Skunk Works Reveals Compact Fusion Reactor Details

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

by geophile • 12 years ago

560 343 12 years ago

aviationweek.com

jacknews2• 12 years ago

Hmm, are they confusing fission and fusion?

tootie• 12 years ago

Horse's mouth: http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.htm...

Lockheed Martin is, indeed, saying they have a workable fusion reactor. Author of this article is the one that's confused.

jacknews2• 12 years ago

Hmmm, are they confusing fission and fusion?

Wintamute• 12 years ago

I think they must write "fusion" instead of "fission" on the second to last paragraph ...

ihnorton2• 12 years ago

Content-free article, but presumably it is this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_beta_fusion_reactor

This is not the first time they have gone public with this - Charles Chase gave a talk at Google X last year, recorded and publicly-available:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAsRFVbcyUY

phkahler• 12 years ago

I read the wikipedia link. How do they get the energy out? What are the byproducts? etc...

nine_k2• 12 years ago

AFAICT, ²H + ²H produce ³H (which is the burned), H, ³He, and ⁴He, plus some neutrons and gamma rays. The latter must bring the energy out of the chamber, by heating some blanketing. Then it must be the same as with fission reactors.

valarauca1• 12 years ago

Electron Disassociation.

Basically you catch electrons flying out of the plasma arc (where fusion is taking place), and ground them back into the plasma (which is positively charged).

Umm its largely theory at this point.

chton2• 12 years ago

It sounds very similar to the way Helion Energy does it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helion_Energy). Do you know what the major differences are?

dkirtley2• 12 years ago

Helion here. There are pretty big differences. They did get the high Beta and compact/modular parts right. The primary differences are that Helion operates entirely pulsed with simple non-superconducting magnets. That allows us to go to higher temperatures, cleaner fuels, directly recovery energy, and if everything works as planned should eliminate the wall concerns and need for particle beams.

I do think what they are doing is interesting. If its like the Gas Dynamic Trap or Tandem Mirror it has promise, atleast from the fundamental physics point of view. Researchers in Novosibirsk had encouraging results in the last 5 years. They still have a long road ahead to get to fusion-relevant temperatures, but we are staying tuned to this one.

ph0rque• 12 years ago

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 said.

So that would power 50k to 100k typical houses in the US... not bad!

hga2• 12 years ago

Compact is good, because until you can fuse helium-3, the reactor is producing neutrons, which will transmute the reactor and its shielding into other, often radioactive elements. So the entire thing will have to be regularly replaced and disposed of (which we can do safely, but too many people believe otherwise).

Someone2• 12 years ago

I do not see how compact matters much here. As far as I understand, the basic reaction used is the same, so that compact design will produce the same number of neutrons per Watt produced as a large one.

Wouldn't the effect of its smaller mass be that the container will have to be replaced more often, more or less in the ratio of the masses of the machines?

etiam2• 12 years ago

U.S. submarines and aircraft carriers run on nuclear power, but they have large fusion reactors on board that have to be replaced on a regular cycle.

sigh To the extent this is true I suspect those "large fusion reactors" are tuned not so much for generating electricity and a great deal for annihilating whatever the carrying missile is pointed at.

But never mind fuzzy thinking at Reuters right now. This is amazing news if holds up. Fingers crossed.

golemotron• 12 years ago

I cringed when I saw that line too.

aqme28• 12 years ago

Looks like they issued the correction

U.S. submarines and aircraft carriers run on nuclear power, but they have large fission reactors on board that have to be replaced on a regular cycle.

Zigurd• 12 years ago

If by "large" they mean "very small" then, yeah.

mpyne• 12 years ago

Even the need for regular replacement went away long ago. Our current (old) designs get refueled only once, and new ships don't get refueled at all (the core lasts as long as the hull does). They do all need regular maintenance, but that's true for all U.S. warships.

dyeje• 12 years ago

I believe you're misunderstanding, those ships run on power generated by a nuclear reactor. A reactor is like when you think of a regular nuclear power plant, it's not part of a missile.

privong4• 12 years ago

I think they understand; they were joking that the only things on the ship which involve fusion are the nuclear warheads.

wlesieutre• 12 years ago

You're right, but it was a joke pointing out an error in the article. They originally said the carriers run on fusion reactors, but it's been fixed.

delinka• 12 years ago

Unless I'm missing something, I think you're making a similar mistake.

Submarines and carriers run on a fission reactor. And it powers everything - drives turbines for locomotion, electricity...

sipior• 12 years ago

At the risk of speaking for the parent, I believe their point was that the only fusion "reactors" on a nuclear submarine are the warheads it carries.

mikeash• 12 years ago

He's making a joke about how fusion has been used successfully for decades, but only for bombs. Thus, aircraft carriers and submarines do have fusion devices on board, but they're only used for destructive purposes.

etiam2• 12 years ago

Maybe you're just less bothered than I about the writer conflating fission and fusion when the difference between them makes for a good deal of the newsworthiness of the article.

I'm well aware of the fission reactors in large military ships, but if there is any application of nuclear fusion on them then pretty much the only option today is thermonuclear warheads. It would be really nice if that's about to change.

raverbashing• 12 years ago

From what I've heard, the reactor actually outlives the ship, no?

wolf550e• 12 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_naval_reactors#m...

JustSomeNobody2• 12 years ago

Must be early. A few people didn't get your joke/sarcasm.

lnanek2• 12 years ago

The article is completely wrong about US Navy ships having fusion reactors. They have fission reactors, not fusion. I wonder if they are even reporting the breakthrough right since they clearly don't know the difference. For all we know the breakthrough may be smaller fission reactors too, which isn't a big deal at all.

geekam• 12 years ago

They issued a correction.

U.S. submarines and aircraft carriers run on nuclear power, but they have large fission reactors on board that have to be replaced on a regular cycle.

flexie2• 12 years ago

Here is a link with more info on the technology behind: http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals-compa...

orkoden3• 12 years ago

U.S. submarines and aircraft carriers run on nuclear power, but they have large fusion reactors on board that have to be replaced on a regular cycle.

I don't think so.

everyone• 12 years ago

I'm guessing thats a typo

bhhaskin• 12 years ago

That is a pretty big typo if it is.

javert• 12 years ago

This bothers me immensely. Clearly, neither the author nor the editor for a "Scientific American" article (for pete's sake, science is in the name!) know the difference between nuclear fission and nuclear fusion.

This article is the cognitive equivalent of parrots squawking, because they don't even understand why the news actually is news.

People calling this a "typo" are giving too much credit. It could be a mistake, but the whole point of having an editor is to catch typos and mistakes! And it's a simple, short article!

waterlesscloud2• 12 years ago

Makes YC's choice to invest in a fusion startup all the more interesting.

http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/08/14/vc-funding-y-...

flexie2• 12 years ago

Here is more on the tech, including a drawing: http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals-compa...

tokenadult• 12 years ago

This article provides a lot more engineering information and other background and is well worth a thorough read. Thanks to flexie for finding and sharing the link.

sungeuns• 12 years ago

I was curious about detail when I saw the news, Thanks for sharing!

danmaz74• 12 years ago

Thanks, much, much better than the original article.

