>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

>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).