program thus pursues several options, hoping that one of them will eventually become economically viable. It is the author's view that the SPS program should conduct itself in a similar manner. In this way the risk of not being competitive after having made a sizable investment can be substantially reduced . The economics of fusion (which are indicated by the attached figure) are generally worse than those of SPSs. Further, the potential environmental impact of fusion is not obviously better than that of the SPSs, and could be much worse. These considerations, along with those mentioned earlier, suggest that funding for the SPS program should not remain at a value which is almost two orders of magnitude less than that which goes to fusion. Instead, it suggests that the funding for SPSs should rise at a judicious pace until it at least approaches the funding level for fusion. Another aspect of risk concerns the effect on society's energy portfolio of adding a new option. This will generally reduce the variance (a good measurement of risk) of the expected price of electricity. Measuring the extent to which SPS does this is (given existing long-run energy models) a doable and exciting project which has yet to be done. Additional aspects of risk are discussed in the text of the paper.
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