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Lockheed Claims Breakthrough On Fusion Energy Project
Lockheed Martin claims it has made a significant breakthrough in the creation of nuclear fusion reactors. The company says it has proved the feasibility of building a 100MW reactor measuring only 7 feet by 10 feet. They say the design can be built and tested within a year, and they expect an operational reactor within a decade. The project is coming out of stealth mode now to seek partners within academia, government, and industry. "Lockheed sees the project as part of a comprehensive approach to solving global energy and climate change problems. Compact nuclear fusion would also produce far less waste than coal-powered plants, and future reactors could eliminate radioactive waste completely, the company said."
That's why it never worked before! Nobody thought about building a two-dimensional reactor!
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Things must really be bad for them to be releasing the "alien" technology from the skinkworks.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Never thought I'd read this...
We just might survive this century after all.
"U.S. submarines and aircraft carriers run on nuclear power, but they have large fusion reactors on board that have to be replaced on a regular cycle."
yeah, no
uh oh, wait. Cold? Fusion? It aint gonna work noway nohow.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This is great news...for those who will survive the Ebola epidemic.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
U.S. submarines and aircraft carriers run on nuclear power, but they have large fusion reactors on board that have to be replaced on a regular cycle.
OMGWTFROFLOLBBQ! Reuters doesn't have a science correspondent. I didn't know they were headquartered in Texas.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
From the Lockheed Martin site : “The smaller size will allow us to design, build and test the CFR in less than a year.
After completing several of these design-build-test cycles, the team anticipates being able to produce a prototype in five years."
They ain't got nothin' yet.
If only we could fall into a woman's arms without falling into her hands
"U.S. submarines and aircraft carriers run on nuclear power, but they have large *fusion* reactors on board that have to be replaced on a regular cycle."
Revealed work in 2013
http://www.dvice.com/2013-2-22/lockheeds-skunk-works-promises-fusion-power-four-years
Well, I'm not sure this article is even talking about fusion or fission. The last paragraph of the article is just wrong where the author says that submarines and aircraft carriers carry large fusion reactors. They of course do not. They carry fission reactors. So the author confused fission and fusion once why not twice?
This is as about as content free a news story as I have ever seen.
Looks like a desperate team trying to generate headlines to keep their funding going.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Now everyone can generate hazardous nuclear waste that must be stored expensively for the coming hundred thousand years.
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
if so, you sir/miss, must be rich as you sell off your shares!
To everyone who was saying we had to invest more in ITER, or that if we had of been increasing our funding of Tokomak related work was anything but a big science pork barrel.
With this and the new ebola infections coming out, it looks like we're on the verge of solving both the energy crisis and overpopulation
I never thought I'd see so much progress in my lifetime. We live in the future!(*)
(*) ...of a Stephen King novel, apparently.
U.S. submarines and aircraft carriers run on nuclear power, but they have large fusion reactors on board that have to be replaced on a regular cycle.
Don't trust anything you read in this article.
I'm very excited about this! I'm most excited because the announcement came from a known company with a track record, that has everything to lose. Normally this sort of thing come from a scammer looking for chump investors.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/15/us-lockheed-fusion-idUSKCN0I41EM20141015
Wow, amazing if they pull if off ...
...fusion power is exciting
On the other hand, I'm not excited about Lockheed Martin developing it.
With my third hand, did anyone else read in the article that nuclear submarines run on a fusion reactor that needs to be replaced on a yearly basis? I was under the impression that it was a fission reactor, so it really makes me doubt if the writer knows what he/she is talking about.
"It's a tarp!" -- Dyslexic Admiral Ackbar
If it's not impossibly heavy and doesn't produce fissile waste it could be used in all sorts of large vehicles, both commercial and military.
But plenty of fusion reactor designs have worked in theory; making them work in practice, though...
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Using a hot air balloon to lift men off the ground.
Sustained heavier than air human flight.
Putting Man on The Moon.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
From the linked article before Reuters edits/corrects it: "U.S. submarines and aircraft carriers run on nuclear power, but they have large fusion reactors on board that have to be replaced on a regular cycle."
WTF Are the conspiracy theorists correct? The US military already has secret fusion reactors. Makes me wonder whether the article is just a poorly edited press release. Otherwise, why is there a need to spend Billion$ on ITER. Compared to ITER, the Lockheed project, if true, would be peanuts.
