I do enjoy sharing this kind of news with all the fusion haters online. Fusion tech is legitimately cracking away on their "perpetually X-years away" stigma. That perpetual barrier can very reasonably be viewed as a normal technology barrier now.
Don't mistake skepticism for hate. I will be the first one to applaud a commercial fusion reactor. But fusion proponents often use it's pending development as an argument against fission - a technology we already have and desperately need to adopt now.
> But fusion often use it's pending development as an argument against fission - a technology we already have and desperately need to adopt now.
If it helps, CEA is also doing a ton of R&D on fission (and batteries, among others). But there, the real issues are mostly political.
Unless you can do a science fiction thing of turning off the sun, and harvesting the hydrogen in it to power local reactors in earth orbit to provide the energy (light) we need without letting the vast majority escape our solar system unused. Otherwise that big fusion reactor in the sky provides all the energy we need.
Energy storage is far from a solved problem. Tesla produces ~40 gigawatts of storage capacity an entire year. California alone consumes ~800 gigawatts of power in a day. Even if Tesla dedicated every bit of lithium it had to building storage capacity for just one state, and demand didn't increase, it would realistically still take over a decade to keeping the lights on purely with renewables for a 24 hour period. At which point the first battery packs would be nearing the end of their service life.
One of those hopefully-you-don't-need-it concerns but it is starting to become a more pressing with the uptick in wars and unrest that seems to be going on.
On a 1:500 year time horizon we know there are threats that dim the sun (possibly quite a bit shorter now that nuclear weapons are on the table and we seem to be incapable of dealing with that threat productively - the number of actors with nukes is growing). Planning for that isn't anti-renewable, it is just cautious.
And nobody was talking about K-Pg events. You'll notice the years quoted were all after the Roman Empire was founded.
Aggressive predictions have us generating ~6-10TWh of batteries by 2030 meaning we’re going to still need about another 3-6 years to actually satisfy demand (ignoring complexity of hooking up the batteries). On top of that, the batteries require rare earth metals that companies are gearing up to satisfy by strip mining the ocean floor for those polymetallic nodules, operations which have a very real risk of completely destroying deep ocean life. It seems to me like it’s slow and ecologically potentially more destructive than even global warming. Is it really wise to be betting on batteries at this scale vs tried and true nuclear fission which doesn’t carry any of these risks?
What people forget is batteries are a manufactured good, which follows Wright's Law. Manufactured goods (like energy storage, TVs, lightbulbs) obey different economic principles to scarce goods (like land, services, or goods with scarce inputs), and they have effectively unlimited supply. The supply is strictly set by demand.
Aggressive predictions of ~6-10TWh/year of batteries in 2030 are more predictions of demand, not so much predictions of supply. If market demand in 2030 is 30TWh/year, then that's what the market will produce. But don't blame manufacturers for the fact that demand in 2030 will only be 6-10TWh/year! And don't confuse this for a sector's inability to increase supply!
The response when seeing a "6-10TWh/year" prediction should be "how can we incentivize demand so that this number is 30TWh/year instead".
Lithium ion is preferred for vehicles because it's lighter, but again we are talking about stationary storage, so the extra weight of sodium ion isn't a problem.
The technology is solved, and the materials needed to make it abundant. It's all about demand. If the demand is there, the industrial capacity will follow. But right now, the market is only demanding about 3TWh/year of storage, and so that's how much industry is producing.
It takes a lot of time for new battery technologies to scale and disrupt existing ones and entrenched players have an incentive to continue competing. Sodium ion, iron air etc might replace lithium ion on the 30 year time scale but lithium ion will continue to drive down costs and up its capacity to try to compete and it has significantly more revenue to fund this by being the only player in the market. So it’s not clear when alternative batteries will start to replace lithium ion, but at scale it’s unlikely to be a quick process. And please don’t pretend like it’s all a demand side problem. It takes time to build out new factories from manufacturing all the equipment needed to acquiring and training employees. There’s plenty of demand for cheap batteries and the ability to manufacture simply isn’t there either and it’s being brought online. Oh and that capacity being added? It’s all lithium ion and requires a long pay off for that investment. Lithium ion is going to be potential a significant ecological debt worse than fossil fuels if the ocean floor strip mining gets going.
