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Yeah, lots of people have been saying the same thing as of late. There's a bunch of fusion designs that promise bigger outputs than inputs, but so far that only

Yeah, lots of people have been saying the same thing as of late. There's a bunch of fusion designs that promise bigger outputs than inputs, but so far that only holds so long you look at the most convenient parameter: the energy going into the plasma, and the energy being produced as a result. Once you take into account that you waste a lot of energy heating up the plasma, and that you capture less than 100% for energy production, and that there are all sorts of auxiliary costs like magnets, the picture is a whole lot less rosy. I support research into fusion energy, but IMO it's very likely it'll never be used for commercial energy production. It might eventually make it into spacecraft and submarines, but I think before it becomes practical to build a powerplant, renewables will eat its lunch.

willis936 3y ago
>Once you take into account that you waste a lot of energy heating up the plasma, and that you capture less than 100% for energy production, and that there are all sorts of auxiliary costs like magnets, the picture is a whole lot less rosy. The startup costs of heating the plasma are only significant in the high density/high confinement time/low temperature regime of pulsed ICF devices, which use no magnets. The notion that laypeople have an accurate idea of rosiness based off of Qplasma progress is not one I can treat seriously. The jump from Qplasma 0.1 to Qplasma 1 is similar to the jump from Qplasma 1 to Qplasma infinity. We burn the plasmas to find the minimally viable machine and we do the science and engineering to continually push it down (obviously the world can not run on NIFs and ITERs).