Full Speed Ahead on China's Designs for Nuclear Energy

The city of Shanghai by night.  Lam Yik Fei/The New York Times/Redux  

"The Chinese are moving very fast."

"They are very keen to show the world that their program is unstoppable."

Mark Hibbs, senior fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 

  

"[A new $570 million fusion research park in eastern China under construction, called CRAFT, is on track to be completed next year.] We don’t have anything like that."

"The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory has been upgrading its tokamak for 10 years now. The other operating tokamak in the United States, the DIII-D, is a 30-year-old machine. There’s no modern fusion facilities at American national labs."

"[There’s a growing unease in the US industry that China is beating America at its own game. Some of the next-generation tokamaks China has built, or plans to, are essentially] copies [of US designs and use components that resemble those made in America. There is] a long history [of China copying American tech]."

"They’re fast followers and then take the lead by dominating the supply chain. We’re aware of this and want to make sure that’s not the way it goes forward."

Andrew Holland, CEO, Fusion Industry Association, Washington  

A satellite image from January 11, 2025, shows a massive nuclear project in Mianyang, China, that appears to include four laser bays pointing at a containment dome roughly the size of a football field, about twice as big as the U.S. National Ignition Fusion Facility.  Planet Labs PBC

 

In the past seven years China has built 13 nuclear reactors with plans for another 33 to get underway. The second most-populous country on the globe is fast becoming a world leader in nuclear power; its many reactors under construction equal the combined output of the rest of the world. The United States has always been the fore-runner in nuclear reactors, and now it sees China catching up and leaving them in the dust of China's rapid pace of construction. Building nuclear reactors is expensive. In the U.S. it is left in the hands of private industry which must seek out capital investment. In China, it is the government that invests and builds reactors.

 

Basically, American innovation and entrepreneurship leads the way in the United States. In China, stealth acquisition of foreign research, technological advancement and technical architecture gives it a heads-up advantage as it appropriates, refines and produces, from medical science to communication to energy production, leveraging what it acquires to advance its agenda by cutting out the preliminary research required to produce new and advanced technologies. Beijing's penchant for branding itself the world's foremost production colossus comes at the expense of other nations' inability to match its cost output.

 

In another five years, at the rate China is engaged in building new reactors, it is set to outpace the United States to become a global leader in nuclear power. Typically, while it was the U.S. that  split the atom for energy production, it was enterprising appropriation by China that will now outdistance the pace of American plans for clean energy production. French and American nuclear designs have been the matrix of China's technological expansion, as it cuts out delays caused elsewhere in the world by bureaucratic interference in progress. 

 

Commonwealth Fusion Systems SPARC tokamak being assembled in December 2024 in Devens, Massachusetts, is scheduled to use superconducting magnets to reach fusion ignition in 2027.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems

 

 Building delays and cost overruns that plague the construction of multi-billion-dollar nuclear reactions have been diminished in China by government decree in its rushed expansion of nuclear power. Its investment in  next-generation nuclear technologies is also outpacing the West as it invests heavily in fusion -- considered a limitless source of clean power. While the West grapples with the problem of disposing of nuclear waste, Beijing has not yet appeared to have initiated its own serious consideration of a solution to that particular dilemma.

 

Its rush is for a very particular mission; in all matters of production, acquisition and trade its aim is to become and to be acknowledged as the ultimate and most powerful, influential source of anything and everything the world needs to prosper, and be recognized as a world power equal to the status of the United States -- until, presumably, it manages to shove the U.S. to second place finish over the winner's line in the race for Number One Status. 

 

As it becomes proficient in design and export of sophisticated technologies, Beijing's clear objective is to be recognized as a primary supplier of nuclear power to the world at large. While competing for global supremacy, energy production is recognized as having emerged on a geopolitical field of conquest. The U.S. having positioned itself as the foremost supplier of fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal, China now dominates manufacture of solar panels, wind turbines and batteries in recognition of renewable power -- the market of the future.  

 

The preamplifier module increases the laser energy as it heads toward the target chamber at the National Ignition Facility. Photo courtesy Damien Jemison at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

 

With global concern continuing to mount over climate change, nuclear reactors are becoming increasingly popular since planet-warming emissions are sidelined with their use,  unlike coal and gas plants. Electricity can be produced continuously, unlike wind and solar power. The current White House plans to quadruple nuclear power capacity by 2050, hoping to develop more advanced reactor technology to power data centres.

 

In its plans for capturing the world market on nuclear energy Beijing has established a protocol for rapid and less expensive production of nuclear reactors; able now to assemble reactors within five to six years,whereas elsewhere in the world it takes twice as long. Modern nuclear power plants must conform to complex construction methods. To safely split atoms the reactor vessel is produced of specialized steel some 25 centimeters thick, to withstand bombardment by radiation, for decades-long lifetimes of use. 

 

Housed in three-story-tall massive containment domes made of steel-reinforced concrete to prevent leaks, thousands of kilometres of piping and wiring is designed to meet safety standards. Regulator approval can lead to delay, causing an increase in borrowing costs to finance these multibillion-dollar projects. Unlike anywhere in the West, Beijing relies on heavy government support where state-owned nuclear developers can claim government-backed loans.

 

As soon as they receive approval from the safety regulator, most reactors in China quickly break ground whereas in the United States such projects are delayed awaiting state governments' additional permits. By mid-century, Beijing's plans are to build hundreds of reactors. Private innovation leads to nuclear expansion in the United States; by contrast, with dozens of start-ups now working on new generations of smaller reactors, less expensive to build.

 

Chinese companies have built six reactors in Pakistan with plans to export more elsewhere in the world, on its way to its ultimate goal, to control and dominate these global market. "Maybe we can convince some of our allies not to buy Chinese reactors, but there are going to be plenty of other countries out there with growing energy demands. And if America isn't ready, we won't be able to compete", mused Paul Saunders, president of the Center for National Interest think tank.  

  

An aerial image of the under-construction Comprehensive Research Facility for Fusion Technology, or CRAFT, in the eastern Chinese city of Hefei, in November 2021. It is scheduled for completion in 2025.

Costfoto/Future Publishing/Getty Images