Inside the High-Stakes Battle for Nuclear Fusion Supremacy
Haley Zaremba

The race is on to unlock a technology capable of creating scalable, commercial nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion has been viewed as the elusive ‘holy grail’ of energy for a century now, always growing closer to reality, but always just out of reach. But now, advances in nuclear fusion experiments are increasing rapidly, and success is in sight. As such, deep-pocketed superpowers around the world are heavily investing in fusion research in a bif to become the first nation to harness the form of energy that powers our own sun, providing nearly limitless clean energy.

The United States and China have emerged as the clear frontrunners of this race, claiming back-to-back nuclear fusion breakthroughs, and piling competing heaps of money behind their further advancements. So far, the West has led the charge, achieving some of the most critical nuclear fusion breakthroughs in the last decade. While China has also played a key role in nuclear fusion development on the global stage, its achievements have by and large been smaller and later than those taking place in the West. 

Just this month, a Chinese tokamak reactor made a key breakthrough when it successfully generated a magnetic field for the first time. But that breakthrough is relatively small, and is not the first of its kind to achieve this milestone. The first tokamak to create a magnetic field was the very first one, Russia’s T-1 back in 1958. While the Chinese experiment, like others of its kind, will provide important data for the global ITER fusion megaproject in France (to which China is party), it’s not a huge breakthrough in and of itself. 

However, recent news indicates that China may be pulling ahead in the competition in terms of building out its own nuclear fusion industry, and could soon be synonymous with major advancements in the sector. While China has lagged behind the west in nuclear fusion achievements in recent years, its current investments toward the technology have put it on track to overtake the magnetic fusion capabilities of the United States in Europe in under five years.

China is leading a focused initiative to place itself at the forefront of global fusion research. It’s outspending every other nation on fusion research at approximately $1.5 billion per year – double the United States’ spending. Furthermore, China has access to the most developed and far-reaching energy supply chains in the entire world, making its pathway toward creating an artificial sun even more frictionless and cost-effective. 

What is more, China is drawing on a massive skilled workforce that no other nation can hope to compete with. China has 10 times more PhDs in fusion science and engineering than the U.S., and is currently constructing a gargantuan fusion technology campus. It’s also launching a national fusion consortium with a heavy-hitting roster featuring some of China’s biggest industrial companies.

And while China is dedicating more manpower and hours than its competition (it has teams of fusion researchers working in three shifts to keep projects going around the clock), it's getting rid of even more resistance by following well-established fusion project plans – those developed by the United States. “They’re building our long-range plan,” JP Allain, who heads the Energy Department’s Office of Fusion Energy Sciences, told the Wall Street Journal. “That’s very frustrating, as you can imagine.”

In some ways, the competition between the United States and China is not just a battle of wallets and wills, it’s a battle of ideologies. A recent op-ed in the South China Morning Post contends that “the hot tech field may have become a genuine contest between Chinese state capitalism and American ‘free market’ capitalism.” And it turns out you can generate a whole lot of research and development momentum when you can write clank checks without bipartisan decision-making processes and pesky regulatory hurdles protecting the environment, markets, and workers. 

While “US billionaire oligarchs” including Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, George Soros, Peter Thiel, and OpenAI’s Sam Altmman have gotten deeply involved in the push for nuclear fusion in the United States, it remains to be seen whether they are any match for the Chinese state machine.

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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