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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!
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"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
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
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.
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..
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?...
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.
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.
Nah. Just build some really big air conditioners and put them outside. That'll work.
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.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.