Techno-economic analysis of what a D-T fusion plant could sell other than electrons. Three co-products — industrial heat, gold transmutation and synthetic fuel — are each credited against the same 1 GWe D-T tokamak and graded on one evidence-tier ladder.
Companion to the 1cFE corridor dispatch of the same name.
Every co-product is credited against the same plant, and the plant’s own cost-down levers track the mature corridor’s ladder at every rung — so a tier here grades the market evidence for the co-product and the plant evidence beneath it together.
| Evidence tier | electricity only | + heat | + gold | + synfuel |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 · design basis | $110.50 | $116.23 | $89.35 | $112.80 |
| 1 · applicable record | $87.16 | $86.01 | $64.89 | $92.05 |
| 2 · extrapolation with a known mechanism | $40.02 | $23.85 | $17.10 | $38.36 |
| 3 · speculation, no mechanism | $23.87 | −$23.46 | −$22.11 | $6.40 |
All figures $/MWh. At the design basis only gold pays — heat and synfuel both raise the cost of electricity, because the plant is too expensive for its own heat or hydrogen to be worth diverting. The plant’s own levers carry $86.6/MWh of the descent, more than any co-product buys.
The ladder and tornado are self-contained: they need no 1costingFE checkout and no patch.
git clone https://github.com/1cFE/Alternate_Revenue_Corridor
cd Alternate_Revenue_Corridor
python revenue_tier_ladder.py # figures/revenue_tier_ladder.png
python revenue_tornado.py # figures/revenue_tornado.png
revenue_tier_ladder.py should print:
rung elec only + heat + gold + synfuel
0: design basis 110.50 116.23 89.35 112.80
1: applicable record 87.16 86.01 64.89 92.05
2: extrapolation 40.02 23.85 17.10 38.36
3: speculation 23.87 -23.46 -22.11 6.40
The gold co-product ledger and the three interactive tools were produced against a 1costingFE working tree; see Why a patch if you want to reproduce those.
The commit above is pinned deliberately. master has moved on, and re-deriving the cost
points against it shifts the 1 GWe D-T tokamak baseline by a measured -1.5%:
pinned 6276a84 |
master at 44434d9 |
|
|---|---|---|
| LCOE | $110.54/MWh | $108.87/MWh |
Almost all of that is one change. ICRF was repriced from $4.38/MW to $1.00/MW and LHCD from $4.23 to $1.00, both restated as explicit NOAK estimates rather than implied anchors. The default D-T tokamak heating mix carries 15 MW of ICRF, so the heating account C220104 falls $99.8M and the installation fraction riding on it another $14.0M. A smaller change in the other direction re-bases the primary coolant account on thermal rather than net electric power, worth +$10.1M here. The first-wall and coil accounts are untouched.
Nothing in this repository depends on which commit you use – the committed datasets are the ones the published figures were drawn from. The shift matters only if you re-derive the cost points yourself, and it moves every rung down by about the same proportion, so no conclusion changes.
| File | Role |
|---|---|
revenue_tier_ladder.py |
The whole model. Plant levers by tier, the gold ledger, the fixed-P_fus cogen calculation, and a port of the H₂ tool validated against it to four decimals. Writes the ladder figure. |
revenue_tornado.py |
Single-lever sensitivity per stream, each lever alone from its tier-0 setting to its deepest ladder value. |
tools/flexible_cogen_tool.html |
Interactive cogeneration: plant sizing against the heat-to-power price ratio, thermal storage, capacity revenue. |
tools/h2_led_plant_tool.html |
Interactive H₂-led plant: busbar split, the H₂ floor price, byproduct-credit LCOE and NPV. |
tools/gold_revenue_ledger.html |
The gold co-product ledger as a standalone page. |
costingfe-revenue-corridor.patch |
The 1costingFE revenue-offset overlay. Not needed for the figures above. |
Open the tools directly in a browser — each is a single self-contained file.
The gold ledger and the stream-comparison numbers quoted in the dispatch were produced
against a 1costingFE working tree carrying a revenue-offset overlay that is not on
master. It is vendored here so those numbers reproduce exactly:
git clone https://github.com/1cFE/1costingfe
cd 1costingfe
git checkout 6276a84
git apply ../Alternate_Revenue_Corridor/costingfe-revenue-corridor.patch
The patch adds src/costingfe/revenue_offsets.py — a non-invasive overlay with
gold_on / heat_on / h2_on toggles, hard-gated to tokamak + D-T and anchored to the
model’s own energy denominator so that all-off reproduces costs.lcoe exactly — plus
seven driver scripts for the cogen and heat-arbitrage studies. Nothing in this patch is
required to reproduce the ladder or the tornado, which carry their own model.
corridor_tiers.json,
tok_1g: 114.58 / 90.38 / 41.49 / 24.75 $/MWh) rescaled onto this dispatch’s $110.5
baseline, PLANT = 110.5 × CT / CT[0], not a direct 1costingFE run of this machine. Its
tier 3 holds the tier-2 fixed-O&M reduction (−55%, lights-out not credited) and the
20%-nominal indirect-cost convention, as the mature and pulsed ladders do.Questions or challenges to the assumptions and methodology are welcome at 1cf.energy/contact.
Original code and associated documentation in this repository are available under the MIT License, copyright 2026 Astera Institute, consistent with Astera’s Open Science Policy. Third-party material retains its original copyright and license.