this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2024
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I specifically picked the statistic that claimed to have included the full cost of installing something new. Most other statistics only include prolonging the life of existing plants, thus ignoring the installation costs completely. You can just quote the paragraphs that prove your point the same way I have and then we can discuss further. Maybe I made a mistake, who knows.
Or you could... Actually read the entire source you linked? It's a pretty good article and goes into a lot of detail on why LCOE estimates vary significantly between countries and depending on discount rate assumptions, so quoting one specific number is useful context but not the full story.
The problem isn't whether the LCOE numbers you quote consider the capital costs - they do, and that's correct - so do the ones in the table below it. It's that those are average values taken from the USA, which has among the highest capital costs for installing new reactors in the world. At best that tells us that fusion isn't cost competitive in the USA right now.