A fusion reactor in China has held a superheated plasma steady for 1,066 seconds — more than 17 minutes — shattering the previous world record and pushing humanity closer to the long-sought goal of practical fusion energy. The milestone came from the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) reactor in Hefei, Anhui Province, and was announced by the Institute of Plasma Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
At a glance
- Fusion endurance record: EAST sustained a stable high-energy plasma for 1,066 seconds, more than doubling the previous record of 403 seconds set by the same reactor in 2023 C.E.
- Plasma stability: Engineers achieved the breakthrough by upgrading the experimental system to double power output while keeping the reaction from collapsing — the central technical challenge in fusion research.
- ITER contribution: China is one of seven members of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor program, and results from EAST will feed directly into the construction and operation of the world’s largest experimental tokamak, now being built in southern France.
Why 1,000 seconds matters
Fusing hydrogen atoms is not, by itself, hard. Scientists have done it in lab settings for decades. The brutal challenge is doing it continuously, stably, and at a scale that produces more energy than it consumes.
To reach that threshold, a fusion device must heat plasma to between 100 and 150 million degrees Celsius — roughly seven times hotter than the core of the Sun — while holding it under pressure and keeping it from touching the reactor walls. Sustaining those conditions for even 10 seconds counts as a basic success. Sustaining them for thousands of seconds is what commercial power generation actually requires.
“A fusion device must achieve stable operation at high efficiency for thousands of seconds to enable the self-sustaining circulation of plasma, which is critical for the continuous power generation of future fusion plants,” said Song Yuntao, director of the Institute of Plasma Physics.
The jump from 403 seconds to 1,066 seconds is not a small step. It signals that the engineering problems around plasma control are yielding to sustained, methodical work.
The prize: energy without limits
The reason fusion has attracted serious scientific effort for 80 years — and a record $7.1 billion in private investment as of recent years — is the scale of what it promises. One gram of deuterium-tritium fuel holds the energy equivalent of roughly 11 tonnes of coal, and the fuel itself is derived from hydrogen isotopes available in seawater. A working fusion plant would produce no carbon emissions, no long-lived radioactive waste, and effectively no fuel constraints.
Those stakes explain why EAST is part of a much larger international effort. The ITER project, now under construction in Saint-Paul-lès-Durance in southern France, is a collaboration among China, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia, and the United States. It is designed to be the first fusion device to produce more energy than it consumes, with operations expected to begin around 2035 C.E. China’s nine-percent contribution to ITER’s construction includes sharing what EAST learns.
A long road, honestly told
Progress in fusion has always come slower than its early champions predicted. The field has a decades-long history of optimistic timelines that slipped, and true ignition — where a reactor sustains its own reaction without external energy input — remains ahead. Private companies like Commonwealth Fusion Systems and others are racing toward compact commercial designs, but no fusion plant is yet delivering power to a grid.
The 1,066-second record does not change that reality overnight. What it does is demonstrate that plasma can be held stable far longer than previously achieved, and that each engineering upgrade yields measurable gains. That is exactly how hard problems get solved.
The broader fusion field is more active and better funded than at any point in history, with multiple technical approaches now in parallel development. EAST’s record is one data point in that larger movement — a significant one, contributed by Chinese scientists working at the frontier of one of the most demanding engineering challenges humans have ever attempted.
Read more
For more on this story, see: New Atlas
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Renewables now make up at least 49% of global power capacity
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- The Good News for Humankind archive on clean energy
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