My Take | In gold rush for nuclear fusion, it’s Chinese authoritarians vs US billionaire oligarchs

The science behind nuclear fusion is certainly fascinating, and a technology that promises virtually unlimited low-cost energy is mind boggling. But there is, I think, a missed political angle that may be just as intriguing.

Nowadays, every pundit and their dog, and that includes yours truly, fret about competing state-backed industrial policies between China and the West. While the outcome in this emerging contest will certainly be momentous, it’s not so interesting from an ideological point of view because the opposing sides essentially agree on the same method of competition. Both sides try to outdo each other by subsidising state-backed national champions and promoting select industrial sectors.

But with the emerging nuclear fusion tech, we may be seeing a genuine contest between Chinese authoritarian state capitalism and American oligarchic “free market” capitalism.

Shanghai-based start-up Energy Singularity has attracted worldwide attention as it has become the world’s first commercial company to build and operate an all-superconducting tokamak. And what’s that? The tokamak is a nuclear reactor built to generate high-temperature superconducting (HTS) to create plasma as hot as the sun using nuclear fusion. Hence the popular phrase, “artificial sun”, is often used in news headlines.

Its work is built on previous research pioneered at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and further developed by such tech firms as Shanghai Superconductor and Startorus Fusion.

Unlike nuclear fission which splits atoms to release energy like a nuclear explosion, fusion, as the term suggests, fuses atoms together so it produces none of the deadly radiation. Only half a dozen companies in the world produce the special wiring capable of reaching the superconducting stage via a magnetic field confinement technique to compass the plasma in a gaseous state, in the chamber of the reactor.