How China Could Win The Nuclear Fusion Race
Alex Kimani

It’s been seven decades ever since scientists started working on nuclear fusion technology, with the allure of almost limitless clean energy proving too powerful to resist. The U.S. was among the world’s first countries to bet big on this futuristic gambit, working on fusion research in earnest since the early 1950s. China’s foray came much later. 

However, China has been making rapid progress over the past decade, and now owns more fusion patents than any country according to industry data published by Nikkei. Further, Beijing is pumping in ~$1.5 billion annually into fusion research, according to Jean Paul Allain, who leads the US Energy Department’s Office of Fusion Energy Sciences. That’s nearly double Washington’s fusion tab at $800 million a year.

“To me, what’s more important than the number, it’s actually how fast they’re doing this,” Allain told CNN.    

Even more alarming is the fact that a small, relatively unknown Chinese fusion startup has been able to achieve what even France-based International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), funded and run by seven countries since 2006, has been unable to pull off. Shanghai-based Energy Singularity has effectively completed the engineering feasibility verification of high-temperature superconducting for its Honghuang 70 (HH70) tokamak device, giving China a first-mover advantage in the critical field of high-temperature superconducting magnetic confinement fusion. Energy Singularity has also become the world's first commercial company to build and operate an all-superconducting tokamak.

"The design work of the device began in March 2022, and the overall installation was completed by the end of February this year, setting the fastest record for the research and construction of superconducting tokamak devices worldwide," Yang Zhao, Energy Singularity's Chief Executive Officer, has revealed.

So, how did this little-known Chinese company manage to pull off in two years what ITER has failed to achieve in nearly two decades? 

According to Yang, using high-temperature superconducting materials can reduce the volume of a device to about 2 percent of that of traditional low-temperature superconducting devices, allowing the construction period of the device to be shortened from ~ 30 years to just 3-4 years.

According to Yang, the company owns independent intellectual property rights of HH70, with a domestication rate of over 96 percent, adding that all of the device's magnet systems are constructed using high-temperature superconducting materials. Despite its commendable success, Energy Singularity is not resting on its laurels, with Yang revealing the company plans to complete the next generation high magnetic field high-temperature superconducting tokamak device dubbed HH170 with a deuterium-tritium equivalent energy gain (Q) greater than 10 by 2027. In nuclear fusion parlance, the Q value reflects the energy efficiency of the fusion reactor, that is, the ratio of the energy generated by the device to the energy input required to sustain the fusion reaction. Q values greater than 1 means the reactor generates more energy than what it consumes, which is essentially what fusion research has been trying to achieve in a commercial reactor for decades. Currently, the greatest Q factor that scientists have achieved is just 1.53.

Big Spending

Energy Singularity has so far received about $112 million in private investment. In contrast, Charles Seife, director of the Arthur L. Carter Institute of Journalism at New York University, estimates that ITER project costs have surpassed  €20 billion ($21.8 billion), more than four times the original budget of €5 billion (then $5.5 billion) and nearly a decade late from its 2016 delivery date.

That said, Energy Singularity is not the only fusion startup that’s pursuing small reactor designs. Deven, Massachusetts-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems is collaborating with MIT to build their small fusion reactor. Dubbed Sparc, the reactor is ~1/65th the volume of ITER's reactor. The experimental reactor is expected to generate about 100 MW of heat energy in pulses of about 10 seconds - bursts big enough to power a small city. 

Small reactors are hardly unique to the nuclear fusion sector. The Biden administration has been a strong proponent of Small Modular Reactors (SMR) that have been making waves in the nuclear fission space. 

Three years ago, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)8 approved Centrus EnergyCorp.’s (NYSE:LEU) request to make High Assay Low-Enriched Uranium (HALEU) at its enrichment facility in Piketon, Ohio, becoming the first company in the western world outside Russia to do so. Applications for HALEU are currently limited to research reactors and medical isotope production; however, HALEU will be needed for more than half of the SMRs currently in development across the globe. HALEU is only currently available from TENEX, a Rosatomsubsidiary

By Alex Kimani for Oilprice.com

Alex Kimani is a veteran finance writer, investor, engineer and researcher for Safehaven.com. 

oilprice.com