🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991Nov11.185109.15995@newserve.cc.binghamton.edu> vu0350@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu (allen h. lutins) writes:
>In article <1991Nov11.154523.18353@jet.uk> cm@jet.uk (colin manning) writes:
>>PRESS RELEASE
>>-------------
>>At 7.44pm Saturday 9th November 1991, between 1,500,000 and 2,000,000 watts of
>>power from nuclear fusion reactions were generated at the JET (Joint 
>>European Torus) collaborative European Community project based at Abingdon, 
>>Oxfordshire, UK.
>
>[rest of article deleted]
>
>..O.K., i'm no physics major, but it seems to me i recall somthing
>about "conservation of power" & the like...so i have a question
>related to this:  where did 2 million watts of energy *go* ?  Wouldn't
>it have to be disspiated (i.e., as heat, light, a big spark, etc.)
>and/or converted to mass?  Forgive me if my ignorance is causing me to
>overlook something here...

Yes, you are. The 1.7 megawatts of *power* equated to only about .94
kilowatt-hour of *energy*. Mostly it was expressed as thermal neutrons
and alphas whose energy degraded to a simple heat flux. This is about
what you would get from an ordinary hot plate. The conservation law
you were thinking about is the law of conservation of energy. Energy
can neither be created nor destroyed, though it can be converted back
and forth to mass. In this case the DT fusion to He and neutrons
led to a miniscule reduction in mass under the relation E=MC^2.

They're a long way from central power station energy levels, but it's
a promising start.

Gary