For fusion to be competitive beyond 2040, costs will likely need to be at or below ∼$80–100/MWh at 2020 price. This will be hard to achieve for early fusion
The Department of Energy’s research and development arm will invest $135 million into removing the “toughest technical barriers” for fusion reaching commercial scale, ARPA-E director Conner Prochaska said today. The question is how fast we get fusion-generated power on the grid, and whether America leads that achievement,” Prochaska said in prepared remarks at the ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit in San Diego. Commonwealth Fusion Systems is aiming to build its first commercial power plant in Virginia in partnership with Dominion Energy, and also has a PPA with Eni. In December, the parent media company of President Donald Trump’s social media network Truth Social made the bizarre move of acquiring TAE Technologies; in March the company said it’s scouting out sites to start building a utility-scale, 50-megawatt fusion power plant. Joel Fetter, managing director of Clark Street Associates’ programs in advanced energy, critical minerals, and industrial technologies, told *Latitude Media* that ARPA-E’s latest fusion investment is significant.
There have been a handful of studies (introduced below) that have previously estimated the cost of fusion energy, which mostly rely on some combination of data from ITER; the PROCESS fusion reactor design code originally developed by what is now UKAEA [40]; and, in the US, models produced in 1980s and updated recently in Ref. We investigate the effect of discount rate, power scaling effects and economy of multiples. Considering the Advanced Small technology option, fusion energy cost of 75 units is in the region of $101-145/MWh – a range that is comparable to 10 units of Advanced Large and also the energy cost of LWR fission reactors. Nevertheless, for fusion to be competitive beyond 2040 with renewables costs including back-up for reliability, generation costs will need to be at or below $80-100/MWh. These low energy costs will be hard to achieve for the early technology large fusion designs considered here even with the reduced capital costs from production learning.
The high case is $11,300/kWh in 2050, in today's dollars, but that is significantly below the current cost for fission plants, at least in the
Cost Model for Fusion Power Plants. The **Fusion Cost Model** is a first-of-its-kind app for analyzing the cost structure of commercial fusion power plants. To meet this need, Clean Air Task Force developed the Fusion Cost Model, informed by more than a decade of collaboration with fusion developers, industry leaders, and international institutions. The model gives users a clear and as complete as possible view of the cost categories present in a fusion power plant, helps identify key cost drivers shaping different fusion power plant designs, and enables consistent, apples-to-apples economic analysis across approaches. **The cost elements currently included in the model are incomplete and do not fully capture the cost structure of a future commercial fusion power plant. The model will be progressively refined as additional data become available and as technological and economic parameters are better understood, with the long-term objective of producing LCOE estimates that more closely reflect the realities of commercial fusion power plants.
16 , https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/13371/chapter/1 .")This approach is used, for example, in the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Department of Energy (DOE) Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.20While the NIF is intended primarily for research to improve stewardship of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile (see "DOE Weapons Programs Research Related to Fusion"), it ha s also demonstrat ed fusion ignition several times, beginning i n December 2022.21 Although each ignition lasted for less than one nanosecond,these demonstrations ha ve increased interest in inertial confinement designs for future power plants.22According to some experts, for lasers to be used in a commercial power plant, they would need to be more efficient and have higher repetition rates than current models. For example, the DOE Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) also supports some fusion energy projects,54 , Power Generation: Nuclear Fusion , 2025 , https://arpa-e.energy.gov/programs-and-initiatives/search-all-projects/complexion-engineered-nanocrystalline-tungsten-alloy-plasma-facing-materials-long-pulse-tokamak-operation .") along with other projects across the full range of energy technologies.
... costs structure of commercial fusion power plants. Developed by ... Energy (ARPA-E) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
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