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The Navy's Patent for a Compact Nuclear Fusion Reactor
- ben_w 7y agoI can’t quite work out what they’re doing here. > According to the patent, Pais’ plasma chamber contains several pairs of these dynamic fusors, which rapidly spin and vibrate within the chamber in order to create a “concentrated magnetic energy flux” that can squish the gases together. If you will excuse the analogy, this sounds a bit like an electromagnetic equivalent to a Lagrange point. Is that a reasonable comparison for me to make?
- ShinyRice 7y agoThey're both points of equilibrium; Lagrange points are both stable (like a ball rolling in a half-pipe) and unstable (like a pencil standing on its tip) equilibriums. A stable equilibrium means that when an object in that point is displaced, it starts oscillating around that point, and unstable means that an object at that point, when displaced, will uncontrollably move away from it, unless you push it back onto that point. Well, the Newtonian gravitational potential is far more simple to deal with than something like super hot plasma confined by a strong magnetic field. But yeah, you typically do not want that moving around the place, so I presume it's a stable equilibrium.
- noodle_face_ 7y agoDoes the reasoning behind it all seem to make sense, or does it seem like meaningless sci-fi word-salad? I don't understand enough to know.
- blakesterz 7y ago"Current [fusion] reactors are approximately the size of a building" I was under the impression there isn't a fusion reactor of any size anywhere yet, am I wrong?
- ryanwaggoner 7y agoThere are many fusion reactors, just none that produce more energy than they consume. Barring some random research breakthrough by a small team somewhere, ITER is probably the best bet for reaching positive net energy first: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
- ben_w 7y agoIndeed. I believe the smallest — most hobbyist fusors — are about the size of a suitcase.
- XaspR8d 7y agoYeah, in fact many folks have created DIY fusors in their garages. Just hook any sort of energy harnessing device onto that and you can claim you've got a fusion reactor too! https://makezine.com/projects/make-36-boards/nuclear-fusor/ https://makezine.com/projects/make-36-boards/nuclear-fusor/
- willis936 7y agoThey may be referring to W7-X. The lower the aspect ratio of stellarators, the larger the major radius is. This makes a bigger, more expensive machine, but really blows the doors wide open on the largest engineering challenges (high neutron flux, high heat flux materials).
- _Microft 7y agoW7-X is this by the way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X
- jussij 7y agoThere are several fusion reactors currently in existence and operational as of this day. The problem is none of those reactors produce more energy than they consume.
- 7y ago
- jacques_chester 7y agoThe patent in question: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20190295733A1/ https://patents.google.com/patent/US20190295733A1/ It doesn't seem to have been examined yet. Only a single inventor is listed, Salvatore Pais[0]. He's also listed as inventor for a "Laser augmented turbojet propulsion system", "Craft using an inertial mass reduction device", "high frequency gravitational wave generator" (which was granted) and "piezoelectricity-induced room temperature superconductor". All of which would be massive technological breakthroughs. Meaning he's either the 21st century's most brilliant physicist or a crank. [0] https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Salvatore+Pais https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Salvatore+Pais
- libertine 7y agoThe funny thing is - this matches what Bob Lazar claimed to be working on at Area-51: - A compact energy generator; - A device that generated gravitational waves; Is the Navy in on the joke?
- molmalo 7y agoEven when Occam's razor would point the way of this being an intel ops to make adversaries waste resources, wouldn't it be cool to be proven wrong, and actually have a sudden and unexpected giant leap forward in science? But yet again... I wouldn't bet on that.
- libertine 7y agoOn one side I can see this is propaganda. You have plenty of real world scenarios of companies wasting resources on the pursuit of something that looks trivial: like electric vehicles. Yet a lot of them are pulling the plug on something that looked easy, after dumping millions into it, right? "It's just electric motors, a battery and wheels". If any government goes on a spiral to pursuit these devices it surely is a money furnace. On the other side, if this is clearly non-sense... don't they have smart people in Russia, China, etc, claiming the same? Maybe that's the genius of it all: it's so obviously propaganda non-sense that's too much obvious to be propaganda.
