Fusion Energy Economics

Why do you think fusion would provide free unlimited energy? With any design even slightly visible on the horizon right now, a single plant will cost billions of dollars and barely produce a few MW of energy. This is much worse than any equivalent investment in solar power, which similarly requires 0 fuel.

Not if it's as expensive as it's likely to be from fusion, no.

Fusion will not be commercial ever at least not for power generation.Fission has potential for far cheaper fuel cost and can be done with less capital cost.We are spending a crazy amount of money researching fusion while we have only explored like 1% of the potential of fission. If only part of this money was invested in fission we could have a competition for multiple advanced fission reactors.

Regarding (1), it's not that simple. It depends on what form fusion takes. Fission was once thought to be the future of energy generation, unlimited clean energy for all, but now we realize the (justified) regulatory, maintenance, safety, and build costs are so incredible it is usually more economical to build gas/coal plants or solar/wind.If we achieve fusion production in the form of modern tokamaks with insane regulatory, maintenance, and build costs similar or worse than fi

Even if we had fusion working already, a fusion powerplant would be expensive to build - comparable to a similar sized fission plant. At a conservative estimate of $2 Billion per GW, that $250B/yr would take more than a century just to build enough reactors to replace current fossil fuel consumption. Realistically, fusion is unlikely to be cost competitive with other power sources outside of niche applications. Even if fusion winds up powering our civilization in the future, something else

OK so with fusion everybody loves it because the fuel would be clean and nearly endless.Isn't that what solar power offers?Nobody wants to deploy solar due to high upfront cost. However, wouldn't the startup on a fusion reactor be much greater?

We're not likely to see large-scale fusion development even if it does become technically possible, because wind and solar are already so cheap that heat-engine-based power generation cannot compete. Even if we could build fusion power stations, investors would still get a better, safer, and quicker return via renewables, so that's where the money would go.

I don't begrudge money being spent on researching fusion. It is definitely a promising technology, but it's not coming to a power grid near you any time soon.Even if we can figure out how to keep a reaction going with a useful energy surplus no one has any ideaa) How much a reactor will cost,b) how long/hard will it be to build orc) If there are any issues with the process - yes no nuclear fuel but there's still some nasty crap coming out of the reaction which you

Fusion energy is not free. The cost of building a reactor alone puts the price in the same range as fission. But it's safer, and we have an abundance of fuel for it. So build it to handle base loads, use wind/solar where it makes sense, and use excess production to some meaningful task.

This was going well until point 6. Fusion isn't anywhere near practical in 2021, it requires lots of investment and research to do even a first prototype. And it is a high tech marvel that won't be cheap to operate. So the funding for it may eventually dry out in favour of boring tech fission plants.