China is on a drive to develop fusion energy, and India’s Mint newspaper provided an interesting overview in its July 8 article, “China Outspends the U.S. on Fusion in the Race for Energy’s Holy Grail,” explains:
“China is outspending the U.S., completing a massive fusion technology campus and launching a national fusion consortium that includes some of its largest industrial companies. Crews in China work in three shifts, essentially around the clock, to complete fusion projects. And the Asian superpower has 10 times as many PhDs in fusion science and engineering as the U.S.”
The 2020 plan outlined by U.S. fusion scientists is being carried out by China, according to the head of the U.S. DOE’s Office of Fusion Energy Sciences, J. P. Allain: “They’re building our long-range plan. That’s very frustrating, as you can imagine.”
The 100-acre magnetic fusion research and technology campus in Hefei, begun in 2018 by the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Plasma Physics, is already operational. China’s private energy conglomerate ENN began a fusion division in 2018, and quickly built two tokamaks. Then late in 2023, China announced a new national fusion company, with the state-owned National Nuclear Corp. leading the way.
Mint adds: “China already has a fast-growing nuclear-technology industry and is building more conventional nuclear power plants than any other country. The country’s nuclear-plant development will give it an advantage when commercial fusion is reached, according to a report released last month by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think.”
U.S. Rep. Don Beyer, a Virginia Democrat and co-chair of Congress’s Fusion Energy Caucus, said that much U.S. fusion spending goes to legacy programs, “not the cutting-edge stuff. In China, from what we can tell, most of their billion and a half is actually going to build stuff that would compete with Helion or Commonwealth Fusion,” two of the U.S.’s largest private fusion firms.
Dennis Whyte, a professor of engineering at MIT, who had sat on Chinese fusion advisory committees, said that China had “almost nothing” of a fusion program for decades. Then, within one decade, China built a world-class fusion science program and national labs. “It was almost like a flash that they were able to get there. Don’t underestimate their capabilities about coming up to speed.” Whyte thought that the U.S. has advantages with an entrepreneurial approach, but it is lacking in efficient coordination between private companies, universities and the government. In the 1950s, with the nuclear submarine program, the U.S. had both.