Estragon• 12 years ago

Seems premature to call this a breakthrough when they haven't even built a prototype yet.

thrownaway24242• 12 years ago

This is HN. If the hyperloop was a technological breakthrough, so is this press release.

dkirtley2• 12 years ago

This looks very similar to the old Russian Gas Dynamic Trap: https://e-reports-ext.llnl.gov/pdf/366958.pdf

RF and neutral beam heated steady reactor with very high mirror ratio and superconductors.

joezydeco• 12 years ago

What is the operating temperature of these superconducting magnets?

I can't see how heat energy is supposed to be flowing out of that plasma envelope yet the magnets are supposed to stay at near-zero temps?

silviorelli• 12 years ago

What a coincidence.. Few days ago has been released the report on the alleged LENR/cold fusion E-Cat reactor... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8436419

KhalilK2• 12 years ago

Meanwhile, work on an actual fusion reactor continues; http://www.iter.org/newsline/-/2020

dweinus• 12 years ago

From the article:

"Until now, the majority of fusion reactor systems have used a plasma control device called a tokamak, invented in the 1950s by physicists in the Soviet Union. The tokamak uses a magnetic field to hold the plasma in the shape of a torus, or ring, and maintains the reaction by inducing a current inside the plasma itself with a second set of electromagnets. The challenge with this approach is that the resulting energy generated is almost the same as the amount required to maintain the self-sustaining fusion reaction."

KhalilK2• 12 years ago

From the article ?

ck23• 12 years ago

Very cheap energy means cheap war and lots of it. This could be bad.

sp3322• 12 years ago

Cheaper and more plentiful resources means less reason to go to war.

ck23• 12 years ago

This isn't Star Trek, this is the United States.

We always find a reason to go to war. Or it finds us and we return the favor.

paulmd• 12 years ago

Unlimited free energy means we eventually global-warm our planet through waste heat. Works out at about 10% the potency of greenhouse gasses per MW.

orkoden3• 12 years ago

If they can manage to build what they envision we will have tanks with with laser weapons.

seren3• 12 years ago

On a similar vein, I wonder what are the strategical consequences of such an advance. Assuming it works as described in the article, do you allow the technology to be exported ?

Because a whole fleet of fusion air carriers, battleships, submarines and bombers versus a conventional army has plenty of implications in term of autonomy, reach, etc.

But on the other hand, there is a such demand for energy everywhere that it would really hard to morally ban all the civilians applications.

pessimizer• 12 years ago

Autonomous drones with facial recognition and laser weapons, rather.

Tloewald2• 12 years ago

Our main reason for war right now is scarce energy.

Cheap clean electricity means no-one needs to care about the Middle East for starters — most of the fighting there is superpower proxy fighting — e.g. Assad would be gone if not backed by Russia and China, so no Islamic State. No Oil, no Iraq war x2. No oil, no Hugo Chavez for that matter.

seren3• 12 years ago

I would only be cautiously optimistic : even if our energy problems are solved, the construction of reactors, for example the superconductors, might require some rare materials. The grab for energy could become a grab for minerals. It will probably involved other regions of the world though and change the whole dynamic.

ZenoArrow• 12 years ago

Hugo Chavez is dead, but I agree with the rest of what you say.

robin_reala• 12 years ago

“the first reactors […] could be ready for use in a decade.”

I’m sure I’ve heard that somewhere before…

nine_k2• 12 years ago

I'm used to hearing that nuclear fusion is going to become mainstream "in 30 years"; I've heard it for ~25 years. If it's 10 years now, some progress has been made.

tormeh• 12 years ago

With all the alternative small fusion reactors I'm taking a strict "show me the energy" approach...

drjesusphd7• 12 years ago

As well you should.

The mainstream magnetic confinement community has been very cautious about overhyping lately. Unfortunately, the over zealousness of groups like this and NIF saps credibility from them anyway.

akavel• 12 years ago

I have the link to xkcd 678 "Researcher Translation" bookmarked for those occasions. Quoting the appropriate row here:

    If a researcher says a cool new technology should be
    available to consumers in... -> what they mean is...
    [...]
    ten years -> "we haven't finished inventing it yet,
                  but when we do, it'll be awesome."

ufmace4• 12 years ago

That would be http://xkcd.com/678/

spellingnazi• 12 years ago

For christ sake fix the title.

Jetrel• 12 years ago

Breakthrough Engery. Yesss.

cmsmith• 12 years ago

I'm not sure why this article is focusing on things like whether the reactor can fit on a truck, where you get deuterium, and how many coal power plants it can replace - instead of the actual question which is how they managed to produce a stable exothermal fusion reaction.

bkcooper• 12 years ago

As far as I can tell from reading various articles (including the Aviation Week article linked elsewhere in the comments), they haven't. The expectation is that they will have a prototype in five years. For that reason, I wouldn't get too excited about this.

ck23• 12 years ago

nevermind, this is hype - buried in the article

The team acknowledges that the project is in its earliest stages, and many key challenges remain before a viable prototype can be built

This falls under the xkcd 10 year plan:

"we haven't finished inventing it yet, but when we do, it'll be awesome"

http://xkcd.com/678/

hliyan• 12 years ago

As someone who still remembers the excitement and the disappointment due to Pons and Fleischmann (I was a teenager at the time), I'm going to wait for independent verification. But I can't deny I'm a bit excited.

27182818284• 12 years ago

could be ready for use in a decade.

That's the standard issue joke. "Nuclear fusion has been just ten years away for the last fifty years"

It is so common as a joke I'm surprised the article didn't mention it.

dragonwriter• 12 years ago

The usual form I've seen for several decades now is 15 years, not 10, but, yeah...

DennisP7• 12 years ago

No, the standard joke is "thirty years away." Or at least it was. Strangely enough the number keeps decreasing with the passage of time.

z92• 12 years ago

Plotting a "Year vs Years away" graph would then give us a good estimation on when we can expect to meet that expectation.

zimbu668• 12 years ago

Google Results: fusion "x years away"

10 - 765,000 results

15 - 9,730 results

20 - 793,000 results

25 - 8,750,000 results

30 - 709,000 results

35 - 4,700,000 results

40 - 472,000 results

45 - 10 results

50 - 493,000 results

Definitely not 45 years away.

mjevans• 12 years ago

Remembering that there's no possible way we could know how many years away a thing is; the numbers are clearly a guesstimate.

