Socio-economic Aspects of Fusion
Author: J.A. Schmidt
Date of PPPL Report: October 2004
To be presented at: the 20th IAEA Fusion Energy Conference, 1-6 November 2004, Vilamoura, Portugal. The papers will be published by the IAEA as unedited proceedings in electronic format on CD-ROM and on the IAEA Physics Section web site as soon as possible after the conference..
Fusion power systems, if developed and deployed, would have many attractive features including power production not dependant on weather or solar conditions, flexible siting, and minimal carbon dioxide production. In this paper, we quantify the benefit of these features. In addition, fusion deployment scenarios are developed for the last half of this century and these scenarios are analyzed for resource requirements and waste production.