It’s no secret that our Skunk Works® team often finds itself on the cutting edge of technology. As they work to develop a source of infinite energy, our engineers are looking to the biggest natural fusion reactor for inspiration – the sun. By containing the power of the sun in a small magnetic bottle, we are on the fast track to developing nuclear fusion reactors to serve the world’s ever-growing energy needs.Lockheed Martin
Compact Fusion: It's closer than you think.
ht Ed Rombach, The Rombach Report, in the comments
14 comments:
Skip the PR, I'll believe it when I see it.
Press releases are dubious, especially from a Gov. Contractor that specializes in milking programs like DOE advanced energy research. It would be neat if they succeed. Solve many of human problems in one quick invention. Incredibly hard feat to simply create fusion. Even harder to harness it. Then nearly impossible to control it for any length of time without damaging and destroying the containment. Fusion conditions destroy all matter in the form we know and are familiar with in our human experience. Everything from the hardest metal, corrosion resistant plastics, most durable minerals are turned into vapor if exposed for even a millionth of a second. Magnetic fields are hard to control but if anyone can do it, skunk can.
Skunk Works is very different from a couple of researchers working in a lab somewhere. They have the expertise and the resources if they can show progress.
Why would a company LM come out with something like this if there were not something credible behind it? Angling for government $?
The bit I don't believe is the size issue. To get self-sustaining fusion in nature you need mass. Lots of fusion experiments work with tiny fusion reactions, but unsurprisingly they don't last very long. Anybody can turn the starter motor on an engine to get it to fire. The trick is getting the engine to run on its own.
it's been "right around the corner" for some years now...
It's the vague allusion to "small" and magnetic fields that gets my guff. The problems with magnetic fields, large or small, is that they are expensive to create and tend to allow some leakage. At these temperatures and pressures, even a small leakage is a catastrophe. The reaction itself doesn't create dangerous radiation but the conditions to create the reaction are explosive, lethal, and unimaginable in normal human experience. We're talking about over-powering the fundamental forces of nature that hold everything we know and love together (with magnetism that is created with the weakest of those fundamental forces!).
If only there was a giant, free, abundant fusion reaction a safe distance from earth where people could harness the energy output for use on earth without all the pitfalls of creating the reaction on earth. That sort of invention might actually be able to power life as we know it. Oh wait...
Some of this boils back down to ideology, Dems and Lefties don't see themselves as part of nature and using what exists and improving upon it. They want to re-invent the wheel rather that using the wheel as it exists. Some times that works stupendously well. When trying to subvert the fundamental forces of nature for use in a starbucks coffee maker, not-so-much, a rightist approach of harvesting from nature is probably simpler, safer and cheaper since the power is abundant and not scarce.
"Why would a company LM come out with something like this if there were not something credible behind it? Angling for government $?"
Of course LMT is lobbying for government money. They're a defense contractor. That's what they do. That said, if LMT is working on a high beta fusion reactor, you can take it to the bank that Russia, China, India, Japan and maybe South Korea are working on it as well. My guess is that's why China is going to the moon. They want get Helium3 which is rare on earth but abundant on the lunar surface. H3 is the best possible fuel for fusion.
3-2-1..."Some of this boils back down to ideology, Dems and Lefties don't see themselves as part of nature and using what exists and improving upon it."
This has been Ryan Harris's daily gratuitous dig, brought to you by Dupont tm. If you got the winning time sig, please claim your doorprize.
The fundamental issue regarding the next energy source is who is going to control it. It's about centralization.
"The fundamental issue regarding the next energy source is who is going to control it. It's about centralization."
Maybe compact fusion will make decentralization viable.
"who is going to control it"
Well that explains why you keep posting stuff about it. It fits into the larger theme you've been guiding us through.
"gratuitous dig"
I don't intentionally do ad-hominem. I've a low opinion of the two-party system. It shows in comments. Though I reserve special criticism for Dems because they usually have the high ground in my view, but nearly always turn the high ground into muck and lies and distortions.
Though I reserve special criticism for Dems because they usually have the high ground in my view, but nearly always turn the high ground into muck and lies and distortions.
The Dems are the Brooklyn Dodgers of politics.
(Disclosure: I was a Dodgers fan until they left Brooklyn and abandoned their fans.)
It occurs to me that many won't know the reference to the Dodgers, whose nickname was "the bums." They had a knack for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, much to the chagrin of their fans. It became something of a joke, which is why the nickname "bums."
In Canada, those bums are known as the Toronto Maple Leafs. They start out green, dry up in the fall, and get blown way in winter.
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