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However, even for technologists as skilled and innovative as those of the Lockheed-Martin Skunk Works, who have developed many not-quite-impossible aircraft (among other things), making a working, net-energy-producing fusion reactor will be the easy part. The hard part will be making it cheap enough to have a business case. That’s really hard because the required cost may have to be well below zero.

In a recent Forbes blog at http://onforb.es/1AnZTO0, I explained why large-scale fusion reactors will very probably be uncompetitive even if the fusion-reactor part of the power station were free—which it assuredly will not be. The proposed Lockheed design is about a tenth the size of modern fission or fossil-fueled power plants, but that may well worsen the economics further.

Lockheed needs to be sure it’s got the right bogey. Central thermal power plants—nuclear fission, gas-combined-cycle, coal-fired—are not the technology to beat. All of them are uneconomic on the margin. The competitors to beat are, in order of increasing market price today, end-use efficiency at 1–3¢/kWh delivered (or less); windpower at under 4¢/kWh unsubsidized; solar power at under 7¢/kWh unsubsidized (or under 8¢/kWh delivered); and cogeneration at roughly 2–5¢/kWh delivered, net of credit for its recovered and reused heat.  (“Delivered” is an important advantage because delivering the average kWh from a central power station to retail meters adds costs and losses averaging around 4.3¢/kWh.) It is really hard to imagine that any new kind of generating technology based on a steam cycle could beat these empirical prices.