Images show China ‘building laser-ignited fusion research centre’ in challenge to US
By Gerry Doyle
Singapore: China appears to be building a large laser-ignited fusion research centre in the south-western city of Mianyang, experts at two analytical organisations say – a development that could aid nuclear weapons design and power generation.
Satellite photos show four outlying “arms” that will house laser bays, and a central experiment bay that will hold a target chamber containing hydrogen isotopes the powerful lasers will fuse, producing energy, said Decker Eveleth, a researcher at US-based independent research organisation CNA Corp.
This satellite picture shows a laser-ignited fusion research centre located in Mianyang, China.Credit: Planet Labs
It is a similar layout to the $US3.5 billion ($5.6 billion) US National Ignition Facility (NIF) in Northern California, which in 2022 generated more energy from a fusion reaction than the lasers pumped into the target – “scientific break-even”.
Eveleth, who is working with analysts at the James Martin Centre for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS), estimates the experiment bay at the Chinese facility is about 50 per cent bigger than the one at NIF, currently the world’s largest.
The development has not been previously reported.
“Any country with an NIF-type facility can and probably will be increasing their confidence and improving existing weapons designs, and facilitating the design of future bomb designs without testing” the weapons themselves, said William Alberque, a nuclear policy analyst at the Henry L. Stimson Centre.
China’s foreign ministry referred questions to the “competent authority”. China’s Science and Technology Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.
In November 2020, US arms control envoy Marshall Billingslea released satellite images he said showed China’s build-up of nuclear weapons support facilities. It included images of Mianyang showing a cleared plot of land labelled “new research or production areas since 2010”.
That plot is the site of the fusion research centre, called the Laser Fusion Major Device Laboratory, according to construction documents that Eveleth shared with Reuters.
This image provided by the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory shows the NIF Target Bay in Livermore, Califonia.Credit: AP
Nuclear testing
Igniting fusion fuel allows researchers to study how such reactions work and how they might one day create a clean power source using the universe’s most plentiful resource, hydrogen. It also enables them to examine nuances of detonation that would otherwise require an explosive test.
The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, to which both China and the United States are signatories, prohibits nuclear explosions in all environments.
Countries are allowed “subcritical” explosive tests, which do not create nuclear reactions. Laser fusion research, known as inertial confinement fusion, is also allowed.
Siegfried Hecker, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, another key US nuclear weapons research facility, said that with testing banned, subcritical and laser fusion experiments were crucial to maintaining the safety and reliability of the US nuclear arsenal.
But for countries that have not done many test detonations, he said – China has tested 45 nuclear weapons, compared with 1054 for the US – such experiments would be less valuable because they do not have a large data set as a base.
“I don’t think it would make an enormous difference,” Hecker said. “And so … I’m not concerned about China getting ahead of us in terms of their nuclear facilities.”
Other nuclear powers, such as France, the United Kingdom and Russia, also operate inertial confinement fusion facilities.
The size of those facilities reflects the amount of power designers estimate is needed to apply to the target to achieve ignition, said Omar Hurricane, chief scientist for the inertial confinement fusion program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which operates NIF.
“These days, I think you probably can build a facility that’s of equal energy or even more energetic [than NIF] and a smaller footprint,” Hurricane said. But, he added, at too small a scale, experimental fusion does not appear possible.
That other countries operate laser-driven fusion research centres is not a cause for alarm in itself, Hurricane said.
“It’s kind of hard to stop scientific progress and hold information back,” he said. “People can use science for different means and different ends, and that’s a complicated question.”
Reuters
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