Yes, of course, there is financing and everything else. I was getting a bit deeper:

If you have to spend 100 joules building a power plant, it better give back more than 100 joules during its lifetime - otherwise it was never worth it to build. That isn’t strictly true, there are special purposes, but certainly as a grid-scale energy deployment you would need - at a bare minimum - for each plant to pay for itself in terms of energy investment.

The dollars follow from that physical reality.

The first hurdle for fusion to clear is that the reaction outputs more energy than it needs to sustained. This would be a great academic success, and not much more.

The second hurdle is that it outputs enough energy such that it exceeds the sustainment energy even after accounting for capture losses (e.g. from neutrons, turbine efficiency, etc.) and production efficiencies (lasers need more energy input than they impart to the reaction chamber, magnets need cooling, etc.).

The third hurdle is that over the lifetime of a plant, it produces enough excess energy to build itself and pay the embodied costs of all maintenance and operations work. If the reaction is technically energy positive, but you need to replace the containment vessel every 48 hours due to neutron embrittlement, then the plant better be productive enough to pay for refining all that extra steel.

The fourth hurdle is then that it produces more excess energy per unit of invested energy than any other form of power generation - at which point we’d never build solar panels again.

These final hurdles are in no way guaranteed to be cleared. Artificial fusion needs to be orders of magnitude denser than natural fusion (Stars) to make any sense… a fusion power plant the size of Earth’s moon, with the same power density as the Sun, could only power around 1 million US homes.

I encourage you to seriously engage with the topic and not just read and regurgitate platitudes from popsci articles.

Solar and wind are nothing like fusion.

Educate yourself, but first maybe pause and spend a second to think that perhaps you aren’t the smartest person in the room and you shouldn’t begin a discussion by speaking down to someone.

When everything hard looks easy, it is a sign you don’t understand it as well as you think you do.

Just some advice for you as you grow up.

Economical energy production, sure, not any energy production. There is a reason we no longer burn wood to heat public baths.

I realize the science marketing of fusion over the past 60 years has been ‘unlimited free energy’, but that isn’t quite accurate.

Fusion (well, at least protium/deuterium) would be ‘unlimited’ in the sense that the fuel needed is essentially inexhaustible. Tens of thousands of years of worldwide energy demand in the top few inches of the ocean.

However that ‘free’ part is the killer; fusion is very expensive per unit of energy output. For one, protium/deuterium fusion is incredibly ‘innefficient’, most of the energy is released as high-energy neutrons which generates radioactive waste, damages the containment vessel, and has a low conversion efficiency to electricity. More exotic forms of fusion ameliorate this downside to a degree, but require rarer fuels (hurting the ‘unlimited’ value proposition) and require more extreme conditions to sustain, further increasing the per-unit cost of energy.

Think of it this way, a fusion plant has an embodied cost of the energy required to make all the stuff that comprises the plant, let’s call that C. It also has an operating cost, in both human effort and energy input, let’s call that O. Lastly it has a lifetime, let’s call that L. Finally, it has an average energy output, let’s call that E.

For fusion to make economical sense, the following statement must be true:

(E-O)*L - C > 0.

In other words, it isn’t sufficient that the reaction returns more energy than it requires to sustainT, it must also return enough excess energy that it ‘pays’ for the humans to maintain the plant, maintanence for the plant, and the initial building of the plant (at a minimum). If the above statement exactly equals zero, then the plant doesn’t actually given any usable energy - it only pays for itself.

This is hardly the most sophisticated analysis, I encourage you to look more into the economics of fusion if you are interested, but it gets to the heart of the matter. Fusion can be free, unlimited, and economically worthless all at the same time.