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For the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Shell company, a book with essays about energy has been created. It has been officially handed to King Willem Alexander.
We - Niek Lopes Cardozo, Gert Jan Kramer and I - also contributed by writing an essay about the difference between solar pv and nuclear fusion. This from the perspective of industrial deployment and a few other economic properties.
In this essay, we compared the growth characteristics of various new energy technologies, particularly of solar photovoltaics and nuclear fusion. From the economical perspective, a key difference between these two is the unit size of an energy-providing apparatus. A fusion reactor is obviously much larger than a PV panel and this introduces more uncertainty to fusion in climbing the growth ladder, as we elaborate on.
Find the essay in the Shell 100 years book
(in its contents, search for: "The cradle of new energy technologies")
The other essays are very much worth the read as well. They deal with a variety of interesting perspectives in the domains of other energy technologies, such as pv, biomass, energy and society, synthetic fuels, hydrogen, the transition.
In footnote 4 we state:
"The experimental fusion reactor presently under construction in the south of France, ITER, is designed to produce 500 MW of thermal fusion power – ten times more than the power needed to run the device. A worldwide collaboration shares its construction costs of more than €10 billion ($12 billion)."
This is not precisely correct: 500 MW of fusion power needs 50 MW of heating power. The power required to generate this heating power is more (in the order of 200-300 MW). Please note that ITER is still an experimental machine and is not designed to generate useful output power. This will be the role of next machines (demonstrators/prototypes).