Yes. And then we could make artifical coal and gas burning plants that provide electricity and put new carbon dioxide into the air keeping the planet nice and toasty warm and giving us a an endless supply of fuel to synthesize using the free fusion energy. And then we could put windmills on our cars too!
I don’t want to watch the video at work. Is he talking about regular fusion or cold fusion? If the former, is there really a benefit over fission?
It’s not cold fusion…no idea where some of the comments in this thread are coming from (didn’t read the other thread though). It’s simply an alternative to the tokomak fusion concept that uses dense plasma fusion instead.
Is everyone saying that Lockheed Martin has come back and said that this is not something they are working on, and that the guy who is doing the video doesn’t work for them or is a spokesman for Skunk Works?
While there have certainly been funding issues for fusion research over the years, the primary showstoppers seem to be the technical issues with plasma stability, maintaining confinement at fusion conditions, and bremsstrahlung losses in conventional inertial and magnetic confinement fusion. Every decade or some effort has focused on some novel way of achieving the orders of magnitude improvements, such as RF heating, electrostatic confinement, novel nested toroid configurations, et cetera. Sometimes these result in incremental improvements in the state of the art, but often they reveal unappreciated complexities in plasma dynamics and end up being abandoned. Muon-catalyzed fusion (the original “cold fusion”) seemed very promising for a long time until the alpha sticking problem (where muons would stick to an alpha particle, limiting their usefulness to catalyzing fewer reactions before decaying than the energy they produce) was generally regarded as a fundamental limitation (though there are still a few groups working on a means to reduce the alpha sticking rate).
Part of the issue is that we have historically lacked the computational power to simulate the highly non-linear plasma dynamics that occur in an “equilibrium” state of plasma at fusion temperatures. For an area like solar physics it is generally sufficient to represent the turbulent behavior in a statistical fashion, but for very fine grained control of a net equilibrium plasma you actually have to be able to simulate the behavior of the plasma and the electromagnetic field it generates (and the interaction with the confinement field) with very high fidelity including perturbations. Only in about the last ten years has that kind of computing ability and the systems to manage it become readily available. Even so, it doesn’t resolve the fundamental physical issues with stability and transport control that make maintaining a stable plasma field so difficult.
Fusion seems like it ought to be easy; we can see it in the sky, and we can produce it in terrestrial conditions in brief, destructive flashes. We can even build devices that will produce fusion products on a bench top scale, albeit at energy negative levels. But the ability to actually maintain fusion conditions at a output level that is useable for power generation is frustratingly evasive. More research funds do mean more avenues that one can pursue (at least in theory) but the basic technical hurdles remain.
However, one needs to appreciate the fact that all this synthesizing of fuels “out of the air” requires considerable work, and all work produces waste heat, e.g. energy at a low enough thermal differential that it is not practical to extract it. In general, the faster your process, the more waste heat it produces. We currently only worry about waste heat at a very local level, e.g. a power plant heating a river or lake that it uses for cooling. If you suddenly have a massive effort to synthesize hundreds of petajoules of fuel per day, the waste heat is going to also scale with that, potentially becoming a regional or even global issue if the waste heat generation exceeds the Earth’s capacity for radiative emissivity. Just having a new energy source is not a magic fix-all for current energy problems.
The benefits of fusion are [ul]
[li]Cheap, nontoxic, and available energy source (deuterium, lithium, boron)[/li][li]High specific yield for footprint (presuming it can be scaled to a reasonable size)[/li][li]High thermal gradient (thermodynamically more efficient)[/li][li]Little or no radioactive residue[/li][/ul]
The downsides depend upon the method used. Neutron-producing fusion (D-D, D-T) has significant material science and maintenance issues as well as the obvious radiation hazards. Aneutronic fusion (D-[SUP]3[/SUP]He, [SUP]3[/SUP]He-[SUP]3[/SUP]He, p-[SUP]7[/SUP]Li, p-[SUP]11[/SUP]B) have much higher triple product requirements and yield less overall energy.
Stranger
There’s been plans for personal fusion plants for a long time: Mini Nuclear Power Plants Could Power 20,000 Homes (Update)
Everyone is saying there is no other indication that Lockheed has made a breakthrough in fusion technology outside of this video clip.
No kidding.
Imagine Philip D. Reed making this statement??
