Lockheed Martin's Fusion Reactor

They really aren't units there's massive advances in capacitor banks, or every town and City wants to pump water uphill during the day and let it run down at night or pump air into underground chambers when it's windy and unload when it isn't then you don't have a choice.

Base load, base load, base load? Ever wonder where the solar panels are made? In China with crappy coal fuelling it, shipped out on diesel ships and installed using diesel trucks and electric tools run on gas turbine power.

By all means use fusion to make solar cells, if we want 7 billion people to have a baseload reliable power through renewables though and they're made with fossil fuels well...

Fusion is possibly the most important technology that humans will pursue this century.

I can't go into detail, but I did a very very in devotion study for a government in 2015, had to defend next gen fission against the leading renewables amateurs. The inneficiencies in sitting the energy and then extracting it back out are simply not there, you might get 40%conversion into potential energy and extract at about the same, you do the math.

A constant, expanding base load 24 hours, air conditioning and heating alone.

Plus fusion works at sea, in space and any other number of applications. All the good battery and capacitor tech can still be used in cars and offers and tablets and all sorts of applications.

Wherever they achieve a net positive outcome will become a more omnitiant site than trinity.
 
As I said my report is several years old but that was based on pumping water to a resivoir and then hydroelectric down.

The dinorwig situation id a bit of a special case. But many populated areas have the geology to make that practical and engineering them is very problematic. Also the base load to avoid spikes in the UK, geographically small (small transmission losses) and heading and billing well managed (underfloor heating can use a lot of electricity but can be used to smooth out spikes).

Try that system in desert states in the US where you don't have good resivoirs, need air-conditioning during the day and electric heating at night over massive distances.

I'm all for renewables, the molten salt mirrors in Nevada are amazing, I've seen amazing tidal and wave tech first hand, but it will never power a Google data centre efficiently. Anyway if we can crack fusion the environmental impact is going to be amazing, it's more renewable than revenue renewables, know how much of an old wind turbine gets recycled? Per MW/h I'll happily take a teaspoon of tritium.
 
sublight is back said:
They're racing against the accelerating spread and declining prices of solar panels and wind farms. Time is not on their side. If they already have a classified military version, that will certainly help them get it into ships and other platforms.
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http://dailycaller.com/2017/07/01/solar-panels-generate-300-times-more-toxic-waste-than-nuclear-reactors/
 
Lockheed patent application fusion reactor

https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/24/5a/0c/0b80839516d6f0/US20180047462A1.pdf

Interesting potential uses based on the pictures
 
Lockheed Martin Now Has a Patent For Its Potentially World Changing Fusion Reactor
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http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/19652/lockheed-martin-now-has-a-patent-for-its-potentially-world-changing-fusion-reactor

Here’s Stephen Trimble’s original Tweet on the topic.

https://twitter.com/FG_STrim/status/978284949139808256?s=20

Newly-awarded patent for Skunk Works engineer shows design of compact fusion reactor, with a drawing of an F-16 included as a potential application. Testing of a prototype reactor is underway in Palmdale. (link: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/24/5a/0c/0b80839516d6f0/US20180047462A1.pdf) patentimages.storage.g
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phrenzy said:
Interestingly we're supposed to have a commercial product from Lockheed around now and the fact that they have gone dark Todd be it's all over our they have credited it and are looking at how best to make this trillion dollar a year project roll out without destroying global energy markets...

If anyone has an update on this I'd really appreciate it (something Lockheed in the last 3 months that isn't recycled from earlier presentations)
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Well there will always be a need for other energy sources and hydrocarbons. Given that there is enough natural gas and other energy sources under the US and Canada alone for the next 1000 years, I for one have ZERO SYMPATHY for those energy companies/monopolies/Orgs domestic and foreign who have profited in the Quadrillions while controlling the tap/pipeline. All that while basically destroying the planet and causing many wars along the way. I think and hope that the markets do crash to let in the innovation and new technology take over. esp if scalable to homes, aircraft, ships, neighborhoods, cities. Those energy companies have made obscene profits and really been in complete control over those markets. I don't mind them taking a good beating, just hope the greedy bastards don't try anything foolish to keep their monopoly. There should be a change globally toward new cleaner energy and less harm to the environment and while providing even more energy, hope it works and get it out in the public fast. I also hope to still see hydrocarbon production continue as needed, but hopefully much reduced to more sane levels.
 
