Lockheed Claims Breakthrough On Fusion Energy Project 571
Lockheed Martin claims it has made a significant breakthrough in the creation of nuclear fusion reactors. The company says it has proved the feasibility of building a 100MW reactor measuring only 7 feet by 10 feet. They say the design can be built and tested within a year, and they expect an operational reactor within a decade. The project is coming out of stealth mode now to seek partners within academia, government, and industry. "Lockheed sees the project as part of a comprehensive approach to solving global energy and climate change problems. Compact nuclear fusion would also produce far less waste than coal-powered plants, and future reactors could eliminate radioactive waste completely, the company said."
Of course! (Score:5, Funny)
That's why it never worked before! Nobody thought about building a two-dimensional reactor!
Re:Of course! (Score:5, Funny)
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Maybe the reactor has no height [xkcd.com].
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No height would be a height of 0. It's a known value. That comic is more akin to a height of infinity.
Re:Of course! (Score:5, Insightful)
Everybody is joking, but this news update on fusion energy coming from an established, well known corporation is pretty serious. Isn't this the first time a respected company is claiming a breakthrough, a working prototype of fusion energy?
Do you realize what implications this has, if it is really fusion energy as they claim? It's a world changer.
I got goose bumps just from reading "Lokheed, breakthrough, fusion energy"....
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, the same people that are attempting to build the F-35.
Re:Of course! (Score:4, Insightful)
Apples and oranges. The F-35 is a Pentagon program designed to funnel taxpayer money to Lockheed to the end of time, the fusion project is their own money so it might actually be real.
Re:Of course! (Score:5, Informative)
There is no working prototype. This is a theoretical break through. They haven't proven anything yet.
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That was if it got if a moderate amount of funding. The problem is its never seen the kind of funding needed to put it on a decent schedule:
http://hardware-beta.slashdot.... [slashdot.org]
Re:Of course! (Score:4, Interesting)
"No matter how many billions you spend, you're not going to make a Chevette go faster than the speed of light."
You're comparing something that most would say is theoretically impossible, to something that most agree is theoretically possible and has already been achieved on a very small scale(LLNL ignition, of course not at the efficiency tipping point yet).
"The problems are technical"
The problems facing a mission to the moon were also technical, but with extraordinary funding they were able to fast track it by dividing up all the technical problems they faced and tackling them individually.
Fusion has many technical problems that could be tackled independently in parallel. See "When will fusion power my house (or vehicle)?" in the previously linked article. It covers this pretty extensively.
"You can't point at funding as a problem for fusion."
I can and did. The facts provided in the link are pretty compelling.
"..can't point at funding.... The problems are ... economic."
You contradicted yourself.
"No amount of money will fix that."
You've never heard of this thing called "employment". You have a technical problem, you use money to employ experts in the field that you are having that problem, and they come up with a solution. If that solution requires labor and materials to implement, you then employ some more people.
No or little amount of funding means little meaningful progress. You have some independent researchers working here and there to produce some papers and try to get published, but at some point you've got to coordinate activities and get appropriate amount of effort applied to each technical problem in an organized way:
http://i.imgur.com/sjH5r.jpg [imgur.com]
You can't call BS if your only supporting argument is BS.
Re:Of course! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Of course! (Score:5, Funny)
"they expect an operational reactor within a decade" - by that time solar will be infinitely efficiency and this will obsolete.
Yay! Fusion power has moved to just being ten years away instead of the twenty years it has been for the last fifty.
Re:Of course! (Score:5, Funny)
It is a design on paper only. Of course it is two-dimensional right now.
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Admittedly, though, 7x10' plans are kinda small as far as nuclear-anything goes. Must be all the hawk-eyed interns that have worked on that project, 'cuz man, they must have printed this shit at 3000 dpi and used Paint to tweak every pixel to fit it on 7x10' of paper :)
Re:Of course! (Score:5, Informative)
Nuclear reactors aren't a whole lot larger, they managed to make them small enough to fit on a space rocket, a submarine and back in the 1960's, nine of them on an Aircraft Carrier. It's the support systems (like cooling) and maintenance buildings that end up taking up several acres. Dissipating the waste heat of a 20MW reactor safely, indefinitely, is no small feat.