They're more of a rounded (hence the clustering at or away from given numbers) measure of the remaining 'effort' versus 'difficulty'. Very likely there is some absolute time required (experiments take time to run), but throwing more people (and more importantly, more resources to run experiments and gather data) at the problem /would/ get to an end result faster (though how much faster is open to debate; it's sort of like asking how much effort does it take to win a top 30th percentile prize from a lottery).

regularfry7• 12 years ago

What's different this time (yeah, I know, I know) is that, if what they and EMC2 are separately claiming is true, it's gone from being a fundamental physics problem to relatively tractable engineering, with well-understood risks and timelines.

Compare this with ITER, where they still don't know what material some fairly critical components can even be theoretically made of. It's just night and day.

trhway3• 12 years ago

Compare this with ITER, where they still don't know what material some fairly critical components can even be theoretically made of. It's just night and day.

the Skunk Works and EMC2 haven't even reached the stage where they would face the same issue of material - all of them would ultimately have to contain the same type of fast neutrons and there is no good known material to do it.

drjesusphd7• 12 years ago

There are still some serious basic physics issues to be worked out.

They dismiss the concerns of the scientific community. Why shouldn't they? They're getting rich off of the ignorance of generals and venture capitalists.

FiatLuxDave4• 12 years ago

My favorite form of the old joke is: "Nuclear Fusion is the energy of the future, and always will be."

Igglyboo2• 12 years ago

The fusion guys should have a meetup with the desktop linux guys.

drjesusphd7• 12 years ago

It's not mentioned because it's tired, played out, and has no intellectual merit.

lovemenot• 12 years ago

Aren't you being rather too hard on fusion there? I heard it could be just a decade or two away.

zwieback• 12 years ago

Mr. Fusion!

jscheel2• 12 years ago

So, they've come up with a way to make a fusor that produces more energy than it consumes? Also, I'd be interested in knowing what kind of scram mechanism they develop. If the superconductors were to fail, the expansion of the plasma would be catastrophic, right?

astazangasta• 12 years ago

It certainly wouldn't produce a runaway fusion reaction, if that's what you mean. A hot plasma would dissipate pretty quickly once confinement fails, so the only energy would be that in the plasma itself. Might be bad for whoever is in the room, but probably not the county.

jscheel2• 12 years ago

Right, I meant catastrophic for the reactor. Definitely not worried about blowing up the country. Probably shouldn't have typed that phrase. NSA is probably all over me now.

cowkingdeluxe• 12 years ago

"McGuire said the company had several patents pending for the work and was looking for partners in academia, industry and among government laboratories to advance the work."

I'm guessing this means that they will try and maximize profit rather than maximize cheap and clean energy for the entire world. That is a bit disappointing if true.

festivusr• 12 years ago

They're a for-profit company.

hangonhn• 12 years ago

Profit and good of the world need not be opposites. In fact they tend to go together if the company is going for the long run.

monochromatic• 12 years ago

If the only motivation is cheap and clean energy for the entire world, expensive research never gets funded.

zo1• 12 years ago

"I'm guessing this means that they will try and maximize profit rather than maximize cheap and clean energy for the entire world. That is a bit disappointing if true."

I don't understand what you expect? You want them to give it away for free? After paying very intelligent, expensive engineers decades worth of salaries to create it? You want them to create a fund where people can donate their hard-earned money for this noble goal? I'm sure you could give them a call with that idea, or you could create your own fund, even.

Or you could badger your "government" to fund such a project. Seeing as government is a very good analogy for a bunch of people giving their collective earnings for society-level goals. Let me know how that goes.

wcoenen2• 12 years ago

100-megawatt reactor measuring seven feet by 10 feet, which could fit on the back of a large truck

A typical thermal power station has an efficiency below 50% for electricity generation, so the plant dissipates at least as much heat as it generates electrical power.

I wonder how you could get rid of 100MW of waste heat from a volume small enough to fit on a truck. That's a heat flux of more than a megawatt per square meter of surface area.

bulltale• 12 years ago

In addition, in the step before where the heat is transferred away from the reactor walls to the turbines, a heat flux is needed of 100MJ/s. Assuming a contact surface of 100m2, that is 1MJ/s per m2. That sounds like a huge flux and I am not sure if there is any medium that could do this.

Or are my assumptions way off?

wcoenen2• 12 years ago

I think I was editing my comment to add an estimate of the heat flux while you wrote this, and we arrived at the same number.

javajosh2• 12 years ago

That's an excellent point! Perhaps they intend the truck to be sitting at the bottom of a fast moving river.

But what gets me is that they are burying the lead. No fusion reactor of any size has reached sustainability...so why is the story here talking about size at all? Small size would be a very nice added bonus; fusion reactors that don't consume more energy than they produce are earth-changing.

TeMPOraL3• 12 years ago

I agree that the announcement is a bit burying the lead here, though maybe the size is actually important to making it work. From Aviation Week[0]:

"But on the physics side, it still has to work, and one of the reasons we think our physics will work is that we’ve been able to make an inherently stable configuration.” One of the main reasons for this stability is the positioning of the superconductor coils and shape of the magnetic field lines. “In our case, it is always in balance. So if you have less pressure, the plasma will be smaller and will always sit in this magnetic well,” he notes."

As far as I understand this (IANAP), they're saying that smaller size = less pressure, and that helps their design to work (in theory).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8458524

aruggirello2• 12 years ago

Perhaps they intend the truck to be sitting at the bottom of a fast moving river.

That's exactly what I was thinking. They'd better call the Truck a submarine, though.

DubiousPusher3• 12 years ago

What the commenter is pointing out is that it may not matter how you cool the reactor. It could be in interstellar space and it might not matter because the material the reactor itself is made of may not be able to transmit the heat away from the reactor. And no such material may exist.

adrianN• 12 years ago

Small size means you can build it easily. It's not a huge undertaking like ITER.

alkonaut• 12 years ago

Normal cooling (cooling towers or similar) requires a huge structure to dissipate 100MW. The cooling infrastructure can't fit in a truck. What you can to is transport the plant to somewhere where the environment can help with the cooling, such as where there is a good supply of cold water.

One can imagine these to be simple drop in replacements for existing coal plants with existing cooling infrastructure,which would be a huge environmental win in places where those are still built.

danbruc3• 12 years ago

The Bugatti Veyron 16.4 has 1200 hp and therefore probably produces around 2.5 MW waste heat at full power. A factor of 40 is still quite a difference but it does not sound like an unsolvable problem.

ufmace4• 12 years ago

That's peak power, though. Basically no street car is designed to be able to produce peak power for more than a minute or two at a time, and probably very few can do it for more than a few seconds. I'm pretty sure that car doesn't have the cooling capacity to cool itself at full power like this plant would have to.

tsotha• 12 years ago

I don't think they're actually proposing to put it on a truck. I think this is a "football fields" type size comparison.

DennisP7• 12 years ago

Sounds like it could make a heck of a launch rocket.

chisophugis2• 12 years ago

FWIW, a single Boeing 747 engine does about 100MW. Such an engine can be considered to "fit on a truck" for some definition of truck.

