China to build world's first fusion reactor

This story comes from People's Daily, that is the Chinese Communist Party's propaganda rag, but it still could be interesting0. According to them China to build "artificial sun" experimental device. They claim that it is the first such machine, obviously wrong since people have been building fusion reactors since the 1950's, and Tokamak style devices since only a little later. Which they even admit later in the article

The new device will be an upgrade of China's first superconducting Tokamak device, dubbed HT-7, which was also built by the plasma physics institute, in partnership with Russia, in the early 1990s. HT-7 made China the fourth country in the world, after Russia, France and Japan, to have such a device.

Nor do they say anything about how close it will get to breakeven. They say it will generate "infinite, clean nuclear-fusion-based energy" with the world infinite meaning that the author is clearly clueless. Nothing in the universe is infinite. Even the universe itself is not infinite! There may be enough deuterium in the earths oceans to provide current power needs for longer you can reasonably expect the human race to last but it is still not infinite. Hence I am going to take the generate energy bit with a pinch of salt as well since nobody has ever been able to get more energy out, in any form, of a fusion reactor than they put in. The closest was JET and that can only manage to just about break even. And we are talking total energy output here, not usable energy that can be harnessed. The main thing about this reactor is really how cheap it is, Iter is going to cost about £6billion this thing is a mere £21million almost three hundred times cheaper.