Re:Of course! (Score:4, Interesting)
No, I am referring to the NERVA rocket engine, a nuclear reactor that shoots superheated hydrogen out the back. The program was so successful followng the Apollo era that Congress cancelled all funding as it would have made a very expensive Mars trip viable using even 1970's technology (shortens the trip from 6 months to 2 months).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA [wikipedia.org]
Clearly someone doesn't play Kerbal Space Program. This has nothing to do with RTGs.
Re:Of course! (Score:5, Informative)
As the person that wrote most of the article you're linking to: no. NERVA was a relatively linear upgrade to the H-2 in performance terms, and there were H-2 upgrades that would have closed the gap to a degree (H-2T for instance).
There *are* nuclear engine designs that are much more efficient than this, like the gas-core design. They would have definitely make Mars a reasonable shot, but they are inherently "leaky" and suitable only for use in space. That's fine, but it pre-supposes you have the infrastructure to get them up there, and we didn't.
Finally, Congress wasn't shutting down NERVA, they were shutting down Mars. They repeatedly told NASA that they would not receive funding for a Mars shot from the late 1960s right through to the 1990s, but the NASA folks just kept pushing here and there trying to sneak it in.
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Pretty soon, they'll be small enough that you'll hear "Is that a fusion reactor in your pants, or are you just happy to see me?"
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That's why it never worked before! Nobody thought about building a two-dimensional reactor!
That's assuming that it's rectangular solid, it's probably an ellipsoid.
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Re:Of course! (Score:5, Funny)
Not exactly. Its section is 7 feet by 10 feet. To achieve 100MW the length must be infinite. Any reduction in length implies a proportional reduction in power.
Re:Of course! (Score:4, Funny)
That's why it never worked before! Nobody thought about building a two-dimensional reactor!
Hey, at least it looks good on paper!
Re:Of course! (Score:4, Funny)
Dude you not only have room for a Beowolf cluster, but enough space for a 100 MWs to power it!
global warmening worse than we thought... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:global warmening worse than we thought... (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember a few years back there was a page on the Los Alamos lab web site that talked about "POPS fusion" experiments.
Basically like IEC fusion, but instead of trying to maintain constant pressure, allow the pressure to oscillate regularly.
Then that page dissapeared.
I wonder if this announcement is about the same thing.
Only A Decade Away (Score:3)
So now Fusion Power will only be a decade away...for the next 60 years.
Re:Only A Decade Away (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, using time is a mistake. It's really about 25 billion dollars away.
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Someone should inform the Greek guy with the electric hair. Surely this must have been designed by aliens with the weird elongated heads using anal probes...under a pyramid...and used to power UFOs.
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wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Never thought I'd read this...
We just might survive this century after all.
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Can anyone find the patent applications? I'd like to cross-reference the authors with what's on arxiv.org.
Re:wow (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the Wikipedia article on his project: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... [wikipedia.org]
Here's some research he was involved in at MIT that he was involved in at some unknown date: http://ssl.mit.edu/research/Fu... [mit.edu]
Here's a video of one of the researchers talking about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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And a prototype by 2017!
This gives me a really good feeling. :)
Don't you actually mean... (Score:3)
And a prototype by 2017!
This gives me a really good feeling. :)
Don't you actually mean "a nice warm feeling"?
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Here's a video of one of the researchers talking about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Watch the video, it explains the whole thing. Wow... I'm very excited.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Great links. If this is deuterium-deuterium fusion [wikipedia.org], I'm baffled why it isn't crazy radioactive. You get two reactions from that, one of which makes Helium and a neutron, the other makes Tritium and Hydrogen. Deuterium-Tritium fusion makes a very energetic neutron.
The neutron from the D-D reaction carries ~2.5 MeV, which isn't that hard to stop (though the reactor is so small - wonder if that includes shielding). The neutron from the D-T reaction, however, is ~14 MeV which is a real problem. Have they f
Re:wow (Score:5, Informative)
It is! Nontechnical discussions aren't very good at differentiating between three somewhat different areas of concern. First, neutrons and gammas produced by the reaction need to be shielded but go away when you turn the reaction off. Second, short-lived activation in which materials are radioactive, but with a half-life of years or less that becomes safe in a reasonable time. Fusion reactors have both of these, but they are manageable. Third, fission leaves behind nuclear waste materials with a half-life in tens of thousands of years--this is nasty stuff and is around basically forever. Fusion produces no long-lived waste (there is probably some component of some alloy that will prove to make tiny amounts of bad waste, but nothing significant compared to fuel rods from fission reactors).
Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Third, fission leaves behind nuclear waste materials with a half-life in tens of thousands of years--this is nasty stuff and is around basically forever. Fusion produces no long-lived waste (there is probably some component of some alloy that will prove to make tiny amounts of bad waste, but nothing significant compared to fuel rods from fission reactors).
The critical thing to understanding this is that fission reactors are (necessarily) full of heavy elements, which is where the long-lived stuff comes from. Fusion reactors are full of light elements.
There are very fundamental physical reasons why radioactive light elements almost always have much shorter lifetimes than radioactive heavy elements. If you've only got a few nucleons to play with, turning a proton into a neutron is a major change in configuration, so the energy gap between the radioactive isotope and the adjacent stable isotope is large, and in general the lifetime against beta decay scales inversely with the fifth power of the endpoint energy. In heavy elements, which have so many nucleons they can be adequately modelled as liquid drops in some cases, changing one neutron to a proton doesn't change the configuration very much so the energy difference is small and the lifetime can be very large. Unfortunately, although the energy of the beta particle emitted is small, the energies of the other particles in the decay chain (gammas and more betas in most cases) can be pretty much anything.
So: heavy elements (fission) bad; light elements (fusion) good. Fusion reactors are designed with this in mind. They will produce a lot of nasty stuff, but almost all of it will decay rapidly, so given that the engineering issues of fission waste are pretty much under control (the political issues are not) we can be confident that fusion power will be OK in that regard.
Re:wow (Score:5, Interesting)
Further reading: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the... [ucsd.edu]
Based on this, 1 gram of Deuterium produces 320 megawatts of power.
The average American would consume the amount of deuterium found in 60kg of ordinary water per year to produce the energy they need in a year. There's enough Deuterium in our oceans to produce free power until long after the sun dies.
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Yeah, you say that now, but when we get more power, you can all but guarantee we'll use more power.
Probably, we'll start creating climate controlled neighbourhoods or something, live in Sunnyvale Town, where it's 30c all year around!
Re:wow (Score:5, Funny)
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This doesn't make sense, mass equates to energy, not the rate of energy.
I understand watts to be power, or the rate of energy usage.
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You are relating a finite amount of mass (gram) to a rate of energy production (watt). This does not work. It should take a rate of mass (grams per second) to result in some rate of energy production (joule per second, aka watt). Perhaps you meant megawatt-hours?
What the article actually says is that one gram of deuterium produces 10^12 J, which is 280 MWh. Not sure where the "320" came from.
credibility of article is doubtful (Score:5, Insightful)
"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."
yeah, no
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Not sure why you got modded down to 0, but the article definitely needs some fact checking. Especially the last line about ships using large FUSION reactors. Looks like an investment scam more than a breakthrough...
Re:credibility of article is doubtful (Score:5, Informative)
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Lockheed shares fell 0.6 percent to $175.02 amid a broad market selloff.
Re:credibility of article is doubtful (Score:5, Informative)
It is amazing that reporters seem to lack even an 8th grade level of science education.
They did change the fusion reactor to fission but.
It now reads
"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."
The reactors last the life of the ship. It is only the fuel that gets changed they they are aiming for that to be the life of the ship as well. It is at least 20 years today.
And this part.
"Ultra-dense deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen, is found in the earth's oceans, and tritium is made from natural lithium deposits."
Wow.... ultra-dense......
Good grief.
Well the reporting is crap but lets hope Lockheed really has what it says it has.
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" Carriers typically have one reactor replacement, combined with a several year refit and overhaul, halfway through their life."
No it is a refueling not a reactor replacement.
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From a certain point of view, they are huge.
I once read (*) that the full gamma burst from a thermonuclear explosion takes several seconds. (Whereas from a fission bomb, it's mostly over in a fraction of a second; the bigger-yield fusion bombs create a lot of temporary unstable shit that gives off more gamma rays as it decays over several seconds.) This led to me developing a nuclear war survival trick, which I will now share with everyone on Slashdot, even though I haven't tested (**) it yet:
If there's a
We need cold hard facts. (Score:2)
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Ten years (Score:2)
This is great news...for those who will survive the Ebola epidemic.
journalizm is dead (Score:5, Funny)
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. [reuters.com]
OMGWTFROFLOLBBQ! Reuters doesn't have a science correspondent. I didn't know they were headquartered in Texas.
