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Lockheed Martin claims “technological breakthrough” in compact fusion

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I wasn't expecting a afternoon promo video from Lockheed that starts with a dubstep intro either but that's what their Skunkworks project just dropped on us. Lockheed expects to be able to build a prototype compact reactor in five years. If everything goes well, the design could "be developed and deployed in as little as ten years." If they pull this off then they say we could have truly clean energy, one that we can export without fears of it being turned into a military weapon, and that it could be as small as a jet engine (and literally be put on a jet to power it), as well as scale up to much larger sizes, plug into the existing grid and "The 100-MW unit would provide sufficient power for up to 80,000 homes in a power-hungry U.S. city."

MOAR here: http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals-compact-fusion-reactor-details

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Comments

  7. It's great to see a young man like this, Let's hope nobody with money or power steals, extorts or stifles his progress, like what was done to Tesla. We would already be enjoying free power if he wasn't financially forced down.

  18. I've let N.A.S.A. in and joy of joys they want my arse to power the next rocket to mars. I am seriously thinking about it. I hear the money there paying is great

  23. Problem is all of the neutrons created after the reaction. They are heavy and basically blow the shielding away after a while. Talked with a professor I have that has worked at ITER.

  53. Stealing pieces of a design is entirely different than "stealing something". The J-20's engines can't even be figured out yet and then keep swapping in old Soviet Fighter engines (though they did announce recently a massive investment in R&D in that area in an attempt to catch the rest for the world).

  54. +Paul Spoerry American officials have said that they think the Chinese have stolen their top secret stealth technology. I agree that it COULD just be a diamond encrusted turd but the Chinese have been caught trying to pay off workers to see top secret designs in the past. The Chinese jet doesn't just look a BIT like the F-35, it looks the double of it and it was seen VERY soon after the F-35 so it's highly likely they got the design.

  55. One issue that I can see, at least with placing this into an airplane, is that almost all fusion reactions give off neutrons. Because of this, there will have to be shielding around the reactor. The only reactions that don't output neutrons are ones that involve He-3 (which is absurdly rare on Earth) or heavier elements, such as Li-6. The problem with the heavier reactions is that they take even higher temperatures and pressures to make them occur. The easier reactions are once that run off of deuterium and tritium, but since those fuels are rare (and tritium is radioactive), the energy still won't be cheap until we can get to the point of running off of good old H-1. But again, shielding will be needed due to neutrons and gamma rays. So, color me skeptical, especially about putting these reactors on planes.

  58. +Mathias Willems Pretty funny that Nations are spending billions, if not trillions on the ITER project and Lockheed manages to do it on it's own(years faster than ITER).There was also news about the E-CAT supposing to work, very sceptical machine but if that would be true someone just invented a fusion reactor in his garage. LOL.

  61. +Mathias Willems E-CAT was just a scam it wasn't anything. And the ITER project is very different thing. They are working on a fusion plants to connect to the public electric grid aka not a military application for one thing, and its aimed at high power output.

    Lockheed are looking at making them smaller for military purpose with less output, i don't know what a truck sized reactor would be useful for in the commercial world. The output is not going to power homes, it would be enough to power planes and ships, but i doubt commercial companies would buy fusion reactors for planes – compared to the price of fuel it is a no brainer to stick with fuel. It would also cost a lot of re-engineer the planes to use the new energy source. Equally i imagine it weights more than the fuel too. So until companies need to switch to fusion they obviously won't because it costs heck of a lot of money.

  66. +Endless Infinity
    ITER is an important fusion experiment, but it's nowhere near a commercial fusion reactor. It's gain will be half of what is needed for a working reactor, and its pulse length is much too short. Indeed, it would be great if someone were able to build a compact reactor, but this group isn't giving enough details to evaluate if what they say is feasible. For the time being I'll remain on the sceptics side.

  67. +Mee Mee, you should lookup the latest news on the Ecat, it might still be a scam but independent researchers have found crazy things.

    For lockheed, they state it will be used for commercial use too, scale this up x10 and you 1gigawatt, that a pretty darn big nuclear fission plant you would need for that. YOu don't know anything about the price right now, so statements that it will not be used for in planes or such are not well placed I find. As with everything it will cost a lot in the begin but as mass production kicks in it can get cheaper. Btw materials the size of a truck will not cost billions. I think if the tech succeeds they will try to make as much money with it, so making this available for the masses is a logical next step. Curious how the oil companies would respond to this.
    Regarding the planes, do you know how much it costs to tank a plane for a year… thats a very big bunch of $$$ 25 kilos of deutermium isn't gonna cost even one hundreth of that.

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