Sounds real promising right up to "operational within a decade" that's code for we have an idea that on paper sounds like it might possibly work. Please give us lots of money.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAsRFVbcyUY
sorry wrong link in other article!
With fusion-powered aircraft carriers. Thats really outside-the-box thinking from locked Martin. It's like, "if we don't have our nuclear warships, how are we going to steal all the rest of the oil?"
If this really works...really cool things could be just around the corner.
From WIKI:
The high beta fusion reactor (also known as the 4th generation prototype T4) is a project being developed by a team led by Charles Chase of Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works. The "high beta" configuration allows a compact fusion reactor design and speedier development timeline (5 years instead of 30). It was presented at the Google Solve for X forum on February 7, 2013.[1]
"The device is 2x2x4 meters in size. It is cylindrical shaped. It has a vacuum inside with high magnetic fields, made using electromagnets. Uncharged deuterium gas is injected. It is heated using radio waves, in much the same way a microwave heats food. When the gas temperature reaches over 16 electron-volts, the gas ionizes into ions and electrons. This plasma exerts a pressure on the surrounding magnetic fields. This plasma pressure is counterbalanced by the magnetic field pressure in a beta ratio:
\beta = \frac{p}{p_{mag}} = \frac{n k_B T}{(B^2/2\mu_0)} [2]
The plan is to reach a high-beta ratio. Plans call for a compact 100 MW machine. The company hopes to have a prototype working by 2017, scale it up to a full production model by 2022 and to be able to meet global baseload energy demand by 2050. Here are some other characteristics of this machine:
The magnetic field increases the farther out that the plasma goes, which pushes the plasma back in.
It also has very few open field lines (very few paths for the plasma to leak out; uses a cylinder, not a Tokamak ring).
Very good arch curvature of the field lines.
The system has a beta of about 1.[3]
This system uses deuterium.[3]
The system heats the plasma using radio waves.[3]
The machine was designed by Dr. Thomas McGuire[3] who did his PhD thesis[4][5] on fusors at MIT. Chase said that “the fuel (two isotopes of hydrogen) has six orders [1.000.000] of magnitude higher energy density than oil. You can’t make a bomb from it, and it has no meltdown risk. It’s very different from nuclear fission reactors.”
In four years of work, they've managed to break the "bigger is better" scaling law common to most fusion reactor designs as well as solve the wall material problems common to ALL fusion reactor designs?
Well, that would be something. If only this article told us anything actually useful.
It's in Aviation Week. It's compact, but they don't say what they're planning to do about the neutron flux.
http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals-compact-fusion-reactor-details
This seems to be a more accurate report of the announcement.
I think this AvWeek story http://aviationweek.com/techno... is a better description, but then Aviation Week has more technical writers..
They they must have stolen the secret from the "crazy" Italian researcher.
On another note they decreased the time frame from 20 years to only couple of them.
Yay progress.
Finally, I'm getting closer to owning a Mr. Fusion!
Seriously, I wish that these companies would keep quiet on this kind of work. Far better to continue the work quietly in multiple directions.
And with the west, the more announcements that we make, the higher the likelihood of having good ideas taken by China.
... it's only 10 years away!
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
So they really did get the tech back in time. Not sure why they gave it to Lockheed, but whatever . . . .
I hope they left the car too. That would be even bigger than Mr. Fusion !!
The 100MW is only meaniful if it is output minus input power. Else I have a 1MW block of concrete you'll be interested in seeing; it scales embarassingly well.
Anyway this article is shady, you'd think they would have got published in a lot of conferences quite easily if they had something real.
If they can build and test it within a year, why would it still take about 10 years to actually produce an operational one..
Lockheed is a military supplier, not a dedicated energy company. That tells me one thing. a 7 foot diameter by 10 foot long power plant for an air vehicle and/or water, that will be able to stay active 24/7/365 and it will be able to use very high power energy weapons.
Military capabilities are about to advance by leaps and bounds, but we need to get ahold of the military industrial complex and reel it back in under our control. With that much power (political and economic), there is no excuse for them needing to control our free speech, right to bear arms, and all our other rights. If they are doing nothing wrong, then stay out of our lives.
"We haven't finished inventing it yet, but when we do, it'll be awesome."
