The Huffington Post- Fusion Energy
By: Martin Greenwald
Fusion is the big winner in what economists call “external costs,” costs that are borne by society as a whole and that don’t factor into the costs of production. Scientists working in the field agree that you could build a fusion reactor that produces a lot of energy, but whether in the end, fusion can be cost competitive and reliable is still an open question.
The most promising approach for commercial fusion energy uses powerful magnetic fields to insulate this hot plasma from nearby material walls. Experiments to date, have produced about as much fusion power as they consume and a simple scale-up in size would yield net energy production. ITER, an experiment to do just that, is under construction by an international consortium that includes the U.S.
The steps required to harness fusion power are well known but will take some time and some money. Fusion won’t come cheap, but the costs need to be put into context in the U.S. alone, direct expenditures for energy are on the order of 1.5 trillion dollars per year, about 10% of the U.S. economy. We’re spending less than 0.03% of that on fusion research. With a reasonable level of investment, the power source of the future could really be the power source of the future.
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