Also consider that much of the size is due to the fan on the front (which is not part of the actual engine power plant), which makes the engine's area in the plane transverse to the axis of rotation seem larger.

However, jet engines have the advantage of burning their fuel directly in the air that is flowing through the engine, which results in an extremely rapid transfer of heat to the air compared to other (this is why 10 Boeing 747 engines == 1 GW coal/nuclear plant which is "buildings" in size).

See slide 25 (page 13) of http://ronney.usc.edu/AME436S13/Lecture1files/AME436-S13-lec...

FiatLuxDave4• 12 years ago

I strongly suspect that they are aiming for the same form factor as the GE LM2500 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric_LM2500. The US Navy likes this form factor, for good reasons.

Note that it converts ~100kW thermal into ~37-47 kW electric. It also has high air flow. I suspect that means that they are aiming to make their fusion reactor small enough that it can replace the burner section of the turbine.

Thermal transfer is still going to be a challenge, unless (Idea!) they are planning on spraying water into the airflow and using heat from neutron moderation in the water to provide primary heat transfer. Hmm, I wonder how much water you would need for 14 MeV neutrons? Let's see, half-value layer is around 10 cm, so if you threw a 40 cm thickness of water across a neutron flux, you'd absorb most of the heat (you could probably catch the rest in the duct casing). That's a lot of water in a pretty small space, but physically possible.

Note that the above is a seat-of-pants calculation and should not be taken as accurate by any means.

JohnnyLee• 12 years ago

Based on the image of the machine, this is a magnetic mirror with neutral beam injection. Mirrors were some of the first plasma confinement devices. An issue they have is that they lose charged particles out the ends in a way that depends on the ratio of perpendicular to parallel velocity and the magnetic field strength. It may be that they think they can use the neutral beam injectors to inject the fuel in such a way that it's well confined in the machine...

Never mind, another linked article says that the injectors are only used for ignition.

csdrane• 12 years ago

Can we assume that their reactor isn't energy positive? Because if it were, I would imagine that they would be announcing so--rather than this nebulous "breakthrough."

seren3• 12 years ago

From the aviationweek.com [0] article, it seems it is a concept, and they don't even have a prototype. They are trying to get some fundings to build the PoC. What makes the announcement a bit strange is that they have very concrete claims "it will fit in a truck" without much substance.

[0] http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals-compa...

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

I guess that's somewhat game-changing. This, however, would be much more game-changing (if we can get confirmation once and for all whether it's real or not):

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/191754-cold-fusion-reacto...

altcognito• 12 years ago

The "or not" link: http://news.newenergytimes.net/2014/10/12/rossi-handles-samp...

nerdy• 12 years ago

I know there are some very smart people at skunk works who've done incredible things in the past but humans have cried wolf so many times on fusion it's sort of hard to just accept until they've actually built a working reactor, shown it and had it independently verified.

regularfry7• 12 years ago

Fusion physicists I know are very sceptical that this design can work. It's a variant on a known design with a known problem: the plasma leaks out of the ends of the magnetic containment. It's also unclear why Lockheed would be publicising it this way at this point, unless it's a naked ploy for more funding from the DoD, and an attempt to bring in money (and possibly pressure) from non-classified sources.

That being said, if they've genuinely cracked it, the game changes so much as to be unrecognisable.

jobu• 12 years ago

From the Aviation Week article that flexie linked: "The team acknowledges that the project is in its earliest stages, and many key challenges remain before a viable prototype can be built."

They don't actually say it, but it sounds like they've only got computer models to work with at this point. Not very likely that they've actually cracked it.

anovikov• 12 years ago

Maybe it's the reverse. It is a PR to make an impression that the fusion is just around the corner to discourage other nations from investments into tokamaks and improved fission reactors, out of impression that this fusion breakthrough will make them all soon obsolete.

charonn0• 12 years ago

the plasma leaks out of the ends of the magnetic containment

According to this link[1] posted by another commenter, they create a "axisymmetric mirror by positioning zones of high magnetic field near each end of the vessel so that they reflect a significant fraction of plasma particles escaping along the axis of the CFR."

[1] http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals-compa...

hackerboos• 12 years ago

We have working reactors they just don't output more energy than they consume.

We should be throwing more money at this...

seanflyon3• 12 years ago

There have even been reactors that produce more energy than they consume, just not in a practical, economical way.

sounds• 12 years ago

This is a very good point. Extraordinary claims...

If you haven't hung around talk-polywell.org before, you might want to. It's focused on the polywell but they seem to at least try to fairly evaluate all contenders.

New confinement techniques (NIF, this article, Helion, Polywell) are actually making real progress. So it's becoming less likely that an announcement like this is 100% vapor.

Put another way, we're getting to the point now where we have tools sufficient to actually know what the results will be. That, more than anything, is the benefit from the billions spent on tokamaks.

nether2• 12 years ago

The AviationWeek article even mentions that the LMSW team drew from Polywell:

"We also have a recirculation that is very similar to a Polywell concept," he adds, referring to another promising avenue of fusion power research. A Polywell fusion reactor uses electromagnets to generate a magnetic field that traps electrons, creating a negative voltage, which then attract positive ions. The resulting acceleration of the ions toward the negative center results in a collision and fusion.

It's great that they've scoured even the non-mainstream ideas and incorporated them.

charlysisto• 12 years ago

I followed the ecat (http://ecatnews.com/) story for a year or so until my BS alarm started getting really loud - but just the prospect of it was so exhilarating, it was hard to resist the enthusiasm overflow...

Now this sounds way more serious than Andrea Rossi's saga. But I did get a lot tougher on my wait and see stand.

nether2• 12 years ago

I'm still waiting on a Steorn Orbo replication...

baq• 12 years ago

couple either of those to a reactionless drive and head off to alpha centauri for vacation...

Tloewald2• 12 years ago

"Ultra-dense deuterium is an isotope of Hydrogen" (1) ultra-dense?, (2) and tritium which is denser (but hardly ultra-dense) and also an isotope of hydrogen.

Ah science reporting.

mletonsa• 12 years ago

Two of their patents were published few days ago:

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2014/0301518.html

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2014/0301519.html

Both have publication date 10/09/2014. Maybe connected with the press release?

jburwell• 12 years ago

This appears to be further development of the novel nuclear reactor approach described by Charles Chase at Solve in 2013 -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAsRFVbcyUY. The video provides a basic overview of fusion reactor designs and their breakthrough.

mbrubeck• 12 years ago

Yeah, and when they first announced it, they were predicting a working reactor in four years ("by 2017"): http://www.dvice.com/2013-2-22/lockheeds-skunk-works-promise...

