Lockheed Martin’s Claims on Fusion Energy Meet with Skepticism

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/531836/does-lockheed-martin-really-have-a-breakthrough-fusion-machine/

by ghosh • 12 years ago

47 46 12 years ago

Skepticism is not unreasonable, but so is hope: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1644

Short version: details matter, Thomas McGuire is a smart guy who knows enough to avoid the obvious mistakes, Lockheed Martin is a commercial company taking a commercial route to technology development, so they are disengaged from the scientific community.

Will it work? They only reasonable answer is: "Maybe." We'll know better in five or ten years.

easytiger• 12 years ago

To be fair to LM if they get this right and it works, they will assume a large portion of all the world's wealth rather quickly.

Also surely we need a Manhatten project for nuclear fusion. Indeed it is possible it the the fault of the Manhatten project that Fusion wasn't pursued at the time

keeganpoppen• 12 years ago

haha yeah-- not saying it's an easy problem or anything, but you'd think that we'd have about as good a chance as humanity could ever hope for if you ask while Oppenheimer, Fermi, Feynman, Bohr et alia are all working together... ON THE SAME PROJECT. And this is ignoring the fact that we wouldn't even give Einstein security clearance...

Icybee2• 12 years ago

If this works, and the global demand for fossil fuels significantly reduces or disappears, imagine the impact it will have on the countries whose economies are largely dependant on exporting oil, gas or coal. A large part of the Middle East, or even countries lie Russia or Venezuela could be in for a very bad few decades.

We could be in for turbulent times, if it works.

jahnu2• 12 years ago

That kind of assumes no country would just copy it. Which they simply would unless LM sold these devices or licenses to them at very reasonable prices.

Shivetya• 12 years ago

well that and Lockheed's proposal doesn't involve the tens of billions of dollars the other more headline grabbing one does, hence it can't be good, can it?

The issue I see is this, no one has done it yet, produce sustainable fusion power so I say, let them all try their theories and we all benefit. If Lockheed's experiment is fractionally as expensive as the big guys on the street then why not. Governments sure piss away enough as it is on lesser adventures.

mcv4• 12 years ago

There's that famous rule of thumb: if it sounds too good to be true, then maybe it is. Lockheed Martin's cheap, compact fusion reactor does sound too good to be true. Then again, if it works, that's enormous. And the massive, expensive ITER can't possibly have the same kind of impact on our energy. I want Lockheed Martin to be correct.

But are they? If this approach has been tried before without success, and no fusion scientist considers this likely to work, then I wonder why Lockheed is even trying this. On the one hand I think Lockheed must be on to something. On the other hand, if they don't have any good data to share (or are unwilling to share it), then why are they going public with this at all? If it makes sense to keep it secret because it's a secret, commercial, profit driven project, then why not just keep it secret?

Why seek publicity when they don't want to share anything real? Is the share price down? Do they need extra funding?

pjc50• 12 years ago

It's almost certainly a portable black hole for funding applications.

Last time this was discussed here the most common problem cited was the emission of fast neutrons, which move fast and break things, especially including the superconductors which are supposed to be part of the magnetic containment.

waps• 12 years ago

Regardless of the success of this particular experiment, you've got to hand it to the US when it comes to fusion research.

US is :

Funding ITER (founding member of ITER)

Funding Z-Pinch

Funding Polywell

Funding steam-based fusion (yes, really)

Funding laser fusion

Funding this new approach by Lockheed Martin Skunkworks

Funding 3 other inertial containment fusion approaches

Over 30 small scale experiments that don't appear to currently justify bigger investment.

The EU (which has ~20% more GDP than the US):

Funds ITER ...

Funds 2 other tokamaks (exactly the same approach as ITER, but smaller scale, and they're being defunded, most people claim because of ITER)

... that's it

Japan

Also supports a number of fusion research paths.

China

Funded a single Tokamak that is reportedly decommissioned by now. One might add that the organization that built it is suspected of forging their results. The end.

Most fusion approaches, including ITER, can only work if our current physics theories are flawed. Polywell, to a lesser extent Z-Pinch and several others, for example depend on the ability to keep a gas non-thermalized for a relatively long time (meaning molecules in a single volume of gas having different temperatures for longer than it takes them to move from one side of the gas volume to the other). Violates thermodynamics as it currently exists. If ITER generates the Neutron pressure it is predicted to generate, it will collapse in a matter of hours at best (which is were most sources got the "fast neutrons destroy matter" criticism. And yes, it's of course true for all fusion approaches. BUT it only matters if it destroys matter fast enough. For example, cosmic radiation destroys any kind of matter a lot better than even the worst fusion reactor. And you're exposed right now ! Nothing can stop them ! Run for the hills, except that even hills don't stop all of them. However, the rate of damage is so low, it would take millions of years to destabilize the head of a needle. The same is true for small fusion reactors).

