Two Races, One Playbook: What The Small Modular Reactor Scorecard Says About The US-China Fusion Race

The SMR race shows that inventing is not winning, and the US-China fusion race is following the same playbook

The Fusion Report recently reviewed the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP) report on “Sizing Up SMRs”, the newest entry in its Tech Scorecard series, and the verdict is blunt: China leads the United States in four of five categories in fission energy small modular reactors (SMRs), while the US keeps its edge in innovation. Read as a fission story, that is sobering. Read by the fusion community, it is a preview.

The structural pattern SCSP describes in SMRs (dozens of American designs backed by private capital and a thin construction workforce, set against fewer Chinese designs backed by state corporations and a deep build machine) is almost exactly the pattern in fusion. The question for our industry is whether we learn from the SMR race or repeat it.

What the SMR Scorecard Actually Says

SCSP scores both countries across five dimensions of technological power: innovation leadership, industrial capacity, market ecosystem, talent pipeline and national leverage. China’s advantage is rooted in two decades of large-reactor construction. By SCSP’s count, since work began on the last two US reactors in 2013, the China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC, a state-owned entity) has built 14 reactors from scratch, finished 28 already underway and now has 32 more under construction. Its HTR-PM began commercial operation in 2023, and the Generation III ACP100 “Linglong One” is due online this year. SCSP does not expect a US SMR to operate before the 2030s.

Independent analysts reach a similar conclusion. Sightline Climate’s first SMR Leaderboard found that four of its top five vendors are backed by the Russian or Chinese state, though the US accounts for half of the 20 ranked vendors and five of the top ten, led by GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy in second place. SCSP’s most useful insight is the incentive mismatch: China has the pieces to scale SMRs quickly but less need to, because it can still build gigawatt plants. The US needs SMR innovation more, but lacks the recent build experience to execute it. Keep that tension in mind, because fusion has its own version.

China’s SMR Lead is Real, But Thinner Than The Headlines Suggest

Linglong One is a genuine first-of-a-kind (FOAK) achievement; it completed cold functional testing in October 2025, and a CNNC research official said it would enter commercial operation in the first half of 2026. That window has closed without a public criticality announcement. Independent trackers including SMR Intel and Going Critical list a non-nuclear turbine test in December 2025 as the last confirmed milestone. Meanwhile, a full-size Hualong One on the same Changjiang site, which started construction 104 days earlier, reached first criticality on July 10 and entered commercial operation in September. This status is as of October 7, 2026, and CNNC does not always announce milestones promptly, so the picture could change quickly.

The cost data is the more important story, with one caveat. Using CNNC’s own figures, SMR Intel puts Linglong One at roughly 50M yuan per net megawatt against about 20M yuan for the Hualong One, a 2.5x premium. To be fair to CNNC, first-of-a-kind units always carry a penalty, and the real test is whether the tenth unit costs less than the first. But the core SMR promise is that factory repetition beats economies of scale, and China’s first unit does not yet prove it. State backing did not make the small-unit math work automatically. Every compact fusion developer should study that closely, because the same promise sits at the heart of most commercial fusion business plans.

The US Finally Has Momentum in Fission Energy

The American side of the ledger looks better than it did a year ago. Under the US Department of Energy (DoE) Reactor Pilot Program, four advanced reactors reached criticality by the July 4 deadline set in the May 2025 executive order: Antares Nuclear’s Mark-0, Valar Atomics’ Ward 250, Deployable Energy’s Unity and Aalo Atomics’ Aalo-X. These were zero-power demonstrations, not power plants, but DoE says they establish a basis for electricity production in 2027 and beyond.

On the commercial side, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) a construction permit for a BWRX-300 at Clinch River, the first US construction authorization for a commercial SMR, completing the review in 14 months and four months ahead of schedule. It followed the TerraPower Natrium construction permit in March. TVA still needs a separate operating license before it can load fuel, so SCSP’s 2030s call stands. But the regulatory clock is clearly running faster.

Fusion: The Same Pattern, With Higher Stakes

China is building with public money. Between 2023 and 2025, China mobilized at least $6.5B in public fusion funding, and some estimates run as high as $13B, roughly three times the $2.34B DoE’s Fusion Energy Sciences program spent over the same period, according to CSIS. In July 2025, Beijing stood up China Fusion Energy Co. with 15B yuan (about $2.1B) in capital, majority-owned by CNNC with PetroChina’s Kunlun Capital holding 20 percent. In Hefei, the Burning Plasma Experimental Superconducting Tokamak (BEST) had two superconducting magnets pass full-load testing in July 2026 and is on track for completion by the end of 2027, targeting an engineering fusion gain of Q=5 and a fusion electricity demonstration around 2030. China’s private players are moving too: Shanghai-based Energy Singularity reported a 21.7-tesla large-bore HTS magnet.

The US is building with private money. The Fusion Industry Association (FIA) 2026 report counted a record $4.48B raised in the 12 months to July 2026, up 69 percent, for a cumulative $14.24B since 2021. Major rounds included Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS; $1B), Helion Energy ($465M, later expanded to $500M) and Inertia Enterprises ($450M), while General Fusion began trading on Nasdaq in July and TAE Technologies is heading to the public markets through its pending merger with Trump Media. CSIS notes that, as of 2025, US firms captured 53 percent of global private fusion investment versus 34 percent for China. Both comparisons need a caveat: FIA’s survey covers only four Chinese companies, and the association has acknowledged that this is an incomplete picture of Chinese activity. In China, the line between public and private money is also blurry, since much “private” capital flows to state-linked firms. The private-capital lead is real, but it is not a like-for-like scoreboard.

