Chinese firm claims first hydrogen-boron fusion on a commercial device, hitting 100 million reactions per second

A Chinese clean energy company says it has done something no commercial fusion firm has done before: fuse hydrogen and boron inside its own reactor, at a rate exceeding 100 million reactions per second. ENN Group announced the result on Monday, September 28, from its EXL-50U spherical tokamak — and an independent panel of more than ten international scientists reviewed the data and called it a 'significant and valuable contribution' to the field.

The claim is precise and deliberately limited. ENN is not saying it has generated net electricity, solved the economics of fusion power, or built anything close to a commercial plant. It is saying it demonstrated measurable, repeatable hydrogen-boron fusion reactions — confirmed by alpha particle detection — on its own machine. In a sector where companies routinely blur the line between a physics result and a power breakthrough, that distinction matters.

The fuel choice is what sets ENN apart from most of the fusion field. The mainstream approach, used by the international ITER project in France and most well-funded startups, fuses deuterium with tritium. That reaction is easier to achieve but comes with serious drawbacks: it releases high-energy neutrons that batter reactor walls and can induce radioactivity in surrounding components, and tritium is radioactive, scarce in nature, and expensive to produce. ENN's reactor instead pairs a hydrogen proton with a boron-11 nucleus.

The hydrogen-boron reaction produces helium nuclei — alpha particles — as its primary output, with no high-energy neutrons. Beyond being cleaner, that opens a theoretically more elegant path to electricity: charged alpha particles could potentially be converted directly into power without the usual detour through heat, steam, and a turbine. Boron is also far more abundant and easier to handle than tritium.

The engineering cost of that cleaner fuel, however, is severe. Hydrogen-boron fusion requires much higher temperatures and tighter confinement conditions than deuterium-tritium fusion — which is precisely why most of the field has not pursued it as a near-term target. ENN's approach was to sidestep the brute-force method of simply heating the entire plasma to extreme temperatures. Instead, the company combined high-energy neutral beam injection with radio frequency waves to push particles into what it describes as the 'first resonance peak' — an energy range where hydrogen-boron reactions are most likely to occur.

Under this mechanism, a large number of 'fast protons' are rapidly generated within the system. Acting as a catalyst for the reaction, these high-energy particles triggered a chain reaction, pushing the overall fusion reaction rate beyond 100 million times per second.— Dannie Peng, Reporter

Yang Yuanming, the chief engineer who led the project at ENN, announced the milestone on social media and pointed to the next target the team is chasing.

[We will] strive to get the plasma to 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit) as soon as possible!— Yang Yuanming, Chief Engineer, ENN Group

ENN is not alone in pursuing hydrogen-boron fusion. Yang noted that TAE Technologies in California and Marvel Fusion in Germany are also working on the same fuel cycle, according to South China Morning Post. That puts ENN in a specific competitive set — companies betting that leapfrogging the deuterium-tritium route entirely could ultimately yield a cleaner and more commercially attractive power plant, even if the path is longer and riskier.

ENN's EXL-50U, also referred to as the Xuanlong-50, is described by the company as China's first medium-scale spherical torus experimental device. It was built between 2018 and 2019, according to startup news reporting.

One important caveat accompanies the announcement: ENN did not, in its public disclosures, identify the reviewing experts by name, and no peer-reviewed paper has been published alongside the result, according to Startup News. In a fusion market where technical validation has become part of the fundraising pitch, independent peer review in a scientific journal would carry considerably more weight than a company announcement reviewed by unnamed scientists — however unanimous their praise.

For the broader fusion investment landscape, ENN's result is a data point in an ongoing argument about which technical path to back. Much of the capital flowing into fusion startups has clustered around companies pursuing deuterium-tritium first, on the logic that it is the nearer-term achievable target. ENN's milestone is a reminder that a separate branch of the industry is still trying to skip that step entirely — and has now put a concrete, measured number on a hydrogen-boron result from a commercial device.

Why it matters — If hydrogen-boron fusion can be scaled, it would offer a path to fusion power without the radioactive fuel handling and neutron damage problems that complicate the mainstream deuterium-tritium approach — potentially reshaping the assumptions behind billions of dollars in fusion investment worldwide.

Reported by goodnewsnetwork.org, scmp.com, startupnews.fyi, heneng.org.cn, neimagazine.com