Media: China has basically caught up with the US in nuclear fusion technology!
According to an assessment, China has basically caught up with the United States in the development of nuclear fusion power generation technology.
The New York Times recently reported that China has made the development of nuclear fusion technology a priority and is rapidly catching up with the United States.
In July of last year, China established the China Fusion Energy Corporation and invested about $2.1 billion. This amount is more than twice the annual nuclear fusion R&D budget of the U.S. Department of Energy.
The New York Times pointed out that under the leadership of the government and with strong financial resources, China has basically caught up with the United States in nuclear fusion technology.
American federal fusion systems company (CFS) announced that it will build a pilot nuclear fusion power plant by 2027, and China is also expected to build its own nuclear fusion reactor around the same time.
This reactor, named "BEST," was built by the Institute of Plasma Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and is expected to be completed in the coming years.
Nuclear fusion, as the core energy technology of the next generation, is currently receiving much attention. Unlike nuclear fission power plants, nuclear fusion is a technology that converts the huge energy released when atomic nuclei are combined into electricity.
Different from nuclear power plants, it produces almost no nuclear waste and has no radiation risk, so it is called the next-generation environmentally friendly energy. However, due to the need for super high temperature exceeding 100 million degrees Celsius at normal pressure for the phenomenon of combining atomic nuclei, the technical implementation is difficult, and no country has successfully developed this technology so far.
China's "14th Five-Year" science and technology development plan released in October this year aims to achieve breakthroughs in nuclear fusion energy and other areas.
The plan also intends to use data from the ongoing construction of the BEST reactor to establish alternative reactor design schemes in the 2030s and 2040s.
The New York Times analysis pointed out that although the BEST reactor only completed its foundation construction in January 2024, satellite images from last year showed that it had completed about half, indicating that the construction speed was very fast.
Physicist Richard Pitts of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) told The New York Times: "China has benefited greatly from participating in the ITER project, and now they are using this knowledge to promote their own development. Every time I go to China, I am amazed by their amazing workforce and efficient work processes."
The New York Times analysis believes that the country that first realizes nuclear fusion technology may dominate in the next round of global energy competition. This is because the world is currently experiencing rapid growth in electricity demand, mainly due to the electrification of various industrial sectors and the competition in the artificial intelligence (AI) industry.
The United States has also realized this and is making efforts at the government level to accelerate the development of nuclear fusion technology. In October last year, the U.S. Department of Energy released a roadmap for the development and commercialization of nuclear fusion technology, announcing its goal to commercialize nuclear fusion reactors in the mid-2030s.
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the United States has currently invested about $9 billion in nuclear fusion technology research.
However, experts point out that even with such a large investment, the difficulty of achieving this technology remains great, and more funding will be needed to achieve the commercialization of nuclear fusion.
Original: toutiao.com/article/1854163197653002/
Statement: This article represents the views of the author himself.