China’s ‘artificial sun’ fuels Western fears it has lost race to energy holy grail

Western governments and investors have spent much of the last week fretting about scientific breakthroughs from China.

Almost overnight, the artificial intelligence company DeepSeek rose from apparent obscurity to challenge America’s unassailable lead in AI, sending markets into a tailspin and sparking national security and data reviews among concerned officials.

Less widely noticed was the emergence of a grainy series of satellite images taken over the central Chinese city of Mianyang. The photos show a large X-shaped building, with four wings protruding from a central hub.

According to researchers at the national security think tank CNA, the images appear to show a giant laser nuclear fusion research centre. In such a facility, high-powered emitters in the four protruding structures fire lasers directly at a central chamber to heat fuel pellets to 100m degrees celsius, creating a reaction similar to the one that powers the sun.

Laser-ignited fusion is critical to simulating nuclear weapons explosions, but could also be a step to the holy grail of energy. If successful, nuclear fusion promises unprecedented levels of green and reliable power.

So far, US researchers have taken the lead in advancing the technology. Two years ago, scientists at California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory said an experiment had produced more energy from a fusion reaction than the power needed to create it, marking a momentous scientific breakthrough.

But the Mianyang facility appears to be 50pc bigger than its US counterpart and has been seen as the latest sign that China not only has ambitions to catch up with the West on fusion but overtake it.

‘Artificial sun’

A sign of how serious Beijing is taking this new energy arms race emerged last week when the Chinese Academy of Sciences announced that the country’s scientists had run an “artificial sun” – a fusion drive aimed at replicating the star’s reactions – for 1,066 seconds, more than double the previous record.

State media published celebratory photos of the doughnut-shaped “Tokamak” machine where the experiment took place, with a prominent Chinese flag poking out of the top.

Unlike nuclear fission – the splitting of the atom to release energy – fusion involves forcing two hydrogen atoms together to create a single element such as helium, producing incredible force in the process.

In the sun, atoms are pushed together by the star’s massive gravitational pull, whereas on Earth it requires extreme temperatures and powerful magnetic fields. If mastered, fusion promises to provide effectively infinite energy without the radioactive waste generated by fission.

Fusion has been an ambition since the postwar years – when China was an economic and technological minnow. However, despite long-standing hopes, scientists have so far been unable to harness the technology.

Stunted progression has enabled the Red Dragon to become a major player over the past 25 years, investing billions of pounds in the hope it can conquer fusion’s promise.

“There’s no question that they’re making tremendous progress, they see nuclear – both fission and fusion – as a big national priority,” says George Borovas, a nuclear energy lawyer at Hunton Andrews Kurth, and who sits on the World Nuclear Association’s board. “They have an objective. It’s very coordinated.”

Much of China’s original work in fusion came through partnerships with Western countries, particularly after the country joined the World Trade Organisation at the start of the new millennium.

In 2003, China joined the France-based International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter), a global project that dates back to the 1980s. Construction began on the project in 2010, but repeated delays pushed back a deadline for firing up the reactor from 2020 to 2025, and last year, bosses said it would now not turn on until 2034. It has been described as the “most delayed and most cost-inflated ­science project in history”.

Geopolitical tensions

While China remains a part of Iter, geopolitical tensions between its members have risen. And while Western projects have been hampered by delays, China has been rapidly developing its own industry.

A forthcoming China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor, a domestic alternative to Iter, is due to be completed around 2035, meaning it could well come online before the long-planned European project. Experts say that while fusion initiatives in the US and Europe are disjointed, China’s long-term plans are aided by huge amounts of state funding and high expectations, giving them a greater chance of success.

“Almost no weekends, no holidays for us,” Xianzu Gong, a scientist at the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak, China’s current top research station, told Nature last year.

The race to master fusion has been given new impetus by net zero targets, but also by the rise of power-hungry artificial intelligence, which tech executives have said could suck up as much as a quarter of US electricity demand by the end of the decade.

The concern now is that China has surpassed the West. A report last year from the Washington-based Information Technology and Innovation Foundation found that America and China were “at a par” in developing fusion, but that China’s ability to build reactors at scale – 150 are planned between 2020 – would give it an advantage in deploying the technology.

The report found that, unlike China, the US lacked “a comprehensive nuclear fusion strategy”. The US government also spends half of what Beijing does on fusion research, with much more of the financing in the private sector.

A series of generously-funded fusion start-ups are now promising a nimble, innovative approach to the technology, many backed by Silicon Valley billionaires. Helion, a start-up bankrolled by venture capitalist Peter Thiel and OpenAI boss Sam Altman, has promised to provide Microsoft with fusion energy by 2028, a goal it stuck to last week when it raised $425m (£341m) from investors including SoftBank.

Britain also has a crop of promising start-ups such as Tokamak Energy and First Light Fusion, as well as a longstanding scientific pedigree. However, last year, the Fusion Industry Association (FIA) lobby group warned that the UK risks squandering its lead in the field to China.

It said that while Britain had “probably the greatest concentration of fusion skills on the planet clustered around Oxfordshire”, the Government needed to lay out a plan for how fusion would eventually connect to the grid. Only then will investors have enough clarity to get involved.

Andrew Holland, the FIA’s chief executive, says that the industry is not calling for a Manhattan Project-sized initiative, but that more support will be needed to match China. “Competing against the world’s second-largest economy as a private company doesn’t seem like a fair fight,” he says.

“I don’t consider China to be in the lead right now,” Holland says. “But am I worried about them in the future? The answer is yes. It’s very clear that the Chinese are able to build much faster.”

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