Will fusion power get cheap? Don’t count on it.
Will fusion power get cheap? Don’t count on it.
核聚变能源会变得便宜吗？别指望了。
Fusion power could provide a steady, zero-emissions source of electricity in the future—if companies can get plants built and running. But a new study suggests that even if that future arrives, it might not come cheap. 如果企业能够成功建造并运行核聚变电站，核聚变能源未来有望提供一种稳定且零排放的电力来源。但一项新的研究表明，即便这一未来真的到来，其成本可能也不会很低。
Technologies tend to get less expensive over time. Lithium-ion batteries are now about 90% cheaper than they were in 2013. But historically, different technologies tend to go through this curve at different rates. And the cost of fusion might not sink as quickly as the prices of batteries or solar. 技术往往会随着时间的推移而变得更便宜。锂离子电池现在的价格比 2013 年便宜了约 90%。但从历史来看，不同技术经历这一成本下降曲线的速度各不相同。核聚变的成本下降速度可能不会像电池或太阳能那样快。
It’s tricky to make any predictions about the cost of a technology that doesn’t exist yet. But when there’s billions of dollars of public and private funding on the line, it’s worth considering what assumptions we’re making about our future energy mix and its cost. 对一种尚未问世的技术进行成本预测是很困难的。但当涉及数十亿美元的公共和私人资金投入时，我们有必要审视一下我们对未来能源结构及其成本所做的假设。
One crucial measure is a metric called experience rate—the percentage by which an energy technology’s cost declines every time capacity doubles. A higher figure means a quicker price drop and better economic gains with scaling. Historically, the experience rate is 12% for onshore wind power, 20% for lithium-ion batteries, and 23% for solar modules. Other energy technologies haven’t gotten cheap quite as quickly—fission is at just 2%. 一个关键的衡量指标是“经验率”（experience rate），即能源技术每当产能翻倍时，其成本下降的百分比。数值越高，意味着价格下降越快，规模化带来的经济效益也越好。从历史数据来看，陆上风电的经验率为 12%，锂离子电池为 20%，太阳能组件为 23%。其他能源技术的降价速度则没那么快——核裂变仅为 2%。
In the new study, published in Nature Energy, researchers aimed to improve predictions of fusion’s future price by estimating the technology’s experience rate. The team looked at three key characteristics that can correlate with experience rate: unit size, design complexity, and the need for customization. The larger and more complex a technology is, and/or the more it needs to be customized for different use cases, the lower the experience rate. 在发表于《自然-能源》（Nature Energy）的一项新研究中，研究人员试图通过估算核聚变技术的经验率来改进对其未来价格的预测。研究团队考察了与经验率相关的三个关键特征：单元规模、设计复杂性以及定制化需求。一项技术规模越大、越复杂，或者越需要针对不同用途进行定制，其经验率就越低。
The researchers interviewed fusion experts, including public-sector researchers and those working at companies in the private sector. They had the experts evaluate fusion power plants on those characteristics and used that info to predict the experience rate. (One note here: The study focused only on magnetic confinement and laser inertial confinement, two of the leading fusion approaches, which together receive the vast majority of funding today. Other approaches could come with different cost benefits.) 研究人员采访了核聚变专家，包括公共部门的研究人员和私营企业的从业者。他们让专家根据上述特征对核聚变电站进行评估，并利用这些信息来预测经验率。（注：该研究仅关注磁约束和激光惯性约束这两种领先的核聚变路径，它们目前获得了绝大部分资金支持。其他路径可能会带来不同的成本效益。）
Fusion plants will likely be relatively large, similar to other types of facilities (like coal and fission power plants) that rely on generating heat. They will probably need less customization than fission plants—largely because regulations and safety considerations should be simpler—but more than technologies like solar panels. And as for complexity, “there was almost unanimous agreement that fusion is incredibly complex,” says Lingxi Tang, a PhD candidate in the energy and technology policy group at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and one of the authors of the study. (Some experts said it was literally off the scale the researchers gave them.) 核聚变电站规模可能相对较大，类似于其他依赖热能发电的设施（如燃煤电厂和核裂变电站）。它们对定制化的需求可能低于核裂变电站——主要是因为法规和安全考量相对简单——但高于太阳能电池板等技术。至于复杂性，瑞士苏黎世联邦理工学院能源与技术政策小组的博士生、该研究的作者之一唐灵犀（音译）表示：“几乎所有人都一致认为核聚变极其复杂。”（一些专家甚至表示，其复杂程度超出了研究人员给出的评估量表范围。）
The final figure the researchers suggest for fusion’s experience rate is between 2% and 8%, meaning it will see a faster price reduction than nuclear power but not as dramatic an improvement as many common energy technologies being deployed today. That means that it would take a lot of deployment—and likely quite a long time—for the price of building a fusion reactor to drop significantly, so electricity produced by fusion plants could be expensive for a while. And it’s a much slower rate than the 8% to 20% that many modeling studies assume today. 研究人员建议的核聚变经验率最终数值在 2% 到 8% 之间，这意味着它的降价速度将快于核裂变，但不会像当今部署的许多常见能源技术那样有显著的改善。这意味着需要大量的部署——并且可能需要很长的时间——核聚变反应堆的建设成本才能大幅下降，因此核聚变电站生产的电力在一段时间内可能会很昂贵。而且，这一比率远低于目前许多模型研究中假设的 8% 到 20%。
“On the whole, I think questions should be raised about current investment levels in fusion,” Tang says. (The US allocated over $1 billion to fusion in the 2024 fiscal year, and private-sector funding totaled $2.2 billion between July 2024 and July 2025.) “If you’re talking about decarbonization of the energy system, is this really the best use of public money?” “总的来说，我认为应该对当前核聚变领域的投资水平提出质疑，”唐说。（美国在 2024 财年为核聚变拨款超过 10 亿美元，而 2024 年 7 月至 2025 年 7 月期间，私营部门的资金总额达到了 22 亿美元。）“如果你谈论的是能源系统的脱碳，这真的是公共资金的最佳用途吗？”
But some experts say that looking to the past to understand the future of energy prices might be misleading. “It’s a good exercise, but we have to be humble about how much we don’t know,” says Egemen Kolemen, a professor at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. In 2000, many analysts predicted that solar power would remain expensive—but then production exploded and prices came crashing down, largely because China went all in, he says. “People weren’t exactly wrong then,” he adds. “They were just extrapolating what they saw into the future.” How fast prices drop depends on regulations, geopolitical dynamics, and labor cost, he says: “We haven’t built the thing yet, so we don’t know.” 但一些专家表示，回顾过去来理解未来的能源价格可能会产生误导。“这是一个很好的练习，但我们必须对自己的无知保持谦逊，”普林斯顿等离子体物理实验室教授 Egemen Kolemen 说。他指出，2000 年时，许多分析师预测太阳能将保持高价，但随后产量激增，价格暴跌，这在很大程度上是因为中国全力投入。“当时人们并没有完全错，”他补充道，“他们只是在将所见的情况推演到未来。”他认为，价格下降的速度取决于法规、地缘政治动态和劳动力成本：“我们还没造出这东西，所以我们还不知道。”