China Prepares To Take the Lead in Fusion Research

Nov. 30, 2022 (EIRNS)—An article in China’s Science and Technology Daily (in Chinese) on Nov. 28 depicts how advanced the Chinese thermonuclear fusion program has become and how focused it is on making new breakthroughs. The article focuses on the new Comprehensive Research Facility for Fusion Technology (CRAFT), which was commissioned in December 2018 and is scheduled to be completed in 2024, at the Hefei University of Science and Technology, also the home of the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST). The facility consists of 14 buildings and covers 400,000 m². The thermonuclear fusion science team at the Institute of Plasma at Hefei has conducted research on the comprehensive performance of materials, the performance of superconductors, superconducting magnets, fusion reactor vacuum chambers, divertor components, and the interaction between plasma and materials.

“At present, more than 100 key milestone construction tasks and the design, pre-research and test verification of core components have been completed, from the laboratory R&D and test stage of the subsystem to the development, on-site integration and debugging stage of some key components,” Hefei Materials Researcher Liu Zhihong told Science and Technology Daily.

CRAFT, however, is not a fusion reactor itself, but is designed to develop all the technologies for the next stage of fusion research beyond the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project based in France, namely, the Chinese Fusion Engineering Testing Reactor. It will be the penultimate stage before the development of the DEMO demonstration reactors to succeed ITER, which will be planned in several countries before the development of commercial reactors.