It makes one question the scale of the project. Is this desktop science or an energy revolution?
A quick Google search turns up a lot of links on it…such as this.
I don’t know how realistic their time table is (seemed overly optimistic to me), but I don’t see any reason to doubt that LM is working on a system of it’s own at it’s Skunk Works facility…that seems reasonable to me, at least on brief inspection.
That looks like another article that is based only on the video linked in the OP. There’s a ton of links to popular science and free energy sites that all go back to that brief video. Now it’s possible Lockheed has something up their sleeve, and this is some sort of feeler to gauge responses, but it sounds more like Charles Chase is a spokesman for wishful thinking.
Extremely cheap energy will make hydrogen fuel cell-powered cars feasible.
I’m pretty sure that they meant megawatts (MW), because I can’t possibly see why anybody would be so eager to get a 100 milliwatt fusion reactor (for “commercial purposes”, and generate all of our energy in a couple more decades).
Also, if you are talking about a white LED, 100 mW (milliwatts) isn’t enough for even two - and that is the tiny low-power indicator kind (max current 20 mA typical, ~3.5 V for white LEDs = 70 mW, although you can run them on lower current).
ETA: See XT’s post, which gets the terms correct, if because it spells out megawatt.
That is a fission-powered plant, and it is hardly “personal” size, insofar as it is the size of a small grain silo and provides 25 MW of power.
All of the links I find point back to the same guy, and indeed, the same presentation, which again, has essentially zero technical content to evaluate either feasibility or the proposed timeline. More than likely, this is a business development person spinning out exaggerated tales of novel, revolutionary technology in order to get the interest of investors for other projects, as BD people are wont to do.
Having a ready supply of hydrogen is only one small aspect of a practical hydrogen fuel economy. You also need infrastructure (transportation, storage, handling), safety training and regulation, and economically viable and practical fuel cells technology. Currently, hydrogen fuel cells cost around US$50/kW and the best volumetric energy density of about seven times less than gasoline. Hydrogen fuel cells also don’t function well if at all below about 5 °C, making them impractical for cold climes without some kind of additional on-board heating. So, even having some kind of stationary non-pollution power supply is not the magic cure-all for world energy demands the way this guy or others claims it to be.
Stranger
The saying used to be “Fusion power has been 10 years away for the last 30 years”.
I recall it as being 20 years away. In any case, it’s considerably less BS than before. Originally that statement was pie in the sky based on nothing but wishful thinking.
Today we have working reactors, just not ones that are feasible (that generate more power than they use, for example). We know what problems need to be solved, and we have promising avenues for solutions.
I’m 55 and I do expect to see fusion reactors in my lifetime, but just barely. Fingers crossed!
Yup. I remember years (decades) ago reading Jerry Pournelle’s “A Step Farther Out”, where he essentially says that with enough energy and technology, we can overcome any of the looming issues that are limits to continued growth (of population, economy, etc).
I do remember wondering what the heck we’d do with all the waste heat from using that energy. But I guessed that Jerry would say that if we have enough energy and technology, we can solve THAT problem too!
There is a fundamental thermodynamic limitation here, though, which is that if you are producing waste heat you have to dump it into a low temperature reservoir. Ultimately, the only permanent and sustainable reservoir is the sky, and if you are exceeding Earth’s capacity to reject heat the only solution is to either increase the effective emissivity (i.e. make Earth a better radiator) or move your heat-generating processes somewhere else.
Stranger
You left out the part about fusion reactions being driven: there would be no realistic way for a fusion generating plant to run out of control and melt down or explode (though I have heard that fission plants could be designed to a similar type of controlled reaction).
This is a much bigger problem than most people realize. The intense radiation from the reaction – especially the undirectable neutrons – would almost certainly degrade the confinement system (superconducting electromagnets) very quickly, which would be an enormous expense to maintain and replace.
Whoooosh!
Pournelle’s colleague Larry Niven anticipated this problem in his “Known Space” millieu. The Pierson’s Puppeteers are, in this setting, an ancient star-faring race of considerable technological advancement. The progressively solved the technological problems of energy generation, eventually mastering an unspecified total matter conversion technology. Clean, easily fueled, totally free of waste products except for one: waste heat.
Quoting from Ringworld:
So, apparently one solution is astronomical engineering. That does seem like the scale of solution needed to solve that final waste problem.