Reply To: The North Atlantic Current

[Tulse]

Brian H wrote: The real “net energy” is usable energy, I think, which is either captured heat or electric current (the ideal end result, which FF gets to far more directly than D-D fusion or D-T fusion can). Energy in the form of neutron emissions etc. is pretty much “lost”.

Is there a standard definition of “over unity” for fusion projects? The impression I have always gotten is that the way “breakeven” is typically used is very theoretical, and involves all released energy, whether it would be practical or not to harvest it (and that such things like the Carnot limit and other parasitic energy losses are not considered). It seems to me that the real beauty of the FF approach is that since most of the energy gets captured directly as electricity, it will be very easy to demonstrate practical breakeven, that is, breakeven with all those losses factored in. (By contrast, even if ITER or NIF produce theoretical breakeven, that tells us very little about whether it can be practically turned into more usable power than it consumes, since the actual generation of electricity requires so much additional engineering.)