On the Nature of Things | Forum

Doc wrote: http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampent ... d-forever/

Lockheed Martin Claims Fusion Breakthrough That Could Change World Forever

Lockheed Martin, the industrial conglomerate based in Bethesda, MD with close ties to the U.S. Department of Defense, is claiming to have made a major breakthrough in nuclear fusion, which could lead to development of reactors small enough to fit on the back of a truck within a decade.

In the simplest terms, nuclear fission breaks a single atom into two whereas nuclear fusion combines two atoms into one.

Fusion, the holy grail of nuclear power, creates three to four times as much energy as fission. More importantly, fusion’s key advantage over fission is that it does not produce cancer-causing radioactive waste.

Tom McGuire, who heads the project, told Reuters that his team had been working on fusion energy at Lockheed’s Skunk Works program for the past four years, but decided to go public with the news now to recruit additional partners in industry and government to support their work.




Last year, while speaking at Google’s Solve for X program, Charles Chase, a research scientist at Skunk Works, described Lockheed’s effort to build a trailer-sized fusion power plant that turns cheap and plentiful hydrogen (deuterium and tritium) into helium plus enough energy to power a small city.

“It’s safe, it’s clean, and Lockheed is promising an operational unit by 2017 with assembly line production to follow, enabling everything from unlimited fresh water to engines that take spacecraft to Mars in one month instead of six,” Evan Ackerman wrote in a post about Chase’s Google talk on Dvice.

The key breakthrough involves using a “magnetic bottle” to contain the vast amount of heat, which rises into the hundreds of millions of degrees, created by the nuclear reaction. Containing and controlling the staggering levels of heat and pressure involved has hampered countless previous efforts to use fusion for generating electricity. The challenges associated with controlling the heat and pressure created by nuclear fusion has been especially difficult at smaller scales, which makes Lockheed’s claimed breakthrough all the more impressive.

“By containing this reaction, we can release [the heat] in a controlled fashion to create energy we can use,” Lockheed said in a statement. “The heat energy created using this compact fusion reactor will drive turbine generators by replacing the combustion chambers with simple heat exchangers. In turn, the turbines will then generate electricity or the propulsive power for a number of applications.”

Lockheed said in a statement that it would build a pilot fusion reactor in the next year.

If it works, the world will be a different place.

But in the meantime the emphasis should remain on the word “if.”

YMix wrote:Don't worry, we'll manage to turn it into bigger and better weapons before you can say "This wasn't supposed to happen".

Typhoon wrote:

YMix wrote:Don't worry, we'll manage to turn it into bigger and better weapons before you can say "This wasn't supposed to happen".

The weapons already exist.

It's the controlled aspect that's proven to be far more difficult.

YMix wrote:The other way around.

Typhoon wrote:It would be good to see the cliche that

"nuclear fusion is the power generation method of the future . . .

and always will be."

finally proven wrong.

"Modifying the most common type of experimental reactor might finally make fusion power feasible"

Sidebar: other alternative fusion energy technologies under development

Typhoon wrote:Science Mag | Mystery company blazes a trail in fusion energy



Plasma "smoke ring".

China's nuclear fusion machine just smashed Germany's hydrogen plasma record

Just last week, we reported that Germany’s revolutionary nuclear fusion machine managed to heat hydrogen gas to 80 million degrees Celsius, and sustain a cloud of hydrogen plasma for a quarter of a second. This was a huge milestone in the decades-long pursuit of controlled nuclear fusion, because if we can produce and hold onto hydrogen plasma for a certain period, we can harness the clean, practically limitless energy that fuels our Sun.

Now physicists in China have announced that their own nuclear fusion machine, called the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), has produced hydrogen plasma at 49.999 million degrees Celsius, and held onto it for an impressive 102 seconds.

[...]

Using shaped laser pulses -- ultrashort, tuned bursts of coherent light -- might make it possible to nudge atoms in a deuterium/tritium molecule close enough to fuse, according to a new study. Researchers at Rice University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Chile suggested that quantum-controlled fusion may provide a possible new path toward the production of energy through nuclear fusion.

YMix wrote:

China's nuclear fusion machine just smashed Germany's hydrogen plasma record

Just last week, we reported that Germany’s revolutionary nuclear fusion machine managed to heat hydrogen gas to 80 million degrees Celsius, and sustain a cloud of hydrogen plasma for a quarter of a second. This was a huge milestone in the decades-long pursuit of controlled nuclear fusion, because if we can produce and hold onto hydrogen plasma for a certain period, we can harness the clean, practically limitless energy that fuels our Sun.

Now physicists in China have announced that their own nuclear fusion machine, called the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), has produced hydrogen plasma at 49.999 million degrees Celsius, and held onto it for an impressive 102 seconds.

[...]