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Lockheed Martin Developing Compact Fusion

sfsuphysics said:
Man that link on the main page looks like it was made by the same person who makes the colorful pamphlets to get people to want to work there.

That said, I'm going to stay skeptical about fusion that can create power, too many odds and ends to worry about. Ignoring what fuel they're using for the moment. How are they going to get energy out of it? They'll contain it to keep the hot plasma from cooling, well how do you get the hot plasma to heat then? Are they going to simply go by the gamma ray photons that are created in the process? How effective are gamma ray photons at being a "heat source" they're fairly energetic to the point that they'd more likely split water apart than they would heat it, to turn it to steam to spin a turbine.
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I wasn't clear on this either. If the magnetic containment field prevents heat from reaching the outer vessel, what is the method of heat transfer? Or is it adjustable where a certain amount of heat can be let through, depending on field strength?
 
JeffDC said:
I wasn't clear on this either. If the magnetic containment field prevents heat from reaching the outer vessel, what is the method of heat transfer? Or is it adjustable where a certain amount of heat can be let through, depending on field strength?
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Energy transfer happens in many forms.

First neutrons are not affected by magnetic bottles (because, SURPRISE, they are neutral in charge.) And they are super heated. The problem is these same super heated neutrons can cause considerable damage and eventually cause unstable isotopes leading to radioactivity. (Usually Beta Decay)

Second, Photons are released when atoms combine. They can be gamma to infrared. Any higher energy (ie: Gamma) band can be converted to a lower one using stokes shift. This is the basis for a lot of LED lights today. Problem is efficiency drops the more of a frequency shift you perform.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stokes_shift

I'm not sure the plasma can be contained, smaller field with less pressures or not. The pressures are needed to maintain fusion reaction.

Imagine it this way, imagine 4 long blocks laying flat end to end on a table to form a line. This represents a plasma stream. Now push on both ends of those blocks (A force creating instability) Eventually the middle two blocks will buckle (upward, or sideways) To surrounding blocks collapse inward sucking on the space where the two inner blocks once were. To push the plasma blocks back down, you have to shove the outer blocks out of the way, which creates it's own problems.

Please see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamics to explain the instability of plasma streams. You have to solve the MHD equations simutaniously to create stability, and that is not an easy feat when you only have a ms to measure to calculate the stability.

This device where a large toroidal current is established (15 megaamperes in ITER) suffers from a fundamental problem of stability. The nonlinear evolution of magnetohydrodynamical instabilities leads to a dramatic quench of the plasma current on a very short time scale, of the order of the millisecond. Very energetic electrons are created (runaway electrons) and a global loss of confinement is finally obtained. A very high energy is deposited on small areas. This phenomenon is called a major disruption.[4] The occurrence of major disruptions in running tokamaks has always been rather high, of the order of a few percent of the total numbers of the shots. In currently operated tokamaks, the damage is often large but rarely dramatic. In the ITER tokamak, it is expected that the occurrence of a limited number of major disruptions will definitively damage the chamber with no possibility to restore the device.
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nakedhand said:
So you are saying that Lockheed Martin is a not a humanitarian project?! But they have done so much of the right kind of death and destruction for us.. surely they will give this technology to the world like Elon Musk gave us the Tesla patents. Surely, it is in the DNA of these people. They don't really like profiting from large scale killing if you ask them in their homes in front of their kids.


Regarding the "news". They claim, and they need five more reactor generations to get anywhere. And we know how these things in fusion usually go.

Here is good article on the subject.
http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals-compact-fusion-reactor-details
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Good Find!
 
Steve said:
or blowing us all up...
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You'd have to worry about that in a fission reactor.

This is fusion.

With this, you wind up atomically welded to something else!

Won't THAT be fun? :D
 
Shit must be getting bad if they're dusting off alien technology from one of their bunkers.
 
tweaked said:
There is a truth in America: Big change can happen when we start throwing defense dollars at a project.

Skunkworks doesn't exactly have a reputation for failure either.

If this was ANYONE else I'd be first in line to be skeptical.
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Exactly. When Skunkworks say they can deliver the future, i damn well believe them. Their track record is unmatched in bleeding edge innovation.
 
wabbitseason said:
There are many people out there who know more about nuclear engineering than I do. You aren't one of them.
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Unless you are a nuclear engineer and you know for a fact I am not (you can rest easy, I'm aerospace), I'm not sure how you can be so sure about that statement. Either way...there's a reason magnetic confinement is getting more attention, probably has something to do with the inefficiencies of inertial confinement that nobody seems to be able to figure out.
 
sfsuphysics said:
Man that link on the main page looks like it was made by the same person who makes the colorful pamphlets to get people to want to work there.

That said, I'm going to stay skeptical about fusion that can create power, too many odds and ends to worry about. Ignoring what fuel they're using for the moment. How are they going to get energy out of it? They'll contain it to keep the hot plasma from cooling, well how do you get the hot plasma to heat then? Are they going to simply go by the gamma ray photons that are created in the process? How effective are gamma ray photons at being a "heat source" they're fairly energetic to the point that they'd more likely split water apart than they would heat it, to turn it to steam to spin a turbine.
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From the Aviation Week article about this very subject:

"The superhot plasma is controlled by strong magnetic fields that prevent it from touching the sides of the vessel and, if the confinement is sufficiently constrained, the ions overcome their mutual repulsion, collide and fuse. The process creates helium-4, freeing neutrons that carry the released energy kinetically through the confining magnetic fields. These neutrons heat the reactor wall which, through conventional heat exchangers, can then be used to drive turbine generators. "
 
wabbitseason said:
Any new ideas in fusion research is good for mankind. We need fusion power.

Though I'm disappointed they went with magnetic confinement. Inertial confinement seems so much more likely to work.
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I thought it weird too, inertial confinement after the first invention always seems to have been relegated to some kids garage's and enthusiasts.. never seemed to have been attempted by you know more serious investment/big scale.

I think the Russian are taking a more realist approach-

http://rt.com/news/196088-russia-hybrid-nuclear-reactor/

Not a new idea, but I think Russia might pull it off..
Also they just finished the nuclear fuel re-processing plant, that makes MOX fuel even though we said it could not 'cause they are broke or whatever' -we where actually the ones that did not do anything because money- apparently we were supposed to also build a MOX fuel plant in the US, maybe I misunderstood.
Russia seems more realist in what to do with the nuclear industry, I don't know I might be wrong.
 
DigitalGriffin said:
That's the problem. Many people don't realize they have to spend days charging massive capacitor banks to fire all these lasers at once to heat a pellet or to super heat plasma in a magnetic bottle.

The problem with each approach is this:

1) The pellet is so small and hard to make the reaction takes more energy then it can generate. (Although they are getting close to breaking even)

2) The tokamak reactors that use magnetic bottles are having a hard time containing the plasma stream. The plasma stream becomes unstable and touches the reactor walls causing an immediate reactor shutdown. They have been trying to offset this effect by making the reactors bigger and bigger allowing for a larger containment vessel safe area for the plasma stream to react. But so far results have NOT been promising.
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hmm.. so this could be used as a super high density energy storage device. your have to charge it up before hand, and even if its not 100% efficient yet, it would probably be safer and smaller than batteries or capacitors.
 
I read somewhere that future nuclear reactor will be size of household water tank. There will be little chance of meltdown.
 
Comixbooks said:
They stopped building F-16s or F-17s or something so they need something else to fall back on.
No need for the jets but recently you would think so.
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Haven't you heard? All we need is the F-35. Anyone who says we could really use those older models because we've got some of the best pilots in the world...can pound sand.
 
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