If the plan for energy conversion is a steam turbine, it’s never going to be economically competitive.
New-build coal isn’t economically competitive anywhere, even where you get the coal essentially for free.
New-build coal isn’t economically competitive anywhere, even where you get the coal essentially for free.
For comparison, fusion fuel is $0.00014/kWh, equivalent to coal at $0.27/ton. There's no where on Earth where coal is that cheap. You couldn't move it from the mine to the powerplant for that cheap even if they were next door to one another. Even if all the costs got subsidized away, you couldn't count on the fuel remaining cheap for the lifetime of a powerplant.
And of course there's that pesky CO2 issue that makes investment in coal unattractive even if it could be economically competitive.
There are places where there is abundant brown coal, which cannot be economically transported long distances and is therefore basically loaded on a conveyer belt directly into power stations.
New-build brown coal isn’t economically viable either.
Some have a secondary steam turbine as an exhaust energy recovery system but as I understand it that’s becoming uncommon on new builds because new gas turbines are expected to be used less now that there’s a lot of renewable energy on a lot of grids.
This article from DW explains it doesn’t make economic sense there either:
https://www.dw.com/en/why-build-600-new-unprofitable-coal-pl...
Provide a source or your own analysis for this claim:
>If the plan for energy conversion is a steam turbine, it’s never going to be economically competitive.
The key point is that only roughly 20% of the capital cost of a coal plant is related to coal handling and pollution control.
https://esmap.org/sites/default/files/esmap-files/TR122-09_G...
So even if the fusion reactor reduces all of those costs to zero, the capital costs would only be 20% cheaper than new-build coal.
As I mentioned earlier, coal isn't economically competitive with renewables pretty much anywhere, even places with very cheap coal resources that can't be traded on the global market. There's heaps of lignite in Texas, for instance, but nobody's building new plants to burn it.
As such, it's hard to see how fusion reactors turning steam turbines are going to be economically competitive either.