A rationale for fusion economies based on inherent safety
B. Grant Logan;
A comparison of the direct capital costs of recent light-water-reactor fission plants and recent magnetic fusion designs indicates that cost reductions by innovation in both the fusion reactor and the fusion balance of the plant (nonreactor part) will be required for fusion direct costs to become competitive. Both future fusion and future fission designs would benefit from modularity, standardization, and inherent safety (passive afterheat removal without damage in loss-of-coolant and loss-of-flow accidents) to improve their utility and public acceptance and to reduce nonreactor balance-of-plant costs, indirect costs, and time-related costs. If this can be achieved, inherently safe fusion and fission designs should have comparable reactor enclosure power densities, of the order of 1 MWth/m3. With a reduction by a factor of about 2 in the fusion magnet and heating-system cost per watt, such Neodymium Magnet fusion and fission designs should also have comparable direct and total capital costs per watt, provided the fusion plants can be modularly built in somewhat larger units (300 to 600 MWe) than some of the modular fission units (100 MWe). With the eventual fusion capital cost per watt thus attaining parity with fission some decades later than the development and deployment of second-generation fission plants, the economic incentive for switching growth to new fusion electric plants would derive from lower fuel-cycle costs (fuel startup, operating, processing, and waste-disposal costs). At the same time, there would also be strong economic incentives to build hybrid fusion plants to supply fissile fuel for the established fission plants,