Hardware is following the capital. CFS reports that SPARC is nearly 75 percent complete with operations planned for 2027. Helion’s Orion plant in Malaga, Washington, is under construction to serve Microsoft, though a Helion executive has indicated full capacity may not arrive until 2030 rather than 2028.

Where The Fission and Fusion Races Differ

A fair reading of the commercial fusion energy versus nuclear fission energy races has to acknowledge three critical differences:

• First, fusion is still partly a science race. China’s construction advantage in SMRs works because fission physics is settled. In fusion, nobody yet has a power plant, and the US still holds the only demonstrated ignition, achieved at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories (LLNL) National Ignition Facility (NIF) in 2022, as CSIS notes. Build speed matters less until the physics is retired.
• Second, the demand signal is different. Artificial Intelligence (AI) buyers are underwriting American fusion directly, through deals such as Microsoft with Helion and Google with CFS. That market pull did not exist for most US SMR vendors until recently.
• Third, and less comfortably, China has shown it can turn ideas first published in the US into hardware quickly. CSIS points out that China completed its Shenguang IV laser facility within about 18 months of the US ignition result, and that the CRAFT campus in Hefei mirrors infrastructure first proposed in a 2020 US advisory committee report. Claims that BEST copies the CFS design deserve caution, because they rest on press reports rather than technical analysis, and the compact high-field approach was laid out openly in seven peer-reviewed SPARC papers in 2020. That is the real point. Open publication is how American fusion science earns credibility, and it is also a free blueprint. If an American company retires the physics first, China’s industrial machine may still scale it faster. That is precisely the SMR lesson: inventing is not winning.

Critics will also point out that timelines are slipping on both sides of the Pacific. SPARC moved from 2026 to 2027, while Orion’s full output may land in 2030 and Linglong One missed its own target. Our industry earns credibility by saying so first.

What Fusion Should Take From The SMR Scorecard

Copy what worked, and fund it: A time-boxed, milestone-driven federal sprint delivered four reactor criticalities on deadline. Fusion already has a template in DoE’s Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program. The bipartisan American Leadership in Fusion Act (H.R. 10574), introduced in September by Reps. Zoe Lofgren and Jay Obernolte, would add $2B to that program and create a new $3B milestone-based demonstration program as part of a $10B package. That is the fusion equivalent of the Reactor Pilot Program: hard dates, clear pathways and money tied to physical results.

Fund the shared infrastructure, not just the companies: DoE’s 2025 Fusion Science & Technology Roadmap identifies six gaps, including structural materials, plasma-facing components, the fuel cycle and blankets, that no single startup will close alone. The American Leadership in Fusion Act targets them directly, with $3.8B for major new test facilities for fusion materials and the fuel cycle, and it would establish an Office of Fusion at DoE in statute, a goal shared by the separate Office of Fusion Act. The $10B total tracks what the Fusion Industry Association and SCSP’s fusion work have called for. Readers should know the number is far from settled: a DoE official reportedly told industry in July that it was not plausible, and authorization is not appropriation. The bill sets the right target, but the money still has to survive the budget process.

Treat the supply chain and workforce as the battlefield: The SMR race was lost in construction yards and component factories, not design studios. In fusion, the equivalents are HTS tape, magnets, vacuum vessels, heating systems, pulsed-power capacitors and power electronics, and the engineers who build them. The Fusion Advanced Manufacturing Parity Act (H.R. 5441, introduced by Rep. Carol Miller, with a Senate companion from Sens. John Curtis and Maria Cantwell) would extend the Section 45X advanced manufacturing credit to fusion components with a 25 percent production credit, and would add fusion-relevant materials such as tritium, lithium compounds and tungsten to the critical minerals list. That matters because component suppliers, not fusion developers, decide where factories get built, and a production credit rewards building them in the US before the first plant orders arrive. The bill has bipartisan sponsors but, per AIP’s tracker, has not moved past introduction, and Congress cut back 45X for other technologies in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, so expect a fight over cost. On talent, CSIS cites an estimate that China graduates roughly ten times as many fusion PhDs as the US. Even if that figure is directionally right rather than precise, the gap will not close on venture timelines.

Plan for exports now: SCSP sees exports as America’s best path back in SMRs, because China has been slow to land international partners. Fusion should design its export and regulatory playbook before the first plant is built, not after Beijing offers fusion through its “Belt and Road” program. Moreover, the hottest markets for fusion are likely to be export ones, particularly in Europe and certain parts of Asia due to the ongoing petroleum export crisis in the Strait of Hormuz.

The Bottom Line

The SMR scorecard is not a fusion scorecard, but it is a warning label. The US pattern of brilliant invention, fragmented execution and late public investment is visible in both races. In nuclear fission, it cost America a decade in market leadership; in commercial fusion energy, the clock has not (yet) run out. Private capital, AI demand, and regulatory momentum all give the US a real chance to win, and two bills now before Congress (The American Leadership in Fusion Act and The Fusion Advanced Manufacturing Parity Act), aim squarely at the gaps the SMR race exposed: public test infrastructure and a domestic supply chain. Whether the US wins depends on turning those bills into appropriated dollars and factories before China finishes building what it has already started.

Disclosure: The author is Chief Marketing Officer of Peak Nano Systems, a US manufacturer of nanolayered dielectric films used in capacitors, including for fusion pulsed-power applications, a component category that H.R. 5441 would cover. He has briefed the House Fusion Caucus in support of the bill.