Here’s the conundrum: if fusion wants to make good on the promise of providing clean power to the world on a relevant scale and time scale, it must :
a) show a working demonstrator ASAP,
b) follow that up with rapid deployment.
The latter requires fast exponential growth of the fusion industrial capacity until, worldwide, more than 100 fusion power plants are taken into operation every year. But, since fusion power plants are large, complex nuclear devices, the build time, i.e. the time between final investment decision and full power operation, threatens to be long (>10 years).
So the question is just how many different concepts should be developed in parallel. To answer that question, Niek will present a probabilistic calculation, which considers the expectation value of the future revenues of the fusion power plants, as well as the fact that future revenues are worth less, today, the farther they are away (discounting).