[russdill]

It's always confused me a bit. It's not like if you put 10kWh into the reactor, that 10kWh goes away. You still lose a significant fraction of it in inefficiency of the cycle but it still goes towards heat which can be used to heat steam and turn a turbine. iirc, you can get about 4kWh back.

On the other side of the coin, if you put 10kWh in and get 10kWh of fusion out, that's 20kWh to run a steam turbine, which nets you about 8kWh. So really you need to be producing 15kWh of heat from fusion for every 10kWh you put in to break even.

[willis936]

Cars are a good analogy. You wouldn't talk about miles per gallon until you have an engine that idles. Humans are in the engine building phase.

[trollbridge]

That’s a good analogy - and the situation right now is trying to make a car that doesn’t use its entire tank of fuel before it arrives at the service station.

[Tade0]

You can't always get this much energy back. Sometimes your waste heat is an enormous pool of warm water.