(CNN) – The bustling city of Shanghai celebrates national holidays with world-famous light shows, illuminating its skyscrapers with dazzling colors, beacons of Chinese innovation.
Here, scientists and engineers are working day and night on the world’s next great technological revolution, from 6G Internet and advanced artificial intelligence to next-generation robotics. It’s also here, on a discreet downtown street, that a small company called Energy Singularity is working on something extraordinary: nuclear fusion energy.
American companies and industry experts fear the United States is losing its decades-long lead in the race to control this nearly limitless form of clean energy as new fusion companies spring up in China and Beijing outspends Washington.
Nuclear fusion, the process that powers the Sun and other stars, is difficult to reproduce on Earth. Many countries have achieved fusion reactions, but sustaining them long enough to be used in the real world remains difficult.
Mastering the merger is an exciting prospect that promises wealth and global influence to the country that achieves it first.
The reward for this energy is its enormous efficiency. A controlled fusion reaction releases about four million times more energy than burning coal, oil or gas, and four times more than fission, the type of nuclear power used today. It won’t be developed in time to fight climate change in this crucial decade, but it could be a solution to future warming.
According to Jean Paul Allain, director of the US Department of Energy’s Office of Fusion Energy Sciences, the Chinese government invests between US$1,000 and US$1,500 million annually in fusion. By comparison, the Biden administration spent about $800 million a year.
“For me, the most important thing is not the number, but the speed at which it happens,” Allain told CNN.
Private companies in both countries are optimistic that they can get fusion power up and running by the mid-2030s, despite huge technical challenges to overcome.
The United States was one of the first countries in the world to seriously explore this futuristic tactic of fusion since the early 1950s when China entered fusion in the late 1950s. Recently, its pace has accelerated: China’s fusion patents have skyrocketed since 2015, and now have more than any other country, according to industry data published by Nikkei.
Energy Singularity, a Shanghai startup, is just one example of China’s breakneck speed.
In the three years since its inception, it has built its own tokamak faster than a comparable reactor has ever been built. A tokamak is a very complex cylindrical or donut-shaped machine that heats hydrogen to extreme temperatures and creates a soup-like plasma in which the nuclear fusion reaction takes place.
For a start-up company working on one of the world’s most difficult physics puzzles, the Energy Singularity is incredibly optimistic. And he has a reason for it: he has received more than 112 million US dollars in private investment and also achieved a global milestone: his current tokamak is the only one that used advanced magnets in a plasma experiment.
The magnets, known as high-temperature superconductors, are more powerful than the copper ones used in older tokamaks. According to MIT scientists investigating the same technology, they make it possible to create smaller tokamaks that can generate as much fusion energy as larger ones and can better confine the plasma.
The company plans to build a second-generation tokamak to prove its methods are commercially viable by 2027, and hopes to have a third-generation device capable of supplying power to the grid by 2035, the company said.
In contrast, tokamaks in the United States are aging, according to Andrew Holland, CEO of the Washington-based Fusion Industry Association. The United States therefore depends on the machines of its allies in Japan, Europe, and the United Kingdom to advance its research.
Holland was referring to a new 570 million fusion research park under construction in eastern China called CRAFT, due to be completed next year.
“We don’t have anything like that,” he told CNN. “Princeton’s Plasma Physics Laboratory has been upgrading its tokamak for 10 years. The second operational tokamak in the United States, DIII-D, is a 30-year-old machine. “There are no advanced fusion devices at US national laboratories.”
There is growing concern in American industry that China is beating the United States at its own game. Some of the next-generation tokamaks that China has built or plans to build are essentially “copies” of American designs, using components similar to those made in the United States, according to Holland.
China’s state-funded BEST tokamak, scheduled for completion in 2027, is a copy of one designed by Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a Massachusetts company working with MIT, Holland said. Both designs feature the same type of advanced magnets that Energy Singularity uses.
Another machine being made by a private Chinese company looks a lot like a tokamak designed by U.S. company Helion, Holland said.
He added that there is a “long history” of China copying American technology.
“They are fast followers and then they take the lead by dominating the supply chain,” Holland said, using solar panel technology as an example. “We are aware of this and want to ensure that this does not continue to be the case.”
CNN did not receive a response from China’s National Energy Administration when asked whether the state-funded fusion research copied or was inspired by American designs.
Nuclear fusion is a very complex process that involves forcing two nuclei that would normally repel each other together. One way to do this is to increase the temperature of the tokamak to 150 million degrees Celsius, which is 10 times the temperature of the Sun’s core.
When the cores are connected to each other, they release a large amount of energy in the form of heat, which can be used to turn turbines and generate electricity.
The United States has spearheaded fusion for decades; It was the first country to use fusion energy in the real world: in a hydrogen bomb.
In the early 1950s, the US military tested a series of nuclear weapons “fueled” by gases that created a fusion reaction in the Pacific Ocean, causing an explosion 700 times more powerful than that of Hiroshima.
Sustaining nuclear fusion for long periods of time is much more difficult, and while China is going full speed ahead with its tokamaks, the United States is finding an edge in another technology: lasers.
In late 2022, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California fired nearly 200 lasers into a cylinder containing a peppercorn-sized fuel capsule, the world’s first experiment to generate a net gain in fusion energy. This means that the process generated more energy than was used to heat the capsule (although the energy needed to power the lasers was not taken into account).
There are even more ways to achieve nuclear fusion, and the United States is betting on different technologies.
It is not impossible for this approach to bear fruit.
“We don’t know exactly what the best concept will be, and it may not be just one,” said Melanie Windridge, a British plasma physicist and chief executive of Fusion Energy Insights, an industry watchdog. Ultimately, there may be several viable approaches to fusion power, he told CNN. “In the long run, it will all depend on costs and other factors.”
But the tokamak, he says, is the best-researched concept.
“It’s been the most explored over time, so it’s the most advanced from a physics standpoint,” Windridge explained. “And many private companies are building on that.”
With the money China is investing in 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 Sun’s core – for more than 17 minutes, a world record and objectively stunning progress.
Mikhail Maslov of the UK Atomic Energy Authority described it as an “important milestone”, adding that maintaining long plasma pulses remains one of the biggest technical challenges for the commercialization of fusion energy.
While the Chinese government is pouring money into the merger, the United States has attracted much more private investment. Globally, the private sector has invested $7 billion in fusion in the past three or four years, about 80% of which has been in American companies, according to DOE’s Allain.
“In the United States, there is an entrepreneurial spirit capable of original thinking and innovation to fill some gaps, not only scientific but also technological.”
But if the Chinese government continues to invest more than $1 billion a year, it may soon eclipse American spending, even in the private sector.
And if these investments bear fruit, the colorful celebrations in Shanghai will not only be fueled by the merger, but will cast China in a whole new light.
