Is America going to lose to Communist China the war for the energy source of the future — nuclear fusion? That’s the concern amid reports that the People’s Republic could put up millions to invest in new fusion technology, which shows promise of generating unimaginable supplies of energy with no carbon emissions. American private enterprise took an early lead, only to be co-opted by the heavy hand of the federal government.

That’s not to say Uncle Sam’s eggheads have been sitting on their hands. Late in 2022, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National lab “made history,” in their words, by “demonstrating fusion ignition for the first time in a laboratory setting.” There is still a way to go, to be sure. Yet the scientists raised hopes of creating a “reactor to supply limitless energy using the process that powers the sun,” we reported, and if developed, “It would be huge.” 

No wonder China is wasting no time in getting in on the action, as President Xi’s regime “races with the west to crack the problem of commercializing the groundbreaking clean energy,” the Financial Times reports. One Shanghai-based startup, Energy Singularity, is working up what the FT calls a “small-scale tokamak.” That’s the machine that America’s Energy Department expects to be the crucial component in “future fusion power plants.”

Energy Singularity envisions getting the upper hand on America’s fusion campaign by taking advantage of China’s technology and manufacturing sectors — which are booming. That’s in part thanks to the tilted global playing field on trade that has turned China into the workshop of the world. It enables Chinese firms to benefit from its own “deep supply chains for key fusion materials,” the FT notes, including the needed high-temperature superconductor material.

The Chinese company touts the “long-term accumulation” of what the FT calls “advantages in Chinese nuclear power technology.” The company’s co-founder, Ye Yuming, crows that “we have a cost advantage on materials, on staff, everything.” He adds that “the cost in China would be at least 50 percent lower than building the same kind of machine” in America. Hence the firm’s appeal for funding, including from “state-backed groups,” the FT reports.

This endeavor out of Shanghai raises echoes of the pioneering work in fusion undertaken in the early 1970s by a private American firm, KMS Industries, which vowed then to have, within five years, a working fusion reactor. The company was founded by a physicist at the University of Michigan, Keeve “Kip” Siegel. His plans, the Sun has noted, faced “much skepticism from scientists allied with the government.” They griped that the timetable was unrealistic.

Some of these public-sector scientists even complained that Siegel’s efforts “infringed on work the government had been doing,” the Sun observed, and “it became quite a feud.” Yet Siegel’s view was that the work was too important to be left merely to government researchers. “Competition in ideas and cooperation in work among industrial and government laboratories” on fusion, he argued, “is probably the most assured way of achieving success.”

It was in 1975, while Siegel was testifying before Congress about the merits of private-sector research — and asking for funding — that the visionary scientist collapsed. He died the next day. Some 50 years later, the promise of fusion power is yet to be fulfilled, but the ferment in China suggests that there was something to Siegel’s idea of giving the private sector a key role. It would be America’s loss if China’s Communist Party capitalizes on that insight before we do.