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Isn't plan A what Lockheed Martin is building? At least they made it sound like they were the closest to real fusion. http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products
by mtgx 10y ago
Isn't plan A what Lockheed Martin is building? At least they made it sound like they were the closest to real fusion.
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.html http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.htm...
- chillydawg 10y agoYeah, but Lockheed could just be running a scam to fleece the US govt out of millions in research grants and tax credits. Obviously it's a huge bet that could pay out $lol if it succeeds, but I suspect it's more of an accounting trick than serious R&D.
- XorNot 10y agoThey're not running a scam, but they don't have the results to be in more then the research curiousity stage. Keep in mind too, the W-7 isn't designed to be net energy positive either whereas ITER is.
- drjesusphd 10y agoAre you aware of ANY results at all?
- sfifs 10y agoI believe that they are self funding it
- chillydawg 10y agoI expect there are significant tax credits available for investing in that kind of research. In the UK there certainly are. You can characterise an awful lot of software development as R&D and write the cost off as research and claim a tax credit, which can be very substantial. The last place I worked was running this "scam" and offset it's dev budget by millions of pounds a year.
- drjesusphd 10y agoTokamaks have already achieved "real fusion" over 20 years ago, and have gotten close to breakeven.
- DennisP 10y agoFrom what I've seen, most fusion researchers are skeptical. Lockheed hasn't revealed much detail, and their people aren't leaders in the field. They also have a long way to go; when they made their big announcement they were running on about 100 watts of power. By comparison, MIT's C-Mod uses as much power, briefly, as the entire city of Cambridge. Lockheed claims that fast iteration will make for fast progress, but they're not the only fusion startup taking that approach. Others include General Fusion, Helion, and Tri Alpha. And Tri Alpha, at least, gets a lot of respect for openly sharing experimental data in papers and conferences.
- zamalek 10y agoExactly, they are going down as my plan A. I've got very little confidence in the likes of ITER because, while they are doing amazing work, they are getting fusion-never funding.