The Future: Made In China

Another large fusion breakthrough rose in the EAST on Monday, January 20th - maintaining a steady-state high-confinement plasma operation for a world record breaking 1,066 seconds. Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) - which is also known as China’s “artificial sun” - achieved this feat; and by the way - the world record they beat was their own from 2023 of 403 seconds.

While we are quite a ways away from the promise of fusion energy - unlimited, clean energy - it is aggressively clear that China is ahead.

Energy and Growth

Graph showing the relationship between many countries’ GDP per person and their energy use per person, with some countries highlighted. While it’s not a direct causal relationship, it demonstrates that energy is a key necessity for economic growth.

Making the cost of energy effectively zero, and having it be clean, enables economic growth we can not even conceive of. Even as the innovations we are working on become more real - like superintelligent AI - they are likely going to always be constrained by energy.

Dominating Energy All Around

Like I mentioned before, usable fusion is still far away. But this isn’t stopping China from another massive energy innovation project which seems to be a large solar power plant in space. This is another massive project beyond the scale of anything the USA has done since the moon landing. This project is still in developmental phase - and execution matters more than talk — but America isn’t talkin’ or executin’.

As a third small point - China is currently building 27 nuclear power plants vs 0 (!!!!!!!!!!) in construction in the USA - and will generate more nuclear power than the USA by 2030 (5 years from now!!). (Source)

I won’t go into the other advantages China has in terms of energy innovation - I will leave that as an exercise for the reader to research.

The Fusion Fix?

I made a lot of the same points, that I will make here about fusion power, about AI in Nationalize AI - Part 5 - Superiority - but it seems like it makes little sense to have so many American firms competing to make fusion work by themselves.

Nationalization, and making the project a moonshot (think The Manhattan Project, the moon landing, etc) seems like the most appropriate move. Not only would this ensure that we could equitably distribute the benefit of fusion, but importantly the combined labor and resources. America has a proven ability to achieve groundbreaking results when it commits unified resources and effort.

Read more:

• https://phys.org/news/2025-01-chinese-artificial-sun-fusion-power.html
• https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/19/climate/nuclear-fusion-clean-energy-china-us/index.html
• https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/nuclear-energy/chinas-artificial-sun-shatters-nuclear-fusion-record-by-generating-steady-loop-of-plasma-for-1-000-seconds