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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
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
This is as about as content free a news story as I have ever seen.
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.
Apparently is IS fusion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
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.”
I think this AvWeek story http://aviationweek.com/techno... is a better description, but then Aviation Week has more technical writers..
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)
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)
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.
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.
Look up Fusion and go away.
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.
Why is Snark Required?
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.
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.
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.
I used to enjoy internet discussions - back in the early 90's when the bar to entry was at least a 105-110 IQ. Now that everyone can "discuss" it becomes obvious that the roughly 23-25% of humanity who are idiots have roughly 75% more time and willingness to post than anyone else which drives the bulk of the sensible posters away and it spirals downwards from there.
The concept of free and open discussion is a failed concept. There need to be bars to entry in order to prevent the 25% from taking up 90% of a forum's bandwidth. I am sure that you have noticed that on any given forum the most prolific posters are inevitably the worst posters - driving other far more informed and interesting posters away? It could be something as simple as requiring a credit card and a $2 fee to participate. When you troll, flame,spam or repeatedly say something incredibly, undeniably stupid than you and your card is banned. There are only so many $2 fees and so many credit cards that someone can reasonably obtain. Additionally how about limiting the posting privileges of both the newest AND THE MOST PROLIFIC contributors so that one person can not dominate a discussion.
I know , I know - cue the rallying cry of "freeze peach!" once again and those are the posters that I am talking about.
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
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 think the egomania is getting worse, because the Slashdot audience has been steadily expanding for its entire existence. It's not necessarily a matter of what sort of people make up the community. It's probably more a matter of the size of the community and why people joined. When you join a small community, it's because you like what it has to offer and want to contribute. When you join a large community, it's because you like what it has to offer and want to enjoy the benefits. On Slashdot, the biggest benefit is and always has been the ease with which we can communicate our opinions to our peers. Surely lots of people, new members and existing ones who've gone through subtle personality changes, now use Slashdot primarily to try and assert their opinions. All they needed was an audience.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
And a prototype by 2017!
This gives me a really good feeling. :)
Don't you actually mean "a nice warm feeling"?
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.