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."

Comments

wow

[Charliemopps]

Never thought I'd read this...
We just might survive this century after all.

Re:wow

[radtea]

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).

The critical thing to understanding this is that fission reactors are (necessarily) full of heavy elements, which is where the long-lived stuff comes from. Fusion reactors are full of light elements.

There are very fundamental physical reasons why radioactive light elements almost always have much shorter lifetimes than radioactive heavy elements. If you've only got a few nucleons to play with, turning a proton into a neutron is a major change in configuration, so the energy gap between the radioactive isotope and the adjacent stable isotope is large, and in general the lifetime against beta decay scales inversely with the fifth power of the endpoint energy. In heavy elements, which have so many nucleons they can be adequately modelled as liquid drops in some cases, changing one neutron to a proton doesn't change the configuration very much so the energy difference is small and the lifetime can be very large. Unfortunately, although the energy of the beta particle emitted is small, the energies of the other particles in the decay chain (gammas and more betas in most cases) can be pretty much anything.

So: heavy elements (fission) bad; light elements (fusion) good. Fusion reactors are designed with this in mind. They will produce a lot of nasty stuff, but almost all of it will decay rapidly, so given that the engineering issues of fission waste are pretty much under control (the political issues are not) we can be confident that fusion power will be OK in that regard.

credibility of article is doubtful

[Anonymous Coward]

"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

Not what they said

[Punko]

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.

Details would be nice

[Crashmarik]

This is as about as content free a news story as I have ever seen.

Re:Sounded real promising right up to....

[catchblue22]

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.

Oh puleeaze. This is Skunkworks. Thomas McGuire did his PhD thesis on fusors at MIT. This isn't just some investment scam. Do some research.

Re:Of course!

[allcoolnameswheretak]

Everybody is joking, but this news update on fusion energy coming from an established, well known corporation is pretty serious. Isn't this the first time a respected company is claiming a breakthrough, a working prototype of fusion energy?
Do you realize what implications this has, if it is really fusion energy as they claim? It's a world changer.
I got goose bumps just from reading "Lokheed, breakthrough, fusion energy"....

Re:Other things they said couldn't be done...

[Required Snark]

You're observation about Slashdot is correct. The attitude of a large fraction of posts is, for want of a better word, stupid.

Teh Stupid is characterized by mindless criticism, nitpicking, absolutist rhetoric, and willful negation of facts. All of which are on display in the response to this thread.

The aspect I find most disturbing is a clear anti-intellectualism. Comments are not based in fact or logic, but self centered illogic: if I say something is right/wrong, that all I have to say.

As for the "agenda driven posters", I think the agenda is egomania. That would explain the obsessive negative attitudes. Being relentlessly negative is a way of asserting yourself if you don't have anything else to say.

Is this getting worse? I'm not sure. I think I see more of it, but don't know if that is because I am more aware of it, rather then an real increase.

At any rate, when I become annoyed enough, I respond with evidence oriented responses. I find references to uphold my position, and include quotes and links. Now someone may disagree with me, but at least I am not making assertions based solely on my individual position. I am generally disappointed because very few people respond with their own external references.

In this case I don't feel the need quote very many examples, because the behavior in this thread is rather self evident.

Re:Also if accurate its a big slap in the face

[Charliemopps]

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.

A lot of this groups work was based on what was learned at ITER. They actively talk about ITER quite a bit in a lot of their talks.
I don't think anyone thought ITER was anything more than a research project. It did exactly what it was supposed to do and spurred innovation.

Re:Some tech info for those interested:

[Anonymous Coward]

> It also has very few open field lines (very few paths for the plasma to leak out; uses a cylinder, not a Tokamak ring).

It only takes one.

Also, a cylinder has endpoints, the whole point of a Tokamak (or other toroidal design) is to avoid endpoints.

Re:Not New information

[Crispy Critters]

>Magnetic mirrors have already been proven not to work.

They do have a huge problem that no one was able to solve. It is not inconceivable that someone who understands the problem will be able plug the ends. But step one is to explain why this mirror would work differently from those mirrors.

Re:Only A Decade Away

[geekoid]

Well, using time is a mistake. It's really about 25 billion dollars away.

Re:Of course!

[cusco]

Apples and oranges. The F-35 is a Pentagon program designed to funnel taxpayer money to Lockheed to the end of time, the fusion project is their own money so it might actually be real.