China claims major fusion advance and record after 17-minute Tokamak run

China’s Hefei Institutes of Physical Science has claimed a new world record for maintaining a steady-state high-confinement plasma operation, a feat needed to create a fusion reactor that in theory will produce vast amounts of energy at little cost.

The operation was performed in the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) which, according to the institute, maintained the operation for 1,066 seconds – almost 18 minutes and considerably longer than the previous record of 403 seconds the facility achieved in 2023.

Creating plasma and keeping it contained is hard. Tokamaks do it in a chamber, often doughnut-shaped, that contains gases that are heated to high temperatures and subjected to enormous pressure until they becomes a plasma. That’s just the start of the fun, as that plasma is so hot it must then be contained with giant magnets lest it burn a Tokamak’s walls.

Keeping the plasma hot, and contained, is no mean feat. So is inducing nuclear fusion in the plasma.

Both are definitely feats worth attempting because the International Atomic Energy Association rates the energy output of a fusion reaction as nearly four million times greater than the result of burning oil or coal, and four times greater than is possible with the nuclear fission process used in current nuclear power plants.

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You can see evidence of fusion’s awesome power most days: it’s what makes the Sun shine.

Fusion occurs all the time on and within Sol, which has abundant energy and gravity to make it happen.

Here on Earth, creating hot plasma requires so much energy that Tokamaks didn’t verifiably make more energy than they consumed until a 2023 experiment at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the USA.

The Hefei Institutes of Physical Science’s announcement makes no mention of how much heat its long plasma burn produced, or if it could produce a net energy gain. Nor does it detail the fuel used to produce plasma, an important factoid. It’s also just a press release – not peer-reviewed work.

The statement nonetheless describes the experiment an event of “monumental significance” and “a critical step toward the realization of a functional fusion reactor.”

That may be an overstatement. But Sony Yuntao, vice president of HFIPS and a director of China’s Institute of Plasma Physics, is quoted as pointing out that “A fusion device must achieve stable operation at high efficiency for thousands of seconds to enable the self-sustaining circulation of plasma, which is essential for the continuous power generation of future fusion plants.”

This is the first time researchers have gone on the record with a claim of a thousand-seconds of sustained high-confinement plasma operations, so maybe the vivid language the Institute used isn’t entirely unjustified – especially as rival Tokamak the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor last year pushed back the date on which it will first make plasma by a decade. ®