Comment by dale_glass
5 hours ago
A good addition would be the sales price per MWh, price for the power plant, and the loan interest rate.
Because IMO all that is extremely critical. I fully support the pursuit of fusion as a scientific endeavor, but given that we're probably at least 30 years away from having anything approaching commercial deployment (assuming ITER is built, works, is followed promptly by DEMO, it works, and is followed promptly by people building more reactors. That's a heck of an assumption), it's not at all a given that it'll ever make a profit. That's a lot of time to build a lot of very cheap renewables.
And there's also opportunity costs. I see a lot of hopes put on fusion and don't really understand this chasing of the perfect solution. Even best case, it's not happening in decades, and it'll take decades more to build fusion as anything more than one off multi-decade-long research projects. That's a lot of time for the world to get worse while waiting for fusion to happen, and we might as well just throw renewables at the problem now instead of waiting.
So opportunity costs would also make for an interesting thing to calculate. Given that fusion will likely not make a major difference climate/pollution-wise for half a century, what else could we build in that time, and how much and what effect would that have?
[delayed]
ITER is a many stakeholders project, with all it's advantages (the costs can be split among participants, international cooperation) and disadvantages (each government wants a piece of the pie - components are manufactured at many subcontractors, in multiple countries) and politics (for example the multi-year process for selecting a ITER location).
The bigger, principal problem of ITER is the used magnet technology (niobium–tin, niobium–titanium). This was safe and conservative choice in 1990s, but as consequence the tokamak has to be big and therefor expensive to build.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems is currently building a tokamak based on the same physics as ITER, but with modern magnet technology using rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) high-temperature superconductors. Their ARC tokamak should be smaller and cheaper than ITER.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARC_fusion_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Fusion_Systems
Of all the fusion energy startups Commonwealth Fusion Systems is nearest to demonstrating a realistic fusion power plant.
ITER is not our best bet for commercial fusion. ITER was a peace project between the USA and the Soviet Union.
https://www.cfs.energy
Side note, all fusion start ups have built upon decades of science research funded in the ITER program, so opposing ITER to fusion start ups is misleading
ITER is definitely the best bet for a workable fusion concept. There are some unsolved issues left, but its nothing compared to the sci-fi solutions most US startups would require.
CFS is ITER with better magnets.
I think it's impossible to calculate at this stage since there're no fusion power plants which actually produce net power.
True, but we've built tokamaks and we're building ITER, which so far has an estimated price of between $45 billion and $65 billion.
Now of course that's a research reactor full of experiments and instrumentation that wouldn't be part of a normal power plant, but given current experience that I think we can expect we won't suddenly knock down the cost to $100M. It's going to be somewhere in the billions. And we have expectations of that DEMO is going to make 750MWe.
We can then plug those estimates into the calculator and basically figure out how cheap and how powerful a fusion reactor has to be for it to make economical sense.
I think a lot of the cost is custom parts. Standardization and economy of scale would bring the price down quite a bit.
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And outputs for how much power would be generated by an equivalent-cost conventional fission or solar facility.