PS One of the answers in the SO thread mentions JET in the UK. I spent a few summers there as an electrical engineering student (it's home to the MAST and JET fusion reactors). When the JET tokamak ignites a plasma, it can't sustain it for very long (we are not yet at the point of extracting enough energy to sustain the reaction). As a result they need to ignite the plasma and keep it hot. They can't do it for more than 1-10 seconds. During that time, they draw massive amounts of power - they're permitted to draw up to 1% of the UK's capacity for a short period, whilst they simultaneously dump all the energy stored in two gigantic flywheel generators housed in a nearby building. I've never been there when the flywheels are running but I've climbed around beneath them. There's nothing quite like massive engineering :)