$600 per ton of CO2. The industry is trying to get to $100 per ton of CO2.

Energy estimated is 1,200 kilowatt-hours per ton of CO2 removed.

Nuclear fission energy averages 0.4 cents/kWh. That's $480 in energy costs alone (ignoring profit margins for removal, etc).

Why would bleeding edge fusion that requires cutting edge lasers, magnets, and various other containment stuff have a cheaper energy generation cost? I could be wrong, but I don't think nuclear waste (which is the primary difference with fusion) is the primary cost contributor. So why would you want to invest in more expensive fusion to remove all this carbon instead of cheaper fission? Nuclear waste by the way isn't waste. It can be reused in breeder reactors and it's used a lot in medicine (I could be wrong but one of the reasons nuclear imaging has gotten more expensive is because radioactive materials are more difficult to obtain due to reduction in global fission energy).

Those are figures for current electrical production schemes.

After decades of R&D fusion should become significantly cheaper than fission per kWh if only due to having less of a regulatory burden and smoother permitting process.

It’s more expensive now, but in the long run it will be cheaper.

You hope. It’s not “more expensive now”. It’s infinitely more expensive because we can’t even build one. It’s unclear how much a fusion reactor will end up costing but I wouldn’t use hope to blind myself into thinking it’ll be 10x cheaper than fission. There’s certainly reason to be hopeful because solar and wind are cheaper, but construction for those is also relatively simple and easy to mass manufacture most of it. Fusion reactors will probably look more like fission than not (ie complex to mass manufacture, still require complex structures, need regular complicated maintenance due to radioactive decay in the containment materials etc). Additionally, solar and wind don’t pose real threats to established fossil fuel interests. Fusion would and it’s unclear how they might respond from a regulatory hurdle perspective.

Fusion plants should be able to save a lot of money though simpler permitting processes, not needing the same level of containment structures, needing less security, and less regulator scrutiny. The equipment itself might be more expensive at the start but if we build these plants at scale those costs should reduce over time.

The first commercial reactor designs are probably 50 years away and another 50 years before costs come down to be reasonable / we can build enough to start replacing existing fission and coal. This is from the CEO of General Fusion a leader in the space. I think if even the fusion people are saying “build fission today to solve global warming” then that tells you something about the time scale this is happening on.

I suspect the regulatory environment is from regulatory capture by the fossil fuel industry. Otherwise why would Gen IV reactors, which can’t meltdown, be suffering many regulatory delays? What kind of nuclear proliferation concerns exist for reactors built and deployed within the US?