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Has Fusion Energy Finally Arrived?
Lockheed Martin has claimed that their famed Skunk Works division made a major breakthrough in developing a nuclear fusion reactor. Their plan is to create several 100-megawatt reactors small enough to fit on the backs of trucks.
As a former submarine reactor operator, I wondered if I would ever see economical nuclear fusion in my lifetime. Fusion has long been a holy grail to nuclear engineers, with research institutions pouring billions into models that produced little energy at exorbitant cost. Many charlatans and cranks have latched onto fusion as a sort of perpetual motion machine, sullying the field for real scientists.
The fact that a respectable organization like Lockheed has claimed a breakthrough — not some unknown professor or LaRouchian zealot — has caused the energy world to take notice.
Put simply, nuclear fusion is the photo negative of current nuclear fission technology. In fission, a relatively large atom (such as Uranium with an atomic mass of 236) is split into two smaller atoms, releasing a large amount of energy. Nuclear fusion forces two tiny atoms (Hydrogen, atomic mass 1) into one larger atom (Helium, atomic mass 4), releasing an enormous amount of energy. (Aerospace Weekly delivers the technical details of the project here.)
We all know the drawbacks of fission reactors: massive facilities, storing radioactive waste, and the fears of a meltdown. But with a fusion reactor, there is minimal waste and zero potential of a meltdown. If successful, fusion will revolutionize power development, creating cheap, sustainable energy at low cost and with minimal environmental impact.
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…
If it proves feasible, Lockheed’s work would mark a key breakthrough in a field that scientists have long eyed as promising, but which has not yet yielded viable power systems. The effort seeks to harness the energy released during nuclear fusion, when atoms combine into more stable forms.
”We can make a big difference on the energy front,” McGuire said, noting Lockheed’s 60 years of research on nuclear fusion as a potential energy source that is safer and more efficient than current reactors based on nuclear fission.
I’ve been very skeptical when past nuclear fusion claims were made (cold fusion, anyone?), but Lockheed’s proposal looks very promising to this retired reactor op. If it works, the technology will upend not only the energy sector, but also the politically charged debates surrounding foreign policy, the environment and more.
Published in General
Figures.
JUST spent $100 to get 8 energy-efficient light bulbs, and come home to find the need for energy efficiency being made obsolete.
Great! Something else the president will take credit for.
Yep. Creating the right magnetic field to constrain the movement of the plasma is a major challenge. The deuterium and tritium are superheated to a plasma state, which then contains at least three species: D+, T+, and e– (deuterium ions, tritium ions, and free electrons, respectively). All these particles tend to move in a corkscrew along magnetic field lines, at different speeds, radii, and directions according to their masses and charges.
With this in mind, ideally you’d have a magnetic field that wraps around on itself and has no “loose ends” so the particles follow closed paths and remain in containment indefinitely. But such a field is practically impossible to generate, so you always have particles escaping out the ends.
Another problem is that a fluid of charged particles moving through magnetic fields also tends to generate its own electric fields. When gravitational, electric, and magnetic fields are all present, the charged particles cease to follow the magnetic field lines and instead start to deflect to one side or the other according to a set of “drift” equations, thus escaping the containment field.
I’m sure the leftist morons will find something wrong with fusion, too. Extra schadenfreude if an evil company like Lockheed makes the breakthrough.
Lockheed is the company that is >60 billion over budget on the joint strike fighter.
This is totally unrelated to this awesome story, but I barely passed Algebra but received straight A’s in chemistry. It was almost like I could do math if I didn’t know I was doing math.
Lockheed’s seminal patent applications published last week. That probably triggered much of the scrutiny and Lockheed’s willingness to open up a bit more.
Despite this, for some utterly unknown reason Iran continues its uranium enrichment.
Well, either something has changed in the world of Nuclear Fusion, or something has changed at Lockheed.
If one of the reasons to believe the release is Lockheed’s reputation, then what threats to Lockheed would seem less acceptable to the board than a half-cocked fusion announcement?
They could well be trying to grow another arm where they fear they will lose one, the ridiculous F-35 boondoggle. Somebody should take the interesting technology from that fat airplane and make an airplane out of it.
Here are the key patent applications:
http://pdfaiw.uspto.gov/.aiw?Docid=20140301517
http://pdfaiw.uspto.gov/.aiw?Docid=20140301518
http://pdfaiw.uspto.gov/.aiw?Docid=20140301519
There are many others not yet published. The volume of filing means either that this is real or it’s an amazing foulup.
<cynic>Drive the stock price up and hope that by the time the 5-10 year “deadline” rolls around no one remembers the announcement.</cynic>
They will spin it off in an IPO long before then.
We could use a man like Thomas Edison again.
In my opinion, we are working at the boundary of practical technical development. Someone is going to figure this out, eventually. It’s the ultimate disruptive breakthrough.
I know! Fusion is bad because it kills hydrogen, and excess helium causes climate change and Mickey Mouse Voice (“MMV”)!
As several others have noted, the idea that a defense contractor wouldn’t promote vaporware is absurd.
