27 ms·
Lockheed's Skunk Works Building Bigger Fusion Reactor
- hn23 7y agoMaybe also interesting in this context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X
- awkwardaardvark 7y agoIf you understand German I can only recommend you give this interview a listen: https://alternativlos.org/36/ https://alternativlos.org/36/ Edit: I should mention that it is about Wendelstein 7-X.
- s9w 7y agoThat is very informative, thanks!
- rland 7y agoFor those who don't understand German, this is an interview in English, also from someone at Max Planck about Wendelstein 7-X: https://omegataupodcast.net/312-the-wendelstein-7-x-fusion-experiment/ https://omegataupodcast.net/312-the-wendelstein-7-x-fusion-e...
- hn23 7y agoThanks, knew this one already :)
- clouddrover 7y agoAnd MIT's SPARC reactor plans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARC_fusion_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARC_fusion_reactor https://www.psfc.mit.edu/sparc https://www.psfc.mit.edu/sparc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4
- rwmj 7y agoAnd General Fusion still seem to be going: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Fusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Fusion and claiming 2023 as a date for a working demo: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/05/general-fusion-will-complete-demo-nuclear-fusion-plant-around-2023-c2-montreal.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/05/general-fusion-will-co...
- pfdietz 7y agoGF recently redid their concept, because the previous one wouldn't work (magnetic fields were far too high, which would cause liquid metal to vaporize off the plasma facing surfaces, hopelessly contaminating the plasma). The new concept uses slower compression, and has a solid metal conductor down the middle of the chamber. This conductor would experience enormous neutron loading (it cannot be shielded from that by a thick layer of liquid metal) as well as enormous forces from magnetic fields up to 100T. I give this scheme very little chance of being workable.
- Element_ 7y agoCan you share a link to the design changes mentioned?
- wiz21c 7y agoand those : https://lppfusion.com/ https://lppfusion.com/ who make lots of reports and thus, are interesting to follow. However, I've no idea how serious they are...
- DennisP 7y agoThey've gotten papers published in serious journals, and present at fusion conferences. That doesn't mean they're not a long shot but whether or not it works out, they're doing real science.
- inflatableDodo 7y ago>"How do you scale it up to generate power for a city or an entire town? That’s all ahead of us," If they think they can get a working fusion reactor capable of powering 80,000 homes into a shipping container, I'd suggest not building them any bigger. Being able to scale in container sized units over time via the existing transport links sounds just peachy. Is quite a big 'if' there.
- 2muchcoffeeman 7y agoWhy was this downvoted? I had the same idea. If you can power 80000 homes with a container sized reactor, why not start deployment? Easy to transport, you could power small neighbourhoods. No more wide spread black outs. Not sure how much maintenance will factor in, but a reactor that size sounds already practical.
- tabs_masterrace 7y agoIt's still a nuclear reactor... You don't just put them into containers and ship them around, or turn them on or off by pressing a switch. They require specialized staff to operate, maintenance, handling of materials, safety and protection precautions and so on. Either you built them big or they are not worth it to operate.
- jpindar 7y agoOK but why can't we have just one of them running somewhere as a demonstration?
- UncleEntity 7y agoKind of like computers back in the day?
- taneq 7y agoExactly. The reasons we have giant centralized power production is that it's cheaper to fuel and maintain one big electrical power station than it is to do so with many small ones. If a new technology doesn't need frequent refueling or maintenance and doesn't become dramatically less efficient when scaled down, it's probably better used in a distributed fashion with the power grid just helping to load level.
- starpilot 7y agoNo!
- adrianN 7y agoThere is not much substance in this article. The most interesting part seems to be the slide with the milestones. They seem to be three or four prototypes away from ignition. How many years is that? How many years from the ignition prototype to something that actually produces more energy than it consumes?
- taneq 7y agoWell, based on the last 50 years of fusion research, the time from 'now' to 'net positive energy production' is quite consistently between 20 and 50 years.
- adrianN 7y agoI think everybody knows that joke by now, but also most people know that fusion research has never received the funding necessary to make fast progress. Given the lack of enthusiasm for funding it, it is in fact surprising that ITER is not cancelled yet.