XKCD seems to be pretty spot on here.
sic transit gloria mundi
Here's a much better article, that not only can differentiate between fission and fusion, but also has purty pictures too.
http://aviationweek.com/techno...
Better known as 318230.
This breakthrough innovation means that instead of being perpetually 30 years away, practical economical fusion will now only be perpetually 25 years away.
The corrected that mistake quite fast.
Clearly, they have a big winner on their hands.
Lockheed shares fell 0.6 percent to $175.02 amid a broad market selloff.
Ah. Hmmm... maybe not.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Now it talks about fission reactors in Navy aircraft carriers and submarines. The article notes that the fuel would be deuterium and tritium so it would have radioactive bi-products, not massive amounts but some. The article talks about future reactors could use a different fuel (boron?) to have no radioactive by-products (but the fusion reaction is harder to initiate and sustain).
All that asside this is a huge step forward...Lockheed wouldn't come out and put this in the open if they weren't very confident they could do this....the fusion age may be at hand (although Wind and Solar will almost probably be cheaper producers of power - as their costs have continued and are expected to continue to fall over time).
You don't get it. It's Fussion! As easy as fission but as newsworthy as fusion!
They just missed an S.
We already have a lot of people terrified of nuclear reactors. Finding a site that will accept a new type of reactor will take a lot of time. Plus, creating a permit process for this... lots of red tape.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Like that story from yesterday. It doesn't work within established science, so it must be a hoax. Especially from a defense company that has technology 100 years advance from what is mainstream.
There's a much better article at Aviation week
Hm. This is hot on the heels of that italian guy's fusion thing. Next thing we know, Italian guy mysteriously dies of natural causes (decapitation when he fell down the stairs) and this project from Lockheed powers the future.
People, its not a troll. Read the argument carefully. Its a real concern. If you disagree with the argument on technical grounds, feel free to reply. Otherwise, don't try to ridicule people for simply expressing their opinions. Reply with a rebuttal on technical argumentation, but don attack people for making the argument, but just marking up messages as Troll is childish because you disagree. What is your problem anyway. Are you that intellectually vacant that you do not reply and instead try to silence people you disagree with?
If you are going to seperate protium from H2O, what will happen over time. The ocean may seem vast, but when you have a widely deployed technology that draws it down, what are the cumulative effects over time.
So now Fusion Power will only be a decade away...for the next 60 years.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I believe you're being ridiculed for, not for expressing your opinion, but for expressing your mathematical incompetence.
The /reactor vessel/ is compact. No doubt you still have to surround it with plenty of boronated polyethene or suchlike to deal with the neutron flux.
If an operational prototype is still a decade away, I'm not holding my breath. I'm a little fuzzy how something can be "built and tested" within a year, but require a decade to produce an "operational reactor". How do you test something that doesn't work?
That said, 100Mw in 70 sq. ft. would indeed be a world-saving device. One of the larger problems to solve with cheap/renewable energy production is getting the juice from the generating plant to the end-user; scaling up distribution grids is not a trivial problem. If every neighborhood substation could have their own reactor, that solves a LOT of issues. For instance, it makes high-powered electric vehicle charging stations viable on a mass scale. It could power desalination plants in remote areas cheaply. Additional power could be quickly brought online upon, say, building a power-hungry factory.
A utility exec quoted in an article I read a while back said that even with "free" energy (meaning energy with zero fuel cost), that would only enable him to cut prices by about 40% due to capital costs for both generation and distribution. If you can lop much of the "distribution" off, that's a significant cost savings.
What's wrong with Lockheed developing it? I suppose it'd be nice if it was a govt. physics lab, but speaking for myself, I'll take anybody developing it for starters. Any patent WOULD eventually run out... and at this pace, it'll be nearly run out by the time it ships.
It's just hot air, and they have to "do something" now that people realize that Rossi's reactor actually works. Can't let Europe win this one!
Sigh
Okay, I am mathematically incompetent. That does not make me a troll. If you think that I am mathematically incompetent, then please explain what is wrong with what I am saying. But to try to label me a troll, doesnt do anyone any good. It does not help your readers understand why i am wrong, which might be instructive for some readers here. Being wrong does not make one a troll, i was not wrong intentionally.
