What trade war? How China and US bonded over soccer and a nuclear ‘man-made sun’
- Fusion energy can be controlled more effectively after latest breakthrough in the two countries’ joint effort
- Lead scientist on Chinese side hails decades-long collaboration and says trade war ‘has not affected us at all’
At a time when growing US-China tensions on trade-related issues have created complications for scientific research, teams of physicists from the two countries are putting such rivalries aside to develop the clean energy of the future.
Whereas some Chinese scientists are experiencing greater difficulty in getting a US visa and Washington is banning the transfer of many technologies to China, fusion – a power source often referred to as man-made sun – has brought the two sides together.
Teams from both countries are working together to make significant progress in controlling fusion’s considerable power, as well as playing soccer together, according to scientists involved.
The world’s two largest economies are major contributors of knowledge and finance for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), the world’s first fusion reactor, which is under construction in Europe.
Both countries are considering building industrial-scale prototype reactors to test the applications of fusion – power generated by blending hydrogen atoms in plasma, an extremely hot gas, in a chamber 10 times hotter than the core of the sun.