A year and a half later, they're apparently no closer to that goal.

adamzerner• 12 years ago

I don't know much about fusion. It seems that the breakthrough they're talking about is that reactors are ~10x smaller. Why is this a big deal? Square footage is plentiful. I thought the problems are safety and how much energy it could produce.

jdnier• 12 years ago

Because these relatively small reactors can be made to tie in with existing gas turbine power plants. They can ship these replacement fusion plants all over the world. http://aviationweek.com/blog/high-hopes-can-compact-fusion-u...

yojo• 12 years ago

If it's 10x smaller it is available for portable applications. Like boats/planes/space ships. It would also presumably be easier to air drop in developing regions to bypass building a giant energy grid (similar to cell phone deployment).

regularfry7• 12 years ago

Take a look at the footprint of ITER. It surprised me how massive the thing is planned to be. That's the competition.

drjesusphd7• 12 years ago

Take a look,at the footprint of ITER

Or any other power plant for that matter.

"If it sounds too good to be true..."

notacoward• 12 years ago

I think it's less about the size in square feet than the size in dollars (including installation, maintenance, and waste disposal). The pool of people willing to buy a $100M device is small. The pool of people willing to buy a $10M device - even if it's less efficient - is much larger. That makes it a potential revenue source, instead of an eternal revenue sink. Much as fusion doesn't become technically useful until energy output exceeds energy input, it doesn't become economically useful until revenue (for its maker) exceeds cost.

FiatLuxDave4• 12 years ago

One big difference is the smaller the device, the quicker and cheaper it is to iterate. If it takes 15 years and $X billion to build and test your device, then progress gets measured on a per-lifetime instead of per-year basis. If your device can be built in a year and for $X millions instead, the testing and debugging can be done much faster. For a software dev comparison, think waterfall versus agile.

peteretep• 12 years ago

    > Lockheed shares fell 0.6 percent to $175.02 amid a broad 
    > market selloff.

Doh.

prewett• 12 years ago

Any movement under 1% is noise. And if there is a broad selloff, you'd expect Lockheed Martin shares to drop.

_-__---• 12 years ago

This title makes me engery

JustSomeNobody2• 12 years ago

Everything is always a decade away.

(And then it rarely happens)

mrisse• 12 years ago

From the article: Lockheed shares fell 0.6 percent to $175.02 amid a broad market selloff.

Shouldn't the market be a little more excited about this?

jerf• 12 years ago

It's dangerous to read the market's mind, but my guess is that there isn't enough information for anyone to believe that this is anything more than a PR puff piece.

As much as I want to believe it I can't find any evidence myself, either. At this point I'm pretty much at the "show me the over-unity reactor" phase. There's so many research paths to fusion right now that are all "promising", but until one of them actually builds something that works in the real world I'm not personally interested in hearing any more vague promises.

By all means fund them and keep working on them! I'm just not interested in the PR pieces any more. Give me a report about how it's working.

patrickk• 12 years ago

Most likely algorithms trading on technical indicators, nothing to do with this news. Short term price movements are almost total noise.

fsloth• 12 years ago

I was wondering the same thing. People have claimed to have working fusion reactors just in a few years if they only could have some more funding for so long that anyone who claims to offer a production capable fusion reactor loses their credibility completely until they actually produce one.

Skunkworks have as an organization an amazing engineering track record of implementing ground breaking technologies. I wonder what their current status is. Anyone have an inside scoop whether their game is still as sharp?

jcfrei• 12 years ago

The general consumer sentiment and state of the economy are much more important even for a company such as Lockheed (slow economy > less profits > less taxes > less DoD spending) than unproven (as of now) claims about yet another fusion reactor.

mikeyouse• 12 years ago

Quick and dirty;

Lockheed has a market beta of 0.7 -- So it's correlated with the general market fairly strongly. On aggregate, if the market increases or decreases by 1%, you'd expect Lockheed to follow the market by 0.7%.

Today most of the major indices are down ~1%, Lockheed is down 0.4%, so you could attribute that 0.3% deviation from the expected number as reactor news. 0.3% of Lockheed's market cap represents about $170M today.

It's obviously not this straightforward, but if I were a shitty journalist, I could make the case that this is actually a pretty good result since commercialization will likely be a decade away, it will take a ton of resources and investment to get there, and there's a high chance of failure.

A shitty DCF with a ramp to $500M/year in R&D, 75% margins on sales, and a $10B/year business in perpetuity comes out to $170M NPV with a ~31% discount rate --- Not too unrealistic.

vegabook• 12 years ago

Ready Steady (govt) Grant!

"Partners in industry and goverment". Translation: 10 years to product (but hey, prototype in 5) so please give us lots of dough. It's the technology of the future and always has been.

bluedino• 12 years ago

Then the dilemma becomes: Does the USA share this with other countries? Or do we keep our clean, plentiful power for ourselves, become energy independent, have clean skies, and keep (exploit?) this technological advantage over the rest of the developed world for the next 20-30 years?

Ygg2• 12 years ago

have clean skies

You can't have clean skies if everyone else is polluting. That is what makes pollution such a hard problem to solve. Even if USA cuts its pollution to zero, China alone can make up the difference.

But yeah, having access to this technology for everyone would be a serious game changer.

hugogee• 12 years ago

What dilemma? Its a no brainer we use it for free and have the rest of the world use it at a $profit$, while getting to enjoy that very same clean(er) air. But as history has shown it is probably too good to be true. Fusion that is.

Edit: We are all riding the same spaceship... Its a serious flaw in thinking 'us vs them' when we are beginning to experiene some of the results in climate change.

startupfounder• 12 years ago

"The early reactors will be designed to generate around 100 MW and fit into transportable units measuring 23 X 43 ft."[0]

These reactors will be similar to the Nimitz-class aircraft carriers and potentially only require refueling every 25 years through a process known as ROH.[1]

100MW capacity in the size of an international shipping container? The implications of this are massive if this technology can be brought to scale, and that is the key term - SCALE.

The cost of solar is plummeting and by the time fusion technology can produce 10% of our energy demand the cost of solar will be heading to $1/Watt, battery storage will be competitive and that is hard to beat even if the footprint is only a fraction of a solar farm.

[0] http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals-compa... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimitz-class_aircraft_carrier#...

leephillips• 12 years ago

I wrote about this when the project was first revealed, in March 2013: http://lee-phillips.org/LockheedFusion/

I didn't find much to inspire confidence.

karcass• 12 years ago

It's exciting to see that fusion has gone from being perpetually 20 years away to being perpetually 10 years away. ;-)

grecy• 12 years ago

Gotta love marketing

Igglyboo2• 12 years ago

We're 10 perpetual years closer!

dmfdmf3• 12 years ago

25 years ago my nuke professor used to scoff at some of the claims of the fusion researchers. The problem is the high energy neutrons flying out of the reactor will neutron-activate every material within the vicinity. He thought the radioactivity and nuclear waste of a fusion reactor could be worse than a fission reactor. Also he thought that fusion researchers were vastly underestimating the problem of neutron embrittlement of the reactor structures and components. This is a very difficult engineering and material science problem that would have to be solved even if they did get the fusion process to work.

