Good news: New Lockheed Martin fusion reactor to solve all the world’s problems in 10 years or so

In case you were too consumed with Ebola news yesterday to notice this, here’s a belated FYI that America’s going to put the Middle East’s oil barons out of business before your grandkids are out of college. Assuming the Ebola doesn’t get us first, I mean.

Lockheed has a webpage dedicated to its new breakthrough in compact fusion reactors but this write-up in Aviation Week is the most thorough explanation I’ve seen of how it would actually work. If I understand it correctly, which I probably don’t, the problem with current fusion reactors is that they’re too darned big and inefficient to be useful as power suppliers. To produce fusion, you inject a certain type of gas into the reactor, which heats it up. When the gas gets hot, the ions and electrons from the isotopes split apart and form a plasma; when it gets really hot, the ions recombine — fusion — releasing kinetic energy in the form of neutrons that collide with the reactor’s walls. The heat generated by those collisions is converted into electricity, and voila, you’ve got power. The trick is containing the plasma as it reaches fusion temperature so that it doesn’t touch the reactor’s walls, which would do damage. The containment is done by generating strong magnetic fields, but it takes biggggg magnets and lots of power to achieve that — so much power, in fact, that you end up putting in about as much as the reactor puts out, defeating the whole purpose. The traditional design of the fusion reactor, in which the plasma is encased in a big tube, is also sufficiently unstable that engineers typically use relatively small amounts of plasma compared to the huge magnetic field being generated. Also inefficient....

Well the history of fusion has always been ‘ten or so years away’.

I was interviewed and selected by Admiral Rickover in 1980 and served in his nuclear program as an engineer before going back to graduate school and earning a PhD. I also worked for Martin Marietta before they merged with Lockheed but I was on a DOD Engineering Tiger Team that reviewed all the major DOD contractors including Lockheed.

I will have a look at the this writeup and get back to you with an assessment. I do know that a lot of advanced technologies are bottled up in political considerations and are timed for release based on political considerations. In other words this development of Lockheed’s Skunkworks has likely been available for quite sometime and has only waited for release approval.

I am more optimistic about a release late last year from the Office of Naval Research that described an efficient economic process of recovering hydrocarbon fuels direct from seawater allowing vessels to sail without ever needing refueling. I suspected that release was timed to inform the Russians and other belligerents that the game was up if the USA decided it was up.

You would not cut your ties to the power companies. THEY would use this to generate the electricity using this generator rather than oil or gas or coal.

It would be nice, but then what would EXXON and West Virgina do with all of their people?

Economically, its disruptive. And that means that it disrupts the current technology and all of the people associated with it. It also means that cheap energy can be placed anywhere: Africa, Asia, India, etc.

Now to come up with batteries that can move my car or motorcycle 500 miles per overnight charge.

could be this.

Oct 13, 2014

US targets novel fusion research

http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/article/news/58886 A US government agency has launched a new $30m programme to support alternative approaches to generating energy from nuclear fusion. The initiative has been created by the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E), which falls under the auspices of the Department of Energy (DOE). In August, the DOE invited researchers to "develop and demonstrate low-cost tools to aid in the development of fusion power". Research teams need to outline their proposals by 14 October with three-year grants ranging from $250,000 to $10m up for grabs.

The new programme from ARPA-E will tap into this middle ground, focusing both on "targets" (methods for containing plasmas) and "drivers" (systems for heating and compressing plasmas). "I have long advocated that the parameter space in-between conventional [magnetic-fusion and inertial-fusion] regimes is clearly where the advantages of [both] can be combined, while eliminating some of the disadvantages," says plasma physicist Glen Wurden of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, who works on magnetized plasmas.

"Members of the HEDP fusion community, especially those previously working in the area of magneto-inertial fusion before the funding was cut, were thrilled to finally see the ARPA-E funding opportunity announced," he adds.

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In fact there are a lot of small fusion companies currently jousting for money.

Here's another "small fusion" concept that a private company is working on:

http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/ The technique they're using is called "plasma focus fusion." They're currently rebuilding their experiment to eliminate arcing that was vaporizing their electrical connection and contaminating the plasma. They expect to have the new device up in a few months; they've already moved the connector outside the vacuum chamber, and have successfully used an indium ring and silver plating on the steel baseplate to reduce the resistance to 6 μΩ. ( Eric Lerner's focus fusion process involves creating electricity directly without the need for heating water to spin a turbine. The cost is but a fraction of coal power production, nearly inexhaustible fuel supplies, and totally clean.)

Another small fusion company, unfortunately their website is being rebuilt, called "Polywell fusion" that's based on the Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor, as extended by the late Dr. Robert Bussard. They have finished proving that their magnetic containment scheme will work for a net-power-output fusion device, and posted a paper on arXiv: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1406.0133v1.pdf

Also worthy of note are Electron Power Systems http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/central/ and General Fusion http://www.generalfusion.com/ both of which are less promising to my mind than either the Plasma Focus or the Polywell. Here's a blog post on the Polywell arXiv paper, which details what they've accomplished and announced, and what remains to be done: http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/06/bussard-emc2-fusion-project-publishes.html

The money and brains behind all these groups is very respectable.

Here's another small fusion company callled Helion Energy. http://www.helionenergy.com/?page_id=704

Another polywell fusion company that has had funding from the Navy is called emc2.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/10/emc2-fusion-releases-results-and-needs.html

My own opinion is that the sheer number of small companies invested in fusion, the respectability of their participants and their money backing suggests that fusion will be solved this decade; I think it's a virtual certainty that if it's not, it will be in the 2020s.

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