ’50s and ’60s in practically every field of science and technology. The philosophy was to just go ahead and build a lot of things and see what works. What has happened to that spirit?
AH: I don’t think it’s gone. I think it’s just lost from the United States government. If you are talking about building things, look at Commonwealth Fusion Systems for example.
They are building a demonstration-class tokamak in Devens, Massachusetts, right now. Look at Helion in Everett, Washington, just north of Seattle, building their demonstrator machine called Polaris. Zap Energy, in the same area, is testing their FuZE-Q machine right now. I could name many more companies actively building right now.
So there’s no shortage of building in fusion happening now in the private sector. In fact, we even see the philanthropic sector getting involved. MIT has found a number of philanthropic investors who want to invest in building a cyclotron that can function as a user facility for the fusion industry to test materials on. This is happening largely without US government support.
JT: Apart from the need to increase its scandalously low fusion budget, what things should the US government be doing now? How does this relate to what the private sector is doing?
AH: If the US wants to secure its leadership, certain things need to happen. You have to build the infrastructure for a commercialization program. What that means is that you need to build materials test stands, you need to build fuel cycle test centers, and so on.
You need to have user facilities that the government builds, and private industry can utilize. A good example is in the aerospace industry: the government builds the wind tunnels and then industry comes in, and pays for access to those facilities. Classical economics says that such public goods would be underinvested, if the government doesn’t step in.
The second thing the government should be doing, but hasn’t been nearly enough, is to be investing in the companies directly, to help them move towards the goal of fusion pilot plants. This has a real catalyzing effect. Public-private partnerships enable companies to secure investment, to secure more private dollars.
Government dollars have that effect in such an ambitious field as fusion. Investors still think that, ah, this is a wildly uncertain area. But if the government comes in and says, we’re directly putting dollars into this company, this is a seal of approval saying that it is worthwhile to invest in it.
This is a real way to accelerate investment into fusion pilot plants. Governments around the world have understood that if they don’t support investment into new technologies, other countries will.
The CHIPS Act, providing $54 billion dollars of funding to build new semiconductor manufacturing facilities in the United States, was adopted because other countries had subsidized this industry so much that it would have taken this strategic industry away from the United States.
To me, there is nothing more strategic than fusion. This is zero-carbon energy without a scarce fuel source; something that can deal with energy security and deal with our problems of scientific leadership right away. This is a strategic industry that any government should want to not only have, but lead, in their country.
The United States has put really good plans in place. I want to be clear about that. The milestone-based public-private partnership is a really good program. The INFUSE program is a really good program. But the amount of money is so small that it really is not impactful to any decision-making by companies at this point.
JT: Why is there not more priority placed on fusion? Is the problem on the level of bureaucratic thinking?
AH: In politics and government, the status quo reigns over any change unless there is a push from the top.
JT: Well, that brings me to a central question. Nowadays everybody is talking about China as the Number One strategic competitor or even adversary of the United States, and people are increasingly aware that China is in the process of surpassing the US in many areas.
The Chinese government has clearly identified fusion as a key strategic area, and China clearly aims to get there first, in terms of realizing a fusion pilot plant and developing a commercial fusion industry. I would think that should spawn the US to say, we had better get moving, otherwise the Chinese will beat us. But apparently, that message has not yet gotten through.
AH: Well, even if it has gotten through, it’s all about timing in Washington. You shouldn’t expect major new programs at the end of a president’s four-year term. It’s all about when you have a divided government versus when you have unified government.
I expect that in 2025, there will be new pushes for legislation from Congress to bolster America’s competitive position vis-à-vis China and the rest of the world. The Trump Administration has goals to shake things up and disrupt the status quo.
The United States is not a place where things happen linearly. Things move in an episodic way. At the beginning of the Biden administration, there was the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, followed by the CHIPS and Science Act, followed by the Inflation Reduction Act, all of which amounted to an extraordinary amount of funding going into high-tech and energy fields. But what went into fusion was really only a cash payment to help build ITER in the South of France.
