How China’s huge industrial supply chain may lead to ‘artificial sun’ via nuclear fusion

[Nan Yang]

Illustration: Lau Ka-kuen

How China’s huge industrial supply chain may lead to ‘artificial sun’ via nuclear fusion​

• After a recent breakthrough in nuclear fusion, experts are predicting the start of a race to dominate the ‘holy grail’ of clean energy

Dannie Peng
Published: 11:00pm, 16 Jul 2024

In the eastern city of Shanghai, an experimental Chinese nuclear fusion power plant dubbed “HH70” just announced it has set a world record.

In mid-June, the machine – claimed to be the world’s first fully high-temperature superconducting (HTS) tokamak device – successfully obtained its first plasma.

In the world of nuclear fusion, it is no mean feat. And in a world striving to find clean, cheap and limitless energy, it is great news. After all, there is a reason why nuclear fusion is known as the “holy grail” of clean energy.

According to the device’s developer, Shanghai-based fusion energy company Energy Singularity, the HH70 also created another record: the fastest development and building of a superconducting tokamak device.

The HH70 full high-temperature superconducting tokamak device has just obtained its first plasma, but could this achievement spark a nuclear fusion global energy race? Photo: Energy Singularity

In a recent interview with the state-run China Global Television Network (CGTN), Guo Houyang, co-founder and CTO of Energy Singularity, said the HH70 is smaller and cheaper to build, and was constructed in just two years.

This is an achievement largely backed by China’s thriving industrial chain and engineering strength. The HTS tapes used in the HH70’s magnetic system are supplied by Shanghai Superconductor, a domestic company that has become a major global supplier since its inception in 2011.

Even though the HH70’s achievement is not going to see the successful commercial production of fusion power straight away, the industry around it is already preparing for the next clean energy race.

But the developer of the technology and the winner of the race do not necessarily go hand in hand. In 2008, Tesla unveiled the world’s first electric vehicle in the US. Yet now, China clearly dominates the EV industry.

Yasmin Andrew, a researcher in the department of physics at Imperial College London, said there are several private companies around the world currently working to develop HTS technology for fusion, but HH70 was the first tokamak to achieve a plasma.

Although the fusion technology is still in its infancy, the quest to generate carbon-free energy like the sun has gradually become more of an engineering endeavour.

Dennis Whyte, former director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Centre at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told the Post that as fusion technology advances, the supply chain and technology development are critical.

“It is no longer just studied for science’s sake but is pivoting towards implementation as a new energy source,” he said.


Andrew Holland, CEO of the Fusion Industry Association (FIA), a non-profit organisation based in Washington, told Reuters in an interview in March that one fear is fusion will follow the pattern of the solar industry, where much of the technology was invented in the US but manufacturing came to be dominated by China.

“It’s very clear that China has ambitions to do the same thing, both in the supply chain and in the developers,” he said. “It’s time for the US to respond to this challenge.”

This is not an unfounded warning. In sectors such as photovoltaics and electric vehicles, while the technology did not originate in Chinese laboratories, with their powerful manufacturing capacity, Chinese companies have consistently made their products more competitive than their Western rivals.

The founder of a Chinese fusion start-up echoed the possibility raised by Holland.

He agreed that it was “very likely” and said China is really ahead of the game when it comes to integrating technology development into real-world applications.

Nuclear fusion is seen as the ultimate solution to the world’s energy needs. While nuclear fission splits atoms – such as uranium – apart to generate energy (the process currently used in nuclear power plants worldwide), nuclear fusion combines atoms to release large amounts of energy without creating long-lasting radioactive waste.

It is the same process that has kept the sun burning for the past 5 billion years – which is why fusion is often called “artificial sun”.
But to achieve fusion, hydrogen atoms must be heated to extremely high temperatures – over 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit) – and confined long enough to fuse them into heavier atoms.

Once considered the realm of science fiction, in recent years private companies and research organisations around the world have been striving to make nuclear fusion a reality.

Most efforts have focused on “magnetic confinement” technology, which heats and compresses plasma, a hot, charged gas, in a giant doughnut-shaped reactor called a tokamak, invented by Soviet physicists in the 1950s.

Technically, the HH70 is not the first or most powerful of its kind. Back in 2013, Tokamak Energy, a company set up in 2009 as a spin-off from the UK Atomic Energy Authority, reported on a similar device made of high-temperature superconductors.

And HH70’s magnetic field, a key measure of a fusion device, is 0.6 tesla, much less powerful than one competitor recently built by a team at MIT, which surpassed 20 tesla.

This result is a major milestone in answering the question of feasibility of [high-temperature superconducting’s] use

Yasmin Andrew


But Andrew from Imperial College London described the achievement as “a significant step for the field” because it provides an important proof of principle for future tokamak designs.

