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Skunk Works Reveals Compact Fusion Reactor Details

aviationweek.com

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Re: Skunk Works Reveals Compact Fusion Reactor Details

#111

Post by startupfounder »

"The early reactors will be designed to generate around 100 MW and fit into transportable units measuring 23 X 43 ft."[0]

These reactors will be similar to the Nimitz-class aircraft carriers and potentially only require refueling every 25 years through a process known as ROH.[1]

100MW capacity in the size of an international shipping container? The implications of this are massive if this technology can be brought to scale, and that is the key term - SCALE.

The cost of solar is plummeting and by the time fusion technology can produce 10% of our energy demand the cost of solar will be heading to $1/Watt, battery storage will be competitive and that is hard to beat even if the footprint is only a fraction of a solar farm.

[0] http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals-compa... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimitz-class_aircraft_carrier#...

Re: Skunk Works Reveals Compact Fusion Reactor Details

#112

Post by regularfry »

adamzerner wrote: post #87

I don't know much about fusion. It seems that the breakthrough they're talking about is that reactors are ~10x smaller. Why is this a big deal? Square footage is plentiful. I thought the problems are safety and how much energy it could produce.

Take a look at the footprint of ITER. It surprised me how massive the thing is planned to be. That's the competition.

Re: Skunk Works Reveals Compact Fusion Reactor Details

#113

Post by jerf »

mrisse wrote: post #100

From the article: Lockheed shares fell 0.6 percent to $175.02 amid a broad market selloff. Shouldn't the market be a little more excited about this?

It's dangerous to read the market's mind, but my guess is that there isn't enough information for anyone to believe that this is anything more than a PR puff piece.

As much as I want to believe it I can't find any evidence myself, either. At this point I'm pretty much at the "show me the over-unity reactor" phase. There's so many research paths to fusion right now that are all "promising", but until one of them actually builds something that works in the real world I'm not personally interested in hearing any more vague promises.

By all means fund them and keep working on them! I'm just not interested in the PR pieces any more. Give me a report about how it's working.

Re: Skunk Works Reveals Compact Fusion Reactor Details

#114

Post by jobu »

regularfry wrote: post #104
nerdy wrote: post #70

I know there are some very smart people at skunk works who've done incredible things in the past but humans have cried wolf so many times on fusion it's sort of hard to just accept until they've actually built a working reactor, shown it and had it independently verified.

Fusion physicists I know are very sceptical that this design can work. It's a variant on a known design with a known problem: the plasma leaks out of the ends of the magnetic containment. It's also unclear why Lockheed would be publicising it this way at this point, unless it's a naked ploy for more funding from the DoD, and an attempt to bring in money (and possibly pressure) from non-classified sources. That being…

From the Aviation Week article that flexie linked: "The team acknowledges that the project is in its earliest stages, and many key challenges remain before a viable prototype can be built."

They don't actually say it, but it sounds like they've only got computer models to work with at this point. Not very likely that they've actually cracked it.

Re: Skunk Works Reveals Compact Fusion Reactor Details

#115

Post by patrickk »

mrisse wrote: post #100

From the article: Lockheed shares fell 0.6 percent to $175.02 amid a broad market selloff. Shouldn't the market be a little more excited about this?

Most likely algorithms trading on technical indicators, nothing to do with this news. Short term price movements are almost total noise.

Re: Skunk Works Reveals Compact Fusion Reactor Details

#116

Post by Ygg2 »

bluedino wrote: post #110

Then the dilemma becomes: Does the USA share this with other countries? Or do we keep our clean, plentiful power for ourselves, become energy independent, have clean skies, and keep (exploit?) this technological advantage over the rest of the developed world for the next 20-30 years?

> have clean skies

You can't have clean skies if everyone else is polluting. That is what makes pollution such a hard problem to solve. Even if USA cuts its pollution to zero, China alone can make up the difference.

But yeah, having access to this technology for everyone would be a serious game changer.

Re: Skunk Works Reveals Compact Fusion Reactor Details

#117

Post by hugogee »

bluedino wrote: post #110

Then the dilemma becomes: Does the USA share this with other countries? Or do we keep our clean, plentiful power for ourselves, become energy independent, have clean skies, and keep (exploit?) this technological advantage over the rest of the developed world for the next 20-30 years?

What dilemma? Its a no brainer we use it for free and have the rest of the world use it at a $profit$, while getting to enjoy that very same clean(er) air. But as history has shown it is probably too good to be true. Fusion that is.

Edit: We are all riding the same spaceship... Its a serious flaw in thinking 'us vs them' when we are beginning to experiene some of the results in climate change.

Re: Skunk Works Reveals Compact Fusion Reactor Details

#118

Post by fsloth »

mrisse wrote: post #100

From the article: Lockheed shares fell 0.6 percent to $175.02 amid a broad market selloff. Shouldn't the market be a little more excited about this?

I was wondering the same thing. People have claimed to have working fusion reactors just in a few years if they only could have some more funding for so long that anyone who claims to offer a production capable fusion reactor loses their credibility completely until they actually produce one.

Skunkworks have as an organization an amazing engineering track record of implementing ground breaking technologies. I wonder what their current status is. Anyone have an inside scoop whether their game is still as sharp?

Re: Skunk Works Reveals Compact Fusion Reactor Details

#119

Post by quink »

bhhaskin wrote: post #64
everyone wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing thats a typo

That is a pretty big typo if it is.

Just in case someone skipped out on the relevant day of middle school science, it should be 'fission'.

The difference is that fission is taking heavy elements, breaking them apart and using the released energy. Radioactivity, Thorium, Uranium, Plutonium, all the yucky stuff. Research has been going on for decades into making these reactors safer, and with breeder reactors and modern conventional designs that appears to have been achieved. Nevertheless, they appear on their way out anyway.

Fusion fuses together light isotopes and uses the energy thus released - they basically do what the sun does. And are clean. For various definitions of clean.

And if you're wondering how they are the complete opposite yet both work, it all pivots around iron. Copying from Wikipedia on iron:

> Its abundance in rocky planets like Earth is due to its abundant production by fusion in high-mass stars, where the production of nickel-56 (which decays to the most common isotope of iron) is the last nuclear fusion reaction that is exothermic.

And yes, that means that everything in this universe will one gigayear end up right at the pivot between fission and fusion, ever onwards oscillating further towards it. Our universe is ever tending tiwards irony. A pivot that we're probably going to see humanity go through too, but in a different way. Hopefully sooner rather than later.

Re: Skunk Works Reveals Compact Fusion Reactor Details

#120

Post by ZenoArrow »

Tloewald wrote: post #39
ck2 wrote: post #26

Very cheap energy means cheap war and lots of it. This could be bad.

Our main reason for war right now is scarce energy. Cheap clean electricity means no-one needs to care about the Middle East for starters — most of the fighting there is superpower proxy fighting — e.g. Assad would be gone if not backed by Russia and China, so no Islamic State. No Oil, no Iraq war x2. No oil, no Hugo Chavez for that matter.

Hugo Chavez is dead, but I agree with the rest of what you say.
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