Not what they said (Score:5, Insightful)
After completing several of these design-build-test cycles, the team anticipates being able to produce a prototype in five years."
They ain't got nothin' yet.
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Their design is so advanced and produces so much energy that they'll be able to build and test the CFR in less than a year even though the team anticipates being able to produce a prototype in five years. It's a hint about how they also found out how to time travel with the same process.
Sometimes nothing is a pretty cool hand (Score:3)
I agree with you that this is hype until proven.
There are now a dozen or so "alternative" fusion designs out there pursuing the dream of fusion energy and almost all have the property of predicating the work on a sound theoretical foundation but with little practical experimental support. Modeling plasma is notoriously hard.
Why didn't Lockheed Martin just build the prototype and then announce Q > 1 when there were actual results?
Not New information (Score:5, Informative)
Revealed work in 2013
http://www.dvice.com/2013-2-22/lockheeds-skunk-works-promises-fusion-power-four-years
Re:Not New information (Score:4, Insightful)
They do have a huge problem that no one was able to solve. It is not inconceivable that someone who understands the problem will be able plug the ends. But step one is to explain why this mirror would work differently from those mirrors.
Details would be nice (Score:4, Insightful)
This is as about as content free a news story as I have ever seen.
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Here are what appear to be a few
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... [wikipedia.org]
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http://sploid.gizmodo.com/lock... [gizmodo.com]
It is small, not sure it consumes less than 100MW (Score:2)
Two global problems solved in my lifetime! (Score:5, Funny)
With this and the new ebola infections coming out, it looks like we're on the verge of solving both the energy crisis and overpopulation
I never thought I'd see so much progress in my lifetime. We live in the future!(*)
(*) ...of a Stephen King novel, apparently.
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it looks like we're on the verge of solving both the energy crisis
No. The energy crisis typically refers to lack of oil, fusion reactors will replace coal. We're still going to have problems in the middle east until we get electric cars.
Not another scam! Right on! (Score:4, Interesting)
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Fusion power is a huge scam.
Fusion is often designed to fuse hydrogen into helium. This process seems sane because... I mean look at the world, just look at it. We're about as likely to ever run out of water as we are to ever run out of oil, or trees.
On one hand... (Score:2)
On the other hand, I'm not excited about Lockheed Martin developing it.
With my third hand, did anyone else read in the article that nuclear submarines run on a fusion reactor that needs to be replaced on a yearly basis? I was under the impression that it was a fission reactor, so it really makes me doubt if the writer knows what he/she is talking about.
Amazing if it works (Score:2)
If it's not impossibly heavy and doesn't produce fissile waste it could be used in all sorts of large vehicles, both commercial and military.
But plenty of fusion reactor designs have worked in theory; making them work in practice, though...
Re:Amazing if it works (Score:5, Interesting)
But plenty of fusion reactor designs have worked in theory; making them work in practice, though...
Yes, but this is Lockheed Martin. And we live in the age of computer aided design, where we can simulate much of an object before building this. In addition, I'm fairly sure that they have built smaller versions of this as proofs of concept. And now they have Thomas McGuire making the announcements, who is the lead scientist on the project, instead of the project manager doing presentations. He wrote his PhD thesis at MIT on fusors.
I am inclined to believe that this is the real thing. My main question is this: They use radio frequency radiation to heat the plasma; how have they overcome the rf shielding effect caused by hot plasma?
Other things they said couldn't be done... (Score:2)
Sustained heavier than air human flight.
Putting Man on The Moon.
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What you'll find though, as far as those "can't be done" arguments are concerned, is that - at least the old ones I've looked at - don't use any math to back anything up. With fusion power it's rather easy to quantitatively demonstrate what the problems are. As far as hot air ballons etc. are concerned, if one actually use the math and physics available back then, one would see that precisely the opposite conclusion has to be drawn. Fluid dynamics have been figured out long before heavier-than-air flight.
