Some good news!!

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http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/gasp-lockheed-skunk-works-says-it-has-a-nuclear-fusion-1646903392

http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals-compact-fusion-reactor-details

Billionaire superheroes Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne's defense companies both had one, and now real-world defense giant Lockheed Martin says they have one too. It is the holy grail of cheap and stable energy, yet it has eluded the scientific community for a century. Well, that may finally be about to change once and for all with Compact Fusion Reactor (CFR).

Lockheed's 'bleeding edge' aircraft design and boutique technology development arm, the Skunk Works, has officially announced that they have what they think is a very workable and incredibly small fusion reactor design. If it does indeed work as projected it could change the the world as we know for the better, not just for powering homes and offices all over the world, but for powering ships and even spacecraft and aircraft, the cumulative effect of which would be akin to a restart on the atomic age all over again.

Early production examples of the Compact Fusion Reactor would fit into a shipping container and produce 100MW of power. This output would be enough to power well over a whopping 80,000 homes in the US and is equivalent to one of the Navy's large A4W fission reactors found on Nimitz Class aircraft carriers.

What is most exciting is that the Compact Fusion Reactor would be able to do this without the tons of radioactive material and waste that are currently produced by nuclear fission reactors scattered around the globe. Aviation Week was given exclusive access to the program, and in their expose on this potential energy revolution (which I highly recommend you read) they addressed what the CFR would need to operate and what radioactive material it would leave behind in doing so:

Lockheed estimates that less than 25 kg (55 lb.) of fuel would be required to run an entire year of operations. The fuel itself is also plentiful. Deuterium is produced from sea water and is therefore considered unlimited, while tritium is "bred" from lithium. "We already mine enough lithium to supply a worldwide fleet of reactors, so with tritium you never have too much built up, and that's what keeps it safe. Tritium would be a health risk if there were enough released, but it is safe enough in small quantities. You don't need very much to run a reactor because it is a million times more powerful than a chemical reaction," McGuire notes.

Although the first-generation reactors will have radioactive parts at the ends of their lives, such as some steel elements in the shell, McGuire says the contamination situation "is an order of magnitude better" than that of contemporary fission systems. "There is no long-lived radiation. Fission reactors' stuff will be there forever, but with fusion materials, after 100 years then you are good." Contamination levels for fusion will improve with additional materials research, he believes. "It's been a chicken-and-egg situation. Until we've had a good working fusion system, there has not been money to go off and do the hard-core materials research," McGuire says. "So we believe the first generation is good enough to go out and do, and then it will only improve in time." Old CFR steel shell parts can be disposed of with "a shallow burial in the desert, similar to medical waste today. That's a major difference to today's fission systems."
When it comes to potential meltdowns and the resulting release of deadly radioactive particles associated with them, Lockheed states:

"There is a very minimal amount of radioactive tritium—it's on the order of grams—so the potential release is very minimal. In addition, there is not enough to be a risk of proliferation. Tritium is used in nuclear weapons but in a much larger inventory than would be involved here, and that's because you are continually making just enough to feed back in [to maintain the reaction],"
Beyond the possibility of incredibly plentiful energy and clean water for billions, the implications of a CFR on the transportation world could me massive, as large ships that currently use swimming pools of fossil fuels on a weekly basis could be powered by a propulsion unit that is just a fraction of the size of their massive engines, and runs without the need to carry many thousands of pounds of fuel. The same can be said for air travel, as airliners could be built that would not need fueling during their entire service life. Additionally, high-flying drones could take the place of satellites, or even cell phone towers, for some communications relay work, staying aloft for months or years at a time without the need for fueling.

One of the most exciting potential uses for this new technology is for space travel. The power that a small fusion reactor can potentially generate, and the efficiency of its power generation, could provide a spacecraft with the thrust and energy it needs to make it to Mars and back in a fraction of the time that is currently within the realm possibility.

