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Interface News reporter | Dai Jingjing

Another Chinese commercial nuclear fusion company has come to the fore, but this time it is not using tokamak technology.

"We have completed more than one round of financing since our establishment, totaling more than 50 million yuan." On August 5, a relevant person in charge of Hanhai Energy (Chengdu) Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Hanhai Energy) said in an interview with Interface News that in order to support the construction of the first generation of fusion devices next year, the company has now started a new round of financing.

Hanhai Juneng was established on December 30, 2022 and is registered in Chengdu, Sichuan. According to Tianyancha APP, Hanhai Juneng completed seed and angel rounds of financing in March 2023 and April 2024, with investors including Qingzhou Capital, Qiji Chuangtan, Huaying Capital and Houshi Fund.

Among them, Qingzhou Capital was founded in 2016 and is a long-term venture investor in early-stage hard technology companies;Qi Ji Chuangtan was founded in 2018. Its founder and CEO is Qi Lu, former president and COO of Baidu, executive vice president of Microsoft, and executive vice president of Yahoo.

This is the latest domestic commercial nuclear fusion player to appear in the public eye. Currently, China’s major commercial nuclear fusion companies includeEnergy Singularity Energy Technology (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Energy Singularity), Shaanxi Xinghuan Energy Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Xinghuan Energy), Fusion New Energy (Anhui) Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Fusion New Energy) andENN Group, etc.

Xiang Jiang, the founder and CEO of Hanhai Energy, has more than 20 years of research and work experience in the field of controlled nuclear fusion.He previously worked at the Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics, China Academy of Engineering Physics.

The company's chief scientific director Wu Songtao is the head of the overall project team for the vacuum chamber of the Tokamak Department of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) and the coordinator and secretary of the ITER High-level Coordination Meeting. He has served as assistant to the general manager and deputy chief engineer of the national major scientific project "EAST (HT-7U) Superconducting Tokamak Nuclear Fusion Experimental Device".

Chengdu is ChinaThe earliest professional research institute engaged in nuclear fusion energy development——Nuclear IndustrySouthwest Institute of Physics is home to a strong nuclear industry system. On December 29 last year, China National Nuclear Corporation took the lead in launching the first nuclear power plant in Taiwan, jointly with 24 central enterprises, research institutes, and universities.The Controlled Nuclear Fusion Innovation Consortium alsoAnnounced its establishment in Chengdu.

This is an important reason why Hanhai Energy chose Chengdu as its location. In June 2023, Hanhai Energy and the nuclear industrySouthwest Institute of PhysicsA signing ceremony for the conceptual design and technology development contract for the HHMAX901 fusion experimental device was held.

"Hanhai Energy will carry out in-depth cooperation with the Institute of West China Physics, and gradually promote and develop technical cooperation with major research institutions and numerous experts in the domestic fusion industry, and build the first generation of experimental equipment and successfully discharge it within one year." Hanhai Energy said in a press release at the time.

Nuclear fusion is the process of combining light atomic nuclei into heavier atomic nuclei and releasing huge amounts of energy. Since the raw materials for fusion are relatively abundant and there is no pollution, controlled nuclear fusion has always been considered an important way for humans to solve energy problems.Considered the "ultimate energy source".

whenThere are three main technical routes for controlled nuclear fusion: gravity field confinement fusion, laser inertial confinement fusion and magnetic confinement fusion.Research devices include tokamaks, stellarators, reverse field pinches,Field inversionAnd magnetic mirror, etc.

Tokamak is known as the "artificial sun". The center of the device is a ring-shaped vacuum chamber with a coil wrapped around it, like a donut. When powered on, a huge spiral magnetic field is generated inside, heating the plasma inside to a very high temperature. Global scalemaximumofinternationalityITER, one of the scientific research cooperation projects, is a huge tokamak device.

With the advancement of high-temperature superconductivity, AI and other technologies,USACommonwealth Fusion SystemsCompany (CFS) buildCompactMagnetic Confinement TokamakDevice, the “successful” ignition of laser nuclear fusion at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in the United States, and other industry dynamics have made the fusion industry a hot topic. Since 2021, global commercial nuclear fusion companies have emerged.Industry financing increased by US$2.8 billion between October 2021 and July 2022.

However, the technology route chosen by Hanhai Energy is not tokamak, but a linear device of field reversal conformation (FRC) in magnetic confinement, which is comparable to the star American startup Helion.

FRC is a simpler magnetic confinement system without a toroidal field coil. The reverse current generated by the internal plasma will form a magnetic field opposite to the external magnetic field, so that the plasma as a whole forms a closed magnetic field structure, thereby achieving confinement of the plasma.

Scientists discovered the FRC phenomenon as early as the 1950s, but the materials, manufacturing level and R&D results at that time did not support FRC becoming the mainstream technology path.

1998, United StatesTAE Technologies was established to adopt and continuously verify FRC technology; Helion, an American company established in 2013, built experimental devices based on FRC technology. It has built the sixth-generation device Trenta, and the seventh-generation fusion prototype is named Polaris, which is expected to demonstrate net power generation capacity in 2024.

Helion Energy has received investments from Sam Altman, founder of Open AI in the United States, and companies such as Microsoft.May 2023, Microsoft signed a bet agreement with Helion to purchase 50 MW of fusion power from the latter in 2028.

The person in charge mentioned above told Jiemian News,Hanhai Energy is already preparing for the engineering of the device. The first generation of experimental equipment will be built in the second half of this year and completed in 2025.

"The second-generation device is expected to be planned and constructed starting in 2026, with the goal of being able to generate net electricity." The person in charge said that by 2028-2030, the company's continuously iterative devices will achieve a power generation capacity of 10-50 megawatts.

FRC's low cost, rapid iteration capability, and the advantage of realizing neutron sources in a short period of time are the main reasons why Hanhai Energy chose this technology route.

"Tokamak was the mainstream path for nuclear fusion in the past, but now is an era of technological explosion, and the competition is about who can iterate technology faster and achieve engineering." The above-mentioned person in charge pointed out that the cost of the first generation of Hanhai Energy's device is about 300 million yuan. Since it can be quickly modularized and iterated, the cost of subsequent devices will be cheaper, and ultimately it will have a great advantage in the cost per kilowatt-hour.

In addition, Hanhai Energy believes that the linear fusion technology route has the advantage of realizing neutron sources in the short term, and can generate certain revenue during the period of 2026-2028. Neutron sources can be used forIt is used in the fields of nuclear medicine, neutron photography, etc., and also provides a suitable neutron source experimental platform for the neutron irradiation test of the first wall material and the verification of tritium breeding program, which are urgently needed in the fusion industry.

July 17, local time,The Fusion Industry Association (FIA) released the "Global Fusion Industry Report 2024". A total of 45 nuclear fusion commercial companies around the world participated in the survey, with a cumulative financing scale of US$7.1 billion, an increase of US$900 million from 2023.

Among these enterprises, 8 enterprises adopt the stellarator technology route, 7 adopt laser inertial confinement, and 3 commercial companies adopt the tokamak, spherical tokamak and FRC technology routes respectively.

The survey data also shows that among the 35 companies that responded, 3 believed that the company would be able to transmit electricity to the grid before 2030; 22 believed that this would be achieved between 2030 and 2035.