Nuclear fusion: could China be the first to harness the energy that powers the sun?
Coordinated strategy of aggressive funding, talent repatriation and rapid prototyping is a bid to challenge Western dominance in the field
The spacious ENN Group campus in Langfang, Hebei province, is home to a cluster of experimental facilities. At its heart is a spherical device called the EXL-50U – a compact tokamak that uses a magnetic field to confine charged gas, or plasma, to fuse hydrogen nuclei.
On the day the South China Morning Post visited, engineers were installing new neutral beam – or heating – systems to increase its plasma temperature.
Chief engineer Yang Yuanming said they aimed to get the plasma to 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit).
To achieve fusion, light atoms must be heated to extremely high temperatures and confined long enough to fuse them into heavier atoms. The energy released when this happens could then potentially be converted into vast amounts of clean electricity.
ENN Group, a leading clean energy provider, is among a number of private Chinese companies as well as state-backed enterprises that are racing to build a commercial fusion reactor by 2035 or sooner.
Their ambitious projects – like the Burning Plasma Experimental Superconducting Tokamak, or BEST, being built by NeoFusion in Hefei, Anhui province – are making fast progress.
They are doing so by leveraging China’s strengths in high-temperature superconductors, precision manufacturing, and large-scale engineering as they try to challenge Western dominance in fusion research.
It is a coordinated strategy of aggressive funding, talent repatriation and rapid prototyping, and it raises the question of whether China could be the first to harness the energy that powers the sun and other stars.
ENN has poured several billion yuan into nuclear fusion research in the past eight years and it plans to invest billions more to build the next-gen device Helong-2.
It has a research and development team of more than 300, some of them having previously worked at top international institutions.
Now, their focus is on overcoming the technological and engineering challenges to build a demonstration commercial fusion reactor within a decade.
Nuclear fusion has long been dismissed as a distant possibility, but as the technology and manufacturing has advanced a growing number of companies worldwide are pursuing the goal of having commercial power plants up and running by 2035, 2030 or even sooner.
China was found to be leading the way in three of six key industries by nuclear fusion experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Writing in MIT Technology Review in July, they found that China was ahead on thin-film processing, large metal-alloy structures and power electronics, and that it could overtake the West in two other nuclear fusion industries.
“China is a country of extraordinary initiative,” Mark Warner, the Democratic vice-chair of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, told Time magazine at a nuclear fusion event in February.
“In domain after domain, China invests early.”
ENN shifted its focus in 2017, turning from low-carbon energy sources – such as deep geothermal energy and bioenergy – to entirely carbon-free solutions.
It eventually set its sights on the highly challenging field of nuclear fusion. “We realised that nuclear fusion is the ultimate energy solution,” Yang said.
The process currently used in nuclear power plants worldwide is fission, where atoms such as uranium are split apart to generate energy. Nuclear fusion instead combines atoms to release a safe, near-limitless source of energy without creating long-lasting radioactive waste.
It is the same process that has kept the sun burning for the past 5 billion years, which is why nuclear fusion reactors are often referred to as the “artificial sun”.
After evaluating multiple approaches, ENN opted for a more compact, spherical tokamak – a “magnetic confinement” technology – rather than a conventional doughnut-shaped device. The company also chose hydrogen-boron as the fuel source, which it said was more sustainable.
According to the Fusion Industry Association a non-profit organisation based in Washington, there has been huge investment in the fusion energy industry worldwide since 2018.
In a July report, the FIA said more than 50 nuclear fusion companies had been established so far – over half of them based in the United States. Latecomers in China include Startorus Fusion in Shaanxi province and Energy Singularity in Shanghai, both of which were set up in 2021.
Industry experts say one factor contributing to this growth is developments in new materials, such as high-temperature superconductors.
The world’s first such superconductor magnet for use in nuclear fusion, with a magnetic field of 20 tesla, was developed in a collaboration between MIT and start-up firm Commonwealth Fusion Systems in 2021.
Yang said it was a breakthrough in the field because the superconductors could be used to create more compact devices that might prove the commercial viability of fusion technology.
China is hoping generous government funding will give the country a competitive edge in the field. Its annual investment is estimated at US$1.5 billion – nearly twice the amount of US government funding, according to an article in Nature last August.
Based in Shanghai, it is backed by seven state-run giants across the nuclear and petroleum sectors, including China National Nuclear Corporation, PetroChina’s Kunlun Capital and the Shanghai Future-oriented Industries Fund.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems chief Bob Mumgaard said in a LinkedIn post that he had been “watching China ramp up its fusion energy efforts for years” and the new state-sponsored company was “taking it to the next level”.
“It’s one of those efforts that blends government backing with a private company, with ties to universities, state-owned companies, and manufacturing experts that position it well to reproduce the success China has had with other technologies like EVs, solar panels, and batteries,” he said.
Mumgaard also noted that China was luring talent back from overseas, using its participation in international projects and central planning to develop fusion technologies.
China has a large talent pool of fusion engineers to draw on, who have spent more than two decades working on the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. Scientists from 35 nations are collaborating on the megaproject in France to build the world’s largest tokamak.
One of those is BEST, the tokamak in Hefei. Its assembly phase started in May and it is expected to be completed in 2027. BEST builds on the legacy of the country’s first-generation superconducting tokamak known as EAST, or the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak. EAST has been operated by the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science since 2006.
While EAST has shown the scientific feasibility of controlled fusion, BEST was designed to allow scientists to progress from experimentation to producing real energy through fusion reactions – a milestone known as net energy generation.
But the founder of one Chinese fusion tech company, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the US remained dominant in the field given its many years of working with the technology, research and enormous capital investment.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems is leading the charge. It had raised close to US$3 billion as of August – around one-third of the total capital invested in private nuclear fusion companies worldwide – and is likely to attract more.
“The company has a talent pool of over 1,000 people and is an innovator in many original technologies, so they are definitely a front runner,” he said.
Helion Energy in Washington is another big player, founded in 2013 and backed by OpenAI’s Sam Altman and SoftBank’s venture capital arm. It said at the end of July that it had started building a fusion power plant that would supply power to Microsoft by 2028.
The company has been devoted to fusion research for over a decade and has raised around US$1 billion. It is also trying a new approach with a technique called field-reversed configuration to produce nuclear fusion instead of a tokamak.
Chinese firm NovaFusionX, based in Shanghai and founded in April, is also exploring this technology to try to harness fusion power.
According to experts, China has long experience in designing and building fusion devices, starting with its first large-scale tokamak reactor, the HL-1. Work on the HL-1 at the Southwestern Institute of Physics in Chengdu started in the 1970s and was completed in 1984. It has since been further developed and upgraded.
As to the question of who will get there first in the race to harness nuclear fusion energy, the Chinese start-up founder said it was too early to tell.
“I think we will probably know the outcome in five years,” he said.