U.S. in a Race with China to Develop Commercial Fusion Power Technology

Fusion energy is a promising form of power generation that aims to harness the same process that powers the sun and stars. Fusion involves combining two light atomic nuclei to form a heavier nucleus, releasing a large amount of energy in the process. This is the opposite of nuclear fission, which splits heavy atoms apart.

In fusion, the most common fuel is a mixture of deuterium and tritium (isotopes of hydrogen). To achieve fusion, the nuclei must overcome their mutual electrical repulsion to fuse. In some fusion energy schemes, temperatures of more than 100 million degrees Celsius are required. Thus, while the process is well-understood, scientists are still working to overcome engineering challenges related to plasma confinement, materials, and other technical details.

U.S. Fusion Research

The U.S. has been actively pursuing fusion energy development since the 1950s through government-funded research and more recently through increased private sector involvement. Major U.S. fusion research facilities and projects include:

• The Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science (SC), through its Fusion Energy Sciences (FES) program, has been a major driver of U.S. fusion research efforts.
• The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), which has conducted fusion research since the 1950s.
• The DIII-D National Fusion Facility, which is an SC scientific user facility in San Diego, California, operated by General Atomics for the DOE. DIII-D has been conducting groundbreaking fusion research since the mid-1980s.
• The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which was completed in 2009 and focuses on inertial confinement fusion.
• The U.S. is also part of the international ITER project, a large experimental tokamak being built in France to demonstrate the feasibility of fusion energy. The ITER project involves collaboration between 35 nations, including China.

Recent fusion milestones have included achieving net energy gain in a fusion reaction at the NIF in December 2022, though the overall process still consumed more energy than it produced. In recent years, there has also been increased private sector involvement in fusion energy development. In May 2023, the DOE provided $46 million in funding to eight private companies for fusion power plant design and research.

China’s Fusion Program a Threat

While the U.S. has been at the forefront of fusion research, China has also put a lot of money toward fusion lately. During a Senate Committee on Energy & Natural Resources Full Committee Hearing to Examine Fusion Energy Technology Development, held on Sept. 19, Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.), chairman of the committee, presented a chart (Figure 1) showing equity investments in fusion companies by country from 2010–2023. The U.S. has firmly outspent all other countries over the period, according to the chart, with about $4.28 billion invested, but China made major investments in 2022 and outspent all other countries including the U.S. in 2023.

“The U.S. is still in the lead, but you can see China entering the field in a big way,” Manchin said. “And China is not only trying to beat us in science, they’re also working to corner the fusion energy supply chain by securing the market for critical materials needed to build fusion power plants like [they] have for solar power and electric vehicle batteries. We cannot afford to lose our competitive edge in fusion energy technology.”

Manchin noted that China has mimicked the U.S.’s strategic plan for developing fusion energy. He said China is rapidly building its own research program and labs modeled after the DOE’s national labs.

Ranking Member Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) in his opening remarks noted that advances in fusion energy come at a time when America’s demand for electricity is expected to grow rapidly. “I brought an article here previously from The New York Times saying by five years from now that the need for energy nationwide would be like adding a new California to the grid as a result of all the areas where new energy is needed. And much of this demand is going to be driven by data centers powering artificial intelligence, by Bitcoin mining, by cloud computing—storage centers. If we can’t provide these facilities with affordable and reliable power, America is going to cede its leadership position to these critical technologies,” he said.

Barrasso continued, “China understands this. They understand the race for artificial intelligence is also a race to secure the energy to power the computers. This is one reason why China is aggressively competing with us on fusion.”

Barrasso then presented an article published in The Wall Street Journal in July in which the headline read, “Beijing Leads U.S. in Fusion Race.” He noted that one of the witnesses at the hearing, Dr. Jean Paul Allain, associate director of the FES, had been quoted in the article. According to Barrasso, the article suggests China is following the U.S.’s roadmap of how to commercialize fusion energy. “They [the Chinese] have this ability to copycat what we do and then try to advance it in ways to get ahead of us—to leapfrog us,” Barrasso said.

The U.S.’s Opportunity to Lead Fusion Development

“The promise of fusion energy cannot be understated,” Allain said in his testimony during Thursday’s hearing. “Harnessing energy from fusion reactions has the potential to unlock a resilient baseload and carbon-free source of energy essential to combating climate change. Further, with such broad and transformative potential, it is essential that we treat fusion energy as a national security imperative. The United States cannot afford to have other nations surpass its technological leadership and competitive edge. To realize fusion energy in a decadal time frame, we must take bold action to address the critical scientific and technological gaps that remain and enable fusion energy to scale.”

