I was discussing fusion recently with someone. Even if fusion can be made to work, I don't think it'll ever be rolled out.
It requires lots of capital, and incurs significant running costs (if only in nuclear engineers.) (And that's before we discuss maintainence, containment, waste, etc.) And time. 10 years or more before it makes any return.
By contrast it's competing with simple, cheap, approaches like dollar and wind. These are "low tech", largely passive, either few or no moving parts. Quick to get going, low maintainence (or no maintainence), high returns.
Can we do fusion? Most likely yes. Can we do it so it gives a decent return on capital? With reasonable risk? Compared to solar and wind? I think thats unlikely.
So it'll be left to govts to fund the things, presumably for "cover load", when the sun's not shining and the wind's not blowing. And to build one you need to be reasonably sure it won't be obsoleted by better storage anytime soon.
But it has the issue that you need a huge accelerator to even get started, on paper you could build a full-size plant that would cost a little more than the AP1000 but you cannot build a subscale test facility so nobody has built hardware.
On the other hand the wall plug efficiency of accelerators is orders of magnitude greater than lasers and you could conceivably make a few shots per second with such a thing whereas lasers are doing good if they can make a few shots a day. Laser fusion can make good demos but is a road to nowhere as an energy source.
It requires lots of capital, and incurs significant running costs (if only in nuclear engineers.) (And that's before we discuss maintainence, containment, waste, etc.) And time. 10 years or more before it makes any return.
By contrast it's competing with simple, cheap, approaches like dollar and wind. These are "low tech", largely passive, either few or no moving parts. Quick to get going, low maintainence (or no maintainence), high returns.
Can we do fusion? Most likely yes. Can we do it so it gives a decent return on capital? With reasonable risk? Compared to solar and wind? I think thats unlikely.
So it'll be left to govts to fund the things, presumably for "cover load", when the sun's not shining and the wind's not blowing. And to build one you need to be reasonably sure it won't be obsoleted by better storage anytime soon.
I just don't see it happening.