Dennis Whyte

So what we call this is scientific, the one that I just talked about, which is for some instance, when I get enough fusion energy released compared to the size of the match, we call this scientific break-even.

Break-even.

And it's because you've gotten past the fact that this is unity now at this point.

Yeah, actually, so the technical term is Q, capital Q. Oh, so people actually use Q. We actually use capital Q, or sometimes it's called Q. So Q is taken.

Q sub P or something like this.

Okay, so this is, which means, what it means is that it's in the plasma.

So all we're considering is the energy balance or gain that comes from the plasma itself.

We're not considering the technologies which are around it, which are providing the containment and so forth.

So why the excitement?

Well, because for one reason, it's a rather simple threshold to get over, to understand that you're getting more energy out from the fusion, even in a theoretical sense, than you were from the starting match.

It's conceptually simple that you get past one.

Like when you're less than one, that's much less interesting than getting past one.

Yeah.

But it really is a scientific threshold because what QP actually denotes is the relative amount of self-heating that's happening in the plasma.

So what I mean by this is that in the end, in these systems, what you want is…

Something that where the relative amount of heating, which is keeping the fuel hot, is dominated by from the fusion reactions themselves.

And so it becomes, it's sort of like thinking like a bonfire is a lot more interesting physically than just holding a blowtorch to a wet log.

There's a lot more dynamics, it's a lot more self-evolved, and so forth.

And what we're excited as scientists is that it's clear in that experiment that they actually got to a point where the fusion reactions themselves were actually altering the state of the plasma.

It's like, wow.