Remember that an energy technology needs to be sustainable over millions of years. When they first started to use oil, they didnt think that far ahead, just assuming that the oil supply would be vast and it wouldnt be a problem for a long time. The problem with oil is just right around the corner. In finding a solution to energy problems, we do not want to replace one problem with another.
On this whole "troll" thing, this "troll" label is being abused, to just suppress anyone who disagree with you, and that is wrong. When someone expresses a view that they honestly believe, its not a troll, even if they are wrong. I have an honest concern over fusion here, you may think its wrong which is fine, please explain why its wrong, but it is not a troll.
When someone expresses a view that you think is wrong, reply to it and explain why you think its wrong. Your readers will benefit from your illuminating insight in the matter, but don't suppress people because you disagree with them or you think that what they are saying is stupid or ignorant. When someone says something you think is ignorant or wrong, don't assume that they are trying to irritate you, in most cases they have an honest concern, if you disagree, then use the reply feature.
I am not trying to irritate anyone, just express something that was an honest concern. If i am wrong, fine, reply and explain why i am wrong.
We are on the cusp of an era of almost limitless energy. So much and so cheap it won't be worth metering. So no more worrying (or investment) into new, clean energy sources like solar or wind. Global warming will be solved Real Soon Now so we can put up with coal burning to get us to the Fusion Era.
Oh, and all that foreign research into fusion? Might as well pull the plug on that right now. We have the answer right here and you folks should go back to making cuckoo clocks and cheese.
Have gnu, will travel.
So, if you try to free copper from rocks, what will happen is you will start destroying earths supply of rocks, despite the best containment system, if copper is seperated [sic] form [sic]rocks, some copper will be leaked out and will float off into a stream or stuff. This is not sustainable and causes permenant [sic]ecosystem damage. No rocks, nothing to stand on.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I have a 1MW block of concrete you'll be interested in seeing;
Actually, I would be interested in seeing you input 1MW into a block of concrete. Got a youtube link?
In the meantime, ob. fun bideos
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
there was nothing wrong with travelling wave reactor designs, or liquid fluoride thorium reactors. those would have saved us just fine
So where does this leave ITER, the European project. There's little point building a 500MW experiment if 5 of these babies will work and produce useable power.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
I have a 1MW block of concrete you'll be interested in seeing;
Actually, I would be interested in seeing you input 1MW into a block of concrete. Got a youtube link?
In the meantime, ob. fun bideos
E=MC2
There is far far far more than a megawatt of energy in a block of concrete already.
Everything in this article has been public for a long time. Even the YouTube video from Google has been out for over 18 months with only 100K views.
The only reason you are reading it now is because of the recent E-Cat news release. The Lockheed team smells money and the E-Cat announcement provided the the perfect opening to reiterate their "Hey me too!" message.
Don't worry, whether it works or not, Lockheed-Martin will not go hungry.
If Fusion produces significant amount of excess energy (more than it consumes) for a significant period, [emphasis added]
That's the key point right there. We've had fusion reactors far smaller than 7x10 which produce significant excess energy (and are even portable) for about sixty years now (the first ones might have been bigger than that), but they release all their energy in a few fractions of a second, and tend to destroy themselves (and most of the surrounding neighborhood) in the process.
Down from the "20 years away" that sustainable fusion has been for the last... 40 or 50 years. Maybe 20 years from now it will only be 5 years away.
The "waste" of fusion is tritium, a commercially valuable substance used for glow-in-the-dark things like gun sights. I have a pair on my pistol, as do many cops. It's safe to carry close to your groin.
I agree with you that this is hype until proven.
There are now a dozen or so "alternative" fusion designs out there pursuing the dream of fusion energy and almost all have the property of predicating the work on a sound theoretical foundation but with little practical experimental support. Modeling plasma is notoriously hard.
Why didn't Lockheed Martin just build the prototype and then announce Q > 1 when there were actual results?
The amount of water (as the protium source) used for fusion would be minuscule compared to the volume of the oceans, even if fusion technology was widespread and used over an extended period of time. Most technically literate people would know this, which is probably why your comment was marked 'Troll'. But as not everyone knows everything, your question does deserve a legitimate answer. The volume of water used would probably be more than offset by the amount of water falling to Earth in comets/asteroids/dust/etc. If it did somehow become a problem (extreme emphasis on 'somehow'), we could bring in more water from asteroids as needed. But if we did somehow burn through that much water through fusion in any reasonable timescale, I suspect we would be killed by the waste heat.
