China strengthens its position in future energy race with 582-ton magnet for ‘artificial sun’

China recently completed the world’s largest fusion magnet, a 582-ton superconducting coil for its BEST tokamak, aiming to achieve fusion power by 2030. Forbes writes.

Last week China finished the heaviest piece of fusion hardware ever built. Its Institute of Plasma Physics completed and tested a 582-ton superconducting magnet in Hefei, a D-shaped coil 21 meters long and 12 meters wide. Every part of it, from the superconducting wire to the structural steel, was made in China. It is the largest magnet ever built for a fusion reactor. It stores three times the energy of the matching coils being made for ITER, the 35-nation project in France that has set fusion’s official timeline for two decades.

The magnet was built for BEST, the Burning Plasma Experimental Superconducting Tokamak now under construction.

Its job is brute containment. The reactor will heat plasma above 100 million degrees Celsius, roughly seven times hotter than the sun’s core, and no material wall can touch matter that hot for more than milliseconds. Sixteen of these coils will ring the doughnut-shaped chamber, each designed to carry 100,000 amperes, generating a magnetic field that holds the burning plasma in mid-air.

The program moved fast by fusion standards. The magnet went from design to final testing in six years․

BEST is slated for completion by the end of 2027, with fusion power generation demonstrated around 2030. On government timelines, China is now a decade or more ahead of the field it entered late.

This strategic move positions China to lead the future energy market.

The global race for fusion energy is fueled by the immense power demands of AI data centers.