BTW, the battery cost estimates there in that link seem very high, not reflecting the recent collapse in LFP prices from China.
Australia updates their GenCost every year, which feeds into their Integrated System Plan. The draft of this year's is up for public comments:
https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/gen...
> In this report, where we make a comparison between the costs of variable renewables such as solar PV and wind and the costs of other technologies we include the cost of firming those renewables which we call integration costs. These are the additional costs of ensuring supply is reliable when using intermittent energy sources. These integration costs are itemised in the report and include storage, transmission, system security and spilled energy
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...
About the worst you can find in terms of small geographical area and having to deal with both Dunkelflautes and arctic conditions spilling south which often leads to -5C to -15C and near zero wind.
Of course excluding that storage is plummeting in price with the latest Chinese auctions with bids submitted December 2024 landing on $62/kWh installed and serviced for 20 years.
https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/15/chinas-cgn-new-energy-an...
A fusion reactor is going to create and consume large quantities of tritium, which is difficult to control because it is an isotope of hydrogen and hydrogen can go right through metals. It might not really be a problem but it is always going to be in the paper that somebody detected tritium around a reactor.
Also, because fusion reactors produce large quantities of neutrons, you could put U238 or Th232 into the blanket and breed either Pu239 or U233. Back in the 1980s some engineers thought that a hybrid fusion-fission system could have better economics that either alone if you used the bred fuel in thermal reactors. Those materials could just as well be used to make bombs, although, unlike a fast breeder cycle, a fusion reactor doesn't require plutonium processing technology in order to work.
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As for solar and wind being "cheap" don't believe the hype. I mean, it is cheap if you don't mind that it is only available when the sun shines and when the wind blows. You see estimates for solar + storage that are deceptive and thought-stopping like Case 17 of [1] (an hour and a half of storage is significant, but it is not comparable to the 24 hour service that fossil fuels and nuclear can provide.)
I haven't seen a detailed analysis of the generation + transmission + storage costs of a 100% renewable system published in the last decade. If you try a back of the envelope calculation it usually winds up worse than Case 9 from that report, except that Case 9 is optimistic because (so far) it always costs a lot more than you estimate to build a nuclear plant. [2]
[1] https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost...
[2] to get some sense of how bad the problem is you need: (a) to get through the night (12 hours of storage? still might beat AP1000...) and (b) get through extended periods of bad weather (2 weeks of storage?) and (c) get through the winter (overbuild solar 2-3x? otherwise 6 months of storage?)