And it is all a demand side problem. If the world wanted to buy 10 or 20 TWh a year at current market prices, that's how much would be produced. But the world doesn't want to do that and hence that much isn't produced. This is Econ 101 for goods with non scarce inputs. It doesn't take ten years to scale up production for commodity goods.
As for scarcity, inputs to lithium ion ARE scarce which negates your entire model. Pretending they aren't is where you're making a mistake. Lithium, cobalt & nickle are relatively scarce and the mines for that have to scale up to meet demand as well. You've also got a workforce to train to do the work which takes time & is also input-constrained. That's why there's massive NEW lithium mines being opened in the US & elsewhere to extract existing reserves to meet the growth in lithium ion batteries. If the world thought that sodium ion or ion air was an immediate future, you wouldn't see these massive large-scale investments into lithium. Lilthium-ion batteries is going to be a large and growing market for decades which brings me back to the strip mining of the ocean floor that's coming to support that.
Whright's law by the way isn't also an inevitable effect that goes on forever. At some point your exponential plateau's and you no longer see such exponential decrease in pricing. That's why processors aren't getting cheaper and compute isn't scaling up quite in the same way as in the early days. There's only so efficient you can make something.
Most states currently only care about installing solar and wind -- not storage -- because they are still majority fossil fuels, and at the current moment it makes no sense to install storage if you still have fossil fuel to dislodge. The only exception is really California, who are installing storage, but their bottleneck is not the market's ability to deliver enough supply.
There are also many storage options beyond lithium ion if you only spent a moment to look.
Maybe fusion will be an alternative someday but for now it's just a fantasy. We need to act based on what's proven to work today.
Fission as a solution is something that is popular on social media, for reasons that are utterly mystifying to me. The arguments are invariably a few words that reach sweeping conclusions with no actual data backing it up, and lots of data contradicting it that the individual appears oblivious to.
Current supply of storage matches current demand. Supply is low only because demand is low. However, as demand increases, supply will continue to match demand, and moreover the price will actually decrease because of the fact that the learning curve is a function of production volume.
This has been a steady empirical phenomenon for 30+ years, and it's predicted by basic economics principles. It's not going to change now!
This is true for all battery types, but especially for sodium ion and iron air, which are constituted of abundant materials. Sodium ion in particular has very similar behavior and cost to lithium ion.
This confusion you're having is you seem to be conflating manufactured goods (like batteries) with scarce goods like land or services, whereby there's a fixed supply that can't be increased and where Wright's Law doesn't apply. This is not correct.
Storage is more like televisions or light bulbs, where you can basically make as much of it as you want, and the price will keep declining as more is made. And supply will always be there for demand, whatever the level of demand happens to be (in this case, a lot).
Converting every passenger car and light truck in the US to a BEV would involve enough batteries to store something like two days of the average grid output, which is more than would be needed for a cost optimal wind/solar/battery/hydrogen system for a 100% renewable grid.
Assuming the power stored in these vehicles can be reclaimed by the grid anytime they want?
It's an argument I like to use. When someone claims "we can't use X because of reason Y, we have to do Z instead" I look to see if Z also is hit by objection Y.
Another example of this is "renewables require too much material that we can't recycle", at which point I observe that the quantity of materials produced by society as a whole greatly exceeds what renewables would involve, even if the society is powered by nuclear. The US produces 600 megatons of construction and demolition waste a year, for example. Renewable waste would just be a minor blip on this existing waste stream. So, either recycling this waste isn't actually needed, or a putative sustainable nuclear-powered society has discovered how to recycle it, so just toss the renewable waste (which is almost entirely things like steel, aluminum, and glass) into that same recycling infrastructure.
