The main problem I see with the claimed Lockheed fusion device is that it’s still using D-T fusion. D-T fusion produces most of its energy output in the form of high-energy neutrons. To get useful energy out of those you’ll still need a steam generator and turbine system, and those aren’t small or cheap anyway. Tritium doesn’t exist naturally, so you need to make it. Presumably they’ll be using a lithium blanket to absorb the neutrons and generate heat and tritium in the process, but that still leaves you with the problem of the entire inside of the reactor being exposed to a high neutron flux. A few years of that and all the structural parts are brittle and radioactive, so you’re still generating a fair amount of radioactive waste from your reactor.
From his Linkedin page, Mr. Chase appears to be a business development person. It is clear from his discussion that he is not a plasma physicist (due to a number of subtle technical errors in his explanation) and he spends about three quarters of the presentation either talking about the general benefits of fusion, criticizing ITER, and spinning out a tale of how this device is going to stop global warming by 2045. The presentation contains almost zero actual technical content, and certainly not enough to evaluate the feasibility and veracity of the claims; there are no metrics other than β, no basis of estimate statement for the proposed timeline, no discussion of the technical hurdles that have to be accomplished or project milestones to achieve the stated timeline, and not even a clear explanation of the mechanics of the device.
From what I can tell, the “brand new way of generating fusion that’s very suitable for a very compact form factor,” is some variation on a reverse field pinch using a cylindrical rather than a toroidal chamber. Since the plasma transport effects and and instabilities in the magnetic confinement field are exacerbated by having a terminal (rather than continuous) path, it is difficult to see how this is easier than toroidal confinement methods. Heating the plasma to fusion temperatures with radio (I’m guessing microwave) sources was a major source of research in the 'Sixties and 'Seventies; unfortunately, as the plasma becomes hotter and denser it screens and absorbs the incident energy, creating local convection cells that destabilize the confinement field and regular flow of the plasma, resulting in turbulence and irregular confinement. The attempts were made in the early 'Eightes (with the advent of sufficiently powerful real time control capability) to create chambers that would sequence the heating at resonant frequencies using ‘bumpy’ toroids, but the plasma could not be maintained at a stable resonance condition and that line of research seems to have been abandoned entirely.
The only Tom McGuire I can find relating to plasma and fusion physics is a 2007 PhD graduate from MIT whose thesis was on inertial electrostatic confinement fusion, which is a very different type of fusion research. It is entirely possible that this is the same physicist who has switched to field reversed confinement fusion, but I can’t find any reference to papers by this researcher published in peer reviewed journals about this line of research. There are plenty of research labs working on field reversed confinement of various methods including Princeton, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Washington, Sandia Labs, and various other universities and labs around the world. It is possible that this researcher has come up with some simple and novel form of confinement and heating working in isolation with a small team in the last five years that has been overlooked by thousands of other physicists and engineers working in the field over the last fifty years but without more detail about the specific of the confinement method I’d have to call that highly unlikely. More likely, you have a bizdev guy spinning the typical tales of wonderous new technology in order to drum up interest in other business.
Stranger
I’m not calling him a fraud. The available record just doesn’t indicate the monumental technology change that he alludes to in the video. It sounds like jet pack speculation to me so far.
Had the US put up photovoltaic panels for the past 50 years with all the money we are wasting on fusion research, we might have something to show for it. http://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/reframe/373 Like $30 billion worth of solar cell farms.
That is not to say I don’t approve of pure science, I do. But this isn’t a project for electricity, it is a military project loosely disguised as science to produce electricity, and have as a by-product a large centralized very expensive steam generating plant that will be privately owned.
Incidentally, the Saudis are going for solar power to the tune of $100 billion. Saudi Arabia Makes Big Bet On Solar
PV solar power generation has a massive footprint per specific power output, is only usable in areas where the mean daytime solar irradiance exceeds ~200 W/m[SUP]2[/SUP] (i.e. lower latitudes with minimal cloud cover), and has significant maintenance and replacement costs. As a supplement to existing power generation systems in some areas it is a consideration, but to suggest it as a replacement for all other forms of power generation is absurd. And PV arrays from fifty years ago had only a fraction of the efficiency of modern PV systems. High temperature solar thermal is actually more efficient as a power generation system, and is well suited to more compact arrays in remote desert locations.
Also, citing an alternative fusion website as your source does not improve the credibility of your argument.
I should hope they are. Saudi Arabia is in a nearly ideal geographical location to use generate solar power, and once their oil reserves run low they have little other indigenous industry to sustain their economy. However, we’ll see how determined they are when the first of the massive sandstorms that the Arabian peninsula is known for sweeps through and does significant damage to their solar farms.
Stranger
The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor is a multinational project involving European Union (EU), India, Japan, China, Russia, South Korea and the United States. That would be a very unusual way to conduct a military project.
