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Re:Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees by zaarn on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @03:31AM (#18448421)
ITER will never produce electric energy but they plan to achieve Q=5, ie, output 5 times more energy than put in.

The more important work on ITER is work around enabling actual power stations using Q=5 and developing the tech to maintain operating fusion reactors (remote robots, etc.)

Re:Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees by therein on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @06:10AM (#18449035)
At that point can't you just store the output current in supercapacitors for later use anyway? You can even feed it into the machine itself. Supercapacitors easily have better than 20% efficiency for each cycle.
Re:Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees by zaarn on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @07:00AM (#18449213)
No, ITER doesn't have any planned way to make electricity, the power it outputs will be largely thermal and radiative. Engineers will likely put up a cooling system to measure the thermal output, especially after putting up the various ways to turn the major neutron radiation into heat (which is a fun way to produce energy with rare materials as a byproduct).

DEMO, to my knowledge, will then include an actual electric generator to be hooked up to the fusion core.