Lcoe

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. ...

Everyone who covers fusion eventually gets asked the same question: what would the electricity actually cost? Almost nobody answers it, because almost nobody can. There’s no operating laser fusion power plant, so there’s no bill to point to. What exists instead is a handful of assumptions about lasers, targets, and plants that don’t exist yet, wired together into a spreadsheet. So I built the spreadsheet. Then I turned it into something you can play with. ...