Lockheed says makes breakthrough on fusion energy project
Reuters - Oct 15, 2014
By Andrea Shalal
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Lockheed Martin Corp said on Wednesday it had made a technological breakthrough in developing a power source based on nuclear fusion, and the first reactors, small enough to fit on the back of a truck, could be ready for use in a decade.
Tom McGuire, who heads the project, said he and a small team had been working on fusion energy at Lockheed's secretive Skunk Works for about four years, but were now going public to find potential partners in industry and government for their work.
Initial work demonstrated the feasibility of building a 100-megawatt reactor measuring seven feet by 10 feet, which could fit on the back of a large truck, and is about 10 times smaller than current reactors, McGuire told reporters.
In a statement, the company, the Pentagon's largest supplier, said it would build and test a compact fusion reactor in less than a year, and build a prototype in five years.
In recent years, Lockheed has gotten increasingly involved in a variety of alternate energy projects, including several ocean energy projects, as it looks to offset a decline in U.S. and European military spending.
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news.yahoo.com/lockheed-says-makes -breakthrough-fusion-energy-project -123840986--finance.html
Reuters - Oct 15, 2014
By Andrea Shalal
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Lockheed Martin Corp said on Wednesday it had made a technological breakthrough in developing a power source based on nuclear fusion, and the first reactors, small enough to fit on the back of a truck, could be ready for use in a decade.
Tom McGuire, who heads the project, said he and a small team had been working on fusion energy at Lockheed's secretive Skunk Works for about four years, but were now going public to find potential partners in industry and government for their work.
Initial work demonstrated the feasibility of building a 100-megawatt reactor measuring seven feet by 10 feet, which could fit on the back of a large truck, and is about 10 times smaller than current reactors, McGuire told reporters.
In a statement, the company, the Pentagon's largest supplier, said it would build and test a compact fusion reactor in less than a year, and build a prototype in five years.
In recent years, Lockheed has gotten increasingly involved in a variety of alternate energy projects, including several ocean energy projects, as it looks to offset a decline in U.S. and European military spending.
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news.yahoo.com/lockheed-says-makes -breakthrough-fusion-energy-project -123840986--finance.html
Comments
On a side note, a 100 MW fusion reactor based on DT fusion would put out ~4x10^19 14 MeV neutrons per second, if I got the numbers right. I wouldn't want to be that truck driver .... ;-)
err...NIF has be obsolete for a very long time. Just shows to go you, that BSers can be out BSed.
Perhaps Tyler Pryzbylek is leading the program?
Scientists Are Bashing Lockheed Martin's Nuclear Fusion 'Breakthrough'
- Jessica Orwig
Business Insider Oct. 15, 2014
Researchers at Lockheed Martin Corp.'s Skunk Works, announced on Wednesday their ongoing work on a new technology that could bring about functional nuclear reactors powered by fusion in the next 10 years.
But most scientists and science communicators we talked to are skeptical of the claim.
"The nuclear engineering clearly fails to be cost effective," Tom Jarboe told Business Insider in an email. Jarboe is a professor of aeronautics and astronautics, an adjunct professor in physics, and a researcher with the University of Washington's nuclear fusion experiment.
The premise behind Lockheed's 10-year plan is the smaller size of their device. The scientists are designing an improved version of a compact fusion reactor. The CFR generates power from nuclear fusion by extracting energy through the extremely hot plasma contained inside it.
The plasma consists of hydrogen atoms that, when heated to billions of degrees, fuse together. When this happens they release energy, which the CFR then extracts and can eventually transfer into electricity.
Traditional containment vessels for these plasmas are called tokamaks, and they look like hollowed-out doughnuts and are the size of an average apartment. Lockheed says its new CFR can generate 10 times more power than a tokamak in a space that could fit on the back of a large truck, according to Aviation Week. But Jarboe disagrees.
"This design has two doughnuts and a shell so it will be more than four times as bad as a tokamak," Jarboe said, adding that, "Our concept [at the University of Washington] has no coils surrounded by plasma and solves the problem."
Although Lockheed Martin issued a press release saying it had several pending patents for its approach, the company has yet to publish any scientific papers on this latest work.
"It's really great that Lockheed has taken an interest in this important challenge of providing carbon-free energy to the world," Michael Zarnstorff, deputy director for research at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, told Business Insider in an email. "We haven't seen any results from the Lockheed experiments but the design is an interesting concept and it looks like they are at a very early stage of exploring this configuration."
While Zarnstorff remains optimistic, others are not ready to believe the hype.
Swadesh M. Mahajan, a thermonuclear plasma physicist at the University of Texas, told Mother Jones reporter James West that there were many reasons to be skeptical of the announcement. Specifically, "We know of no materials that would be able to handle anywhere near that amount of heat," for a device as small as Lockheed is proposing.
As of now, Lockheed's results are purely theoretical, so it's hard to know whether they will work in reality, Rosi Reed, an assistant professor of physics at Wayne State University and researcher at the Large Hadron Collider, told Mother Jones.
When asked if the concept of Lockheed's new design was in any way unique or novel, Zarnstorff told Business Insider that it was too early to tell.
While headlines touted Lockheed's results as a "breakthrough" that could "change the world forever," the corporation used no such language in its press release. However, it appears that we will have to wait at least a little while longer before any reactor Lockheed envisions enters the market.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/191754-cold-fusion-reactor-verified-by-third-party-researchers-seems-to-have-1-million-times-the-energy-density-of-gasoline
this "announcement" helps Lockheed justify the IRD rate.
The 40 year evolution was
-aximsymetric mirrors
-min B mirrors (baseball)
-tokamak and stellerators (closed solenoidal field)
-tandem mirrors flanking a solenidal field
-tandem mirrors with strong solenoidal magnetic field plugs (throttle)
-mirrors with electrical potential end isolation
-forms of ion and electron resonance heating to create a stronger end plug plama isolation including additional neutral beams heating the end plugs
-transient compact self-sustaining mirror plasmas created by coaxial plasma acceleration.
Only the tokamak is still being supported, and the size and complexity to approach scientific energy breakeven in colossal, even by NIF standards.
Hope Lockheed has a breakthrough instead of finding a well trodden path.
Science and technology has advanced 40 years since then. Perhaps, new more efficient heating sources are used, perhaps ferromagnetic materials are used to better shape the mirror regions. Perhaps new resonance systems isolate the plug regions. Perhaps higher speed control systems can tailor fields to damp instabilities real-time.
But the key has been, as plasma density and energy increase in the magnetic well, too much leaks out the ends.