- sgt101 7y agoThat's kind of a tautology - because there's no substantial progress. The real problem is that every time the fusion community has tried something some unexpected effects and behaviours have emerged derailing the technical approaches and sending the community back to the drawing board.
- simonh 7y agoYep, if governments had committed Manhattan project scale funding to Fusion say 30 years ago, it would almost certainly have gone into a technical approach that is now thoroughly obsolete. It simply wouldn’t have worked, because we just didn’t understand the problem domain well enough. IMHO we still don’t. The pragmatic approach is to fund a variety of research projects enough to keep making progress, but not so much that too many resources get wasted on dead ends. A dead end is fine if we learn from it, but we should only commit the resources needed to learn the lesson, and as little more as possible.
- Zardoz84 7y agoSo, it's a design using magnetic mirrors? I was asking what happend with this way of building a fusion reactor. The last that I know is that was used on the 60's.
- gmueckl 7y agoTokamaks are the direct evolutionary step up from magnetic mirrors because these had problems with with electron containment at the mirrors. A circular design removes the mirrors and therefore this problem. Unless these guys have completely novel mirror configuration, they must run intonth same issue because electron and proton trajectories are quite different at these energies.
- benj111 7y ago"Despite slower than expected progress" I mean on the one hand this is the story of fusion. On the other they should have preempted that by being extra pessimistic, so was extra pessimism built in? Did they guess they were going to be perennially 5 years away when in fact they're 10 years away. Or did they think the project would be done in 18 months, and is still 10 years away? Any bets on what the predicted timeframe will be in 10 years time?
- creeble 7y agoFive years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5323504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5323504 The original article is gone, but the click-bait title of that HN post was "Lockheed's Skunk Works: fusion power in four years?" It did end in a question mark, I guess.
- pletnes 7y agoThe biggest hurdle for fusion power is, ultimately, how to deal with the neutrons. These particles are electrically neutral and their trajectories are unaffected by electromagnetic fields. The approach so far is to put a «blanket» around the fusion core to slow them down, but this fails to mention that the blanket will be slowly (or not so slowly) damaged by neutron induced transmutation. Since a lot of the energy released in fusion power comes in the form of kinetic energy of neutrons, it’s also essential to convert that energy into eg steam, for power generation.
- darkpuma 7y agoIs putting a big pile of concrete around the reactor not a suitable solution? Concrete is often used as neutron radiation shielding because it's full of hydrogen (in the water chemically bound up in it) and because of its desirable structural properties.
- snops 7y agoThey already do this with ITER[1] for the "bioshield" to protect humans from radiation, the facility is semi underground as well. However by the sounds of it, a reasonable fraction of the output power is in the form of neutrons. If you had no lithium blanket and just concrete, the energy of the neutrons would go into heating the concrete, where it would either be wasted, or require the concrete to be actively cooled which would be difficult as concrete is not a great conductor. [1] https://f4e.europa.eu/mediacorner/newsview.aspx?content=941 https://f4e.europa.eu/mediacorner/newsview.aspx?content=941
- bbatha 7y agoThe main concern with the neutrons is damage to the reactor itself — you don’t want to have to replace the main chamber walls with any frequency. Fusion reactors generally do not release enough neutrons to hurt people. So shielding on the outside doesn’t do much except provide additional fail safes.
- pfdietz 7y agoThe neutron flux inside a fusion reactor is many orders of magnitude higher than the maximum allowable for human exposure. The flux is low on the outside precisely because of the many absorption lengths of shielding between the reactor and people.
- vertline3 7y agoI tip my hat to them. We need some boldness to move forward.
- moreati 7y agohttp://julien.hillairet.free.fr/wiki/doku.php?id=list_of_fusion_startups http://julien.hillairet.free.fr/wiki/doku.php?id=list_of_fus... is the most complete list I've seen, of private fusion efforts
- nabla9 7y agoPeople running this project (Tom McGuire) are aerospace engineers who are familiar with plasma in hypersonic speeds and computational fluid simulation. It seems that they don't have experienced particle or plasma physicists in the project. Can anyone correct me on this?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- controlweather 7y agoAnd you wonder why they can’t determine why the jet stream just hit an anomaly so far outside of normal that it’s bad!
