Retail electricity prices in France are €0,13/kWh, so not that cheap (€0,18/kWh pre pandemic).

https://www.statista.com/statistics/418087/electricity-price...

This doesn't matter, though, because France doesn't need many nukes anymore, therefore doesn't subsidizes new plants anymore. One new plant is built in France, and it already is hellishly expensive: "As of 2020 the project is more than five times over budget and years behind schedule. Various safety problems have been raised, including weakness in the steel used in the reactor." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...

There are two problems with this reasoning. First, you are comparing the cost of written-off plants, for a technology that has huge upfront costs and much lower fuel costs.

Fission is not cheap if you build a new nuclear plant, not in the Western world. That's why almost no nuclear plants are being build. Making a safe plant is just really, really complicated.

Second, this specific argument can be used to see why fusion is a pipe dream. The primary competitor to fusion is fission. And the fuel costs of fission are pretty low, as you just said. So fusion will not be competitive unless you can built them around the same price as fission plants.

Someone else in this thread talked about S curves. Well, those kind of S curves happen for tech that gets produced in larger quantities, where it is economical to spend engineering resources making the production of the tech cheaper.

Maybe I’m wrong but fission also don’t need extreme cooling utilities. And fission seems to be way more secure than fusion. So, while I do agree on the « new tech » costs, I’m pretty confident we’ll be able to build this plants anywhere in the world and not only near rivers.

But maybe I’m too optimistic :)

I think you mixed up fission and fusion there. Regardless, a fusion reactor will need similar amount of cooling infrastructure if you want to output a similar amount of electricity.