China has commissioned a major engineering site and delivered the new campus for the BEST (Burning Plasma Experimental Superconducting Tokamak) in the high-tech hub of Hefei, Anhui Province. BEST represents significant progress, moving beyond pure laboratory plasma science toward producing usable electricity from nuclear fusion for the first time in history.
The facility was designed under the direction of the Institute of Plasma Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ASIPP) and is being built by Fusion Energy (Anhui) Co Ltd.
Since July, multiple key core components of the BEST have been delivered to the site, and assembly has progressed steadily, with tasks now more than halfway complete. The project has entered its highly complex “four-ring assembly” phase – a giant “thermos-like barrel” nested layer by layer. The innermost layer is a vacuum vessel, then a thermal shield and toroidal field magnets are wrapped around it. The final step involves installing internal precision components.
The vacuum vessel is where nuclear fusion reactions occur, and the thermal shield acts as a super insulation layer to block heat. The recently-tested superconducting toroidal field magnets are responsible for generating an ultra-strong magnetic field, firmly confining the high-temperature plasma so it does not touch the vessel walls. Construction is estimated to be completed by the end of 2027, after which deuterium-tritium fusion power generation demonstrations will begin around 2030.
Unlike its predecessor – the highly successful Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) which made headlines by holding 100-million-degree Celsius plasma for over 1,000 seconds – BEST is uniquely engineered to sustain a burning plasma.
While older tokamaks consume more energy than they produce, BEST aims to prove that a controlled deuterium-tritium fusion reaction can generate net power and send electricity to a grid system.
BEST is positioned as a fast-tracked stepping stone to the future China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR). By targeting 2030 for power demonstration, China is tracking significantly ahead of multi-national projects like ITER, which do not expect full-power operations until later in the 2030s.