DennisP7• 12 years ago

With D-T fusion you would have more activation of the reactor materials, because D-T produces such high-energy neutrons. What you wouldn't have is transuranics, which make up the bulk of our nuclear waste (and all of the really long-lived stuff), or fission products (the most radioactive stuff, like the cesium and strontium we heard about after Fukushima).

But D-T is only the easiest form of fusion. Next up is D-D, which has much lower-energy neutrons. Helion is working on D-D combined with D-He3, producing only 6% of its energy as neutrons. And several outfits are hoping to manage proton-boron fusion, producing very little neutron radiation.

dmfdmf3• 12 years ago

Correct me if I am wrong, but each of these "steps" is a research project in their own right.

The AviationWeekly article mentioned D-T fusion for the Lockheed prototype and includes a diagram with the caption "blanket absorbs neutrons to breed fuel and transfer heat to turbines". This "blanket" will be tons of material that would be activated during operation and would have to be disposed of at EOL. Also, modern materials include many trace elements within the main molecular lattice such as cobalt, chromium, etc in steel and in some ways might be more difficult to process than used fuel rods.

I worked in the nuclear power industry decades ago and I don't recall the how the energy of fusion neutrons vs fission neutrons compared but I thought that in general fusion neutrons were significantly higher. Most power fission reactors also have neutron moderators which help to reduce the activation and embrittlement problems. Nevertheless, core components in fission reactors are already experiencing neutron embrittlement and has been a concern.

I'm not trying to be negative on fusion power but these overly optimistic reports have to be read with a critical eye.

Mvandenbergh2• 12 years ago

I don't know about the waste being worse, since none of it will be transuranic. All short-lived activation of a few hundred years at most, you could just switch it off and mothball it really.

Totally agreed about the neutron embrittlement, I think that (IFMIF aside) this issue has just been brushed aside as a materials engineering 'detail' to be dealt with as part of commercialisation in a few decades when it might actually make the whole concept of using fusion for energy impractical.

dmfdmf3• 12 years ago

I think my prof's main point was that the volume of waste could be problematic. If a fusion reactor had a 50-60 year life it could activate a lot of material. The volume of fission reactor waste is small enough to be stored on site (so far) for decades and reprocessing can reduce that dramatically.

salzig• 12 years ago

Sounds like the "Solve for x" talk from last year (2013-02-11)

https://www.solveforx.com/moonshots/charles-chase-on-energy-...

Everhusk• 12 years ago

"The team acknowledges that the project is in its earliest stages, and many key challenges remain before a viable prototype can be built."

No doubt that Skunkworks is world class... but claiming a "breakthrough in fusion energy" before a prototype has even been built is pretty bold of them.

nabla92• 12 years ago

I'm not seeing any top physicists working in this program (McGuire is not one). I would be willing to bet 1000 EUR that their math and modeling does not add up, or they have skipped some details.

Problem with fusion research like this is that the closer you get self sustainment or energy generation, the harder it gets and problems pile up. This project looks like many other similar projects that have gone bust. They start by solving the easiest problems first, get some funding and hit the wall.

The main problem with any reactor design is how to handle the 14 MeV neutrons produced by the fusion reaction (no mention in the article). They tend to damage the reactor and make it economically unfeasible. At this point being able to create fusion reaction is not the main challenge. It's the sustainment and economics of limiting the damage. If they really have solved all the problems and demonstrate economically sound fusion in 5-10 years, they will be handed Nobel price in physics for sure.

cswhatt• 12 years ago

Betting on a math error from Skunkworks? Highly unlikely. If anything, scalability will be the issue, as it always is

gh02t2• 12 years ago

It's a very safe bet. Well, probably not a math error as they are quite a fine institution, but what he says is probably the case.

The challenges of fusion power are largely fundamental nitty gritty engineering issues. We know fairly well how to design most of a fusion reactor; in a lot of ways they are conceptually easier than fission reactors.

The two main hurdles are the materials problems and how to keep the reaction critical with radiative heat loss. These are big problems that so many times have been ignored by people claiming to have solved fusion power. You just can't get away from them, but solving them would be truly revolutionary.

I'm not saying they don't have something novel here as they really are some fine researchers at Skunkworks. Just temper your expectations.

TrainedMonkey• 12 years ago

Tokamaks were perfect on paper till they were fired up, and then we realized that there is a lot about high energy confinement we did not know about. So I think the math is correct according to current models, but whether those models are close enough to reality for this to work is another question entirely.

tonyplee4• 12 years ago

How much dangerous are the neutrons from such device? Similar to radiation, worst?

Time sell any oil company stocks, mutual fund holding?

adventured2• 12 years ago

Time to buy airline stocks. If you can put a miniature fusion power plant on an 747 equivalent, airline profit margins will skyrocket.

Actually even if you believed there's a chance this Lockheed concept can work, the time to buy airline stocks would be on the back end of this dead bull market that's about to fall off a cliff. And then there's the 20 year wait before it's finally deployed to a commercial airplane.

privong4• 12 years ago

How much dangerous are the neutrons from such device? Similar to radiation, worst?

Neutrons are interesting in that they dump all their energy into a very small region. Instead of losing energy continually and gradually, they travel a ways and then dump all their energy into one spot. This makes them potentially very useful for things like cancer treatment (you can select neutrons to ensure they deliver most of their energy into the cancer, rather than evenly along their travel path). I suspect this effect means that, for reactors, the wear and tear is more localized, but of a larger amplitude.

nabla92• 12 years ago

How much dangerous are the neutrons from such device?

Fusion neutron (14 MeV) from fusion reactor is exactly as energetic as fusion neutron emitted by a neutron bomb and causes equal damage (just distributed over longer time). They have 10x as much energy as fission neutrons and travel at speed of 52,000 km/s (17.3% of the speed of light). Neutron capture before they hit and damage magnets, electronics or wear out materials is important part of the fusion reactor design.

aortega5• 12 years ago

How much dangerous are the neutrons from such device? Similar to radiation, worst?

Neutrons are radiation. Also It's the worst kind of radiation because unlike X-rays or Gamma, neutrons make other things radioactive.

tjradcliffe4• 12 years ago

There are a variety of more-or-less sort-of correct answers below, but I'll throw in my two cents regardless. I am a nuclear physicist who spent a lot of time worrying about neutrons, which are a major source of backgrounds in neutrino detectors.

Two points made reply to you are correct: neutrons are radiation, but not electromagnetic radiation; and neutrons can make other things radioactive.

Some thing other people are saying are less correct: any individual neutron will deposit most of its energy in one place, but averaging over many neutrons their energy deposition will be spread out. Furthermore, neutrons will come out in all directions. The problem of neutron damage is not small, but no one seriously believes it's a show-stopper.

