The vibrant city of Shanghai celebrates national holidays with world-famous light shows, illuminating skyscrapers in dazzling colours as beacons of Chinese innovation.
Here, scientists and engineers work day and night to create the next big leap in global technology, from 6G internet and advanced AI to next-generation robotics. It is also here, on an unassuming downtown street, that a small startup called Energy Singularity is working on something extraordinary: nuclear fusion energy.
American companies and industry experts worry that America is losing its decades-long lead in the race to master this virtually limitless form of clean energy, as new fusion companies pop up across China and Beijing outspends DC.
Nuclear fusion, the process that powers the sun and other stars, is extremely difficult to replicate on Earth. Many countries have achieved fusion reactions, but sustaining them long enough to use them in the real world remains elusive.
Mastering fusion is an attractive prospect that promises prosperity and global influence to the country that tames it first.
The price of this energy is its sheer efficiency. A controlled fusion reaction releases about four million times more energy than burning coal, oil or gas, and four times more than nuclear fission, the kind of nuclear power used today. It won’t be developed in time to combat climate change in this crucial decade, but it could be the solution to future warming.
The Chinese government is pouring money into the venture, investing an estimated $1 billion to $1.5 billion a year in fusion, said Jean Paul Allain, who directs the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Fusion Energy Sciences. By comparison, the Biden administration has spent about $800 million a year.
“For me, it’s more important than the number, how quickly they do this,” Allain told CNN.
Private companies in both countries are optimistic, saying they can connect nuclear fusion power to the grid by the mid-2030s, despite huge technical challenges that still remain.
The US was among the first in the world to make the futuristic move, having been seriously pursuing fusion research since the early 1950s. China’s foray into fusion came later that decade. More recently, the pace has picked up: Since 2015, the number of merger patents in China has soared, and it now has more than any other country, according to industry data published by Nikkei.
Shanghai-based startup Energy Singularity is just one example of China’s breakneck speed.
It built its own tokamak in the three years since its founding, faster than any comparable reactor ever built. A tokamak is a highly complex cylinder- or doughnut-shaped machine that heats hydrogen to extreme temperatures, creating a soupy plasma in which the nuclear fusion reaction takes place.
For a startup working on one of the world’s toughest physics puzzles, Energy Singularity is incredibly bullish. And rightly so: it’s raised more than $112 million in private investment and has also achieved a world first: its current tokamak is the only one to use advanced magnets in a plasma experiment.
The magnets, known as high-temperature superconductors, are stronger than the copper ones used in older tokamaks. They could enable smaller tokamaks that can generate as much fusion power as larger ones, and they could better contain plasma, according to MIT scientists studying the same technology.
The company plans to build a second-generation tokamak by 2027 to prove its methods are commercially viable. It expects to have a third-generation device capable of feeding power into the grid before 2035, the company said.
By contrast, the U.S.’s tokamaks are aging, said Andrew Holland, CEO of the Washington, D.C.-based Fusion Industry Association. As a result, the U.S. is relying on machines from its allies in Japan, Europe and the U.K. to continue its research.
Holland pointed to the construction of a new $570 million fusion research park in eastern China, called CRAFT, which is expected to be completed next year.
“We don’t have anything like that,” he told CNN. “Princeton Platinum Physics Laboratory has been upgrading its tokamak for 10 years. The other working tokamak in the United States, the DIII-D, is a 30-year-old machine. There are no modern fusion facilities at the U.S. national labs.”
There is a growing discomfort in the U.S. industry that China is beating America at its own game. Some of the next-generation tokamaks that China has built, or plans to build, are essentially “carbon copies” of U.S. designs and use components that resemble those made in America, Holland said.
China’s state-funded BEST tokamak, expected to be ready in 2027, is a copy of a tokamak designed by Commonwealth Fusion Systems, according to Holland, a Massachusetts company working with MIT. The two designs share the same type of advanced magnets that Energy Singularity uses.
Another machine being built by a Chinese company closely resembles a tokamak designed by the U.S. company Helion, Holland said.
There is a “long history” of China copying American technology, he added.
“They’re fast followers and then they take the lead by dominating the supply chain,” Holland said, using solar panel technology as an example. “We’re aware of that and want to make sure that’s not the way it goes forward.”
CNN has not received a response from China’s National Energy Administration on whether the state-funded fusion research was a carbon copy or inspired by U.S. designs.
Lasers vs. Tokamaks
Nuclear fusion is a very complex process in which two nuclei that would normally repel each other are forced together. One way to do this is to raise the temperature in a tokamak to 150 million degrees Celsius, 10 times that of the core of the sun.
When they bond, the nuclei release a large amount of energy in the form of heat. This heat can then be used to drive turbines and generate power.
The US has been a leader in nuclear fusion for decades. It was the first country to use nuclear fusion energy in the real world: in a hydrogen bomb.
In the early 1950s, the US military tested a series of nuclear weapons in the Pacific Ocean that were “boosted” by gases that caused a fusion reaction, resulting in an explosion 700 times more powerful than the explosion at Hiroshima.
Sustaining nuclear fusion for a long time is a much bigger challenge. While China is leading with its tokamaks, the US is ahead with another technology: lasers.
In late 2022, scientists at California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory fired nearly 200 lasers at a cylinder containing a fuel capsule the size of a peppercorn, in the world’s first successful experiment to generate a net gain of fusion energy. That means the process produced more energy than was used to heat the capsule (though they didn’t count the energy needed to power the lasers).
There are additional ways to achieve nuclear fusion, and the US is pursuing several technologies.
It is not impossible that this approach could be worthwhile.
“We don’t know exactly what the best concept is going to be, and it may not be,” said Melanie Windridge, a U.K.-based plasma physicist and CEO of Fusion Energy Insights, an organization that monitors the industry. There may ultimately be multiple viable approaches to fusion energy, she told CNN. “And then it comes down to cost and other factors in the longer term.”
But the tokamak is the best-researched concept, she said.
“Over time, it’s got the most research put into it, so it’s the most advanced in terms of physics,” Windridge said. “And a lot of the private companies are building on that.”
With the money China is pouring into research, the tokamak concept is developing rapidly. China’s EAST tokamak in Hefei kept plasma stable at 70 million degrees Celsius — five times hotter than the core of the sun — for more than 17 minutes, a world record and an objectively astonishing breakthrough.
Mikhail Maslov of the UK Atomic Energy Authority described it as a “major milestone”, adding that delivering long plasma pulses remains one of the biggest technical challenges to commercialising fusion energy.
While the Chinese government is pumping money into fusion, the U.S. has attracted much more private investment. Globally, the private sector has spent $7 billion on fusion in the past three to four years, about 80 percent of it by U.S. companies, according to the DOE’s Allain.
“In the US, you have that entrepreneurial spirit that can really think outside the box, innovate and really address some of these gaps, not just in the sciences, but in the technology,” he said.
But if the Chinese government continues to invest more than $1 billion annually, it could soon surpass U.S. spending, even in the private sector.
And if those investments bear fruit, Shanghai’s colorful celebrations will not only be fueled by mergers, but will also cast China in a whole new light.
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