Steel mills run when power is cheap. They historically have run at night (and only minimum power during the day) because cheap power is available at night. Of course there are lots of different steel mills, older ones can't shut down - but modern ones don't run 24x7, they run when power is cheap. Even the old 24x7 ones did their yearly maintenance in December - when power demand is highest (Christmas lights).
Wind and solar are easially predicted a few days in advance with high accuracy, and thus the mills change their shifts/output to follow the cheap power. If it is cloudy/no wind they will send their employees home (with pay) or do maintenance for that week while waiting on more cheaper energy. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to melt iron and so they manage this carefully because it makes them money. They can't deal with months of no production, but they can manage a week here and there.
If this isn't about ceasing carbon emissions then none of this is necessary. Fire up the coal plants!
(1) the emissions of a 98% renewable + 2% natural gas grid that comes online in 6 years, assuming fossil fuels for t between [t, t+6 years].
(2) the emissions of a 100% fission grid that comes online in 16 years, assuming fossil fuels for t between [t, t+16 years].
If you insist on ignoring the temporal nature of cumulative emissions, then sure, you can arrive at a convenient but false conclusion. But any honest analysis will consider the emissions in that [t+6 year, t+16 year] interval.
(... it would also consider things like social licensing risks leading to early plant closures like what's happening in Germany, or the fact that nuclear will likely be paired with natural gas too because demand itself is variable, and overbuilding nuclear is expensive.)
Start both with the same (current) % for renewables and (1) have some realistic ramp-up of renewables to reach 98%, and (2) keep the renewables more modestly rising in the fission version, while fading-out fossils in favor of fission
You should also account the carbon foodprint of grid-level energy storage (yes, it will be needed, even with the natural gas plans), vs the foodprint for fission plants (undoubtedly quite bad).
Renewables are by their nature much more distributed in space, which makes them much harder to enclose and control in the way required to reproduce the current structure, especially as they are mainly being built by challengers who aren't really interested of forming monopolies with the fossil industry.
Which is why we aren't building record-setting amounts of natural gas infrastructure, oh wait...
https://headwaterseconomics.org/wp-content/uploads/HE_electr...
It's not. If it was the world wouldn't be using 140k TWh of fossil-fuel-produced energy[1], and would be using a lot more than 9k TWh of renewable energy[2]
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-fossil-fuel-consum... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/modern-renewable-energy-c...
That is, it would seem likely that fusion power would be costly to build. It would also seem apparent that if it were to fulfil its promise then the power it generates is sold at or less than the current amount. That would then seem to imply a lengthily time to make a return on the initial investment. Or am I missing something else with this equation?
Easy to find research showing the detrimental effects of masks on communication, etc: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10321351/
Helion's reactor, if it works, could become a source of the cheapest neutrons on the planet. It would greatly enable nuclear proliferation by providing neutrons for breeding of fissionable material for bombs.
A 50 MW DD reactor would produce enough neutrons to make half a ton of plutonium per year. Remember, none of these neutrons have to be turned around to make tritium, as they would have to be in a DT reactor.
Every schemer I have ever seen is quite a bit more complex than a fission reactor. Often, designs will depend on materials that do not yet exist.
That said there is a tremendous variety of techniques that fit under the umbrella term of "fusion," so I'm hoping to learn something more.
I've looked a lot into this in terms of how to get a project like Georgia's Vogtle to have cost less, or Olkioluoto in Finland, or Flamanville 3 in France. Big complex construction projects are expensive, and it's not clear at all to me that fusion would be simpler or smaller, or escape the rest of Baumol's cost disease that has been plaguing fission in highly developed economies.
Though I guess some of that infrastructure could be overbuilt due to excessive regulation.
Also much of the concrete and steel is needed for the containment domes. Fusion power likely wouldn’t require nearly as much protection. Perhaps just a fairly standard industrial building.
(and other than that I echo elcritch's comments)
I still think its worth researching and we'll get there at some point, but I'm not holding my breath-- the whole industry has overpromised in the past, continues to overpromise now and will be probably be irrelevant for de-carbonizing the grid by the time the technology is actually ready at an industrial scale.