This announcement seems a bit premature, they've come up with yet another containment reactor design, big whoopee. The real question will be if it works. Their lead engineers background is in aeronautical engineering, which is a far different field than high energy physics. Its possible that a little outside the box thinking has resulted in a novel approach, but its also possible that Lockheed will burn through a few billion dollars of money on a flawed concept before providing a substandard product or flat out saying that it's impossible.
"In theory there is no difference between theory
and practice. In practice there is."
Yogi Berra
Ever notice that Cobra Commander sounds an awful lot like Star scream?
Earth routinely loses hydrogen, from water, into space. Water vapor in the upper atmosphere is split by solar radiation into hydrogen and (atomic) oxygen. That's why near-Earth space has atomic oxygen.
Not to fear, though, since that atomic oxygen also combines with hydrogen in the solar wind and ultimately precipitates out as water again. Earth is also routinely bombarded by small ice chunks (comet fragments), again supplying more water.
The amounts in the above are far beyond anything that human demands for energy would destroy by converting 2 H2O -> He+O2.
For comparison, Earth's oceans contain over 1,300,000,000,000,000,000,000 litres of water. Even if we destroyed all 60 litres of water need to get the deuterium out (we don't, it's a distillation process) to provide power for one American for a year (see upthread somewhere), the oceans have enough deuterium (never mind protium) to provide a population of 10 billion people, at US consumption rates, energy for about 216 billion years. Which is about 40 times longer than the sun is going to last.
This is why we need fusion.
And if we can develop small fusion units which can be fabricated reasonably easily, we can expand into the galaxy by hopping from one Oort-cloud body to the next like Polynesians spreading across the Pacific one island at a time.
Whether RF is absorbed, reflected, or passes right through depends on the wavelength and polarization of the RF waves, external magnetic field, and plasma density and temperature. There is a zoo of resonances, evanescent layers, and nonlinear mechanisms to consider. The effects of gradual changes in plasma parameters can be understood in approximation, but if there are sharp gradients in the plasma parameters you need 3d modeling and a prayer.
Yes it is a troll and no it isn't a real concern. If the poster hasn't figured out that the mass of hydrogen converted to helium is utterly negligible compared to the mass of water in the oceans, then he or she shouldn't have posted in the first place. This is no more reasonable than saying that the reactors will produce n-waves that interfere with instructions beamed from our galactic overlords and demand that others refute it.
I am mixed on this announcement. While I hope it is true, I have a hard time understanding how anyone can promise commercially available reactors on such a short time frame and at such small scales.
ITER will take about a dozen years from site prep to construction assuming no more slips in schedule with operations occurring about a decade after that. Yet somehow, Lockheed will be (presumably) manufacturing these things in ten years? Hard to believe. But if it is true, the scientists involved in ITER will have a lot of egg on their face.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I have a 1MW block of concrete you'll be interested in seeing;
Actually, I would be interested in seeing you input 1MW into a block of concrete. Got a youtube link?
In the meantime, ob. fun bideos
E=MC2
There is far far far more than a megawatt of energy in a block of concrete already.
Oh for the ironic, ignominious pedantry fail.
You overlook a couple details:
- The upper atmosphere is rich in monoatomic oxygen, which is highly reactive and will tend to form water molecules with any hydrogen gas encountered
- The planetary hydrogen reserves are by continuously replenished by the solar wind, which is basically a continuous flow of ionized hydrogen propelled out of the sun's atmosphere.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
And I suppose you have magical powers that let you convert mass into energy at will? And E is measured in Joules, or for some reason when we're talking about electricity consumption, Kilowatt-Hours. 1 Megawatt would mean 1 Megajoule per second. In any case, the energy source is still your magical mass-to-energy power, not the concrete.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
Remember that an energy technology needs to be sustainable over millions of years.
Nonsense. There is no reason that we have to use the same energy source for millions of years.
Not to mention that, as the AC pointed out, this particular source would actually be sustainable over that time frame, even without doing anything to add to the Earth's hydrogen supplies... and also not to mention that even if that weren't the case, acquiring more hydrogen from off planet is very close to already being within our capabilities... and certainly would be within them if we had cheap, effective fusion.