The reason I mention this is that this is the criticism against a lot of the fusion approaches. Z-pinch cannot work because it violates ... Polywells can't work because gases thermalize whether or not you have big electrical fields fooling around ... of course, similar (and "equally" valid, in other words, with an unknown level of validity since we haven't tried) criticism exists against ITER. ITER is simply the bet that what you might call "the scientific community of physics" feels most comfortable with.

When I was taking philosophy, one remark stayed with me. On many occasions in history the scientific community has rallied around certain theories. Generally "the next theory" (e.g. relativity versus Newtonian physics) was available for decades before it became popular. Every single time the scientific community rallied around one of the theories and not once, not one single time, did they rally around the right theory (why ? Because almost every single time they rallied around the old theory, even in the presence of known flaws like the black body paradox. Scientists are no different from the rest of us : if possible, they'd like everything to neatly stay just the way it already is).

Given that, the US and to a lesser extent Japanese approach to fusion appears to be the right one. Maybe they should do more, but not by increasing ITER's funding. Frankly, if there is a good way to do fusion, the US deserves to find it, and frankly, the EU does not.

blackkettle• 12 years ago

All reasonable points, and there is plenty of good reason to be skeptical. On the other hand, Lockheed Martin is one of the largest defense and aerospace contractors out there, with a solid track record for bringing to market sophisticated aerospace solutions. They also made ~$3B in profit last year, so they are probably ok on the money front. At the least they deserve a bit more benefit of the doubt than, say that Italian guy running around claiming cold fusion.

Ygg2• 12 years ago

On the other hand, they are the makers of F-35, no? I think a fair amount of skepticism is needed.

mcv4• 12 years ago

Absolutely. Had it been anyone else, it'd probably have been written off right away. But it's Lockheed Martin, so everybody assumes there's something to it.

Still, why go public on this without any data? Not publishing at all because they want their competitive advantage I'd understand. Publishing data I'd also understand. But a spectacular hype story with nothing to back it up? That suggests it'd about something other than just the science or the product.

I still hope it's real, though.

adventured3• 12 years ago

I try to remind myself that the CFR vs ITER, isn't much different in scale of leap than what Craig Venter pulled vs the government's genome project (in the sense of it being rather breathtaking as a leap forward compared to the backwards prior approach).

That is to say, such leaps over what people commonly think is the required approach, are in fact possible. It reminds me to leave my mind open to something like the CFR being possible.

XorNot4• 12 years ago

This is a wildly inappropriate comparison. For one thing, Craig Venter didn't necessarily produce a "good" genome, and his approach wasn't objectively better at the time.

For another, it was hardly a problem of engineering at that point, the basic chemistry was well known and well understood. It was very much a problem of data-processing and logistics to get it all done though.

cynic_• 12 years ago

They are going public and not giving any specifics, because they want someone else to foot the bill.

They probably didn't make much progress in the last couple of years, and costs and risks are still to high.

chrisBob• 12 years ago

There's that famous rule of thumb:

No. It says "If it sounds too good to be true then it probably is." I am very hopeful though.

crdoconnor• 12 years ago

I got a little suspicious when this came at the exact time a few other bits of news did that were clearly intended to push the price of oil futures down.

freedombeer• 12 years ago

I'm always skeptical of bald claims. And bold ones too, of course.

FiatLuxDave• 12 years ago

I don't see anything to get excited about in the information which has been provided in the press. Hutchinson's comments are about the basic type of design. I presume they have some kind of secret sauce which they see as providing a better solution. I say, good for them for trying it.

Just like some of the other commenters, I suspect that the reason they went public with an information-lite release is due to internal politics at LM. When I was in the fusion research business, we stayed in stealth mode the entire 5 years. We probably could have continued if we had put out press releases like this to attract more funding. We didn't think we had any results worth having a press release about, however, and I didn't want to be that guy.

If I were to jump back into fusion, I probably would go with a linear, mirror-type, high beta device. They are easier to build, cheaper, and have one major design flaw (i.e. problem which needs fixing). I have had some ideas on how to improve the endcaps, which are the real weakness of the design type. I saw that dkirtley had some good things to say about the Budker-style Gas Dynamic Trap design in the last thread about this. I'm not so sure that I buy into that way, but I'm glad that people are following that path.

What the article really tells us is that there is one more group out there who is following a technical path that probably wasn't being followed before. That is good news, because there are many ways to build a fusion reactor that doesn't work, but there may be one or more ways to build one that does. It's good that we have a few more scouts checking the territory.

Lockheed Martin’s Claims on Fusion Energy Meet with Skepticism

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