Mass media reporting on the whole sector is admittedly even worse; especially for uninformed readers without an engineering background.
I believe the current timetable is no longer contingent upon funding (since they've got the funding they think they need). It's no doubt still an optimistic startup timeline, a target, that they might well fail to achieve (even without the startup failing, just being late).
It's a cool concept, but probably not gonna be viable anytime soon (if ever!).
Does the physics change as they scale up the field strength? No one is really going to know until they try (unless we get a lot better at simulating plasma real fast). If not, they lost a bet, but they lost it honestly and as far as I can tell (not a physicist) it was a reasonably good bet to make.
Can they physically build the bigger magnets they need fast enough to meet their timelines (and everything else. I understand they are currently bottlenecked on capacitors)? Apart from normal "startups are overly optimistic" issues I don't see any reason to think that they shouldn't be able to reliably predict how fast they can scale magnet size, or be limited to a linear rate. While they are big magnets, it's not exactly new physics.
I'm not sure I'd say they are "probably going to be viable" anytime soon either. I think they have a good chance, but "probably" as in ">50%" is probably pushing it. (Also depends on where you put the goalposts of course)
FWIW I believe that 2018 report was for a high gain low pulse rate plan that Helion rejected, and they are aiming for substantially lower strength magnets as a result. I can't find anything more than rumors to confirm that though.
It's just that from everything I know about the project, they still have a long way to go, and there are a lot of milestones to hit that are just pipe dreams for now (actually fusing He3, breeding it, net-gain energy extraction, ...).
I would expect progress to slow down significantly as the scale of prototypes and their complexity increases (like what happens for basically every engineering project ever)-- but progress is already slow/behind schedule to begin with...
To move that "plausibly" into "actually" you have to have very careful design review by regulators. Very careful review of construction to make sure what is constructed is what was designed. And so on and so forth. It's a lot of friction that skyrockets costs. Legitimately. People inevitably attempt to cut corners, and there's no way to make sure they aren't on the safety parts without checking. Actual currently regulatory costs seem to bear out the difference between these, with SMR people spending large amounts of money to convince regulators they didn't screw up, vs Helion fusion being "regulated like a hospital".
I'm not saying fusion has no proliferation concerns. But it's the difference between "low grade nuclear waste, or a very high tech very advanced program to weaponize a working reactor" and "even a broken reactor can be strapped to some explosives to make a dirty bomb". I can't say I'm very aware of how much proliferation concerns drive costs.
Public sentiment also helps.
I was thinking more of large scale D-T fusion, e.g. the tokamak design, which requires breeding tritium & is expected to create a lot of neutron activated waste. The tritium is especially concerning, as it's roughly as deadly as polonium-210 & highly bioavailable in the form of super heavy water.
You're probably right for smaller aneutronic designs like Helion's. If they can actually be made to work, they'll be much safer.
And the first generation will be expensive. That's how all new technology is.
It's not only initial investment. Half of the fusion fuel is tritium, which is one of the most expensive substances on Earth (a google search finds that the price of tritium is about $30k per gram [1]). For comparison, fission reactors need enriched uranium, and that costs only about $4000 per kilogram [2]. People have the idea that fusion produces many times more energy than fission, probably because fusion bombs have a higher yield than fission bombs. This is not true. The most typical fusion reaction involves one deuterium and one tritium and yields 17.5 MeV from a total or 5 nucleons. A fission reaction involves one neutron and one atom of U-235 and yields 190 MeV from 236 nucleons. So fusion yields about 4.3 times more energy per nucleon. That's respectable, but in the popular imagination fusion yields 100 or 1000 times more energy than fission, so the fuel cost can be neglected. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Perhaps one day we'll get there, but I worry that the current advancements using the rarer isotopes will end up proving to be a dead end on that road, much like so many attempts at GAI. In the short term I suspect we'd have better odds with getting thorium reactors to be economical.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/01/nuclear-fusion/
Tritium is rare but lithium isn't, and we can make tritium from lithium using the neutrons from fusion. (We also get tritium from fission plants, which is how we'd build the first fusion reactors.)