Neutrons are the exploding billiard-balls of nuclear physics. Fusion produces "fast" neutrons, with moderate energies. This is a deuterium-deuterium device, so most of the neutrons will come out with 2.4 MeV, which happens to be the same as fission neutrons. The DD reaction produces tritium as a byproduct about half the time, though, and DT fusion will lead to 14 MeV neutrons. There will be fewer of these in most designs, and some designs incorporate ideas to get rid of the tritium quickly to suppress these higher energy neutrons.

At high energies neutrons don't tend to interact very much with light nuclei, and for a variety of reasons fusion reactor design is dominated by light nuclei. What they do do is bounce off, which is where the billiard-ball analogy comes in. Each time a neutron bounces off another nucleus it loses energy (because the nucleus it bounces off of recoils, carrying some energy with it.) This is just pure Newtonian mechanics.

Neutrons typically travel a few metres in the process of slowing down, depending on the material. Light materials slow them down faster: a light ball bouncing off a heavy ball doesn't loss much energy, but bouncing off another light ball it does (hydrogen is the best material for slowing neutrons down because of this, and hydrogen-rich materials like water are good too.)

The neutron never completely stops because the nuclei it is bouncing off of are in thermal motion. At room temperature a neutron in thermal equilibrium moves at about 2200 m/s. But not for very long, because this is where the exploding comes in.

You can think of it in these terms: once thermalized, a neutron is passing by other nuclei rather slowly (2200 m/s is slow when you're a neutron). This gives it lots of time to react with nuclei, rather than just bouncing off, and eventually it does. When a nucleus absorbs a neutron it becomes a different isotope of the same element, and in many cases adding a neutron to a stable isotope makes it radioactive. Carbon-12 is a stable isotope that, with the addition of a neutron becomes carbon-13, and if it happens to get another neutron added later on, radioactive carbon-14.

Neutrons are a pain, even to fission engineers, and fission depends absolutely on them to happen. They get everywhere, are hard to shield, make stuff radioactive and damage materials. But we know pretty much how to deal with them, and it's unlikely they will make the difference between working and not working in a device like this.

jsmthrowaway3• 12 years ago

It's always a safe bet that the top Hacker News comment will always be "won't work, it's too hard." It's like sitting around for a year trying to sell a project at my current employer, with everybody and their lead telling you "that'll never work," then you implement in a weekend and those same people start nitpicking what you've come up with. (What happened to it'll never work? "Well, your CSS isn't great.")

Honestly, those folks that stand back with their arms crossed watching you fail, and reminding you the whole way that you might fail, are the biggest pains in my ass in this profession. By a mile.

Maybe you can contribute your wisdom by going to Lockheed, instead of Internet commentary in which you bet against them?

protonfish• 12 years ago

And it's always a safe bet the top response to that comment will be somebody criticizing it without any solid facts or reason but with fuzzy "you just need to believe harder!" kind of nonsense.

rayiner6• 12 years ago

That's hardly ever true. In my experience, Hacker News is full of people from the software field; folks whose professions are often unconstrained by physics,[1] and who have a generally optimistic "this can happen" mentality. That's why everyone here believes we'll have fully self-driving cars in 5-6 years.

In the rest of the engineering world, the answer to any question is: it'll be harder than you think it'll be (physics will beat you over the head at every step). You can cross your arms and say "that won't work" and you'll be correct 97% of the time. Fusion is something that some of the smartest people in the world, with enormous amounts of money behind them, have been beating their heads against for the last half century or more. Somebody will figure it out, eventually, but statistically, any given project is very likely not to be the one that does, and it will almost certainly take much longer than the optimists assume it will take.

Did you know that coal plants, which still make up the majority of U.S. energy production, are only about twice as efficient today than they were a century ago?

[1] Although math can be a kick in the ass too if you're working in domains where you can prove there are no polynomial-time algorithms for whatever problem you're working on. E.g. there is a reason people have been banging their heads on the garbage collection problem since the 1950's and it's still an active area of research.

nutjob123• 12 years ago

I dislike negativity as much as the other guy but fusion specifically has been "10 years away" for the last 60 years. I'm not convinced, especially without any specifics about what improvements they made. Probably just another grab for funding.

the_real_bto• 12 years ago

It's easy to be a critic.

Dropbox is a prime example of this effect: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

munchbunny• 12 years ago

I think people here are generally willing to believe that this is solved if the hard problems are solved. Right now the skepticism is that the hard problems haven't been solved - but that's true of any bet that you make. Either the hard problem has been solved, or you're betting that your people will solve it soon.

aetherson• 12 years ago

Thank you for your detailed explanation of why people should not make any attempt to apply their judgment, experience, or knowledge of the world to press releases, and instead accept them uncritically.

guelo• 12 years ago

If you have to periodically throw away your reactor and buy a new one because of neutron damage that would be a positive thing for a company like Lockheed.

Zikes2• 12 years ago

Maintenance costs alone would be astronomically lucrative.

titanomachy3• 12 years ago

"There aren't any top physicists working on this project" isn't really enough to dismiss it outright. The number of brilliant physicists is much greater than the number of top physicists, so it's not unheard of for major developments to come from someone who's not yet highly recognized. McGuire's an MIT Ph.D, so it's likely he's not a complete idiot.

I hope they have some novel ideas about neutron containment, though, otherwise you're right and this is project is not likely to yield the first economical fusion reactor.

trhway3• 12 years ago

McGuire's an MIT Ph.D, so it's likely he's not a complete idiot.

obviously. The proposed reactor looks exactly like a great PhD thesis with honors - a novel field configuration proposed which allows to reach beta of one. The rest of the whole system is given only cursory treatment. In particular how about a "neutron absorbing blanket" in a business-jet size envelope?

graycat4• 12 years ago

The Skunk works has one heck of a good reputation. So, I have to guess that the Lockheed suits had this guy's work and PR reviewed with a microscope from tip to tail, math, physics, materials, software, experiments to date, etc., including reviews by people who would have loved to have found something wrong.

logicallee• 12 years ago

I'm not seeing any top physicists working in this program (McGuire is not one).

McGuire is a top physicist - he is currently working on a compact fusion reactor at Skunk Works, which came out with the SR-71 Blackbird among other innovations.

Oh, did you mean, ones who had already succeeded in their top projects? Well, how do you think they got to succeed - by not doing it?

scottlocklin3• 12 years ago

"Top physicists?" Fusion is an engineering problem. The thing to check here is what plasma temperature/densities they have achieved with their new confinement scheme. They've basically said the results are preliminary, and some of the results are from simulation (which should not be trusted; aka look at how well the NIF simulations worked). This is not particularly interesting.

Shielding was mentioned, though not enough, but it's fairly trivial: if you add enough matter with a high neutron cross section (paraffin for example), and build the mechanical components out of things with a low cross section (iron, I think) it's not a problem. Plasma is the problem.

