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China is building the HL-4 tokamak in Shanghai to demonstrate that high-temperature superconducting magnets can sustain continuous fusion reactions. The reactor uses a 25-tesla magnetic field to trap plasma and will serve as a validation step before moving to a commercial demonstration reactor.
- HL-4 will be the first tokamak with high-temperature superconducting magnets capable of steady-state burning operation, solving the overheating problem that limits current reactors like HL-3 to pulsed operation
- The 25-tesla magnetic field shrinks the reactor's physical size while enabling study of plasma behavior at previously unreachable conditions
- The project is explicitly positioned as an engineering validation platform, not a commercial reactor—success here leads to a demonstration reactor phase before any commercial deployment