According to Jimmy Goodrich, a senior advisor at the Rand Corporation, an organisation with close links to the US military, “whoever masters it (fusion energy) will gain enormous advantages – economically, strategically and from a national security perspective”. Goodrich is warning the Trump administration of the dangers of cutting funding, when China is mobilizing huge resources in this area.
Nuclear fusion, the source of the sun’s heat, could provide nearly unlimited power without releasing any of the greenhouse gases driving global warming. By fusing together atomic particles rather than splitting them, as in conventional nuclear power, no toxic radioactive waste is given off. Also, again unlike in conventional nuclear reactors, fusion has a built-in fail-safe mechanism, if there is a power failure the reactor automatically shuts down.
Research into fusion has continued for decades with only slow progress. Governments and firms have been reluctant to put in the resources needed because of high start-up costs and the long-term commitment needed, linked to formidable technological challenges. Fusion needs very high temperatures and pressures to happen. Fusing atomic particles is possible on the Sun because of the high pressure on its surface, caused by the enormous gravitation force. Even so, a sustained temperature of ten million oC is needed as well. Due to the much lower gravitational force on Earth, far higher temperatures are required, 100 million rather than ten million degrees.
Compounding the deterrent of high start-up costs, fragmentation by countries and firms of efforts to develop fusion is holding back progress. What is needed is a pooling of resources between countries and avoiding duplication of effort by coordinating R&D and agreeing on the most promising way forward. The development of the nuclear bomb in the second world war is sometimes given as an example of such an approach, where a working bomb was developed in three years. The project’s scale can be judged by its consuming ten percent of all US electricity production for several years. If similar relative resources had been put into fusion it could have been operational now. However, no post-war state was willing to risk the money needed; it only happened in the second world war because groups of imperialist powers were engaged in a life-or-death military struggle with their mortal rivals. None of the capitalist powers today see climate change as similarly important.
Until recently, it was thought commercial fusion power was still many decades away, maybe the end of the century. However, a breakthrough at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in the USA three years ago changed the picture. For the first time, more energy was generated in a reaction than it took to maintain the necessary temperature and pressure. This breakthrough put fusion higher up on the agenda of the big powers.
R&D on a ‘conventional’ fusion alternative to lasers, involving an electromagnet to contain the reactor fuel, has been slowly progressing for decades. (Using magnets to contain the reactor fuel is necessary because no material can withstand 100m degrees.) The Chinese bureaucracy recognised the potential of fusion to transform global energy supply and was also developing this technology. However, after the breakthrough in the USA using lasers, China reacted quickly with massive investment in what appears to be a similar approach, although China’s version is on far bigger scale.
Analysts at the Rand Corporation studied satellite pictures to map the development of China’s laser fusion project. This revealed a very large X-shaped facility under construction in Sichuan province, with each arm of the X-shape containing a laser, each focused on a central chamber to achieve the necessary 100 million degrees.
China will want to corner the market in fusion, as it has already done with other green tech, such as electric vehicles, solar, and increasingly wind power. It sees dominating the fusion market as an important aim, with the huge commercial advantage and geo-political influence this will give. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is a secondary factor for the Communist Party leaders.
How likely is it China’s leadership will succeed in their aim? It will be aided by the fragmentation of R&D investment in the West. In the USA, state backing on the required scale is in doubt under president Trump, a strong supporter of Big Oil, who see fusion as a commercial threat. Other US backers are a few billionaires, with diverse and competing approaches. The other main capitalist countries and blocks are developing their own projects, mostly using electro-magnets.
A long-term strategy, cooperation and pooling resources is needed to make rapid progress. In particular, a decision will need to be made about which technology to back, using electro-magnets or lasers. Agreement will be difficult, with green tech at the forefront of escalating inter-imperialist rivalry, and the stakes so high.
China has a big advantage over its rivals, partly because it is not a fully capitalist country. The Chinese bureaucracy can take a longer-term strategic view because it is influenced to only a limited extent by the capitalist ‘rules of the game’, in particular, the short-term quest for profits. China is currently funding both fusion technologies, but will be in a better position to make a decisive choice when the time comes because there are fewer competing interests. There is no possibility of one of the many Chinese billionaires independently investing in fusion. If they politically challenge the state, even to a limited extent – as, for example, Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, the Chinese version of Amazon, did – they are very rapidly brought to heal. Although there is the danger that an unaccountable bureaucracy can misallocate capital, without democratic checks from the working class including the scientists and technicians involved, it will also, for example, be very difficult for the albeit powerful fossil fuel interests to influence the leadership on such a vital strategic question.
Another advantage China has over the West is that lithium, as well as being needed for much green tech, is used to process one of the fuels, tritium, necessary for a fusion reaction. Although China does not have a monopoly of lithium reserves, it dominates the lithium processing market. The importance of this mineral was shown at the beginning of the present trade wars when, in response to Trump’s tariff walls, China banned all exports of processed lithium, a material in short supply. This quickly forced the US to return to the negotiating table and strike a deal, after Western corporations’ industrial production was disrupted.
China’s advantage was commented on by the analyst at the Rand Corporation cited at the beginning of this article. He noted the Biden administration was spending $800m a year on fusion, three times less than China according to some estimates. Supporters of fusion in the US are warning the US capitalists that China could be in a very strong position to dominate a strategically vital new technology. No longer could they rely on superior technological capability; China has now assimilated from the West sufficient expertise to master even the most advanced technologies, such as fusion.
Neither side in this conflict will act in the best interests of the environment, whoever wins the race for dominance. Despite their past green rhetoric, the US ruling class and its representatives will prioritise short-term profits at the expense of the environment and will not change. Although being world leaders in green tech, China’s greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise steeply, showing China’s rulers will represent their own national interest at the expense of the environment. None of the rulers of the big powers can be trusted to quickly introduce this potentially transformational new form of energy.
Pete Dickenson