Fusion's Economic Lawson Criterion: A Viability Map
Dennis Whyte (MIT’s plasma physics center director) and Andrew Lo (an MIT finance professor) just got a paper accepted to the Journal of Fusion Energy. Their pitch: the Lawson criterion tells you when a plasma produces net energy, independent of whatever specific reactor you’ve built it in. Nobody had built the economic equivalent, a single framework that tells you when a plant produces net profit, independent of whether it’s a tokamak, a stellarator, or a laser target chamber. So they built one, and called the output Q_econ: economic gain over economic cost. Above 1, viable. Below 1, not. ...