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Yeah. I'm somewhat disappointed that shallow dismissive/mocking comments seem to outnumber more engaged comments by three to one. We are supposed to be geeks. How many of us have heard about this reactor? It was announced many months ago. How many of us have searched the term "high beta reactor"? This development is potentially world-changing. It would solve the world's energy problems. It would make human deep space travel feasible. And the announcement is coming from a credible scientist from a c
Re:Other things they said couldn't be done... (Score:5, Insightful)
Teh Stupid is characterized by mindless criticism, nitpicking, absolutist rhetoric, and willful negation of facts. All of which are on display in the response to this thread.
The aspect I find most disturbing is a clear anti-intellectualism. Comments are not based in fact or logic, but self centered illogic: if I say something is right/wrong, that all I have to say.
As for the "agenda driven posters", I think the agenda is egomania. That would explain the obsessive negative attitudes. Being relentlessly negative is a way of asserting yourself if you don't have anything else to say.
Is this getting worse? I'm not sure. I think I see more of it, but don't know if that is because I am more aware of it, rather then an real increase.
At any rate, when I become annoyed enough, I respond with evidence oriented responses. I find references to uphold my position, and include quotes and links. Now someone may disagree with me, but at least I am not making assertions based solely on my individual position. I am generally disappointed because very few people respond with their own external references.
In this case I don't feel the need quote very many examples, because the behavior in this thread is rather self evident.
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The concept of free and open discussion is a failed concept. There need to be bars to entry in order to prevent the 25% from taking up 90% of
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Re:Other things promised repeatedly... (Score:3)
The observed jadedness might perhaps stem from failed promises of energy "too cheap to meter," ah, yes, here's James E. Akins writing in "Foreign Affairs" in the 1970s on that:
"Having argued throughout this article that the oil crisis is a reality that compels urgent action, let me end on a note of hope. The current energy problem will not be a long one in human terms. By the end of the century oil will probably lose its predominance as a fuel. The measures we have the capacity to take to pro
Some tech info for those interested: (Score:5, Informative)
If this really works...really cool things could be just around the corner.
From WIKI:
The high beta fusion reactor (also known as the 4th generation prototype T4) is a project being developed by a team led by Charles Chase of Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works. The "high beta" configuration allows a compact fusion reactor design and speedier development timeline (5 years instead of 30). It was presented at the Google Solve for X forum on February 7, 2013.[1]
"The device is 2x2x4 meters in size. It is cylindrical shaped. It has a vacuum inside with high magnetic fields, made using electromagnets. Uncharged deuterium gas is injected. It is heated using radio waves, in much the same way a microwave heats food. When the gas temperature reaches over 16 electron-volts, the gas ionizes into ions and electrons. This plasma exerts a pressure on the surrounding magnetic fields. This plasma pressure is counterbalanced by the magnetic field pressure in a beta ratio:
\beta = \frac{p}{p_{mag}} = \frac{n k_B T}{(B^2/2\mu_0)} [2]
The plan is to reach a high-beta ratio. Plans call for a compact 100 MW machine. The company hopes to have a prototype working by 2017, scale it up to a full production model by 2022 and to be able to meet global baseload energy demand by 2050. Here are some other characteristics of this machine:
The magnetic field increases the farther out that the plasma goes, which pushes the plasma back in.
It also has very few open field lines (very few paths for the plasma to leak out; uses a cylinder, not a Tokamak ring).
Very good arch curvature of the field lines.
The system has a beta of about 1.[3]
This system uses deuterium.[3]
The system heats the plasma using radio waves.[3]
The machine was designed by Dr. Thomas McGuire[3] who did his PhD thesis[4][5] on fusors at MIT. Chase said that “the fuel (two isotopes of hydrogen) has six orders [1.000.000] of magnitude higher energy density than oil. You can’t make a bomb from it, and it has no meltdown risk. It’s very different from nuclear fission reactors.”
dubious (Score:2)
In four years of work, they've managed to break the "bigger is better" scaling law common to most fusion reactor designs as well as solve the wall material problems common to ALL fusion reactor designs?
Well, that would be something. If only this article told us anything actually useful.
A better link for the story (Score:5, Informative)
Fusion (Score:2)
Mr. Fusion (Score:2)
I hope they left the car too. That would be even bigger than Mr. Fusion !!
hmm.. (Score:2)
10 years? Let me check the translation... (Score:2)
XKCD seems to be pretty spot on here.