Each fusion reaction consumes one tritium atom and produces one neutron. If that neutron hits a lithium atom, it can split that and produce a tritium atom. If everything goes perfectly and there are no losses, then you get a 100% replacement of all the tritium that you consume. If you have a 90% replacement ratio (highly optimistic), you essentially lower the cost of your tritium fuel by a factor of 10, so from $30000 per gram to $3000 per gram, or $3 MM per kilogram.
> We also get tritium from fission plants
Yes we do. Mainly from Candu reactors. There are 49 Candu and Candu-like reactors in the world, and each produces less than 1kg of tritium per year. According to [1] a 1 GW fusion power plant would consume about 55 kg of tritium per year. So you'd need to run more than 50 fission power plants to operate one fusion power plant. Most people who dream of fusion think that fission will become irrelevant, not that you'll need 50 fission power plants for each fusion power plant.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09203...
Initial tritium load for a small, high-field reactor like CFS is much smaller than for ITER. And I'll note that the paper you linked has this conclusion:
> The preliminary results suggest that initial operation in D–D with continual feedback into the plasma of the tritium produced enables a fusion reactor designed solely for D–T operation to start-up in an acceptably short time-scale without the need for any external tritium source.
Ok, let's talk about that. For those who are not familiar, CFS stands for Commonwealth Fusion Systems, as startup with links to MIT. CFS aims to build a fusion reactor similar to ITER, but many times smaller, the secret sauce being that they use superconductors to achieve high magnetic fields. Back in 2022 some of the MIT guys got an ARPA-E grant to investigate the use of FLiBe to achieve atritium breeding ratio higher than 1 [1]. The results are in [2], they were published in January 2025. Here are some quotes:
> The long-term goal of LIBRA is to demonstrate a TBR ⩾ 1 in a large volume (1000 kg ∼ 500 l) of FLiBe molten salt using D–T neutron generators. Note that a full-scale LIB in an ARC-class FPP will require ∼250 000 l of FLiBe, hence the importance of understanding tritium behavior in large salt volumes.
Anyway, what breeding ratio was achieved? 3.57 x 10^(-4), or 0.0357%. It's a long way to go from here to 1.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but too many things related to fusion are just "engineering details".
[1] https://arpa-e.energy.gov/programs-and-initiatives/search-al...
[2] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1741-4326/ada2ab/...
In the Solar System, the abundance of beryllium is similar to that of gold and of the platinum-group metals. On Earth, the scarcity of beryllium is less obvious only because it is concentrated in the continental crust, where it is relatively easily accessible, even if its amount in the entire Earth is much smaller.
Lead neutron multipliers would be preferable, because they only inter-convert isotopes of lead, so it is not destroyed, like beryllium.
However lead used for this purpose becomes radioactive, with a very long lifetime, unless expensive isotope separation would be used for it.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deuterium%E2%80%93tritium_fu...
That would still be more expensive than Solar and Wind (by 100% or more) - but I am skeptical in the same time frame those sources will be able to take over baseload generation.
It's really comparing apples to oranges.
Plus, it's a very hypothetical future. Anything could happen between now and then.
Because IMO the only approach that is even capable of delivering here is the Helion one (=> direct conversion). And that design is incredibly far from ready, the whole approach is completely unproven and their roadmap is mainly wishful self-delusion (from what we can tell by evaluating past milestones, like "first 50MW reactor finished by 2021"-- there is no 50MW reactor even now).
From my PoV, ITER-style tokamaks are the most conservative/certain design, and also the furthest along by far. That would imply:
=> Cryogenics for the magnets
=> big hightemperature vacuumchamber for plasma
=> all the thermal/turbogenerator infrastructure needed in conventional plants
=> super high neutron radiation flux (this is a problem)
I just don't see where you save anything. This is basically just a fission reactor, only a magnitude more complicated and demanding. I absolutely don't see how it could ever get significantly cheaper than conventional nuclear powerplants.
