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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."
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
Revealed work in 2013
http://www.dvice.com/2013-2-22/lockheeds-skunk-works-promises-fusion-power-four-years
Apparently is IS fusion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
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.”
I think this AvWeek story http://aviationweek.com/techno... is a better description, but then Aviation Week has more technical writers..
It's just bad journalism. The actual press release doesn't make this claim.
Here's the Wikipedia article on his project: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
Here's some research he was involved in at MIT that he was involved in at some unknown date: http://ssl.mit.edu/research/Fu...
Here's a video of one of the researchers talking about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It is amazing that reporters seem to lack even an 8th grade level of science education.
They did change the fusion reactor to fission but.
It now reads
"U.S. submarines and aircraft carriers run on nuclear power, but they have large fission reactors on board that have to be replaced on a regular cycle."
The reactors last the life of the ship. It is only the fuel that gets changed they they are aiming for that to be the life of the ship as well. It is at least 20 years today.
And this part.
"Ultra-dense deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen, is found in the earth's oceans, and tritium is made from natural lithium deposits."
Wow.... ultra-dense......
Good grief.
Well the reporting is crap but lets hope Lockheed really has what it says it has.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Nuclear reactors aren't a whole lot larger, they managed to make them small enough to fit on a space rocket, a submarine and back in the 1960's, nine of them on an Aircraft Carrier. It's the support systems (like cooling) and maintenance buildings that end up taking up several acres. Dissipating the waste heat of a 20MW reactor safely, indefinitely, is no small feat.
moox. for a new generation.
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.
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.
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.
It is! Nontechnical discussions aren't very good at differentiating between three somewhat different areas of concern. First, neutrons and gammas produced by the reaction need to be shielded but go away when you turn the reaction off. Second, short-lived activation in which materials are radioactive, but with a half-life of years or less that becomes safe in a reasonable time. Fusion reactors have both of these, but they are manageable. Third, fission leaves behind nuclear waste materials with a half-life in tens of thousands of years--this is nasty stuff and is around basically forever. Fusion produces no long-lived waste (there is probably some component of some alloy that will prove to make tiny amounts of bad waste, but nothing significant compared to fuel rods from fission reactors).
There is no working prototype. This is a theoretical break through. They haven't proven anything yet.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
As the person that wrote most of the article you're linking to: no. NERVA was a relatively linear upgrade to the H-2 in performance terms, and there were H-2 upgrades that would have closed the gap to a degree (H-2T for instance).
There *are* nuclear engine designs that are much more efficient than this, like the gas-core design. They would have definitely make Mars a reasonable shot, but they are inherently "leaky" and suitable only for use in space. That's fine, but it pre-supposes you have the infrastructure to get them up there, and we didn't.
Finally, Congress wasn't shutting down NERVA, they were shutting down Mars. They repeatedly told NASA that they would not receive funding for a Mars shot from the late 1960s right through to the 1990s, but the NASA folks just kept pushing here and there trying to sneak it in.