Allain said FES’s approach to realizing its decadal vision for fusion energy is built on three key actions. “First, we must drive innovation by closing critical science and technology gaps, investing in Fusion Energy Sciences to align with the bold decadal vision as well as recommendations of the FESAC [Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee] long-range plan [LRP] will help us accelerate at the necessary speed and scale,” he said.

Second, Allain said leveraging public-private partnerships is important. “The proposed public-private consortium frameworks enable participants from across the economy to support the development of fusion science and technology to realize commercial fusion energy,” he said. “Participants might include academia, government labs, private equity, loan programs, state and regional governments, philanthropic investors, and large-scale industries and corporations.”

The last action on FES’s list involves building a robust fusion technology manufacturing network. “This investment will produce innovations and scale essential fusion technologies, including internal components, advanced materials, and tritium management systems, needed to make fusion economically competitive at scale.”

Another witness at the senate hearing, Dr. Patrick White, research director with the Nuclear Innovation Alliance, suggested two items be prioritized as the U.S. works toward the commercialization of fusion energy. “First, we need to ensure that clean energy policies are technology-inclusive to create a clear market pull for fusion energy as a firm, clean-energy source. Second, private companies, academic researchers, national labs, and the federal government must closely coordinate and collaborate to implement and support, with appropriate federal funding and policies, an integrated fusion energy program that effectively and efficiently prioritizes efforts to accelerate fusion energy commercialization through all four stages of development, demonstration, and deployment,” he said.

China Is a Highly Engaged Competitor

White noted in his written testimony to the committee that China has a plan for its domestic fusion industry and the country is executing on it. “In Hefei, China, the Chinese Academy of Science’s Institute of Plasma Physics is coordinating and directing billions of dollars of research and development each year on commercial fusion energy. China’s scientists and engineers are already operating the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), one of the leading experimental fusion machines in the world. They are already constructing Burning Plasma Experimental Superconducting Tokamak (BEST), which is designed to serve as both a scientific and engineering demonstration machine—testing key fusion fuel cycle and tritium components for fusion energy—in China in three to five years. The China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR) is currently being designed and will be their first commercial demonstration machine in the 2030s as they envision widescale commercial deployment in the following decade. They’re also building enabling technology research facilities to help accelerate development. The Comprehensive Research Facility for Fusion Technology (CRAFT) will be completed in 2025 and will enable and accelerate technology development to support their scientific, engineering, and commercial demonstrations. Simply put, China has a plan for all phases of the fusion energy commercialization pathways and they are making investments to accelerate development and future deployment,” the testimony says.

Yet, Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) suggested the U.S. should consider collaborating with China, rather than competing with it. “When this technology becomes available, large-scale, commercial, it’s literally world-changing. This is one of the most important topics we’ll ever discuss around here,” King argued. He said the best thing anyone can do for the environment today is get China off of coal.

“Why does this have to be a competition with China?” King asked. “This isn’t a military technology. This is a civilian technology that’s going to affect all the rest of us. Why can’t this be a breakthrough in the relationship between the two countries where we work together? They’re going to get there and we’re going to get there. Together, we might get there five years sooner.”

White, however, suggested the competition between the countries is beneficial. “The more competition, the better, because that means we have more shots on goal to actually get this technology working,” he responded. “There is a way to think about how competition breeds innovation, and ultimately gets more smart people working on this topic, because it is something, as you said, that could be world-changing.”

Meanwhile, Jackie Siebens, director of Public Affairs at Helion Energy, a private company based in Everett, Washington, that is working to build the world’s first fusion power plant, said China is already working aggressively to lock down the fusion supply chain. “We see the real race here beginning after we actually demonstrate and deploy that first machine,” Siebens said. “When we think about all the demand we’re forecasting and already seeing from customers to deploy not only at scale here in the U.S., but around the world, we think it’s a national security issue to ensure that here in the U.S., and along with our allies, we can secure a supply chain that enables us to dominate this marketplace. Because if we don’t, China will and all of the geopolitical influence that accompanies that.”

“There is no question that we’re in a race,” said Allain. “The realization of fusion energy is one of the most significant challenges to mankind. So, we need to recognize that as we’re putting together a lot of our expertise and leveraging a lot of our resources, we need to keep in mind that it’s really important to have our eye on the ball and very much focus on closing the science and technology gaps that we’ve been talking about.”

Allain continued, “The good news is, after decades of investments in the public program—in the public sector—these have actually enabled the private sector to have been able to step up the investments toward fusion technology development. And this is good news.”

—Aaron Larson is POWER’s executive editor (@POWERmagazine).