Nuclear Fusion Energy Economics

The question of market introduction is most significant at the early stage when fusion has reached a clear level in terms of technological maturity, and it is ready to offer a first generation of power plants. So, the construction of the first-of-a-kind power plants will be associated with significant technological risk, and we may not expect this first generation to be very good performers; they will not have high availability, are likely to be prone to unplanned outages, have low plant efficiency, and couple that with a relatively high capital investment cost. To put it another way, Gen-1 fusion reactors demand a significant technological risk and an initial investment of hundreds of billions of euros to produce a product that is not competitive in terms of price or performance at a meaningless scale in terms of energy generation. “Who is going to pay for the Gen-1 fusion power plants, and why?” is raised by this. In product development, this stage is equivalent to what is known as the “valley of death,” which can only be overcome with strong financial support. However, the fusion situation is special because it will take a high-risk investment of hundreds or possibly thousands of billions of euros to get over the valley of death.