Garantee you they weren’t generating a whole lot of power though… And if you can’t do that part then what’s the point?

The first planes only flew for a few seconds.

Yeah, and we measured them to the purpose of flight… Not wingspan, or how soft the wheels were.

So maybe we should measure technology that’s about generating power by…

I’ll let you fill in the blank.

I’ll let you fill in the blank

Code switch for: “I don’t have a point so why don’t you make it for me”

Verified electrical output, the answer is verified electrical power generated.

…as in we should measure lower generation experiments by how much power they generated.

Isn’t that obvious?

They weren’t trying to generate electricity in this experiment. They were trying to sustain a reaction. As you said in another comment, they are different problems.

Converting heat to electricity is a problem we already understand pretty well since we’ve been doing it basically the same way since the first power plant fired up. Sustaining a fusion reaction is a problem we’ve barely started figuring out.

I don’t think we do have a means of converting this heat energy into electrical energy right now. With nuclear we put radioactive rods into heavy water to create steam and drive turbines…

What’s the plan for these fusion reactors? You can’t dump them into water, nor can you dump water into them… I don’t believe we have a means of converting the energy currently.

The idea is to have water or molten salt cool the walls of the torus from outside, and those drive ordinary turbines like any other generator. The main issue is that particles fly out of the confined plasma donut and degrade the walls, whose dust flys into the plasma and reduces the fusion efficiency. They’re focusing on the hard part - dealing with the health of plasma sustainment and the durability of the confinement walls over time. Hot thing that stays hot can boil water or salt to drive regular turbines, that’s not the main engineering challenge.