The troll label seems appropriate to me. In fact, I consider myself to have been trolled.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Assumptions:
Assuming a fusion energy output equal to the 1995 global power output of about 100 EJ/yr
Fusion process using only deuterium from sea water
We would be good for approx 150 BILLION years before we ran out of fuel.
ITER and similar projects are great, but their size and complexity also limit their progress. They take over a decade to design and then over a decade to build and if initial tests reveal a better design they're stuck with the current one for decades more until a new one can be designed and built. With a smaller design the entire process changes, you can take risks with your initial designs, build it, and if the tests show a better configuration/size you can design and build another one within a couple years to test. You go through more prototypes sure but its much easier & cheaper to do so because they take far fewer resources to build and they have a lot less invested in the individual designs. That said I'm a bit dubious as to their ability to achieve sustained fusion in such a small package when they have such a hard time doing so even with much larger designs.
thank you for the very informative and iluminating reply.
Could copious nuclear fusion allow us to effectively reverse global warming by (at an insanely large scale) break atmospheric CO2 and H2O back into hydrocarbons and O2?
And, would cheap energy let us sensibly deal with that huge floating island of garbage that's apparently floating around the Pacific?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't we still just trying to get a sustainable fusion reaction generating more power than it takes?
This article reads like the acheivement is in the commoditization and simplification of a process that doesn't (afaik) even exist yet?
What's next, announcing that they've figured out how to run an oscillation overthruster with your ipad?
-Styopa
The observed jadedness might perhaps stem from failed promises of energy "too cheap to meter," ah, yes, here's James E. Akins writing in "Foreign Affairs" in the 1970s on that:
"Having argued throughout this article that the oil crisis is a reality that compels urgent action, let me end on a note of hope. The current energy problem will not be a long one in human terms. By the end of the century oil will probably lose its predominance as a fuel. The measures we have the capacity to take to protect ourselves by conserving energy and developing alternative sources of energy should enable us, our allies, and the producer nations as well, to get through the next 25 years reasonably smoothly. They might even bring us smiling into the bright new world of nuclear fusion when all energy problems will be solved. This final note would ring less hollow if we did not remember the firm conviction of the late 1940s that the last fossil fuel electricity generating plant would have been built by 1970; and that in this new golden age, the home use of electricity would not even be measured. It would be so cheap, we were told, that the manpower cost of reading meters would be greater than the cost of the energy which the homeowners conceivably could consume. But perhaps in 2000..."
coupled with the periodic media ado about cold fusion (debunked. again. Next!) and otherwise fusion running neck and neck with Mickey Mouse actually entering the public domain ("in 20 years", or five, or whatever), well, I am shocked, shocked and amazed that some humans might somehow have grown a mite bit jaded after decades of such antics.
I'm not convinced, (been burned on that too many times over too many years) but in the back of my mind I always thought that if practical fusion is ever achieved, it'd be by a private company that intends to make money off it.
So, we put one 'a' these next to every one of those 2400 amp auto quick chargers, and we'd really have something.
Something this small also revives the possibility of fusion propelled spacecraft.
But, you know, it has to work first.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
About 10 years off.... Boom!
The parent made the common mistake of mixing up power and energy. Regardless, a 1 metric ton block of concrete dropped out of a plane will easily reach a power of 1 MW when falling over 100 m/s, in terms of conversion of gravitational potential to kinetic energy and heat in the atmosphere.
I used to work with a guy that had worked on Nerva. Because of the nuclear fission involved, they had neutron detectors positioned strategically around the test area. Every time a detector sensed a neutron, it would click. Everyone learned to ignore single clicks from the detectors. Every once in a while, you would get a quick click-click and everyone would tense up, ready to head for the hills. Because of this, some people would get a bullhorn, sneak up behind someone, then rapidly key the bullhorn a bunch of times causing a rapid click-click-click-click-click. The victim would invariably fall over themselves and anyone around them trying to hightail it out of there.
It is now asking for partners.
"McGuire said the company had several patents pending for the work and was looking for partners in academia, industry and among government laboratories to advance the work.
Lockheed said it had shown it could complete a design, build and test it in as little as a year, which should produce an operational reactor in 10 years, McGuire said. A small reactor could power a U.S. Navy warship, and eliminate the need for other fuel sources that pose logistical challenges."
