China is pulling ahead of the U.S. in the global race to develop fusion energy, according to an April 29 report in IEEE Spectrum. The article draws conclusions that experts in the field already knew: China is ahead of everybody, including the United States, in the effort to develop fusion energy, and will likely be the first to produce fusion energy for the grid. This achievement will be a turning-point for humanity, by providing a relatively endless source of energy for decades to come.
China began its program in the 1980s, and in 1990 they received a small superconducting tokamak reactor from the Kurchatov Institute. China entered forcefully on the path to use fusion research as a key science driver for economic growth. While the United States and the Soviet Union had been leaders in the 1960s, and had a productive cooperative relationship after Igor Kurchatov decided to declassify fusion research in 1958, the failure of Congress to finance the 1980 Magnetic Fusion Energy Engineering Act led to the demise of the U.S. program and its fragmentation. Russia maintained its program even through the breakup of the U.S.S.R., and has improved it during the Putin years, including in cooperation with China.
China is active in all the different areas of experimentation, with the tokamak, with laser ignition, and with a fusion-fission program which now has been developed commercially.
In Hefei, where China’s first tokamak was located, its Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), dubbed the “Artificial Sun,” has been built as a testbed for technologies that will feed into next-generation fusion reactors. The upcoming Comprehensive Research Facility for Fusion Technology (CRAFT), now being built in Hefei, will develop the underlying engineering requirements for future fusion machines. CRAFT and EAST will in turn provide the bridge to designing the China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor, which will lead from experimental to commercial fusion power. (The 1980 Fusion bill in Congress also called for the building of a fusion engineering facility, but short-sighted bureaucrats in the Administration thought that that should wait until the fusion process was totally under control.)
