World’s 1st high-temperature superconducting tokamak built in China

Chinese startup takes the lead in nuclear fusion by building a tokamak that is smaller and cheaper than conventional fusion reactors.

4 comments

Fusion is a field where you can't have the "statup mindset": investments are in hundreds of millions and take at best a decade (and most likely two) to pay off. That's one field where it can't go anywhere without public funding.

It is very possible that China gets there first, considering how ridiculous western fusion efforts have been.
- We've proved we can do fusion, but we're still at the stage of just having singular reactions. None of these are power stations with a continuous flow of output, and they're not even close to being so.
  
  I know. But we know it is "just" an engineering problem which can be solved at a high cost.
Currently, the highest Q value obtained from a tokamak is 1.53

I'm pretty sure this is the value of Q achieved by the National Ignition Facility, which uses inertial confinement, not a tokamak. As far as I know, the record Q for a tokamak is still only 0.67, set by the Joint European Torus back in 1997.