Sense checking claims about the cost of electricity from fusion (spoiler: it's gonna be expensive!)
Intuitively, you might expect that the 'holy grail' of energy will be expensive. Yet, government labs, academics, and private fusion companies promise that cheap green electricity is just around the corner.
Billions of dollars of public and private money have been invested in fusion, and earlier this month General Fusion listed publicly with a promise to deliver carbon free electricity to the grid in the 2030's, and that ultimately the electricity would become cost competitive.
The problem? New research published in the Journal of Fusion Energy shows that some of those promises are fallacious.
About the study
The study puts questions and debate about technology and timelines to one side, and assumes that the tech delivers as promised, today.
Rather than taking the conventional approach of estimating the costs of each yet-to-be-designed component and adding them up, the study works backwards from a claimed cost. By methodically removing the known costs (such as financing, steam turbines, cooling systems, and so on) the implied costs of fusion hardware are revealed.
It is shown that in some cases, such as the General Fusion investor information filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the fusion hardware would have to be produced for free to make the sums work. This is nonsense.
Why it matters
We are being asked to invest, either directly by purchasing shares, or indirectly through our taxes. Indeed, billions of dollars of taxpayer money and private investment have already been spent on fusion research. Yet, it can easily be shown that even if the technology worked today, and we could build a powerplant overnight, then the electricity would not be affordable.^(1)
There's an opportunity cost to the pursuit of uneconomic fusion schemes. For one, money is being diverted from other 'better' (cheaper, greener, more economical, ...) technologies to pursue something that, even if it worked, appears doomed to be uneconomical.
Despite the hype, fusion schemes such as the one proposed by General Fusion have clear and obvious shortcomings that even a high school level analysis can identify. Why are policy makers and investors blind to this?
Judge for yourself
Have a read of the paper here:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10894-026-00592-w
^(1) Note that the study specifically pertains to fusion thermal powerplants (tokamaks, stellarators, MTF, ...). It says nothing about schemes that rely on direct energy conversion.