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It's always confused me a bit. It's not like if you put 10kWh into the reactor, that 10kWh goes away. You still lose a significant fraction of it in inefficiency of the cycle but it still goes towards heat which can be used to heat steam and turn a turbine. iirc, you can get about 4kWh back.

On the other side of the coin, if you put 10kWh in and get 10kWh of fusion out, that's 20kWh to run a steam turbine, which nets you about 8kWh. So really you need to be producing 15kWh of heat from fusion for every 10kWh you put in to break even.



Cars are a good analogy. You wouldn't talk about miles per gallon until you have an engine that idles. Humans are in the engine building phase.


That’s a good analogy - and the situation right now is trying to make a car that doesn’t use its entire tank of fuel before it arrives at the service station.


You can't always get this much energy back. Sometimes your waste heat is an enormous pool of warm water.




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