Introduction

"Clean," "Safe," and "Unlimited," nuclear fusion is regarded as the ultimate solution to human energy needs. One gram of fusion material can release 90,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity...

"2021 was a remarkable year for fusion development; I don't think we've ever had a year like this in fusion history," said Steven Cowley, Director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.

On the night of December 30, 2021, the Institute of Plasma Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Hefei, China's major national scientific facility EAST (Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak), once again set a world record by achieving 1056 seconds of long-pulse high-parameter plasma operation, the longest duration high-temperature plasma operation in a tokamak device worldwide. Previously, EAST also set the world record by maintaining plasma at 100 million degrees Celsius for over 100 seconds. Other notable achievements include the HL-2M device from the Southwestern Institute of Physics and the Xuanlong 50 from the ENN Energy Group, each realizing discharge and achieving significant technological breakthroughs. Reaching and maintaining a plasma temperature of 100 million degrees Celsius has opened the door to controlled fusion power generation.

On December 21, 2021, the Joint European Torus (JET) fusion device in Oxford, UK, produced the highest sustained energy pulse ever, releasing 59 MJ of energy over a 5-second reaction time.

Several commercial companies, including Tokamak Energy in the UK, Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) in the US, HELION, and TAE, have all moved up the timelines to achieve fusion power generation by 2030. The world's largest fusion device, ITER in France, also completed the installation of its main components in 2021.

While the magnetic field strength of low-temperature superconducting coils is limited, the maturity of HTS materials offers a more feasible accelerated path for compact fusion technology solutions.

According to CFS on its official website, the maturity of HTS materials has made magnetic confinement fusion possible. Founded in 2018, CFS achieved a significant milestone breakthrough within just three years: in September 2021, CFS' s HTS magnet provided a steady magnetic field of up to 20 Tesla. This magnet's potential has paved the way for net power output from fusion and has become the world's strongest fusion magnet. This technological breakthrough was listed among MIT Technology Review's top 10 breakthrough technologies globally, bringing the largest commercial financing in fusion development history for CFS. CFS has already began to construct an experimental reactor, expected to be completed by 2025. If successful, CFS plans to establish a fully commercial power plant within the next decade.

Google AI's DeepMind and physicists from the Swiss Plasma Center at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) have jointly developed a reinforcement learning algorithm system that successfully accelerates the exploration of optimized solutions for plasma operation control.

Aiming for commercial power generation by 2030, Tokamak Energy in the UK also became the first commercial company to achieve continuous plasma operation at 100 million degrees Celsius. Chris Kelsall,CEO of Tokamak Energy, stated that the combination of HTS magnets and spherical tokamak is the best way to achieve clean and low-cost commercial fusion energy.

Every step reinforces decades of technological breakthroughs and accumulations, perfecting the grand vision of fusion.

Globally Leading companies like Google and Amazon have already started investing in fusion and top billionaires like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos also invested in fusion commercial companies. In February 2022, The Wall Street Journal quoted industry insiders saying, "Wave after wave of funds are flowing into the fusion field, signaling the expansion of the fusion industry.

Data from PitchBook shows that the fusion industry has attracted nearly $5 billion in capital financing in recent years and nearly $3 billion in 2021 alone. According to the report by the Financial Times in November 2021(incomplete statistics), the investment scale in the US fusion field reached 2.3 billion euros in 2021. In the following month, four companies, HELION, TAE, General Fusion, and CFS, received approximately $4 billion in financing, with CFS alone securing $1.85 billion.

The surge in fusion investments includes actions by Chinese companies such as Tencent investing in the UK's First Light Fusion and investments in Shanghai's Energy Singularity by Mihayou and NIO Capital. In April 2022, Energy Singularity, founded in June 2021, completed its first round of financing, raising nearly 400 million RMB.

Andrew Holland, CEO of the Fusion Industry Association, believes that in the 2030s, the main competition in fusion will not be scientific or engineering problems but manufacturing problems—how quickly you can build.

According to data released by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), by the end of 2021, there were 96 fusion devices in operation worldwide, 9 under construction, and 29 planned. Public utility organizations owned a total of 107 fusion devices. Countries with fusion experimental devices include China, France, the US, the UK, Germany, Japan, Russia, South Korea, Canada, the Netherlands, and India.

On March 15, 2022, the U.S. government announced, "We are formulating a bold ten-year vision to accelerate nuclear fusion." On March 17, at the Fusion Summit held at the White House, U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm stated that the Department of Energy would now coordinate all its fusion energy research institutions to advance this technology. In the U.S. Congress's comprehensive appropriation bill for fiscal year 2022, $713 million was allocated to support fusion research and development.

On October 1, 2021, the UK government unveiled the "National Fusion Strategy," launching the "Spherical Tokamak Energy Production Program," which plans to establish a nuclear fusion power plant by 2040. In this strategic plan, "the UK aims to build a world-leading fusion industry and export fusion technology to the world over the coming decades," has become a clear national strategic goal.

China's fusion engineering project, CFETR, is also planned to be completed in the 2030s.

The late Soviet physicist Lev Artsimovich, one of the inventors of the tokamak device, once said, "When society needs fusion, fusion will be ready."

Project Cases

| Controllable Nuclear Fusion Project — Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), USA

CFS in the USA uses HTS tapes to wind large-diameter, 20T strong-field magnets for SPARC and ARC superconducting fusion applications. The first phase of the magnet was successfully tested in September 2021. In March 2024, CFS and MIT jointly published a paper, verifying the feasibility of superconducting magnets in commercial fusion applications.

SST has supplied more than 110 kilometers of ST-04-E high-performance HTS tape with 30-micron ultra-thin substrate for this project, used in the development of fusion conductors and magnets.

Source：Commonwealth Fusion Systems Official website

| Controllable Nuclear Fusion Project — Tokamak Energy, UK

Tokamak Energy's ST-40 spherical tokamak reactor reached the temperature of 100 million degrees Celsius in March 2022, marking a significant milestone in commercial nuclear fusion research. In February 2023, the DEMO4 magnet was completed and will be assembled and tested in the fusion power plant.

SST has been in deep cooperation with Tokamak Energy, supplying batches of wide high-performance HTS tapes from 2017 to 2020 for the development of strong-field magnets and superconducting controllable nuclear fusion.