This all sounds so fantastic. If the Skunk Works' prophesies come true it could change the political and socioeconomic balance of the world forever, and let's face it, boy could the world use some good news. Yet we must keep in mind the fact that we have heard fusion reactor claims many times before, and other research and development tanks are working on other fusion systems as this is being written, but the abundant resources and historic track record of Lockheed's Skunk Works does give the program serious cache. There is also the fact that Lockheed has allowed such a deep look into the program, and their stated time line for making an active prototype (within five years, a production example with ten) is ambitious to the point that it would do the company no good making such claims if they did not think they were truly onto something.

In the end, it will be a wait and see affair to see if this technology turns into a stable, virtually globe saving form of near free energy. The Skunk Work has done some amazing things in the past, and many more things we still are not allowed to know about, but the creation of stable and efficient nuclear fusion concept would be quite the stripe on the Skunk's back.
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Awesome news!
 
That is quite a breakthrough. At 23 x 42 feet I wonder if it will become even smaller? Fussion power cars... FTW
 
Eish, been waiting for this announcement pretty much all of my life... what's the catch?
 
The fact that its still in the incredibly early stages of the research, and this seems to be a pump to try get investors..

There is no real fusion reactor yet... a prototype is at least 5 years away, if the research proves feasible.
 
Scientists skeptical of Lockheed Martin's truck-sized FUSION reactor breakthrough

Lockheed Martin has caused quite a stir with its announcement that it will ship fusion reactors the size of a truck within the next decade.

"Our compact fusion concept combines several alternative magnetic confinement approaches, taking the best parts of each, and offers a 90 percent size reduction over previous concepts," said Tom McGuire, compact fusion lead for the company's Skunk Works' Revolutionary Technology Programs. "The smaller size will allow us to design, build and test the CFR [compact fusion reactor] in less than a year."

The team reckons it can have a reactor prototype up and running in five years and in full production in ten. In a promotional video, McGuire claimed such a fusion system could give aircraft unlimited range and endurance – and the tech could be exported around the world without fears over nuclear proliferation enabled by fission reactors.

Lockheed gave Aviation Week a sneak peek at the technology, and McGuire certainly talks a mean game. Conventional fusion reactors are massive systems of machinery that contain superheated plasma held in a torus using magnetism, but the Lockheed design eschews that approach in favor of a reaction chamber that can hold the plasma in a new configuration that is much smaller.

It’s one of the reasons we think it is feasible for development and future economics,” McGuire said. “Ten times smaller is the key. But on the physics side, it still has to work, and one of the reasons we think our physics will work is that we’ve been able to make an inherently stable configuration.”

The prototype is expected to only run for about ten seconds, but should generate much more power than what's put into running the thing. The goal is a 100MW reactor that's 23 by 43 feet (7 by 13 metres). The team is seeking outside investors to make it happen in the next ten years.

According to Aviation Week, the reactor apparently works thus:

Fusion fuel, made up of hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium, starts as a gas injected into an evacuated containment vessel. Energy is added, usually by radio-frequency heating, and the gas breaks into ions and electrons, forming plasma.

The superhot plasma is controlled by strong magnetic fields that prevent it from touching the sides of the vessel and, if the confinement is sufficiently constrained, the ions overcome their mutual repulsion, collide and fuse. The process creates helium-4, freeing neutrons that carry the released energy kinetically through the confining magnetic fields. These neutrons heat the reactor wall which, through conventional heat exchangers, can then be used to drive turbine generators.
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All this is expected to be contained in a vessel the size of a business-jet engine.

Gift horse, meet mouth

Sounds great, right? Compact fusion reactors of this type would solve the world's energy needs at a stroke, slash carbon emissions, and ensure reliable, clean power anywhere in the world with some easy-to-obtain fuel: hydrogen. But experts are skeptical, not just about the technology but about the manner in which it is being promoted.