What we’re pushing for, and we expect to see in the new Congress in 2025, is new competitiveness funding. And we hope that fusion will be part of that.
We have a plan. We’ve put forward a $3 billion supplemental funding request, and we think there is a case that it should be expanded up to a $5 or $10 billion supplemental funding request. This is money outside the annual appropriations funding that would go to building fusion infrastructure and supporting public-private partnerships in fusion.
JT: Let me bring up the China issue once more, in terms of manpower. I saw a figure that China has ten times as many PhDs in fusion science and engineering as the US.. Shouldn’t that be a signaI for rethinking in the US?
Once upon a time, China depended for much of its top-level knowledge and skills on students sent to the West. Those times are gone. Now, China produces its own top-level fusion scientists and engineers at a far greater rate than the US. Shouldn’t the US be concerned about that, if the US wants to retain its leading position?
AH: I actually don’t worry about that problem. The workforce issue is a market issue. And if there’s a market pull, we’re going to find the workers for it. That’s the great benefit of the American system, the combination of government, philanthropic universities and private sector working together.
I think there’s a reason why the US has a leading position in higher education, with by far the largest percentage of the top 100 universities of any country in the world. US universities are market-oriented, so they listen to what the students want, and make the investments.
I’m worried more at the top level. The top level of government funding is just not there. And so we may get these universities to invest in PhD plasma physicists, but then they go to work in the UK or in Germany. That’s more what I worry about.
JT: What has happened to the US national labs that were formerly carrying the ball in terms of fusion research? It seems that hardly any new experiments are being built there.
AH: The national labs are the crown jewel of American science. They are the ones that get the funding from DOE. The vast majority of the $800 million fusion budget is going into national labs or into the General Atomics DIII-D facility, which is basically a national lab-class facility.
I want to be clear that the national labs are doing really important science. But we need to see the transition from science for physics’ sake to science for commercialization’s sake.
If you look at a pie chart of where the $800 million DOE funding for Fusion Energy Sciences goes, the largest chunk, $240 million goes to ITER. The next largest goes to DIII-D, which is a 30-year-old Tokamak run by General Atomics. It does really important science. It has really good diagnostics, but it is not a new machine. It’s not breaking new ground.
The next largest experiment is Princeton Plasma Physics Lab’s National Spherical Torus Experiment-Upgrade (NSTX-U).
JT: The NSTX is quite an old facility.
AH: They intend to reopen an upgraded facility for experiments next year, but we haven’t been able to do experiments on it for nearly a decade.
So if you look at those three facilities I just mentioned, that’s the bulk of the DOE fusion budget. But programs aimed at commercialization must include building the fusion infrastructure I mentioned earlier. We need to make investments in both.
Now I would love it if we could have “a rising tide that lifts all boats”. If we had a billion-dollar program or more in the Fusion Energy Sciences, then we could do all of these things.
There is still good science coming out of DIII-D, and we expect to see really good science coming out of NSTX-U. But it’s not clear to us that this is better than the science that will come out of the private sector, where companies are building the next generation of these machines.
JT: Are you thinking of an analogous process to the commercialization of space flight, with the transfer from NASA to SpaceX and other private companies?
AH: This is exactly it.
In 2006 NASA was looking to replace the space shuttle for access to the International Space Station. They had their plan, the Constellation and Orion programs, that was to build rockets to deliver astronauts to the space station and ultimately to Mars. A small group within NASA said, well, there are private space companies coming up, SpaceX and others.
Originally, nobody thought that they could ever actually do this, but NASA said, okay, here’s $500 million, let’s do a public-private partnership with them. They called the project COTS, Commercial Orbital Transportation Services, which aimed to develop private spacecraft to take deliveries, and ultimately astronauts, to the International Space Station.
The NASA COTS program invested directly into SpaceX in a milestone-based format. That means SpaceX only got paid when they reached milestones. The ultimate milestone, of course, was delivering an astronaut to the International Space Station. But they negotiated and agreed on multiple milestones along the way.
