China Pins Big ($1.4B) Hopes on Nuclear Fusion

China has tossed down a $1.4 billion bet on the world energy roulette wheel.

China's stake is 10% of a research project, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, trying to unlock the secret to nuclear fusion, a potentially boundless, clean and cheap form of energy. The United Staes is also a partner, as are the European Union, Japan, India, South Korea and Russia.

Unlike today's nuclear power plants, which split atoms (nuclear fission) the experimental reactor in France will attempt to fuse smaller nuclei into larger nucleus, a process that unleashes huge quantities of heat and light on our sun and other stars. If scientists can corral this process, it would produce more longer-lasting nuclear fuel than fission produces, but lest radioactive waste.

China's stakes, in one sense, are also the world's. By some measures the leading polluter of carbon dioxide, China has emerged as a central ongoing source of the greenhouse gas emissions that fuel global warming. If it could harness fusion as an alternative to burning coal, it could solve not only China's immense and growing demand for energy, but save the world from an overheated future.

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