3. Socio-economic aspects

As an energy source, fusion has to take into account the safety of the reactors that will be built, as well as the price of the kilowatt-hours that will be produced. Although these concerns may seem remote, they are not the sole motivation of the fusion laboratories, since they provide food for thought when it comes to the very current decisions on support for fusion research. This paragraph is based on several studies commissioned by the European Commission to assess the potential value of fusion as an energy source.

For these studies, two FCM reactor images were constructed in sufficient detail to enable meaningful calculations. These two reactor images are :

• on the one hand, Model 1, which is relatively optimistic, since it uses very low activation materials and helium as a coolant;

• ...