And what exactly would be the military application? Nuclear reactors seem to be sufficient for aircraft carriers and submarines for the foreseeable future. And the military already has fusion bombs; it’s much easier to make a fusion bomb than a stable fusion reactor.
If I told you that I would have to kill you. Every technical advance in human history has been put to military use. Usually before any other use.
And many technical advances wouldn’t have taken place at all if it weren’t for their military uses. So?
The point being that the US government funds technology projects primarily for their military and diplomatic effects, not out of generosity. We are being sold these projects based on their supposed civilian applications and that isn’t really honest. NIF in Livermore is not going to yield civilian uses, it is research on fusion for military applications.
Historically speaking, you cold say the same thing about computers, jet engines and teflon frying pans - they were all designed for military purposes. Hell, I’m sure that 90% of what humanity know about metalworking comes from the desire to make better weapons. It doesn’t matter. Once something is invented, it stays invented. It doesn’t matter what it’s invented for.
Bells, statues, jewelry would be more pertinent I think.
One of my points remains that we are not being told and persuaded to go forward on the basis that it is a weapons project, which NIF most certainly is. The other is that all energy on Earth comes from either fusion or gravity. Even nuclear has uranium (and other elements) created in past fusion reactors. Practically harvesting fusion energy is going to require various forms of wind and solar. Tidal and hydro for gravity.
What you aren’t getting here is that fusion is a power source. It obviously has military applications, in that military things often involve stuff consuming power. But if fusion generators are invented, they will instantly be appropriate for civilian applications.
If they were inventing a supermetal for armor, it could still instantly be used for building bridges. If they invent a super power source for laser weapons, they still have a super power source that can be used in the civilian sphere.
It’s not like they’re inventing a special kind of armor penetrating shaped charge. The military uses of fusion are exactly the same as the civilian ones.
Good comment-incidentally, the USA has a 200 year supply of shale oil (the Green River Oil Shales). If we had a good way to extract it, we would have no oil problems. Venezuela has a similar deposit (the Orinoco Belt); but there is at present to no way to extract it.
And if my grandma had wheels, she would be a streetcar. Let there be no mistake, strip mining hundreds of square miles of land for cheap oil is a bad idea. And that is what exploiting oil shales and tar sands entails; vast swaths of strip mined mountain majesties.
Thing about linear confinement is that terminal plasma leakage can feed through an inductive decelerator that could harvest current directly from the charged stream – possibly enough to offset the cost of fuel (re-)injection. And one of the things they would be looking at with the trailer-sized reactors is an aneutronic reaction, probably using a p+[sup]11[/sup]B (hydrogen-boron) cycle. Boron is not as abundant as hydrogen, but I believe it is quite a bit more common than tritium. Aneutronic fusion (which actually means hugely lower neutron output) means a lot less shielding and a much longer life for the pinch containment vessel.
Interesting technically, but it still sounds pretty much like sky-pie to me. The very first thing we absolutely must do is harvest energy from the most abundant source we have: stop wasting it in boatloads. Improved efficiency where use is intractably necessary, along with economic revision so that we just produce less garbage. Nothing will go farther toward addressing our energy needs than addressing the very level of need itself.
Garbage is virtually all recyclable, or can be turned into energy through pyrolysis. We just need to recycle everything or turn it into fuel through burning.
Yes, but it also creates stability issues with the plasma field. It would be a great concept if your application is a pulse rocket (and this has actually been a proposed application of linear RFP fusion devices) but not so much if it is a power plant where you would like stable power generation.
I’m not saying that the proposed system is unworkable, mind you; only that there is insufficient detail to support the timeline and claims in the presentation, and that there are other reasons to question the credibility. Just because it has the “Lockheed Skunk Works” label on it doesn’t mean it isn’t overhyped.
Stranger
If Lockheed really comes out with a “trailer-sized fusion power plant” – and that’s just the power-a-city size, presumably it could be scaled down to “Mr. Fusion” size for other purposes – that means the U.S. armed forces can have fusion-powered tanks and APCs and jeeps and helicopters that can go years before they need refueling. There might even be potential for fusion-powered “jets” or “rockets,” using the fusion plant to heat a reaction-mass that is not the same as the fuel.
I really want this to be true. If we ever get to the point where a reliable design with these capabilities is rolling off an assembly line we could start terraforming deserts with them. It could solve many of our biggest problems.
But this doesn’t mean it is feasible. How do we decide what portion of our resources to invest in uncertain but potentially trans-formative technologies at the expense of fission systems proven to be able to provide clean base load power, and other proven means of mitigating our energy dilemma, such as improvements in efficiency? It kinda seems like a poor person deciding how much of their income to spend on a mystery lottery that they don’t know the odds of winning.