https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03039-9
Hmm... Two years ago Tokamak Energy said clean and abundant fusion power by 2030.
https://www.tokamakenergy.co.uk/
So now it's by 2040...

It's fifty years they say we shall have power by fusion reactors in fifty years and the date keeps sliding. ITER should reach breakeven in 2035 but power production would be coming from the DEMO reactor, which is still in the planning stage. A blogger in Le Scienze who works at CERN says that DEMO should be bigger than ITER, which is already bigger than STEP.
I don't believe in small fusion reactors and big projects like ITER cost a lot of money. Can England afford to go alone? I don't believe so , so STEP seems to me only politics.
Tullio

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DEMO is what the name suggest, a demo that would hopefully produce net energy to the grid. By 2048 they say it will produce 2 GW... The price of that energy will not be what any consumer want to pay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Station
But DEMO lie in its capability to generate between 0.3 GW to 0.5 GW net electricity to the grid. That is really not much. Forsmark NP north of Stockholm produce more than 3.3 GW.
https://www.euro-fusion.org/programme/demo/
Then if all goes well PROTO, yes a prototype, after that. It's not to be implemented before 2050.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROTO_(fusion_reactor)
Yet again. The price of that energy will not be what any consumer want to pay.
Then if all goes well again PROD will be build... Actually there are no plans for such plants yet...
ITER is funded by 35 nations.
But now the UK say they will start produce net energy all by them self already in 2040.
Have they announced what the price will be for a consumer?

A Deuterium-Tritium reaction does not produce electricity. It produces 14 MeV neutrons which can destroy any material in a short time. To produce electricity you must use them to boil some water, produce a vapor which moves the turbines etc like a fission Reactor. There was a cartoon in Nuclear Engineering International showing two engineers standing before a Boiling Water Reactor and saying: there must be a simpler way to boil some water. The Joint European Torus in Culham, Oxfordshire, financed by Europe is trying to find the way. But will UK finance it after Brexit? I doubt.
Tullio

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Here in this part of the US (Tennessee Valley area) we are paying right at 10 cents per kilowatt hour. This cost can be a mild burden to cool rather large homes during the summer. A middle-class home that was built to standards of the year 2000 may run about $350 per month for electricity in a home which has gas-powered hot water and cooktop.

TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority--a relic of the great depression and FDR) sells power to a distributor --mine is Nashville Electric Company who maintains the lines. I am sure that they make a handsome profit on the entire operation but generally produce a reliable product. Currently, natural gas is super abundant here in the United states. Bulk commodity prices are around 20 cents per Therm (100,000 BTU's) . My silly-putty supplier --Piedmont gas (Duke Energy) charges me around $1.00 per Therm. This is a sweet deal for Duke Energy and a rip-off of the consumer.

In the Valley, we have nuclear and coal in about an even balance--Natural gas may be competitive. Years ago we bought coal at the University of Illinois' Power Plant for about $25.00 per ton which was about 20,000,000 btu per . Adding the capital and operating cost of scrubbers ran up the cost of coal produced electricity and steam. At about $2.00 per million BTU's gas is being burned more and more given Carbon tax style initiatives.

So, the question is how much do you want to pay for electricity. In Europe where there is more solar and wind I bet you are already paying at least 20 Cents (US Dollar-based) per Kilowatt hour.

So, the question is how much do you want to pay for electricity. In Europe where there is more solar and wind I bet you are already paying at least 20 Cents (US Dollar-based) per Kilowatt hour.

If that is true then it's due to markup. The production cost for wind-generated electricity is down to roughly $0.02/kWh.

By the way, the largest wind farms in the U.S. are being built in Texas. Disregarding all the political and environmental baggage, it's simply much cheaper.

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I think that there are a lot of fakers when it comes to describing the costs. Some forget capital costs, maintenance and repair, distribution, wholesale mark-ups etc.
Any way, the proof comes at the consumer level which may be set by how much political power corporations, resellers and government owned utilities are allowed to gouge the consumer.

All that being said I doubt the long term cost of solar is 2 cents per kilowatt hour--you could argue that it is zero since the wind is free (I think ??)

here is what I find on our ultra reliable internet"

What is the cost of wind energy per kWh?
8.2 cents
According to the federal Energy Information Administration, the "levelized cost" of new wind power (including capital and operating costs) is 8.2 cents per kWh. Advanced clean-coal plants cost about 11 cents per kWh, the same as nuclear. But advanced natural gas-burning plants come in at just 6.3 cents per kWh.Dec 21, 2012.

I imagine that advanced coal plants have scrubbers and other sequestration measures.
Poor management will result in consumers paying double ala the Three-Mile Island melt down, Fukushima and the PGE fire reparations.

When I worked in Power Research-- Advanced Engineering for General Electric 50 years ago ---PGE was a leader in the industry. Now they were goaded by politicians and left-wing tree huggers into putting their capital into alternative energy instead of maintaining and updating their service infrastructure. Now they have fewer trees to hug and fewer people to live in Paradise.

All the while creating a third world environment of power outages to go with the other consequences of liberal agendas.