Finally, of course, SpaceX did succeed, and now they’re able to do it for 10 times less than what NASA had originally planned to spend. So we’re at that same moment in fusion right now, with the equivalent of the NASA COTS program – a milestone-based public-private partnership program.
They have put it into place, but the government just hasn’t given it $500 million – or anywhere near what’s needed. To date, only $46 million has been allocated to companies. And we expect another $40 million to come in this year’s budget when they complete it next year. But to be impactful, you need to add a zero to those numbers. You need an order of magnitude more.
We think that the milestone-based program is the way that the United States is going to get to its fusion pilot plants. It’s the classic American way. It’s your private sector and your public sector working together in partnership. The private sector takes the risk. The public sector supplies the infrastructure know-how. It’s a really exciting way to do it.
JT: Coming back to China, how would you characterize their effort and what do you think are the most important projects they have coming online?
AH: You said it seems like there’s a government plan. China is not the Soviet Union. It has morphed into something different than a classic command top-down economy, and some internal competition seems to be happening. There are private companies involved. We know three private fusion companies in China: ENN, Startorus Fusion and Energy Singularity.
There’s probably more, but those are the ones that have been significantly funded and are doing important work as of now. Energy Singularity is the one that has built a tokamak using high-temperature superconductor magnets and following basically a similar plan to what the US company Commonwealth Fusion Systems is building at the moment. The other two companies are looking towards other varieties of tokamaks.
So there is a private sector approach, which is increasingly well-funded. And then there is a government program. But of course, the government in China is both, Beijing, central government funded, as well as state-owned enterprises. They have created a new China Fusion Corporation that looks to be a delivery vehicle for what they are calling BEST – the Burning Plasma Experimental Superconducting Tokamak.
This is not a high temperature superconducting tokamak, but a more classic low-temperature superconductor device, but it will be an ITER-class machine — a machine that will reach fusion break-even. They are building it right now in Hefei, in Anhui province, not far from the CRAFT platform, the Comprehensive Research Facility for Fusion Technology.
What’s interesting is that if you look at the company registrations and funding, a very significant amount of funding into this government program has come from, nominally, private investors. Leading among these is the electric vehicle company NIO.
We’ve done some digging into Chinese public corporate records and it looks like the NIO is at least partially funding the building of BEST and it is unclear who is funding the China Fusion Corporation. To be clear, I haven’t actually talked to them and I don’t know and of that for sure.
And it is hard to be sure about any of this, because China is a different system than it was 10 years ago. It’s not as open. But that said, Chinese scientists, both public companies and private companies, are fully engaged in the international fusion sector, and they participate in global meetings on fusion science. They’re there to learn and they are there to share their details.
Still, some aspects remain opaque. There was an announcement late last year of the formation of a China Fusion Corporation; a press release was put out by the China National Nuclear Corporation. But within a day or two, that press release was taken off the Internet. I have an English language translation, but you can’t get the source anymore.
JT: In view of all the talk about China as a strategic rival of the US, do you see a national security angle in the race to realize a pilot fusion power plant?
AH: Any concentrated source of electric power that doesn’t rely on energy resources from an unstable world is national security related.
JT: What if China were to win the race to commercial fusion energy?
AH: If the Chinese get to fusion first, we shouldn’t expect that this would just be a pure market-based approach. What we should expect is that China will use its newfound leadership in fusion in global geopolitical affairs. We should expect that they will use it throughout their Belt and Road partner nations, further tying them into a centralized, Beijing-led whole order.
So fusion is more than just something the United States should do because it’s good for business and good for the climate. Examples from other industries show that China will take this and make it central to their global effort to put China at the center of the global geopolitical order.
JT: Would you compare this with the race to get to the Moon?
AH: It’s similar in that we’re seeing a global race and multiple players work towards something very technologically challenging. But, I have to say – while going to the Moon was and is an extraordinary achievement – if you can produce power without emissions and without dependence on potentially hostile external sources, it’s much more impactful on the day-to-day life of the people living in your country.