4 ms·

It's not 10-11MW heat out for 1MW electricity in. It's "500 MW plasma from 50 MW of injected thermal power" which would need 300 MW electrical input. After conv

• Retric 6y ago
  Useful clarification, but I think ITER’s website makes it unambiguous. For 50 MW of injected heating power it will produce 500 MW of fusion power for long pulses of 400 to 600 seconds. https://www.iter.org/sci/Goals https://www.iter.org/sci/Goals. To be more clear, injected heating power excludes the energy required to get to a steady state, as otherwise pulse length needs to be factored in. That said ITER is running a lot of equipment unnecessary for a commercial power plant making engendering Q factors misleading. For example a power plant would not need to collect, process, and store the vast amount of scientific data that’s the point of the experiment. It’s really better if their not turning the rooms lights off trying to hit some arbitrary target. PS: It was posted ~3AM and I am still out of it. So, I am kind of surprised how coherent that was even though I mess up conveying some heat was from electricity where the other heat was from fusion.