"I think it's very overplayed; they are being very cagey about divulging details," Professor Edward Morse from UC Berkeley's School of Nuclear Engineering in California told The Register. "An isolated group working in skunkworks is great at developing stealth aircraft, but it doesn't fit for this kind of research."

Prof Morse said that, judging from what limited information is out there, the reactor looks very like the small devices he makes for plasma physics experiments. While the new reactor design may emit neutrons, it may not generate the kinds of temperatures Lockheed is claiming could be possible.

These kinds of claims have been made before he pointed out. Back in the 1950s the US spent a lot of time and money at Los Alamos National Laboratory building the Perhapsatron to test out the Z-pinch theory of fusion generation, which eventually proved fruitless.

"The search for fusion has been long and painful and a lot of people embarrassed about it," Prof Morse said.

The professor also pointed out a curious part of the Lockheed announcement: the frequent mention of the search for outside investors. If the technology is such a game changer, why isn't moneybags Lockheed prepared to put its own money behind it?

"Lockheed Martin had revenues of $45bn last year, and profits of $2.9bn, so why are they seeking external funding, he asked. "That's like Barack Obama asking me for a loan."

A spokesman for General Atomics, a defense contractor that has focused on fusion and fission research for decades, said Lockheed's idea was raising eyebrows because this was the first the contractor had heard of it – and GA has been working with the US Department of Energy for years on fusion research.

General Atomics' fusion experts were unreachable as they are in Russia at the moment attending the 25th Fusion Energy Conference (FEC 2014) in St Petersburg, which would have been a logical place for Lockheed to present their idea.

It's very rare in the scientific field for a revolutionary leap forward of the nature Lockheed is claiming. It's not impossible, but the scientific community will need to see a lot more evidence before the compact fusion reactor is taken seriously.
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http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/1...ckheed_martins_claims_to_have_cracked_fusion/
 
These words concern me:

Skunk Works
Deuterium
while tritium is "bred" from lithium

Maybe they will also use Unobtanium in the near future ?
 
This could actually explain the $20 drop in the oil price in the last few months... get the "drug" that is oil nice and cheap so people depend on it for longer because "why invest in something that will cost so much when we already have cheap energy"
 
MightyQuin said:
These words concern me:

Skunk Works
Deuterium
while tritium is "bred" from lithium

Maybe they will also use Unobtanium in the near future ?
Click to expand...

Skunk Works is well known and doesn't concern me. If true, this is good news for the world but bad news for my uranium shares.
 
MightyQuin said:
These words concern me:

Skunk Works
Deuterium
while tritium is "bred" from lithium

Maybe they will also use Unobtanium in the near future ?
Click to expand...

Deuterium is quite a common isotope, about 1 in every 6000 atoms of naturally-occurring hydrogen on earth (this includes everything in the water) is deuterium.

I heard about this a while ago on some podcast (can't remember which one), they actually spoke to one of the investors in the project. It's nowhere NEAR ready or even any feasible technology at the moment. It's just media sensationalism at the moment.

The energy requirement is still a lot more than the output which means it's completely useless as a power source. The reason why it made news is that other fusion reactor prototypes such as the Tokamak etc. require thousands or millions of times more energy to sustain and contain the reaction than it generates, while this process has got it down to a few hundred times or something. The point is it still requires massively more energy to keep the reaction going than you get out.

He even explained how it worked, by thin electrodes, like needles with a high charge flowing through them, creating a sort of plasma field that compresses the matter in the center. Not exactly sure of the details as I'm unfortunately not a physicist.

Found it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dense_plasma_focus

He also said something about the electrodes being made out of some very rare exotic metal, that doesn't just insta-melt when the reaction starts. They used platinum at first but that wasn't good enough.
 
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Even if it is true, top oil companies wont just roll over and die.
They will do anything in their power to buy/destroy this technology before it reaches the public.
How else will they make their billions.
 
Will it fit in my giant robot's chassis?
 
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