Late is better than never.
The problem with fusion is not technical (although we've not yet solved the technical challenges, which are considerable) but financial/economical.
Let's assume all the physics are sorted out later today. Now all we need is $100 billion to build a demo plant. Because we live in a real world, it will take 10 years before we can break ground.
Probably 5 more years of construction, testing, etc. So your $100b should start earning a return 15 years from now. If all goes well.
And returns should be pretty good. Assuming no great breakthroughs in storage tech between now and then.
Of course, returns will be seasonal, and mostly at night. We can expect solar to supply daytime demand. (Hey, solar is a form of fusion energy as well!)
So yeah, we need $100 billion now, perhaps more later as costs spiral, theres no prospect of a return anytime soon, actual returns are hard to forecast, and frankly life-span of the asset is hard to predict.
All of which is to say that it's unlikely to be privately funded. Govt maybe. Assuming the project survives multiple govt funding rounds. And, of course, being govt funded, timelines will drag and costs will overrun.
Unless of course, well, China. Cost is no object, experienced at getting major stuff built. Fewer delays. Money no object. But even there, why choose fusion when solar is so cheap? What strategic advantage does it hold?
Betting on fusion today means betting that it gets to production faster than storage. Indeed that it beats storage hy 30 years. And that's some bet to make.
The problem with solar is not technical (although we've not yet solved the technical challenges, which are considerable) but financial/economical.
Let's assume all the physics are sorted out later today. Now we need $500 billion to build 15 mines around the world for whatever new magical element we need in massive amounts. Because we live in the real world, this will be fraught with global pushback, because finding the political support today for creating insanely massive mines in favor of hopefully one day breaking even on carbon neutrality is a fool's errand.
Probably 25 more years of litigation, and you should start getting access to mines which would allow you to pollute to insane degrees so we can fight climate change in a century.
I could go on, but you get the point.
Individual wind turbines aren’t very big, solar panels get laughably small, and while they are not efficient at their small form factors they are very easy to scale up and down. Nuclear is the exact opposite, representing a very large single point of failure, and even under pre-renewables hard to absorb; some of the first pumped hydro was developed to take excess nuclear capacity because it cannot scale up or down very easily.
You are right that China has structural advantages when it comes to building nuclear, and they are making use of them.
By 2030 there is 110GW planned of nuclear and 2800GW of solar and wind.
Unfortunate, but that's the way the cookie crumbles.
Without price anderson act dumping the liability on to taxpayers nobody would build nuclear reactors even at the cost they are.
You can also bypass most project overrun concerns if you use already-approved reactors instead of trying to use a brand-new one, but of course this pushes back the schedule for profitability.
Given the current instability of oil prices, where considerably more than 4 countries are producers, it's perhaps dangerous to bet the farm on future fuel supply.
Edit: for reference each reactor consumes about 140 tons of uranium each year, and current production is lower than demand by about 10%.
So if there's a growth in nuclear reactors (which there is, in China alone) I guess we're hoping for an equivalent growth in uranium supply? Do yeah, you're not wrong. Currently nuclear, once built, is very reliable. But equally it has a "single supplier" problem as well.
The cost to produce such components that must safely operate in very demanding conditions is prohibitively expensive in comparison to producing a solar panel.
Solar panels will always win because you’ll never have the required demand to mass produce nuclear power station components.
It’s really that simple.
Nuclear is a good technology but not commercially viable.
It's a shame it wasn't competitive.
Nuclear isn't uncompetitive due to some inherent technological reason. It's uncompetitive due to overregulation and gold plating.
Solar used to be completely uncompetitive, but improvements in technology and increases in scale made the economics work. Nuclear got kneecapped before that could have a chance of happening.
This is an oft repeated point by pro nuclear folk, but it’s not true. There are many regulatory regimes all over the world, and new nuclear is competitive in effectively none of them. Even in single party state china with few regulations , nukes are a declining share of total power every year.
They’re just giant big complex pieces of machinery. With huge ongoing security, insurance and deferred decommissioning costs.
Is there a study that identifies which regulations are unnecessary and how much removing them would save?
Compare a nuclear project to a solar panel. Solar is cheap, simple, commoditised, flexible, and is riding on almost miraculous learning curves. If dispatchable energy can be solved, beyond just gas/coal plants, ideally with long-duration storage based on the conversion of electricity, then this is going to be an infinitely better option. It's also just not clear what role nuclear plants have given that renewables need highly dispatchable power to ramp up and down according to their variable output, not baseload nuclear power.
That's the go-to nuclear apologist argument, but it doesn't hold water. Nuclear is struggling globally, even in China. That points to inherent problems. Regulation also doesn't explain why costs have been so widely underestimated. That's a function of dishonesty of the cost projections, not of regulation.
I'll add that regulation is the price you pay for implicit subsidy like government insurance against accidents. You don't get the latter without the former.
Nuclear is so competitive that they had to ban it in Germany to get rid of it.
The implication you're trying to draw there is a non sequitur. That situation doesn't contradict what I said. Moreover, France is going to be dragged kicking and screaming into the renewable age because they can't afford to subsidize nuclear builds enough to make a nuclear approach work.
France is now on ancient fully depreciated nuclear reactors that are soon in dire need of replacement. Of course it’s cheap. But they have huge investments ahead of them to replace, upgrade, refurbish, etc. They have identified that that need to expand renewable energy to 50% of power generation, at least.
We’ve also seen recently that Germany has had to save France during hot summers when their reactors have had to shut down.
What’s the lesson from France? Build lots of nuclear all at once many decades ago when labor was cheap and then stop investing and letting your infrastructure rot, and you’ll have cheap power for some limited time? Is that something anyone can or should copy today? No.
Now, even VALCOE (value-adjusted LCOE) of wind and solar is coming down well below all other fossil and nuclear alternatives. So how can you say betting on renewables was the wrong at this time? It has been expensive to transition but long term it’s drastically cheaper than everything else. And we haven’t even started getting the benefits of how repowering old renewable power plants is significantly cheaper than building new ones.
Simply not stopping the most modern nuclear plants we had (like Isar 2 in Munich) would have made a nice impact on costs and CO2 emissions.
Building new (nuclear) ones is probably not worth it, though.