Fusion has none of this. Assuming Q >> 1 will be demonstrated in a design that can be commercialized the next biggest problem is dealing with high-energy neurons on a scale never experienced before with potential much faster degradation of materials than anticipated leading to prohibiting operational costs.
Does money even matter once fusion is attainable?
Make all energy free. What does that change? It lowers operating costs for many things, but up front capital costs are still there. Land still matters. Food still matters.
Money will still matter. Allocation of time, of resources, all that still matters a lot. Energy is big for the economy, but if its free we shift our focus to other matters of logistics.
I'm generally pro-publicly funded research. There is not any direct ROI on say the LHC, but it does fund advanced manufacturing and engineering work that might enable other more practical industrial applications. The ROI might be a century away.
It'll still make a difference in large scale energy intensive stuff, like desalination, aluminium refining, etc. but the average punter is going to save a lot more by installing solar panels.
For pure return on investment, I agree with your take.
Provided of course that any future threats to humanity as a single planet civilization don’t materialize. There’s a low and uncertain tail risk ignored in our calculation.
Rather, the main benefit would lie in the technological advances made in order to enable such a Mars mission in the first place (similar to advances during Apollo).
I agree with this view, but the comment I was replying to only mentioned as a benefit that Mars could be a second home (which I find rather ridiculous).
The first and second sentences of that comment literally say
> A Mars mission would benefit humanity, but less directly. The past lunar missions and space program benefited humanity in many ways.
And then it goes on to acknowledge the "second home" element, but only as a small consideration.
Dude, the relentless decrease in cost of manufactured items, this decrease that makes your current way of life possible, is driven by exactly that. Manufacturers are in life-or-death competition and we consumers reap the benefit as prices are driven ever downward.
The benefit to humanity is the technological advancement.
I bet I can guess the name of the god too!
A 'gift of God'?: The public health controversy over leaded gasoline during the 1920s: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1646253/
There's also many paths to improved fission. Fast neutron reactors, thorium, small fast neutron reactors for industrial heat, thorium reactors, accelerator-driven subcritical reactors ... Millions of years of fuel available and new ways to use the output beyond boiling water for electricity.
Note that I'm not mentioning slow neutron SMR, they're mostly pointless and just an excuse not to build current and perfectly fine PWR/BWR/heavy water reactors.
Fission still has this huge stigma about "nuclear=dangerous and bad" which clearly isn't true with the growing number of passively-safe designs... but nobody wants to fund development of those into proper commercial reactors.
Meanwhile, fusion is still different and futuristic enough to have support from governments and the general public.
Seems ironic that in a thread about fusion with loads of difficult technical challenges that will still require decades of research after 60 years of investment and research have already been poured into it, a minor issue of slight corrosion in LFTR requiring maybe a few years of research is seen as an insurmountable obstacle with "no real solution in sight".
Fusion has better security properties than fission, so perhaps it will find some use case in the far future.
Paperwork, standards, logistics, non-destructive tests, monitoring, certification, other "boring" stuff.
Tech people LOVED bitching about how complicated the USB-C standard is, how it does too much, etc.
Guess what? As a consumer, I can plug pretty much anything into anything else, use literally any brick to charge nearly any device, deliver outstanding amounts of wattage over cables the size of headphone wires, for pretty cheap, and USB-C docks that you just plug into whatever and things just hook up and function.
It does that because of the millions spent on human beings spending time to work out bugs, work around edge cases, discover what people tolerate and care about with the standard, etc.
Consumers ignored all the complaints about it being complicated and just fucking used it and it's ubiquitous and works for pretty much everyone and the only people who have bad experiences are the ones buying exclusively fraudulent cables off amazon and only some of those people are hitting those problems!
I can just plug a cable into the power port and get HDMI out of my steam deck. Holy shit.
THAT'S the future.
Why do you think a result like this would make anyone less skeptical of fusion? Ability to run a device for this long is not the obstacle to success for nuclear fusion. This is just another vastly overhyped "breakthrough", which we seem to have every week.
