Does everyone understand what I am trying to say here???  I continue to get so much insane argument from the scientific community over this, time after time after time after time, over the years!  Please let me try to spell it out to everyone again in 'no uncertain terms'.  Whenever you try to initiate a thermonuclear reaction using an accelerated nuclei, this inertial energy is not, repeat, NOT used up in the process!  The energy from this effort still resides in the reactor core in the form of recoverable and reusable heat.  It is simply a matter of the efficiency of the overall method which you use to recover the heat from the reactor core, which determines how much energy you are ultimately able to recycle.  By the way, back in the 1960s, there was a method of generating electrostatic energy from low grade (waste) heat which was already approximately 70% efficient at the time.  This low pressure condensation generation technology basically emulated the natural processes which generate lightning in thunderclouds, and one reason that it was so efficient is because it basically used no moving parts.  I remember first reading about this technology in Popular Electronics in the later part of the 1960s.  What this basically means is that you can essentially power this thermonuclear system which I am describing by using the low grade waste heat left over from electrical generation, the type waste heat that we normally throw away into the environment using cooling towers.  (You can also use low grade heat from solar energy, too.)  Is that reasonably clear to everyone now?  You DO NOT use up more energy than you generate, even though successful thermonuclear reactions tend to be infrequent, because you do not actually use up any energy at all by trying to initiate a thermonuclear reaction.  That inertial energy continues to reside in the reactor core in the form of recoverable and reusable heat.

- Rick Carter