Better article (Score:4, Informative)
Here's a much better article, that not only can differentiate between fission and fusion, but also has purty pictures too.
http://aviationweek.com/techno... [aviationweek.com]
I'm not holding my breath (Score:4, Interesting)
If an operational prototype is still a decade away, I'm not holding my breath. I'm a little fuzzy how something can be "built and tested" within a year, but require a decade to produce an "operational reactor". How do you test something that doesn't work?
That said, 100Mw in 70 sq. ft. would indeed be a world-saving device. One of the larger problems to solve with cheap/renewable energy production is getting the juice from the generating plant to the end-user; scaling up distribution grids is not a trivial problem. If every neighborhood substation could have their own reactor, that solves a LOT of issues. For instance, it makes high-powered electric vehicle charging stations viable on a mass scale. It could power desalination plants in remote areas cheaply. Additional power could be quickly brought online upon, say, building a power-hungry factory.
A utility exec quoted in an article I read a while back said that even with "free" energy (meaning energy with zero fuel cost), that would only enable him to cut prices by about 40% due to capital costs for both generation and distribution. If you can lop much of the "distribution" off, that's a significant cost savings.
Re: (Score:3)
And we had a proof of concept for tokamaks in the 50s.
There are several aspects of this announcement which cause me to disregard it. First of all, there doesn't seem to be any journal article describing the work. I'm of the impression that science journalists are mostly full of shit and one must go to the primary sources to get any semblance of reality. Where are the technical documents?
The idea of a magnetic mirror is not new. For a state-of-the-art mirror system, take a look at the Gas Dynamic Trap [google.com]. You
Re:Is it fission or fusion? (Score:4, Informative)
Apparently is IS fusion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
It's also been reported on a year a and a half ago. I'm not sure what's changed now.
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Can't we just ask Superman to throw the nuclear waste into the Sun?
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Actually tritium has a half-life of about a dozen years. This isn't plutonium we're talking about.
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Look up Fusion and go away.
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Yes! I saw a video lecture [youtube.com] on this last year. Been wondering when we'd hear some news on this project.
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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.
Don't trust anything you read in this article.
But everything else on the internet is okay, right?
Re:Sounded real promising right up to.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds real promising right up to "operational within a decade" that's code for we have an idea that on paper sounds like it might possibly work. Please give us lots of money.
Oh puleeaze. This is Skunkworks. Thomas McGuire did his PhD thesis on fusors at MIT. This isn't just some investment scam. Do some research.
Re:Fusion in some forms can be very dangerous. (Score:4, Informative)
The amount of water (as the protium source) used for fusion would be minuscule compared to the volume of the oceans, even if fusion technology was widespread and used over an extended period of time. Most technically literate people would know this, which is probably why your comment was marked 'Troll'. But as not everyone knows everything, your question does deserve a legitimate answer. The volume of water used would probably be more than offset by the amount of water falling to Earth [astrobio.net] in comets/asteroids/dust/etc. If it did somehow become a problem (extreme emphasis on 'somehow'), we could bring in more water from asteroids as needed. But if we did somehow burn through that much water through fusion in any reasonable timescale, I suspect we would be killed by the waste heat.
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I believe you're being ridiculed for, not for expressing your opinion, but for expressing your mathematical incompetence.
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Earth routinely loses hydrogen, from water, into space. Water vapor in the upper atmosphere is split by solar radiation into hydrogen and (atomic) oxygen. That's why near-Earth space has atomic oxygen.
Not to fear, though, since that atomic oxygen also combines with hydrogen in the solar wind and ultimately precipitates out as water again. Earth is also routinely bombarded by small ice chunks (comet fragments), again supplying more water.
The amounts in the above are far beyond anything that human demands
Re:Also if accurate its a big slap in the face (Score:5, Insightful)
To everyone who was saying we had to invest more in ITER, or that if we had of been increasing our funding of Tokomak related work was anything but a big science pork barrel.
A lot of this groups work was based on what was learned at ITER. They actively talk about ITER quite a bit in a lot of their talks.
I don't think anyone thought ITER was anything more than a research project. It did exactly what it was supposed to do and spurred innovation.