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Criteria for the economic viability of fusion power plants
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10894-026-00577-9
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Fusion power plants are not viable for several reasons. The easiest to explain is that all but a couple of efforts require tritium. The world supply of tritium will be exhausted by ITER. There is talk of breeding but the last I heard even ITER is not even going to experiment with breeding. Plus several published papers point out breeding will not work for simple reasons like tritium being lost to diffusion. The other efforts use either He3 or boron. He3 is to be mined on the moon or come from the decay of tritium. You first have to get the tritium or build a very large mining operation and maintain it in vacuum and in high temperatures when no shadow. In permanent shadow there is no He3 flux. For a plasma with boron the temperature is so high that the electrons have to be out of equilibrium at a lower temperature to avoid radiating too much energy. Good luck.
That's right, also the world production of Be is only a few hundred tons, and it is crucial to producing T in breeding schemes otherwise you need more endothermic reactions and lose energy output. Also the world has limited production of He needed for cryogenics. Sometimes advocates say that the limit for energy is the D in seawater of course, but it is hard to imagine that would be the case. In reality the materials needed for fission reactors are more prevalent in the earth's crust, including U and Th, which are present in typical crust with an energy density if fissioned several times the same volume of crude oil. As for the T issue, for economic power generation, it would have to cost $1000 a gram or less (far below current prices) -- sometimes the claim is that the reactor operators would not have to pay this cost and would obtain it "for free" from breeding. What this really means is that the cost centre of the breeding within the reactor complex would still have to produce T at this price point when the cost is broken out. This is an ambitious goal and perhaps not really possible with current technology. Another factor is that a fusion reactor requires more electrical capacity than an equivalent baseline load fission reactor as some of the electricity goes back into powering its own operations, this adds capital cost, and makes the economic case worse.
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