“The application of HTS for tokamaks is an active area of global investigation, so this result is a major milestone in answering the question of feasibility of its use,” she said.

Magnetic confinement fusion technology uses superconducting magnets to generate strong fields. According to Andrew, compared to low-temperature superconductors, HTS has the potential to access stronger magnetic fields, leading to smaller machines that are cheaper and faster to build.

Until now, projects such as the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) – a mega-project in France in which 35 nations are working together to build the world’s largest tokamak – have used low-temperature superconductors. However these require a cumbersome system to cool the magnets – at an astronomical cost.

Over the past decade, however, HTS materials have begun to move out of the laboratory and into the hands of downstream customers in consistent quality and quantity, coinciding with the active trend of private fusion company formation in recent years.

“China is a key player in this emerging market,” Andrew said, adding that companies in the EU, US and China are leading the high-temperature superconducting industry at the moment.

In the 1980s, a class of HTS materials called REBCO (rare earth barium copper oxide) were found to be capable of carrying very high current densities at temperatures up to 20 Kelvin, but because they are brittle, it took nearly three decades for researchers to make wires from them.

In 2011, a laboratory at Shanghai Jiao Tong University became the first in China to produce a wire 100 metres (328 feet) long from the material. In the same year, the Shanghai Superconductor was established to pave the way for this scientific breakthrough to be translated into commercial applications.

The HH70 was also built in record time, giving hope for future development of the “ultimate” clean energy source. Photo: Energy Singularity

According to the company’s website, it is now one of the six international manufacturers that can mass-produce HTS tapes of more than 100km (62 miles) per year, and its products are sold to major fusion power developers both in China and overseas.

In 2021, collaborating with MIT, Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) – an American start-up spun out of MIT and founded in Cambridge in 2018 – successfully developed the world’s first magnet that can be used for nuclear fusion with a magnetic field of 20 tesla.

Its magnet is made of high-temperature superconducting material, and Shanghai Superconductor was one of the three tape suppliers behind the feat.

“China has done well in establishing the foundations for fusion technology supplies in general, with companies like Shanghai Superconductor,” Whyte from MIT said, although he also noted strong competition from companies in the US, Japan and South Korea.
The increasingly mature industrial chain is accelerating efforts to pursue commercial fusion energy in China.

In October 2021, Startorus Fusion was founded in Shaanxi province in northwest China. Founder Chen Rui highlighted how the growth of upstream suppliers has made fusion technology more commercially available.

“The birth of new materials like HTS allows us to design a relatively compact device in two or three years to prove the feasibility of fusion at a much cheaper cost, such as less than 1 billion yuan [US$137 million].”

Energy Singularity, which was founded in the same year as Startorus Fusion, says it is leveraging “recent breakthroughs of and strong synergy among HTS magnets, advanced tokamak physics and AI technologies” to develop fusion energy.

This is not just happening in China. According to the FIA, since 2018, huge investments have been poured into this industry and the number of fusion companies has mushroomed, especially since 2020.

Nuclear fusion, an energy technology that The Diplomat described in a June article as “the next frontier in both climate change and great power competition”, is attracting major countries to raise the stakes, from financial investment to political support.

In September, Lu Tiezhong, chairman of China National Nuclear Power, said that the first electricity generated by controlled nuclear fusion “must come from our country, and we are working towards this goal”.

In December, Beijing announced the creation of a new state-owned company, China Fusion Energy, with the task of pooling resources from across the country to bring a nuclear fusion reactor to life.

China aims to build an industrial prototype fusion reactor by 2035 and to have the technology in large-scale commercial use by 2050.

Meanwhile in December, nine organisations secured contracts worth a total of £11.6 million (US$12.7 million) with the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) to develop innovative technologies for fusion energy.

And at the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference (Cop28), former US climate envoy John Kerry unveiled an international partnership initiative on fusion involving 35 country partners. Then in March, a funding bill signed by US President Joe Biden contained US$790 million for fusion science programmes for 2024.

Despite other countries’ efforts, according to Startorus Fusion’s Chen, China has the advantage in the engineering implementation of nuclear fusion technology.

He said the integrity of the supply chain, experience in large-scale manufacturing, its vast workforce and policy support all work to China’s benefit.

In terms of the supply chain, for example, thanks to its large domestic market and manufacturing base, China’s production of high-temperature superconducting materials has made significant progress, and suppliers may further reduce prices and improve performance – which is crucial for the magnet system in tokamak devices.

At the same time, through more than two decades of participation in the ITER project in France, China has developed a large talent pool of outstanding fusion engineers.

Despite these favourable conditions, Chen stressed that this does not mean China is bound to dominate the global fusion industry.

“International cooperation, technological innovation and sustainable development strategies will be the key factors determining the future landscape of the fusion industry,” Chen said.