China's investment in fusion power

Fusion really is the answer to the world's energy crisis, for all the reasons laid out in the article (can't melt down, ease of procuring fuel, no pollution, relatively small generation of nuclear waste). It's a shame that it doesn't have better funding.

In addition to the tokamak work being done in the EU at CERN, the US has been funding fusion research for years at the NIF. The US system does not use a tokamak (magnetic confinement of a donut of plasma), but instead involves crushing balls of hydrogen with lasers. The US and the EU are currently in competition to see who can get to "ignition" first. The NIF is hoping for it to happen in the next 2-3 years.

This sounds great and all, but there's at least 10-20 years of work still yet to be done before we can start building commercial fusion power plants. Ignition will be a wonderful "HEY, IT WOOORRRKSSSSS" moment, but there are a lot of big unanswered engineering questions looming ahead, such as "what material do we build the ignition chamber out of that can withstand temperatures high enough to melt salt as well as survive constant neutron bombardment?" Hopefully ignition, when it happens, will motivate major countries to open their wallets and let pour the funding. We'll see. An appreciable percentage of the US's plasma physicists may retire once the US gets ignition. They have been working on this problem for quite literally their entire careers.

Unfortunately, there's almost no actual information about China's fusion research in the linked article. There is a lot of information, almost rambling, about the future of their fission plans after Fukushima, most of which has been covered more cogently elsewhere.