State-directed heavy infrastructure — China's BEST and CFETR tokamaks

China's state-directed fusion program continues to shatter endurance records while rapidly constructing next-generation heavy infrastructure. The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) recently set a milestone by maintaining steady-state high-confinement plasma for 1,066 seconds — nearly three times its previous record.

Building on this operational data, the Institute of Plasma Physics is constructing the Burning Plasma Experimental Superconducting Tokamak (BEST) at the CRAFT campus to explore steady-state control of deuterium-tritium plasmas and strictly validate tritium breeding and extraction schemes. BEST is designed as a reduced-scale engineering test bed, de-risking systems before they are committed to the full-scale demonstration reactor.

These devices serve as engineering precursors to the China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR), a massive demonstration plant targeting 1.5 to 3 gigawatts of fusion power and an exceptional fusion gain between 15 and 30. CFETR is widely viewed as the only government program with a credible path to multi-gigawatt fusion electricity this side of 2040.