Reply To: Physics Nobel to Big Bangers

[Aeronaut]

Tulse wrote:
But a pulsed device does require power input for each pulse — surely it is reasonable to define Q as simply the ratio of the amount of power produced by a fusion reaction to the amount of power required to produce the reaction. That definition is agnostic as to whether the reaction is steady state or pulsed. At the very least, we can integrate over a period of time for pulsed devices to make such issues irrelevant.

And I think it is a red herring to factor in the energy fed back into the FF device, since a steady-state device over unity could also feed its own energy back into maintaining the plasma, just not as directly. (And there is no reason in principle why the FF capacitors have to be charged directly from the device itself — that is just the potentially most efficient way to do so.)

I think Eric refers to this as ‘wall plug efficiency’, which I like for how simple and direct it is. Its also the way most people will perceive Q without a long conversation, imo. You also have a great point about integrating the pulses into a sort of average over time.

And why not extend the concept of a ‘net zero’ house (the solar and wind features sell as much power as it consumes) into a net positive business location? The higher the thermal to electrical profit ratio, the more critical it will be to charge the caps from the grid. Would it take an ultra brawny cap bank regulator to charge around 200 to 300hz?