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Skunk Works Reveals Compact Fusion Reactor Details (2014)
- ijk 11y agoLockheed Martin has at least managed to gum up the Google search for "Fusion in 10 years".
- petergatsby 11y agoA tall achievement in and of itself.
- marktangotango 11y agoPutting my aluminum foil hat on, and tying into your 'information obscuration' idea, I speculate the Lockheed announcement may have been diversion for some other activity they have previously or currently working on in secret.
- leephillips 11y agoBut probably won't. http://lee-phillips.org/lockheedFusionAgain/ http://lee-phillips.org/lockheedFusionAgain/
- petergatsby 11y agoJury is out. I wouldn't bet against research 75 years in the making. Anyway, Phillips isn't.
- ijk 11y agoI think Lee Phillips is probably a good judge of Lee Philips' current opinions. But maybe that's just me.
- dang 11y agoUrl changed from http://sploid.gizmodo.com/lockheed-martins-new-fusion-reactor-might-change-humani-1646578094 http://sploid.gizmodo.com/lockheed-martins-new-fusion-reacto..., which points to this.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- ajays 11y ago> The team acknowledges that the project is in its earliest stages, and many key challenges remain before a viable prototype can be built. There you go. Fusion be a harsh mistress. I would put my money on Thorium reactors, to be honest.
- waterlesscloud 11y agoI haven't come across any meaningful news on this project since the article linked here. I search every month or so. I do that with several projects that had a moment of hype. I've thought about setting up a small site for it. Tracking promising sci/tech stories with unknown likelihood to ever actually come about. It's the kind of thing I have a natural interest in, as I think it's where the cool things happen. Is there such a site? Dedicated to tracking the status of these kinds of things on an ongoing basis?
- johndevor 11y agoThis sounds like a great idea. I'll check back on you in a month to see if you've actually developed it. ;)
- jadeddrag 11y agoI use the google alerts service.
- kriro 11y agoSo do I it's actually a pretty useful service that I have incorporated into my regular news consumption way too late :) I currently have an Alert for "Magic Leap" for example.
- x5n1 11y agoThat's the thing with these type of hyped things. General Fusion is another company that was going to do something 5-7 years ago and has received much funding from energy companies and has yet to put out anything substantial. http://www.burnabynow.com/news/27-million-for-general-fusion-1.1949072 http://www.burnabynow.com/news/27-million-for-general-fusion...
- bottled_poe 11y agoPerhaps the funding has produced exactly what was asked for.
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- monochromatic 11y agoThis is a lot of talk and hype for something that hasn't been built yet.
- Ixiaus 11y agoSpheromaks, specifically the Dynomak, look much more promising than this.
- Everhusk 11y agoWhile it's probably true that increasing the iteration time on design will get you to a stable tokamak design faster, comparing the time it took to get to ITER is not really a fair comparison. With large scale mechanical engineering projects, scaling the size down will create a world of new problems that ITER never ran into. They will need to solve these all in house, whereas the tokamak design for ITER had the best researchers all over the world working on it. I'm actually more surprised that skunk works makes youtube videos now. I can almost feel the engineers cringing when PR came to them with this idea...
- Animats 11y agoNo new news since October 2014? Lockheed's own site hasn't changed. That's not good. They were going to have a new prototype each year.
- thescrewdriver 11y agoOctober 2014 + 1 year = October 2015
- dm2 11y agoThe first public announcement was in October 2014. They estimated they could build a test reactor within one year (by October 2015) and the prototype within 5 years. http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.html http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.htm...
- XorNot 11y agoWhen it was invented the Tokamak was talked about in similar ways - and a half-dozen more schemes after it. Only the Tokamak is still here, with the finicky details still being worked out and bigger machines necessary to bring it together. The reason ITER is huge is because it's a lot easier to confine a big plasma then it is to confine a small one - all your path lengths mean your field strengths keep fast moving ions inside the vacuum chamber. Building compact reactors invites a whole new world of confinement problems and there's some hard limits on how much magnet you can get from materials science at the moment. I want them to succeed but the odds are against them that they don't run into the usual crunch of balancing problems which most "otherwise stable" confinement schemes do.
- drjesusphd 11y agoAs far as I can tell, this is just a magnetic mirror with neutral beam injection. The problem with mirror devices has and always will be plasma squirting out of the sides. Sure, at any given moment, that may represent a small fraction of the plasma (only particles that have a certain velocity will exit). But collisions eventually change particles' velocity, eventually dooming them to the path outward. It looks like they're relying upon the neutral beams to replenish particles that leave. That takes energy, and is one of the primary heating mechanisms in tokamaks. Whether they can break even with such a scheme is entirely unknown since they're not providing details. More power to them, but I remain skeptical until they actually release details (this hardly counts). If it's secret, it's not science.
- marktangotango 11y agoHe talks about recirculation, maybe they figured out a way to plug the ends? Ie if the plasma is positive charge, then would placing negative chargs at the sides seal it? I don't know if this was ever tried.
- drjesusphd 11y agoPlasma is almost always quasi-neutral. It's very hard to separate positive and negative charges, especially along the field line. Electrons move very quickly to cancel out any excess charge.