Caixin News, October 27th (Editor: Shizheng Cheng) Recently, there is another challenger in the field of nuclear fusion power generation that has reported a milestone breakthrough.

Tokyo startup Helical Fusion held a press conference on Monday, announcing progress in developing high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets essential for fusion reactors, marking an important step toward the company's goal of achieving "commercial fusion energy."

As background, nuclear fusion engineering is often called "artificial sun" - generating energy by mimicking the principle of the sun's operation. Humans are heating the isotopes of hydrogen (usually deuterium and tritium) to temperatures far higher than the core of the sun, forming a superheated gas called plasma. In this state, atomic nuclei undergo fusion, releasing a huge amount of energy.

Due to the high temperature of the plasma, no material can withstand contact with it, so high-temperature superconducting magnets are needed to generate a magnetic field to confine it within the reactor. Unlike the mainstream tokamak design globally (which means "magnetic coil toroidal vacuum chamber" in Russian), Japan's fusion industry has been studying its unique "helical magnetic confinement technology."

(Schematic of Helical Fusion's first nuclear fusion reactor Helix KANATA)

Helical Fusion announced on Monday that the high-temperature superconducting magnets it developed successfully completed the scheduled tests under conditions simulating a real fusion reactor. These magnets, assembled into coils, are full-sized and intended for actual reactors.

At the same time, to meet the "three-dimensional helical structure" design, Helical Fusion adopted a solution of combining multiple high-temperature superconducting tapes, enabling its high-temperature superconducting conductor samples to have both performance and "flexibility."

Regarding this recent verification, Helical Fusion claimed it is a "first-of-its-kind achievement that any European or American company has never reached."

Helical Fusion was established in 2021, integrating the results of the National Institute for Fusion Science in Japan, with the goal of making its KANATA demonstration reactor the world's first commercially viable fusion power plant in the 2030s. According to reports, the commercial viability of a fusion power plant has three criteria: 1) stability for continuous operation throughout the year; 2) output energy exceeding consumption; 3) the ability to perform regular maintenance on components.

For this cutting-edge field, Helical Fusion, based in Japan, also faces the disadvantage of lacking "financial strength." The company stated in July that it had completed a Series A funding round of 2.3 billion yen (approximately 107 million yuan), bringing total capital, including subsidies and loans, to 5.2 billion yen.

Helical Fusion's CEO Takaya Taguchi also said on Monday: "In the past five years, countries such as China and the United States have invested over 1 trillion yen in the fusion field. Meanwhile, Japan only invested 100 billion yen during the same period."

However, with the Russia-Ukraine conflict, global warming, and the large-scale construction of artificial intelligence data centers, the prospects for fusion energy are increasingly attracting attention from governments and investors around the world. For example, in Japan, the new Prime Minister Asahi Hayato mentioned in her first policy speech last Friday that the Japanese government will aim to "quickly realize the application of fusion energy in society." It is reported that during US President Trump's visit to Japan this week, the two countries will sign an agreement on advanced technologies, including fusion energy.

In the United States, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a spin-off from MIT, plans to build the first "grid-level fusion power plant" in Virginia, aiming to achieve electricity generation in the early 2030s.

According to Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning's introduction last weekend, China's nuclear fusion device BEST is expected to be completed in 2027, potentially becoming the first device in human history to achieve fusion power generation.

(Caixin News, Shizheng Cheng)

Original: https://www.toutiao.com/article/7565877784246026762/

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