Unlike "obscene" and "sane", quadrillions have a defined scale as in 1000 trillion. Unless you are talking Venezuelan Bolivars or Zimbabwean Dollars, I have a hard time seeing that amount of money escaping the attention of politicians (for graft if for no other reason).
 
fredymac said:
Unlike "obscene" and "sane", quadrillions have a defined scale as in 1000 trillion. Unless you are talking Venezuelan Bolivars or Zimbabwean Dollars, I have a hard time seeing that amount of money escaping the attention of politicians (for graft if for no other reason).
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Yeah, no need for hysterics.
 
sferrin said:
fredymac said:
Unlike "obscene" and "sane", quadrillions have a defined scale as in 1000 trillion. Unless you are talking Venezuelan Bolivars or Zimbabwean Dollars, I have a hard time seeing that amount of money escaping the attention of politicians (for graft if for no other reason).
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Yeah, no need for hysterics.
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+1 Perhaps a bit enthusiastic.
 
+2

Nothing matches a good conspiracy-theorist going hysterical, to keep a discussion intelligent and enlightening, and a forum enjoyable.
 
Here’s a small nugget about Lockheed Martin’s fusion program in this article, one of a series, regarding the 75th anniversary of The Skunkworks.

It included images of the compact fusion reactor, an effort Lockheed acknowledged five years ago to develop a breakthrough nuclear powerplant. But Lockheed officials have said ongoing tests on a series of subscale prototype reactors won’t produce data needed for a go-ahead decision until later this year or next year.
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https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/analysis-does-skunk-works-hiring-binge-indicate-sec-449492/
 
For those without an AW account.

Aviation Week was first to report the updates on the CFR program, including that Lockheed Martin is in the process of constructing its newest experimental reactor, known as the T5, on July 19, 2019. The company's legendary California-based Skunk Works advanced projects office is in charge of the effort and had already built four different test reactor designs, as well as a number of subvariants, since the program first became public knowledge in 2014. The War Zone has been following news of this potentially revolutionary program very closely in recent years.

"The work we have done today verifies our models and shows that the physics we are talking about – the basis of what we are trying to do – is sound," Jeff Babione, Skunk Works Vice President and General Manager, told Aviation Week. "This year we are constructing another reactor – T5 – which will be a significantly larger and more powerful reactor than our T4."
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Unfortunately, despite the progress that Skunk Works has made, many questions remain about whether its new reactor concept will be able to succeed whether other designs have failed. Lockheed Martin has initially suggested it might have a viable prototype ready this year or the next.

By 2017, that schedule had gotten pushed back to sometime in the mid-2020s. In his interview with Aviation Week, Babione did not offer any more of a specific timeline for when a practical reactor, which the company refers to as TX, might be ready.
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www.thedrive.com

Skunk Works' Exotic Fusion Reactor Program Moves Forward With Larger, More Powerful Design

This will be the company's fifth major design iteration as it pushes ahead toward building a potentially revolutionary practical prototype.
www.thedrive.com www.thedrive.com
 
IIRC, ever since I was a teenager, fusion has been about to work in the five or ten years...

I would love it if Lockheed's claims were justified, but I have difficulty reconciliating them with the fact that the rest of the world, including the USA, is spending zillions on the ITER Tokamak in France to hopefully start producing plasma by 2025 (not even yet surplus fusion power), and plans to "begin operations" by 2025.
 
In 1976, a somewhat famous study was done by ERDA that describes different scenarios and funding levels to achieve usable fusion.


fusion.png
Ever sinee then, actual investment levels have been below the "Logic 1" line, a.k.a. "Fusion Never".
 
What Hobbes said; I've heard engineers working on fusion projects state that if they were given something like $50 billion a year they could have a commercial reactor ready within the decade (this stuff being stated back around 2013). The low funding has also resulted in projects like ITER which mirror NASA's SLS in that they're almost guaranteed to work, but are by no means time or cost effective, with a science experiment being turned into a major infrastructure project and with international collaboration introducing extra bureaucracy.
 

Skunk Works Halted Nuclear Fusion Effort Before 2021 | Aviation Week Network

Although a 25-person team continued to make progress through 2019, Lockheed Martin decided to shut down the project to focus on core technology.
aviationweek.com aviationweek.com
Ahhhhhhhhhhhh.. so that's happened, bummer. Well, at least we can forget the idea of seeing fusion-powered fighters anytime soon. This serves as a cautionary tale to dispel the notion that every seemingly abandoned program must mean development is being covertly continued in the black world, ready to be unveiled when the world least expects it. as some people tend to assume, when the real reason is a more mundane, disappointing truth.
 
sublight_ said:
Say what? The hot plasma is contained in a magnetic field which does absolutely nothing to shield the heat from reaching the outer container.
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You're also mistaking temperature for energy.

Yes, fusion plasmas are hot. (radiating up in the X-rays, not even UV or white light)

But when the total amount of atoms being fused is measured in micrograms or nanograms, the total energy in joules that the outer container needs to absorb as heat is manageable.

For example, I can build on my desk at home a Farnsworth Fusor. It will achieve fusion via electrostatic and inertial confinement. The electrode grid that provides half of the containment will not melt due to the low number of atoms fusing. Further, the electrode grid absorbs so much heat from the reaction that it's impossible to break even with a Fusor.
 

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