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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
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!
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.
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.
...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
Yes! I saw a video lecture on this last year. Been wondering when we'd hear some news on this project.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
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.
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.
But everything else on the internet is okay, right?
I think this AvWeek story http://aviationweek.com/techno... is a better description, but then Aviation Week has more technical writers..
Finally, I'm getting closer to owning a Mr. Fusion!
... 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 !!
If they can build and test it within a year, why would it still take about 10 years to actually produce an operational one..
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.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
"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.
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.
There's a much better article at Aviation week
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.
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.
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
Not the article, the 'journalists' interpretation of it.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Still seems to stack up pretty well. After all ITER has another 13 years to go before they plan to even attempt D-T fusion, and even if everything goes well it's still just a proof-of-concept prototype that will never be suitable for commercial power generation - at best it's a stepping stone on the way to solving the copious engineering challenges associated with the design.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Lockheed is an engineering company. Even if the military is funding this project it could have huge benefits for everyone. Cheap, clean electricity and no dependence on uncertain sources of oil are the goal.
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.
Not sure if you're a troll or an idiot - this is conventional high-energy plasma fusion, just using yet *another* different mechanism to contain the plasma and stimulate fusion - there's dozens of techniques out there. Rossi's device, assuming it's not just a scam, is doing something completely radically different and unexplained by current fusion theory.
--- 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.
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.
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.
What else is supposed to power our megawatt lasers?
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
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
Rossis device is perfectly explained by current fusion theories.
It is only an open question if/how the device works.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Umm, no it's not. The energy-balance equations, sure. But there's no way it's generating anything close to the kinetic energies believed necessary to overcome the coulomb barrier so that nuclei can get close enough to each other to trigger fusion. Nor is there any way in current theory for the observed reactions to be occurring without emitting significant neutron radiation. If it's working it's somehow managing to trigger fusion at energies many, many orders of magnitude lower than necessary in plasma fusion - the only kind of fusion we have reliable evidence for being possible, or a generally accepted theory to explain *how* it happens.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
the Area 51 guys were finally able to decode the alien symbols! Good job guys!
E Proelio Veritas.
Nobody tell ITER!
Why don't you simply read up how the Rossi process works instead of making an idiot of yourself?
Besides 'his process' there are hundreds if not thousands of fusion processes that do not release neutrons.
The most famous one is 2H + 3He that is why everyone mentions He3 (more precisely 3He) and mining it from the moon.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.
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."
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).
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.
Exactly! Skunkworks' mandate is to try out wacky ideas that sound good on paper to see if it might possibly work.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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!
Because his description of the process is speculative at best, as are the dozens of other conflicting proposals as to the mechanism in play, none of which have been broadly accepted. And none of them are consistent with broadly accepted fusion theory, which requires massive energy levels to overcome the immense electrostatic repulsion of atomic nuclei at distances far smaller than the atomic radius - the radius of the nucleus is after all between about 23,000x and 145,000x smaller than the atom itself. (uranium and hydrogen, respectively)
And yes, there are fusion reactions that don't emit neutrons, but transmuting nickel to copper isn't one of them. To transmute nickel to stable copper you need to add several additional nucleons ("normal" copper has 1 more proton and 4 more neutrons than "normal" nickel), and many of the intermediate isotopes should be highly unstable (too many or too few neutrons). The fact that there's negligible radiation or radioactive waste suggests that the process is somehow preferentially targeting the most unstable isotopes first, and managing to trigger several additional fusion events essentially instantaneously before any of the unstable nuclei can decay.
And of course on the "it's a hoax" front there's also the fact that early demonstration units produced copper in exactly the same isotope ratios as found naturally (highly unlikely), while these newer demonstrations have a more believably different isotope ratio, but still don't include any radioactive isotopes. Maybe that's a coincidence, but it looks an awful lot like someone dialing in their scam by removing the most glaring inconsistencies.
Don't get me wrong - I'm rooting for Rossi to actually be on to something, but the man has a history of fraud, and his "demonstrations", even this latest more independent 32-day one, consistently have flaws you could drive a bus through. Any halfway competent 2nd-year chemistry student could design a more reliable test than anything done so far. The only thing I'm sure of right now is that his device is most definitely NOT operating on the same principles as plasma fusion, and so far plasma fusion is the only kind we have any sort of well-tested theory to describe.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
How is that any different than NASA spending $20 billion on developing the Orion and SLS system for putting astronauts into space when SpaceX is able to launch those astronauts @ $20 million per seat?
I could name other good examples, but seeing the federal government spend billions of dollars on redundant and otherwise useless projects is hardly new. The bullet train to nowhere being built in California is another similar project.
And a prototype by 2017!
This gives me a really good feeling. :)
Don't you actually mean "a nice warm feeling"?
If only we had magical precognition powers telling us which approach is going to work in advance, we could save money by only funding that approach and ignoring all the rest.
In the meantime, though, we have to invest in different approaches and hope that at least one of them produces something useful.
If only we had magical precognition powers telling us which approach is going to work in advance, we could save money by only funding that approach and ignoring all the rest.
In the meantime, though, we have to invest in different approaches and hope that at least one of them produces something useful.
Well we have a couple of magical things one is called hindsight the other is called cost accounting.
Hindsight comes into play when people promise to deliver something for 50 YEARS !!! and fail to deliver but keep saying they just need more money to git er done.
Cost accounting comes into play when the prototype reactor is going to cost $ 50,000,000,000.00 !! and there is no guarantee it will work and the people pushing it have a very good chance of coming back with their hands out.
Both of those things involve a little magical something called common sense. It's a very strange kind of magic, in that you have to put away the wishful thinking, get a hard nose and actually start questioning what people are telling you.
Anyone foolish enough to take anyone's word on faith, be it a Televangelist or a guy in a labcoat with a degree deserves the raping they will get.
Hindsight comes into play when people promise to deliver something for 50 YEARS !!! and fail to deliver but keep saying they just need more money to git er done.
They promised to deliver said something in 50 years given increased funding. Instead, the funding steadily decreased. Well guess what, if you keep giving them less money, the schedule is going to stretch out further and further. So that's your "it's always in 20 years" effect, completely self-fulfilled.
Not to mention that theoretical science and advanced engineering like this is very hard to estimate accurately - you can't really estimate how long it'll take for the breakthroughs necessary, you can only roughly gauge the amount of experiments you might need to run. This isn't Starcraft where you click on a button to research something and get a progress bar.
If it were that easy, then everyone in the field would have been expecting Skunkworks people to come up with the first working thing. But few people bet on them, even despite the fact that the details behind this project were available for quite a while. To me, this indicates that the subject is much less obvious than you make it be.
They promised to deliver said something in 50 years given increased funding. Instead, the funding steadily decreased. Well guess what, if you keep giving them less money, the schedule is going to stretch out further and further. So that's your "it's always in 20 years" effect, completely self-fulfilled.
Yes what they promised to deliver was a less advanced version of ITER that would have cost more in constant dollars. JHC man think this stuff through.
You can see the endpoint of tokomak research. It's sitting there in france, it's expensive and uneconomical.
What is your response ? If we had of spent more money we could have wasted it faster and funneled more into a dead end ?
In any engineering process at some point when things are going horrendously wrong you have to stop and say "There must be a better way".
What happened with "BIG FUSION" was so many prominent people had based their careers on a failed concept there was no way they were ever going to say "Oops we were wrong". Hell just look at the Princeton Fusion project which is multiple ways wrong and obsoleted but is staying afloat because of the university's connections to congressmen.
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.
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.
ITER doesn't actually exist yet. I think this is based on lessons from JET, the previous generation tokamak.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
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.