- ivanb 7y agoIt's the patent by Salvatore Cezar Pais. The same guy who patented gravitational wave generators, room temperature superconductor and "craft using an inertial mass reduction device".
- molmalo 7y agoRelevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21208051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21208051 Seems like the HN community expressed scepticism/doubt about the science behind patents filed by this guy? (Also commented in the posts regarding the ufo sightings by us navy pilots).
- calebclark 7y agoWhy is the government filing patents? The research is paid for by our tax dollars. Patenting it doesn’t seem right.
- achow 7y agoSo that France cannot copy it?
- omginternets 7y agoFunny, seeing as the US essentially bullied France into selling it's nuclear technology. (See: Alstom purchase by GE)
- stedaniels 7y agoTo make money so those tax dollars have been soundly invested? To protect the invention from commercial patents? Sounds sensible to me.
- onion2k 7y agoTo stop someone else patenting it and then trying to claim license fees from the Navy.
- tamizhar 7y ago> To stop someone else patenting it prior art.
- jabl 7y agoFrom TFA: > Related Videos XXXXXX YYYY Dash Cam Captures Accident Seems popularmechanics.com needs to tune their what-is-related algorithm a bit. Or is it a subtle jab at "yes my boss says I need to publish this even though it's an obvious crank and it's just clickbait"?
- xibalba 7y agoIf the military has developed several breakthrough technologies, why in the world would they patent them, thereby making them public? Given a revolutionary new tech, no foreign government would respect a U.S. patent, nor would it be enforceable in the first place. It's amazing to me that the ET/UFO cranks would take the publication of these patents at face value. As others have posited, likely another explanation is warranted: 1) luring foreign militaries down blind alley's of expensive research, 2) putting out these patents to only later debunk them and thereby possibly muddying the waters for some legitimate revelations, 3) a simple prank, etc. etc. Is it possible to verify that the filer is legitimately the U.S. Navy, or could anyone just file a patent and list the Navy as the assignee?
- Zenst 7y agoLet us not forget SDI (Strategic Defence Initiative - aka StarWars) from the Reagan era. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative Which, with how it panned out, does fit: "1) luring foreign militaries down blind alleys of expensive research" most aptly, albeit not put into the wild via a patent and more case of funky CGI graphics pushing a dream as reality.
- colechristensen 7y agoThat is also a really good way to spin failing to achieve something you tried really hard at,
- Zenst 7y agoYes, the spin rabbit hole goes to infinity and beyond. But certainly a plausible situation. We may never know and suspect that very few people ever knew in such secretive projects. Remember this was still with the whole Moon landing era fresh in mind for so many, that was also a President's speech dream, that seemed equally as wild and fantasy at the time. Yet that happened. SDI was, given the media mindsets of that era, easily to latch onto as - it's going to happen. Today, we are more cynical/pragmatic/realistic in mindset and with that, do question things and able to do so en-mass more easily with the internet than ever before.
- currymj 7y agocould this not just be a weird dude who happens to be funded by the Navy in some more mundane capacity, and therefore assigns patents to the Navy?
- driverdan 7y agoThis is the original article: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/30256/scientist-behind-the-navys-ufo-patents-has-now-filed-one-for-a-compact-fusion-reactor https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/30256/scientist-behind...
- colechristensen 7y agoThere are a lot of skeptics that think this is conspiracy theory nonsense, but Lockheed has been open about working on fusion for a while and maybe some others too. The tech could have been operational for twenty years and this is how they’re declassifying it. Maybe they think world security will be better with this public, maybe the secret is already leaked, maybe they think a bigger advantage will come from having this commercially available, maybe this is useless for defense because it is trivially detectable, or maybe they’re filing patents to mislead adversaries on operational details and delay them, or maybe knowing how it works is unimportant because there is some impossible to acquire secret sauce . There are lots of ways to think about it, and obsessive grabs on technology secrets is not the only one. https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion.html https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion...