I've followed fusion for probably longer than you've been alive, and there are fundamental showstoppers for the common approaches, particularly tokamaks and stellarators. Fusion may have a chance with unconventional approaches, like Helion's, but the consensus approach looks like an exercise in groupthink that won't lead anywhere.
Just 9 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43000301
>>Ability to run a device for this long is not the obstacle to success for nuclear fusion.
What an odd take. Do you also consider the list of flight endurance records to be immaterial to aircraft evolution?
This achievement is relatively unimportant. It's not the major issue that would block a DT fusion reactor. As such, achieving it doesn't move the needle much on the plausibility of DT fusion in tokamaks.
Plasma runtime in not a showstopper then?
Even if nuclear fussion had the advantage of free combustible, the costs of building and manteinance alone could make it not practical. As of today it's not enough to have positive net return, but to have a LCOE of maybe $60/MWh (and going down). Current estimates put fussion at $120/MWh.
If it can't keep up with solar and eolic rade of fallig prices, it might be only suitable to replace fission power (which is not falling), about 10% of the grid. And there have been literally billions spent in research.
The elephant in the room is natural gas which is the true competitor to fission and is still dirt cheap in the US.
There's a reason China is installing two orders of magnitude more solar than nuclear these days (nameplate capacity basis).
On the margin I don't argue that renewables are cheaper, but you still need a way to generate base load power on demand.
If you don't count externalities (see cost of firming intermitency [1]).
> (and going down).
Not the last two years according to LCOE+ 2024. the main culprit is inflation, but the curve was nearing flat anyway.
[1]: https://www.lazard.com/media/gjyffoqd/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...
We should give the folks at model.energy the next peace prize for their effort.
Your answer gives a model unrelated to the figures I was discussing, with extremely agressive prices [1] set as hypotheses and zero network costs factored in. Sure, I can accept it as a minimum limit for the cost of a system, but that's not a very useful information, and you're not quoting this price as a lower limit either.
I don't see an honesty issue here, just someone believing that spherical cows are going to produce milk tomorrow.
[1]: e.g. the Lazard report quotes utility PV at $29-92/MWh, while your tool quotes it at 21.7€/MWh.
Neither solar or wind are free. There are costs associated e.g. with building, shipping, maintaining, decommissioning these things (and hopefully at some point recycling, but that’s not solved). Looking at the whole picture, these costs are not that different. These technologies are complementary, they have very different characteristics.
> Current estimates put fussion at $120/MWh.
Current estimates are completely unreliable, because no industrial-scale demonstrator was built. They are a useful tool for planning and modeling, but not solid enough to build an industrial strategy on them. (And it’s “fusion”)
But if there is not a clear and speedy path to get fusion to $30/MWh it's not going to make it. Batteries, solar wind, and geothermal are all busy deploying and getting cheaper every month, year, and decade. The grid system possible with 2035's solar and battery tech is going to be completely unimaginable to today's grid ops.
As of today, we are closer to mass batteries as renewable companion than fusion, at least in terms of ROI. If both end up competing for lithium, it would go to batteries unless fusion becomes dirty cheap.
Current estimations are useful because they mark the starting point for fusion: they are at around 120. They need to reach 80 to replace fission. They need to reach 60 to replace batteries. Assuming batteries don't get better ROI.
Same numbers were useful 30 years ago for solar: it was fully functional, but not yet economically sound. It was not much than a toy and a promise (as it is fusion today). Only when prices made sense it turned to a serious energy source.
I recall a story of some lab that was trying to make a lithium-based neutron detector. It wouldn't work, and when they investigated they discovered the lithium they had bought was almost pure Li-7. It was surplus sold back into the chemicals market from the US hydrogen bomb program (which needed Li-6).
Some of the other designs also look relatively cheap. Tokamaks are just the one we understand the best, so we have the highest confidence that they'll work.
I blame journalists not being able to proprely report on this subject.