If it had something really excellent, they would't be looking for partners. The original deal for Lockheed was to make a reactor to sell to the Navy.
Of course you can use the strong neutron flux to make weaponizable Pu-239 from inexpensive U-238 lining the outside. You could more easily turn on and off the neutrons to enhance the desirable -239 production and less of the 240 production compared to fission reactors.
First, not a troll. Trolling means trying to incite a response that devolves the conversation. An example: turn the topic into an attack on Thorium reactors, knowing that some people will defend the idea and others will flame the people that defended it. I don't see any such possibility in this, and I certainly don't see the intent.
Second, some numbers. The Earth has a total of ~1.67x10^21 kg of water, and assuming each individual consumes 60 kg of water per year (as another Slashdotter calculated), and assuming we could actually access all of that water, that gives us roughly 4 billion years of fusion power before we run out of water. While that is less than the remaining lifetime of our planet (based on the remaining lifetime of the sun, between 5 and 7.6 billion years), I cannot imagine the human race surviving for so long, or what we would look like in even a tenth of that time.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
I might worry about this shortly before I start to worry about the heat death of the universe. If we look at one of the largest lakes on earth which contains about 3,000,000,000,000,000 gallons of water and extracted water out of it for the purposes of using the hydrogen in it for fusion reactors at the average rate we have been extracting oil out of the ground for the last 100 years it would take about 5000 years to drain the thing assuming no new water entered it. Now add in that this is one lake representing about 10% of the available fresh water and that most of the water on earth by a very substantial margin is sea water and we should be good for at least the next half a million years or so. This also assumes that we would extract the water at the rate we do for oil even though fusion would be providing orders of magnitude more power for the same volume of fuel. So that pushes it off for at least a few 10s of millions of years. If in that time we haven't managed to get off this rock, I say fuck it we all deserve to die.
Time to offend someone
This news is from Lockheed Marteen, the Swedish Chef school, not the well known Lockheed Martin that we fund with our tax dollars.
the Area 51 guys were finally able to decode the alien symbols! Good job guys!
E Proelio Veritas.
Of course this comes out after news that the indy inventor's fusion reactor is legitimate.
We all know big corporations invent/buy shit, sit on it, and continue to rape humanity until they are forced to announce it as omgz 0-day breakthrough!!!
Nobody tell ITER!
In SimCity 2000 couldn't you build fusion power plants around 2020?
Sounds like they got it about right.
> In all the fusion research the key question is, "Is it producing more energy than it consumes?"
That's stage one, technical feasibility. Then you get to stage two, economic feasibility...
"Is it producing enough electricity to sell that it covers the interest payments on the CAPEX it took to build it?"
Even if we get stage one, so far it is *extremely* clear that tokamaks and ICF will *not* *ever* be able to pass stage two.
New devices like this may, but in any event, both large and small devices are still not even at stage one.
Based on the Z-Machine (~2006) this is totally possible.
French Reference w/ Jean-Pierre Petit vulgarization :
http://www.gizmodo.fr/2013/01/14/jean-pierre-petit-les-z-machines-permettent-denvisager-une-fusion-nucleaire-pratiquement-sans-dechets.html
Based on the work of Malcom Haines at Sandia laboratory, New Mexico
From the article: "In a statement, the company, the Pentagon's largest supplier, said it would build and test a compact fusion reactor in less than a year, and build a prototype in five years." So if they haven't even built a reactor yet, much less tested it to see if it really works, what exactly is the amazing breakthrough they're claiming?
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
Only .01% of seawater is deuterium, so it simply can't happen unless proton-proton fusion is considered. As far as 3H, seawater has less than 1dps of 3H, so...
In other words, some people were wrong about something, therefore some other people must now be wrong about something else. It is just lazy thinking and overgeneralization, characterized by sloppy usage of words such as "they" (sorry Mom).
There seems to be plenty of reserve water in Antartica that's melting away in a crazy temp.
Don't worry. By releasing the hydrogen into space, we'll all die from hyperoxia long before we run out of water.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Funny timing around election cycle. Give fox news some talking points for the next couple weeks.
And a prototype by 2017!
This gives me a really good feeling. :)
Don't you actually mean "a nice warm feeling"?
Okay, I am mathematically incompetent. That does not make me a troll. If you think that I am mathematically incompetent, then please explain what is wrong with what I am saying.