- Accujack 7y ago>The tech could have been operational for twenty years and this is how they’re declassifying it. Uh, no. Even a horrifically expensive to build but working fusion reactor would have been released in that time frame. The military in the US is secretive, but not that much... there's a strategic advantage to having more advanced tech than your enemies, but there's a much bigger one from your whole country having large amounts of cheap, clean power. Not to mention that such a discovery would have been worth trillions of dollars to the energy industry, and the Navy has plenty of civilian firms working with them that would have pushed hard for this tech to be exclusively licensed to them if it worked. AND it's unlikely that the tech wouldn't have been stolen in that time frame. It would be a major, major coup for whatever country got it, and in the past 20 years almost every secret military tech the US has created has ended up in the hands of the Chinese or others... the US military just isn't that good at security, and you can't keep all the docs needed for development of something like this offline or in paper form.
- dangerface 7y ago> Uh, no. Even a horrifically expensive to build but working fusion reactor would have been released in that time frame. The military in the US is secretive, but not that much... The Glomar Explorer is an example of the US Military doing exactly that, they made a boat specifically for recovering a sunk sub and told every one it was a research vessel they kept it a secret for over 20 years. There are countless other examples of this like the black bird. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer
- PopeDotNinja 7y agoConspiracy theory... This is not a good reactor design, and therefore they files a patent for it, hoping to mislead foreign countries into using it. Another idea is that by filing a patent, Congress could give that kind of patent extra long protection, extending the amount of time it could only be used by the US Navy.
- jtbayly 7y ago> Current reactors are approximately the size of a building; a relatively portable compact fusion reactor, one designed to power relatively small vehicles, would be a game-changer. Ummm... Isn't it more important to say that current reactors don't even work (at least not yet)? A working one would be a game-changer, never mind how big or small it was.
- davedx 7y agoThey kind of work, longest fusion reaction is 70 seconds. The two main issues are: * Keeping the reaction going indefinitely in a controlled way * Doing so without the system power input being greater than the power output
- PBnFlash 7y agoThey work as in produce fusion. They don't work as in produce power. Teenagers build "working" fusion reactors. No one has built a fusion reactor that produces useful power.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- rpmisms 7y agoThis looks like someone mashed a wankel engine and a tokamak together. Interesting, but I'd need to see it in action to believe it.
- fusure 7y agoPointless, it's already been disrupted. Www.fusure.io
- ninkendo 7y ago... This site is a joke, right? You can buy a "fusure core" now, with a 4-week lead time, for $3000. The description gives some vague hand-wavey stuff about "thousands of nanoscale tokomaks [sic]", allowing the "Coulomb barrier to break via quantum tunneling". Is it just an experiment to see who's dumb enough to give them their credit card information?
- fusure 7y agoIt just works. Does not produce net energy. This is our MVP and we want to ship fast into the hands of hardcore fusion hobbyists called fusioneers.
- FiatLuxDave 7y agoHi, former and possible future fusioneer here, with disposable income. Care to post any specifications? If I just want some neutrons I can do that myself.
- fusure 7y agoSure, I will email you.
- zarro 7y agoHighly skeptical of "ground-breaking" innovation emerging from the Navy.
- MS90 7y agoSame here. Those idiots have never come up with anything new or revolutionary, only stupid run of the mill stuff like nuclear submarines and carriers, planet spanning underwater listening systems, spy subs that can sit on the ocean floor, drones that can land on carriers, electromagnetic railguns that fire projectiles at mach 6+, and other worthless crap.
- otterley 7y agoSource article: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/30256/scientist-behind-the-navys-ufo-patents-has-now-filed-one-for-a-compact-fusion-reactor https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/30256/scientist-behind... Also, it’s a patent application, not an issued patent.
- zyxzevn 7y agoLooks a bit similar to focus fusion. See Google talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhKB-VxJWpg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhKB-VxJWpg