It's interesting, but "10 years off" is not much better than the standard "20 years off" promises of fusion research. As others have pointed out, controlled fusion has been 20 years in the future since 1950 or so. "1 year off" would be a lot more noteworthy. As it stands, this is just Lockheed informing us they have a controlled fusion program. Anyway, "nice press release, dudes."

peterfirefly2• 12 years ago

"Top physicists?" Fusion is an engineering problem."

So are refrigerators.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_refrigerator

Gravityloss• 12 years ago

I don't think it's "just engineering". Plasma physics is quite complicated.

twocommas• 12 years ago

"They start by solving the easiest problems first, get some funding and hit the wall."

Exactly! Just repeat keep repeating that process!

FranOntanaya• 12 years ago

Maybe the trick is that the reactor design is either cheap enough to be disposable, or just lasts enough to run a submarine for a few months (not necessarily in an economical fashion, but with other desirable advantages) and have it replaced like a car battery.

jfolkins• 12 years ago

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/2162586...

"As Tom McGuire, who is leading the Lockheed team, notes, however, the circular magnetic fields which coil around a tokamak’s doughnut become unstable if the plasma’s pressure is too high."

problame• 12 years ago

I'm happy if that is true, but guys: the first thing you think of is putting a potentially massive explosive on the back of a truck? Driven by humans? What could go wrong...

Balgair• 12 years ago

True, but we currently have gallons and gallons of highly flammable liquids hidden behind the cheapest #8 steel possible and something literally called a bumper, all exposed to whatever rust and rocks the nation's roads can throw at it. It's all about the level of risk.

Animats• 12 years ago

This might work. It's from Lockheed's Skunk Works, which has a very good track record and tremendous respect in the aerospace community. With the basic physics laid out, this is mostly an engineering and construction problem. Their plan is to build and test a new prototype every year. The Skunk Works can do that; they've been doing it for decades. They're a manufacturer of prototypes, and have in-house capabilities for building things fast. They don't have to contract out much, and where they do, they have a contracting operation and supply chain they can rely on.

ninkendo• 12 years ago

With the basic physics laid out, this is mostly an engineering and construction problem.

That phrase has been accurate for nuclear fusion in general for more than 50 years. The engineering and construction problems are immense.

titanomachy3• 12 years ago

That's definitely true, and it's nice to have another set of brilliant engineers working on this problem from a somewhat different angle than that taken by previous brilliant engineers. Personally, I've become somewhat disillusioned with ITER after reading so much about their bureaucratic hurdles... but maybe they have enough talent onboard to pull it off anyway.

drjesusphd7• 12 years ago

I have not seen any "basic physics" laid out at all about this concept. Namely, how do they keep the plasma from leaking out the sides of the mirror? What calculations/simulations have they done?

As long as they remain secretive, they have no right to demand to be taken seriously.

was_hellbanned• 12 years ago

The ".NET Rocks!" podcast did three GeekOut shows this year on nuclear fusion, which will probably make you only more skeptical of fusion research claims.

Fusion Power GeekOut: http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1013

Fusion Power GeekOut #2: http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1022

Cold Fusion GeekOut: http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1037

al2o3cr2• 12 years ago

I'd love to know how they're planning on disposing of heat in the magnets themselves - most of the available high-current superconductors prefer to stay close to liquid helium temperatures, which is a challenge when you've set them next to a ten megakelvin plasma that's emitting a 100MW neutron flux...

aortega5• 12 years ago

IMHO the best thing is how they pitch this as a power source for carriers and military ships, that are mostly used to fight wars for oil. Well played, Lockheed.

ChuckMcM2• 12 years ago

Interesting when you compare to the recent dynomak paper announcement[1]. The pointer to 'superconducting magnets' doesn't get a lot of ink though. I went by Fry's the other day and they were out of them :-) I wondered about them because to date such things usually are sitting in a cryogenic bath (think MRI machine) and not next to a million degree hot plasma. Even in the LHC there is a lot of space between the beam and the ring magnets. Dr McGuire in the article suggests -- “We should be able to go to 100% or beyond,” which is quite the challenge from the thermal management perspective.

It is however another great example that there is money going into lots of different fusion ideas. And that can only be a good thing as far as I am concerned.

[1] http://www.washington.edu/news/2014/10/08/uw-fusion-reactor-...

anigbrowl2• 12 years ago

On a tangent, is there any fundamental reason that reactors are always built to drive turbines rather thermocouples - do they simply not scale up to the amount of heat a typical reactor puts out, or what?

avian• 12 years ago

Steam turbine plus a conventional generator is vastly more efficient than thermocouples - 30-40% for steam versus <5% for thermocouples.

I suspect they are also much, much cheaper when you are talking about powers in the hundreds-of-megawatts range. I don't have specific data at hand to back that though. I never heard of any grid-level power generation being done with thermocouples.

anigbrowl2• 12 years ago

That is in line with general impression. I just find it really weird that after all the high-tech nuclear stuff is working the next stage is an old-fashioned water boiler like on a steam engine of hundreds of years ago. (Well, obviously these turbines are not old-fashioned or simple boilers, but you know what I mean.) It just baffles me that we don't have a way of efficiently generating electrical current directly from particle radiation, eg through pressure fluctuations in a magnetic field, instead of through heat transfer.

knappador• 12 years ago

Aneutronic fusion would be lighter-weight, but it's good to see another concept we can learn something new from. There are two aneutronic fusion projects to look at. Polywell has become a Navy project last I heard and focus fusion (DPF) is working on an all-tungsten electrode, after which we might see the very first experiment without electrode contamination from arcing in the contacts vaporizing metal.

peter_l_downs• 12 years ago

Crazy. Vernor Vinge has an excellent short story called "Bookworm, Run!" [0] that, among other things, discusses the effects of cheap, clean, compact power being distributed around the world. In particular, it describes a wide-spread economic depression. Kind of interesting to think about, and definitely worth reading if you're into sci-fi.

[0] http://books.google.com/books?id=tEMQpbiboH0C&pg=PA15&lpg=PA...

WalterBright• 12 years ago

Makes me wonder if the modern Lockheed Skunkworks bears much relation to how Kelly Johnson ran it in the 50's and 60's.

Many companies have tried to set up a skunkworks since, but didn't have the guts to run it like Kelly did, and didn't get the results, either.

gpvos• 12 years ago

Does anyone know how to get around the paywall?

ridgeguy• 12 years ago

This looks like a real thermal engineering challenge in one respect. The superconductive magnet coils are exposed to the neutron flux that transfers fusion reaction energy to the absorptive thermal blanket. I don't know offhand the neutron cross-sections of likely superconductor materials at whatever neutron energy spectrum this reactor will produce, but I suspect energy absorption by the magnet structure won't be small. I wonder how they plan to keep the magnets cold. Never mind the other effects on materials of high-flux neutron absorption.

Skunk Works Reveals Compact Fusion Reactor Details

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