4 ms·
When you are comparing across different fusion techniques, which we implicitly are in our brains (because we are not sophisticated plasma physicists and not eve
by dnautics 5y ago
When you are comparing across different fusion techniques, which we implicitly are in our brains (because we are not sophisticated plasma physicists and not every strategy right now is magnetic confinement), Q_engineering is important to think about: different strategies will have different capabilities of harvesting the energy and turning it into power, and maybe some of the strategies (laser inertial confinement cough cough) are super-unlikely to ever have reasonable and efficient capture strategies. It would be nice to have an "estimated Q_engineering" come out of these experiments, even if they are wildly overinflated and crap estimates (as long as the assumptions that go into that are recorded). For that matter, it's not entirely clear to me how one harvests energy from magnetically confined fusion plasmas. Can someone give me a soundbyte on that?
- willis936 5y agoYou're asking for a simplification when there is no way to do it without lying. The fact is you do need to know more than a layman to appreciate how impractical ICF really is or how useless looking at Q is in nearly every context that matters. No MCF machine has even attempted to get a higher Q in the past 25 years. Look at lawson criterion and scaling laws for progress.