The New York Times reports:

China’s government has made fusion a national priority, marshaling resources at daunting speed. Recently, a Shanghai start-up essentially matched an engineering breakthrough by America’s best-funded fusion company, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, in much less time. Over the summer, the Chinese government and private investors poured $2.1 billion into a new state-owned fusion company. That investment alone is two and a half times the U.S. Energy Department’s annual fusion budget.

The two countries’ progress could soon be tested head-to-head.

Commonwealth says that by 2027, the experimental device it is building in Massachusetts will pull off a key feat: producing more energy than it takes to run. That would be a signal that fusion could someday generate electricity for data centers, steel mills and more.

China’s leading plasma-physics lab is aiming for its new machine, which has the modest name of BEST and will sit in the twin-armed building in the country’s east, to cross that milestone in the next few years, too.

“It’s a very tight schedule,” said Lian Hui, a scientist at the lab. Even so, “we are very confident we will be able to achieve BEST’s research goals,” he said.

China’s commitment to science, and fusion, comes from the very top.

The government’s new five-year plan, covering 2026 through 2030, promises “extraordinary measures” to secure breakthroughs in fusion energy and other areas. China’s state-owned nuclear company is preparing detailed fusion research proposals, calling it “the main racetrack in future scientific and technological competition among the great powers.”

The country was a minnow in fusion only two decades ago, and it grew by teaming up with other nations. It worked closely with France to develop its most modern tokamak, a type of doughnut-shaped fusion machine. It became a key contributor to the 33-nation ITER fusion experiment (pronounced “eater”). During much of the past decade, American and Chinese researchers conducted joint experiments and extolled their nations’ “long-term friendship” in plasma physics.

Now, Chinese labs and companies are pouring concrete for cutting-edge research facilities of their own. The Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Plasma Physics is building both the new BEST tokamak and a 100-acre complex nearby where researchers will develop and test components to operate under the extreme conditions of a fusion device. Scientists there are also sketching out another tokamak that would power a pilot fusion plant in the 2030s and ’40s.

Richard Pitts, a British-French physicist at ITER, visited the BEST site in January last year, when it was little more than an empty platform. Today, it’s half finished.

China has learned a great deal from being part of ITER, and now it is applying that knowledge to make its own advances, Dr. Pitts said. “Every time I go there, I’m taken aback by the sheer numbers of people and the sheer efficiency with which things get done,” he said.

Even if the core technology works, however, fusion reactors won’t power the world until companies figure out how to build and operate them affordably and at industrial scale.

And on that front, China’s expertise in engineering and construction gives it a distinct advantage, said Jimmy Goodrich, a senior fellow at the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. “The risk for the United States is we create a viable technical pathway first, but then China engineers and scales it up before we can,” Mr. Goodrich said.

Recently, Commonwealth got a glimpse at how quickly China is moving.

Last year, scientists with the company published academic papers describing one of their biggest accomplishments: the enormous, D-shaped magnets that will sit inside its new tokamak in Massachusetts. They are made with materials that carry electricity with exceptionally low resistance, allowing them to produce superstrong magnetic fields.

Then, this past summer, scientists with a Shanghai start-up, Energy Singularity, published a paper about their own, very similar magnet.

To Dennis Whyte, a Commonwealth co-founder, this was no mere feat of reverse engineering. Mobilizing the supply chains and manufacturing expertise needed to build and test such a magnet so quickly showed “really amazing skill,” Dr. Whyte said. [Continue reading…]