Nuclear Fusion Race Intensifies With Chinese Breakthrough
Haley Zaremba

China just achieved another milestone breakthrough for nuclear fusion technology, bringing the country closer to achieving its goal of commercial nuclear fusion by 2050. This week scientists announced that the nation’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), achieved a sustained temperature of 100 million degrees Celsius, shattering previous records and bringing nuclear fusion closer to reality.

This breakthrough is just the latest in a long line of milestones for China, where the government has been investing heavily in nuclear fusion research and development as part of a global “high-stakes battle for nuclear fusion supremacy.” Beijing has been outspending every other country in the world on fusion research at approximately $1.5 billion per year – approximately double Washington’s spending. 

The potential ramifications of achieving commercial nuclear fusion are difficult to overstate. In the words of a recent Daily Galaxy report, “If China or any other nation succeeds in making fusion commercially viable, it could trigger an energy revolution, transforming how the world powers homes, industries, and even space exploration.”

The EAST experiment, located in Hefei, Anhui province, is often referred to as an “artificial sun,” as it generates plasma to mimic the process by which our sun powers itself. This is achieved by fusing hydrogen atoms together, rather than traditional nuclear power production, which generates energy by splitting atoms in a process known as nuclear fission. While nuclear fission has proven to be much easier to achieve and control, nuclear fusion is seen as the “holy grail” of clean energy, as it doesn’t require any radioactive fuel and produces more energy than fission.

However, achieving nuclear fusion requires the creation of insanely high temperatures, similar to the heat at the center of the sun. For this reason, EAST’s recent breakthrough is a major one. At 100 million degrees Celsius – several times hotter than the sun’s core – plasma is created and atoms smash into each other, naturally fusing and releasing huge bursts of energy in the process.

However, despite these recent breakthroughs, the nuclear fusion sector still faces significant challenges in making the technology commercially viable and scalable. As Bloomberg reports, nuclear fusion “is notoriously difficult to carry out in a sustained and usable manner and only a handful of countries like the US, Russia and South Korea have managed to crack the basics.”

Scientists are still struggling to sustain high enough temperatures to maintain plasma for any meaningful length of time. They are also putting so much energy into creating the right conditions that the energy released from the fusion itself doesn’t break even with the energy inputs. There is also still much work to be done toward developing materials able to resist ultra-high temperatures for magnetic confinement. 

Scientists are also looking into other ways to create fusion. While some of the world’s biggest nuclear fusion experiments are tokamaks, the donut shaped plasma machines used in the EAST experiment, breakthroughs have also been made with machines employing lasers to superheat hydrogen molecules. 

In 2022, scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California used lasers to finally overcome nuclear fusion’s most significant barrier: creating net positive energy. Now it appears that China is building its own giant laser facility in Sichuan province to conduct similar experiments with ignition.

Achieving commercial nuclear fusion will be a golden ticket for the nation that achieves it, and China seems determined to be that nation. But putting politics aside, creating commercial energy through nuclear fusion would be a huge win for the entire world, with the potential to create nearly limitless clean energy and put concerns about climate change to rest. 

By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com 

Haley Zaremba is a writer and journalist based in Mexico City. She has extensive experience writing and editing environmental features, travel pieces, local news in the Bay Area, and music/culture reviews.

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