An article in China’s Science and Technology Daily on Nov. 28 gives an idea of how advanced the Chinese fusion program has become and how focused they are on making new breakthroughs. The article focuses on the new Comprehensive Research Facility for Fusion Technology (CRAFT), which was commissioned in December 2018 and is scheduled to be completed in 2024 at the Hefei University of Science and Technology, also the home of the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) reactor. The facility consists of 14 buildings and covers an area of 400,000 m². Hefei’s thermonuclear fusion science team at the Institute of Plasma has conducted research on the comprehensive performance of materials, the performance of superconductor, superconducting magnets, fusion reactor vacuum chambers, divertor components, and the interaction between plasma and materials.
“At present, more than 100 key milestone construction tasks and the design, pre-research and test verification of core components have been completed, from the laboratory R&D and test stage of the subsystem to the development, onsite integration and debugging stage of some key components,” Hefei Materials Researcher Liu Zhihong told Science and Technology Daily.