OK. So let's say 1 gram of water is used per person per year to make lots of energy. For entire population, that is 9Gg or 9,000 tons or about 9x10^-6 cubic kilometers. Let's even round up and say 1x10^-5 cubic kilometers. The earth has
http://water.usgs.gov/edu/eart...
1,386,000,000 cubic kilometers
So, divide the two numbers to get number of years we can use water for fusion before we run out of water,
1,386,000,000
------------------
0.00001
= 138,600,000,000,000 years
or 138 trillion years. So, age of the Universe is about 14 billion years. So water will last on Earth for power purposes for almost 10000 longer than the age of the Universe.
So now assume we use energy at 10000x that rate. Which means about 250GWh/person/year. That means we can only use water for about 14 billion years before we run out. Basically, one full sized nuclear reactor per person running full tilt for the life of the universe.
Is that now clear why you were modded troll? Your concerns are quite preposterous if you think about them for more than a few seconds. The sun will run out of hydrogen first!
Lockheed, huh? Now let's just keep the Navy, Marines and Air Force out of this. If they all jump on the bandwagon and submit wildly different specifications and require a single device to conform to all of them (just to keep it "cheap") nothing good will come out of this.
Whenever I see an article reference "Polywell" my BS detector pegs at 11.
The US Navy funded the Polywell boondoggle for years without discernible result.
They (Lockheed) got nothin' ...
Cloned foods give the statement "We had that last week!" a whole new meaning.
"Initial work demonstrated the feasibility of building a 100-megawatt reactor measuring seven feet by 10 feet, which could fit on the back of a large truck, and is about 10 times smaller than current reactors, McGuire told reporters."
Similar science and physics idea to what I already planned to develop in college and along with it the same physics and reactor for powering a warpdrive engine I've come up with but this technology of theirs is smaller compared to the application of this technology and its function when combined with my enhanced warpfield generator I'm building. At ITT tech.
Similar science and physics idea to what I already planned to develop in college and along with it the same physics and reactor for powering a warpdrive engine I've come up with but this technology of theirs is smaller compared to the application of this technology and its function when combined with my enhanced warpfield generator and a new type of processor technology I'm building. At ITT tech.
Dustin J F
There have been many many reports of fusion power breakthroughs over the years. This is promising because it comes from a company with a track record, but I'm only giving it guarded enthusiasm until I see a real product.
One point twenty-one Gigawatts!!
To all the doubters... "In the history of the world, every new truth began as heresy." --- Geo. Bernard Shaw
I couldn't help but notice the same thing in several other online communauties. The more people you pack in the same space (communauty or sub-communauty), the worse the quality gets.
This actually seems to hold with any kind of group or crowd. The more people, the less thinking.
It appears they finally figured out how the Saucer was powered.
I think it is designed to persuade the world's oil and gas producers to not get too greedy. Ten years can be dragged into twenty with luck and that's twenty years to find a real solution to the problem that (most of) all our energy is belong to them.
The killmart people claim they have almost singlehandedly achieved something the brightest minds from all over the world have not managed in 60 years. Combine that with American Bullshit Style and the simple explanation is that they are clueless idiots who will never get anything real done. Except that they might have some naive computer model which only they know and which tells them something which is untrue.
They HEAT with nuclear-generated electricity. Only where the Anglosaxon oli&war scam rules (like in Germany and Italy) we need oil and gas to heat our houses.
Now, admire the ingenuity of Ecole Nationale d'Administration and Charles de Gaulle. When they are not chasing an extramarital affair, the Frenchies can be absolutely efficient at times !
Imagine how we could put all the unemployed millions of France, Spain, Greece and Germany to good use. They could be proud Uranium miners in Thüringen, Saxony, Poland, Bohemia. All under nicely controlled, healthy conditions. Others could be proud welders, electricians, engineers and material scientists building amazing machines which Generate Power From Our Intelligence And Muscle.
But alas, the Anglos have decided it is funnier to steal oil at gunpoint and force all their vasalls to buy it expensively. It probably resonates more with the Anglosaxon tradition of Rape&Pillage-In-Foreign-Lands aka. Viking warriors.
I want one small enough to mount on the back of my DeLorean.
Turns out they do have some sort of prototype, just not the complete one they plan to refine with 1-year iterations.
Here are some details about their technology.