IMO, they’re trolling for funding.
Bingo. I also read this yesterday, and didn’t post it because it lacks two words: “working prototype”.
I’ll be interested when I see that.
What they have instead is “should” and “could”.
Heck, I “could” have a working prototype of a fusion reactor in ten years. Perhaps I should type up a press release…
So, here is my question if this works and makes it to market:
How many nanoseconds after the first commercial release of a fusion power plant will it take for a Saudi-funded film / book / movement to appear decrying the health dangers of waste helium from fusion plants?
Bonus question:
Will the United States shut down its helium reserve if this proves practical?
Seawriter
I was thinking it might take 100 years to get this fusion thing working, so 10 would be great – this is potentially the biggest news this century – long after Mr Obama, Mr Putin, Ebola and IS have gone into the dusty books of history.
To the cynics I’d say look at fracking – it came online in spite of Mr Obama, and is the other energy revolution that is already making what happens in the emerging Caliphate less important (the Caliphate will probably be around for another Century, at least – let them squabble among themselves).
And, as an added bonus, it makes the French look silly, with their White Elephant ITER :-)
None of those describe a working prototype either. How can you patent something that you haven’t yet invented?
Which means the enviro-wackos will find a reason to oppose.
To answer my question above, “how can you patent something you haven’t invented?”:
“A perpetual-motion machine may defy the laws of physics, but an Indiana inventor recently succeeded in having one patented.
“On November 1 Boris Volfson of Huntington, Indiana, received U.S. Patent 6,960,975 for his design of an antigravity space vehicle.”
Or “Patents for Unworkable Devices“.
It’s a long page…
Patent law’s as screwed up as any other part of modern law…
Invention is the combination of conceiving the invention and either actually reducing it to practice by making a working device or constructively reducing it to practice by filing an application that enables those skilled in the relevant art/field to make a working device.
If the applications disclose enough info so that those practicing in the field (e.g., anonymous’s friends at CERN…) could build a working device, they can satisfy that constructive reduction to practice.
An engineer I used to work with told me a time he got a call from senior management telling him about a proposed device whose inventor was calling it a “reactionless drive”. The inventor claimed was a revolutionary space technology, able to propel itself across the galaxy without expending any fuel, eventually reaching relativistic speeds if you run it long enough. He brought his design to this major aerospace company looking for several million dollars of funding to develop it.
My friend told management it was impossible because of Newton’s Third Law, the conservation of momentum: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The corollary is this: if you’re not exerting a reaction force on some other object, then you can be sure no force is being exerted on you.
But the inventor and his “expert” (PhD in psychology) insisted his device could pull itself along by its own bootstraps, and that they had a working proof-of-concept model and a US patent. My friend called the patent office to advise them to revoke the patent on the grounds that the device’s intended function was physically impossible. They said that was not sufficient reason to revoke a patent.
In spite of its impossibility, management asked my friend to try to write a computer simulation of the device to prove whether it would work in space or not. He told them the results would be meaningless, because one of the assumptions inherent to simulation software is Newton’s Third Law, so try to disprove it by simulation is tautological.
The device had no wheels or propulsion system; instead it used a set of cams and spinning asymmetrical weights to cause itself to wobble. The inventor claimed the wobble was just slightly asymmetrical, wobbling harder to one side than the other. He knew this was so, because on ground tests it walked across the floor just like an unbalanced washing machine. The problem was the inventor didn’t realize it wouldn’t work without the floor underneath it.
But he still got a patent.
If I had to guess I would guess this is based off of Dr. Robert Bussard’s Polywell or “wiffleball” reactor concept. In my opinion while not widely publicized this type of reactor seems much more promising then something like ITER. If LM’s reactor is something different then we may have two promising lines of fusing development in the works.
I am interested in the cynicism on display here. Skepticism seems appropriate, but why the cynicism?
I am not sure the scare tactics can stop this. If it were real it would be too big. One of the huge benefits to this is it really is meltdown proof and in the work case scenario (a leak of some tritium or tritiated water) could be cleased up with standard industrial was cleanup practices and a radiation suit.
John,
You are as always correct about the reactor vessel. I think in the long run though these neutron activated materials are much less nasty to deal with then spent fuel rods and the like.
Because the environmental movement doesn’t really want a clean, safe, cheap, abundant source of electricity. That would allow us to go on living our current consumptive lifestyle, and ignore their screams at the same time. Solar and wind are their ideal energy sources because they’re so unreliable. Otherwise, the one percent can go on making money from their factories 24/7, and the proles can watch their Faux News and reality television until late into the night.
I was was scanning thru the posts to see if anyone brought up the incidental radioactive materials that will be created by neutron collisions with the various parts of the reactor. anonymous did raise this issue and it could be the Achilles Heel of this technology. Remember Yucca Mountian? Despite the investment of millions (or more likely, billions) for this state-of-the-art facility for storing radioactive waste, it sits empty thanks the the efforts of Harry Reid, President Obama, et al.
A friend just posted this video on the project: