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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."
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.
But plenty of fusion reactor designs have worked in theory; making them work in practice, though...
Yes, but this is Lockheed Martin. And we live in the age of computer aided design, where we can simulate much of an object before building this. In addition, I'm fairly sure that they have built smaller versions of this as proofs of concept. And now they have Thomas McGuire making the announcements, who is the lead scientist on the project, instead of the project manager doing presentations. He wrote his PhD thesis at MIT on fusors.
I am inclined to believe that this is the real thing. My main question is this: They use radio frequency radiation to heat the plasma; how have they overcome the rf shielding effect caused by hot plasma?
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
I remember a few years back there was a page on the Los Alamos lab web site that talked about "POPS fusion" experiments.
Basically like IEC fusion, but instead of trying to maintain constant pressure, allow the pressure to oscillate regularly.
Then that page dissapeared.
I wonder if this announcement is about the same thing.
Great links. If this is deuterium-deuterium fusion, I'm baffled why it isn't crazy radioactive. You get two reactions from that, one of which makes Helium and a neutron, the other makes Tritium and Hydrogen. Deuterium-Tritium fusion makes a very energetic neutron.
The neutron from the D-D reaction carries ~2.5 MeV, which isn't that hard to stop (though the reactor is so small - wonder if that includes shielding). The neutron from the D-T reaction, however, is ~14 MeV which is a real problem. Have they found a way to extract all the tritium before it can fuse? That would be neat (and hopefully drive down the price of Tritium gun sights).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Further reading: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
Based on this, 1 gram of Deuterium produces 320 megawatts of power.
The average American would consume the amount of deuterium found in 60kg of ordinary water per year to produce the energy they need in a year. There's enough Deuterium in our oceans to produce free power until long after the sun dies.
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.
No, I am referring to the NERVA rocket engine, a nuclear reactor that shoots superheated hydrogen out the back. The program was so successful followng the Apollo era that Congress cancelled all funding as it would have made a very expensive Mars trip viable using even 1970's technology (shortens the trip from 6 months to 2 months).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA
Clearly someone doesn't play Kerbal Space Program. This has nothing to do with RTGs.
moox. for a new generation.
"No matter how many billions you spend, you're not going to make a Chevette go faster than the speed of light."
You're comparing something that most would say is theoretically impossible, to something that most agree is theoretically possible and has already been achieved on a very small scale(LLNL ignition, of course not at the efficiency tipping point yet).
"The problems are technical"
The problems facing a mission to the moon were also technical, but with extraordinary funding they were able to fast track it by dividing up all the technical problems they faced and tackling them individually.
Fusion has many technical problems that could be tackled independently in parallel. See "When will fusion power my house (or vehicle)?" in the previously linked article. It covers this pretty extensively.
"You can't point at funding as a problem for fusion."
I can and did. The facts provided in the link are pretty compelling.
"..can't point at funding.... The problems are ... economic."
You contradicted yourself.
"No amount of money will fix that."
You've never heard of this thing called "employment". You have a technical problem, you use money to employ experts in the field that you are having that problem, and they come up with a solution. If that solution requires labor and materials to implement, you then employ some more people.
No or little amount of funding means little meaningful progress. You have some independent researchers working here and there to produce some papers and try to get published, but at some point you've got to coordinate activities and get appropriate amount of effort applied to each technical problem in an organized way:
http://i.imgur.com/sjH5r.jpg
You can't call BS if your only supporting argument is BS.