Lockheed says makes breakthrough on fusion energy project

Reuters ^ | 3 hours ago | Andrea Shalal

[zeugma]

Fusion is always "ten years away". Crossing my fingers and hoping for this, but not holding my breath.

[NorthMountain]

I wasn’t aware that there WERE any current Fusion reactors....????

There are. They're huge warehouse sized things, and they consume more power to fire their LASERs than they produce by the resulting fusion.

[Diogenesis]

“In a statement, the company, the Pentagon’s largest
supplier, said it would build and test a compact fusion
reactor in less than a year, and build a prototype
in five years.”

That is not data from a successful working test.

[from occupied ga]

In any case, we're talking about something having low level radioactivity for 100 years

Not necessarily. It depends on what materials the thing is made of. For example, any cobalt in the structure will be activated to cobalt-60 half life 5+ years, and carbon will get activated to C-14 half life of 5760 years. Then there is neutron embrittlement of any steel structure.

What isotopes were you referring to?

[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

-— If true, it’s another triumph for the profit motive. -—

They must have stolen the idea from the Department of Energy. /snurk

[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

Lockheed is fishing for investors.

Yeah. Seriously, if they were sure of this working, they would be locking out investors, seeing as how it would represent the greatest scientific breakthrough in human history.

Still, I hope it works out.

[pierrem15]

My understanding is:

1) a fusion reaction simply produces fewer neutron emissions per amount of energy released (which stands to reason since the fission process is itself driven by neutron emissions and produces more of them).

2) less energetic neutrons are emitted (more of the fusion reaction release of energy is in the light spectrum), which should produce fewer transmutations in the surrounding materials;

3) a proportionately higher percentage of the transmutations that do occur create isotopes with shorter half-lives (I believe this follows from #2).

4) There are differences in the blanketing material: fission reactors (as someone pointed out) use stainless steel as the containment vessel and this is subjected to heavy neutron bombardment. Most of the fusion deesigns I've see seem to be using copper jackets as a blanketing material/heat sink. So the transmutations that occur will be different than the ones in stainless steel.

But I'm not sure a 100% about any of this: I'm just cobbling together what I can remember from the articles I've read on possible fusion reactors.

As a side note, one of the big issues with fusion reactors is that the neutron bombardment of the superconducting magnets transfers heat and/or destroys the crystalline structure required for superconductivity (although I think the higher temp superconducting materials are more resistant). I believe the Lockheed design addresses this in part because the containment envelope is designed to recapture more of its own neutron emissions, in effect partly converting the neutron emissions into more deuterium and tritium fuel. Really clever.

[from occupied ga]

Actually the slower neutrons are more likely to be captured and cause transmutations. This is why fission reactors have a "moderator" graphite or water. Also this explains some of the criticality accidents in the early days of fission research.

a proportionately higher percentage of the transmutations that do occur create isotopes with shorter half-lives (I believe this follows from #2

I'm not sure of the physics behind this. Are you saying that less energetic neutrons produce shorter half lived isotopes?

I was referring to the confinement material being subject to mechanical and chemical degradation by the neutrons an addition to transmutation

As a side note, one of the big issues with fusion reactors is that the neutron bombardment of the superconducting magnets transfers heat and/or destroys the crystalline structure required for superconductivity (

I read this too. Like you I have no idea how Lockheed is going to address this problem.

This isn't anything new. Mirror fusion designs have been around in theory for at least 30 years, but this is the first I've read of anyone actually doing anything with them. I wish them good luck.

[pierrem15]

I wasn't sure of some of the basic physics, just that I know neutrons of different speeds (MeV) produce different effects, and the transmutation effects are dependent upon the surrounding material.

I still can't see how the neutron flux for a fusion design producing an equivalent release of energy can produce a neutron flux as high as a fission reaction.

I hope it works also, although I've seen the professor from the Washington State fusion project questioning a lot of the physics behind the Lockheed design, but I also note that some of his criticisms seem very dependent on the materials used, and if there's any group experienced with the creation of exotic engineered materials, it's the Skunk Works.