- Robotbeat 7y agoFusion is hard. Neutrons are a concern, yes, but none of this matters without ignition, without break-even (choose your definition). Until break-even is achieved, it’s all premature optimization to me. Compact or not, clever neutron handling or not, integrated tritium-breeding or not, break-even is the minimum bar to cross, and no one has crossed it outside of fission-triggered bombs. That must be the focus. Once that is achieved, there will be plenty of resources to solve the myriad of other problems, but until break-even is achieved (by ANY means other than fission trigger), solving those other problems just doesn’t matter.
- pfdietz 7y agoThe focus on ignition is strange. If the engineering and economics look hopeless, then why focus on ignition? The only reason I can think of is that the people working on it want to keep their jobs and defer the likely practical showstoppers until after the ultimately irrelevant plasma physics problems are solved.
- tim333 7y agoWell it's a step in the direction. If you can get that to work then maybe you can then figure out the other stuff afterwards.
- pfdietz 7y agoIn the same sense that climbing a tree is a step in the direction of getting to the moon.
- Robotbeat 7y agoIn the same sense that flying to orbit is a step to getting to the Moon. We did Mercury before Apollo.
- gmueckl 7y agoClimbing a tree is useful for going to the moon. Having access to heights from which to drop things is a prerequisite step for the first experiments that lead to an understanding of gravity and acceleration ;).
- pfdietz 7y agoLockheed enlarged their original concept, reducing the power density (counting the volume of the reactor, not just the plasma) by a factor of 100. It's now about 0.5 MW/m^3, about the same as MIT's ARC concept. In contrast, the power density of a PWR primary reactor vessel is 20 MW/m^3 (and of the core alone, 100 MW/m^3). How exactly is fusion supposed to be cheaper than this, when the reactors are both so much larger and so much more complex? Saving on fuel is irrelevant, as fuel is only a small part of the cost of running a fission reactor.
- pcl 7y agoWhat’s meaningful about power density as a metric for reactors?
- pfdietz 7y agoPower density determines size (for a given power output), which is strongly correlated with cost. Simply put, larger machines are more expensive than smaller ones. And cost is the showstopper for fusion, not the comparatively shallower issues of plasma physics.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- IanCal 7y agoCost also rapidly translates iteration time too. The bigger you get, the more expensive it is and the more you need larger groups or collaborations, which means more politics. If you can shrink the reactor enough you can go from requiring governments to work together to just needing a single company.
- evancox100 7y agoI'd assume it's a decent proxy for cost. It would also be an important metric for mobile reactor usage
- hanniabu 7y ago
- amluto 7y ago> Containing the reaction, the same one that occurs in our sun and other stars... Not really. Our sun is fueled mainly by the proton-proton chain reaction, which produces no neutrons. This reaction is very very slow and happens at comparatively low temperatures. The large power output of the sun is because the sun is huge. Useful fusion reactors need to use much faster reactions and require temperatures several times higher than the sun’s core. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_core https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_core
- smallnamespace 7y agoTo add to that, the sun's average power density barely rivals a compost heap.
- techdragon 7y agoThat’s awfully simplistic. Having spent most of today day wrestling with permutations of the various radiometric flux and power formulas. It’s pretty clear that depending on what you count as the “edge” you can get some very disingenuous results when it comes to anything related to the sun’s density. What’s the math behind the compost heap estimate there? (Genuinely curious since I’ve spent the day doing math adjacent to this one)
- erik_landerholm 7y agoPhysics exchange has a calculation. Bunch of articles about it accessible from google.
- analog31 7y agoThat was my reaction too. Indeed, among the many possible ways to think about it, the sun can warm the compost heap, but not vice versa. On the other hand, the sun is a cosmic compost heap. ;-)
- maxander 7y agoRemember the square-cube law; for two things of different sizes, the difference in surface area is proportional to the square and the difference in volume is proportional to the cube of the difference in sizes. So, compared to any Earth-bound compost heap, each bit of the sun's surface (wherever you draw the boundary) has more heat-generating interior backing it up.
- Animats 7y agoThe amazing thing is that Lockheed is doing this with their own money. Not for PR; they seldom say much about the project.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- kalium-xyz 7y ago"we have a fusion reactor, she is real. You just never met her because she goes to a different school"