[afp]

The issue with the efficiency begins already with the high-power lasers that are needed for wakefield acceleration, which have a typical wall-plug efficiency of ~0.1%. From that, only about ~1% of the laser pulse energy gets transferred into the accelerated electron beam. And only about ~0.1% of that gets converted into light again during the FEL process.

All together, that would mean an efficiency of ~10^{-8}, which is about a million times smaller than for the ERL (I'm no expert there, but I think in the article they mention 1-10% efficiency).

There are prospects for much more efficient high-power lasers, but there's still a long way to go.

I don't know what would dominate the costs in this particular case, but given the low efficiency and reliability (high-power lasers break often) as well as the other issues, I wouldn't bet on wakefield accelerators as an alternative.

[amirhirsch]

Thanks for your notes! I've only worked with solid state lasers that are pretty efficient and would have figured 10% aught to be possible for a CPA from wallplug to multi-terrawatt beam. I'm not sure how losses would go in the chirp pulse amplifier, plasma or FEL stages though.

I think we could afford a 10^-6 wall power to EUV beam loss and still be economical probably not 10^-8... my rough estimate is that for your 100W EUV beam equivalent to what ASML provides you can afford to burn on the order of 100MW for four years and still use less dollars to pay for that power than the capital expenditure for your ASML EUV system.