In Italy I am paying 0.21 euro/kWh. This includes taxes and also the cost of dismantling 4 nuclear fission reactors. There is no national site for spent fuel elements like in Finland. According to my ENI utility in 2017 electricity came 36.60% from renewable sources, 13.73, from coal, 42.34% from natural gas, 0.75% from oil, 3.68% from nuclear, 2.88% from other sources like geothermal. Nuclear electricity comes from France. Sardinia, which had coal mines, has many coal fired plants but coal comes from Poland. There is a direct current high voltage line connection from Sardinia to Corsica and Italy.
Tullio

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So, the question is how much do you want to pay for electricity. In Europe where there is more solar and wind I bet you are already paying at least 20 Cents (US Dollar-based) per Kilowatt hour.

Here in Sweden it depend on if it's summer or winter. This year the prize is 70 US cents per Kilowatt hour in the winter and 35 US cents in the summer. And we have a lot of hydro power that cost nothing to produce. I think the cost is only about infrastructure and maintenance like the other energy resources. Will the prize drop if fusion reactors become a reality? Of course not:) As I understand it a fusion reactor needs tritium that is a scarce resource and difficult to produce...

Sweden's electricity production consists largely of hydropower and nuclear power. Together, they account for 80 percent of total electricity production. The rest is produced with wind power, cogeneration and condensation heat and some other minor energy sources.

For those fascinated with the split of electricity production there's a website which gives a more or less real-time picture for the UK & France:
https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

It’s never too late to try:)
https://youtu.be/t5wntLZCcYA
Build a Fusion Reactor
Yes, you can build your very own nuclear fusion reactor in your house! ...
Step 1: Assemble the Vacuum Chamber. ...
Step 2: Prepare the High Vacuum Pump. ...
Step 3: Build Inner Grid. ...
Step 4: Assemble the Deuterium System. ...
Step 5: High Voltage. ...
Step 6: Setup Neutron Detection. ...
Step 7: Fire It Up (and Cross Your Fingers)
https://www.instructables.com/id/Build-A-Fusion-Reactor/

It’s never too late to try:)
https://youtu.be/t5wntLZCcYA
Build a Fusion Reactor
Yes, you can build your very own nuclear fusion reactor in your house! ...
Step 1: Assemble the Vacuum Chamber. ...
Step 2: Prepare the High Vacuum Pump. ...
Step 3: Build Inner Grid. ...
Step 4: Assemble the Deuterium System. ...
Step 5: High Voltage. ...
Step 6: Setup Neutron Detection. ...
Step 7: Fire It Up (and Cross Your Fingers)
https://www.instructables.com/id/Build-A-Fusion-Reactor/

You dont have to go to that trouble at all. Just wait a year or two and Putin's Avangard hypersonic missle will deliver it right to your rooftop (assuming you are not in Russia). In a blinding flash of insight you will realized that Roosevelt screwed up at Yalta in '45 when he gave away eastern Europe. My grandson has been hired to teach english in St Petersberg. He does not have a GED but learned Russian on his on with home schooling. He told one of my other kids that his students all look like models. They may look like models but I am guessing their profession is going to be something else and Russian language will get them paid only with rubles and vodka.

prize is 70 US cents per Kilowatt hour i

Unbelievable ===about 7 Times
what what we are paying here n ˇTennessee.

prize is 70 US cents per Kilowatt hour i

Unbelievable ===about 7 Times
what what we are paying here n ˇTennessee.

I think we are ripped off by the energy companies... (no surprise really)
Can we please connect to the US grid?
Lot's of coal in Tennessee. Clean coal as Trump say it is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM84OekHtAQ

You dont have to go to that trouble at all. Just wait a year or two and Putin's Avangard hypersonic missle will deliver it right to your rooftop (assuming you are not in Russia). In a blinding flash of insight you will realized that Roosevelt screwed up at Yalta in '45 when he gave away eastern Europe. My grandson has been hired to teach english in St Petersberg. He does not have a GED but learned Russian on his on with home schooling. He told one of my other kids that his students all look like models. They may look like models but I am guessing their profession is going to be something else and Russian language will get them paid only with rubles and vodka.

Hehe:) But I think we want our energy delivered in a orderly fashion. Not all at once.

I have read that the National Science Foundation is going to finance again the Princeton Spherical Torus which was stopped in 2016. Good luck!
Tullio

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You are probably paying for too expensive attempts at renewables (Wind and solar)--probably a good bit of them are not working at all.

If you can get natural gas then you should build power plants to use that fuel.
If you are brave and can keep the tree-huggers at bay then Nuclear will be the cleanest and should be competitive with other power production methods.

Recently I wrote a blog in Le Scienze online magazine about the SESAME synchrotron radiation source in Amman which is surrounded by a wide field of photovoltaic panels. An Italian physicist who works at CERN has replied that SESAME, an international cooperation with a very low budget, pays its salaried workers by selling the electricity produced by those panels to the Jordan electric network.
Tullio

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https://phys.org/news/2020-12-korean-artificial-sun-world-sec-long.html

Thanks for that: Spectacular!


Here's hoping for affordable clean power sooner rather than later...

Keep searchin',
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)