Fusion Power: For Real This Time?

[Marshall]

We've heard lots of these stories over the past few years, however this time it comes not from a couple scientists trying to make a name for themselves but from a defense contractor.

This is an invention that could change civilization as we know it: A compact fusion reactor developed by Skunk Works, the stealth experimental technology division of Lockheed Martin. It's the size of a jet engine and it can power airplanes, spaceships, and cities. Skunk Works claims it will be operative in 10 years.

Instead of using the same design that everyone else is using—the Soviet-derived tokamak, a torus in which magnetic fields confine the fusion reaction with a huge energy cost and thus little energy production capabilities—Skunk Works' Compact Fusion Reactor has a radically different approach to anything people have tried before.

sploid.gizmodo.com/lockheed-martins-new-fusion-reactor-design-can-change-h-1646578094

[Eric]

I have been using cold fusion to heat my house for over a year now.
What's all the fuss?

[Marshall]

How's that?

[Eric]

Well the missus is a bit cold. So we start with a rub down, then move to a bit of fusion.

Keeps the house toasty.

[flatandy]

A viable, commercial fusion reactor has been "30 years away" for my entire lifetime. I suspect it still will be when I die.

[mids]

Oct 16, 2014 23:57:44 GMT flatandy said:

A viable, commercial fusion reactor has been "30 years away" for my entire lifetime. I suspect it still will be when I die.

This one's only 10 years away though so they've advanced.


This is very cool. Imagine the world's energy problems being solved by an arms manufacturer. Brilliant.

[Eric]

I thought this was all going to be done with hydrogen power cells?

[Scooby Do]

Oct 16, 2014 23:57:44 GMT flatandy said:

A viable, commercial fusion reactor has been "30 years away" for my entire lifetime. I suspect it still will be when I die.

Depends when you die, maybe.

[rick49]

"Lockheed has a webpage dedicated to its new breakthrough in compact fusion reactors but this write-up in Aviation Week is the most thorough explanation I’ve seen of how it would actually work."

"All of this is merely theoretical; Lockheed thinks/hopes/expects that it’ll have a working model in 10 years, but is that true? Some scientists say, er, no."

"Mahajan called Lockheed’s announcement “poppycock.”

tinyurl.com/k6f74t9

Poppycock. Isn't that what they said about people going to the moon on those big thingies that shoot gas out of the bottom? Isn't that what they said about those new fangled tele-o-phone gadgets that let people talk over long distances? Isn't that what they said about those boxes that have teeny-tiny people inside of them?

[Marshall]

More details here:

aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals-compact-fusion-reactor-details

"Until now, the majority of fusion reactor systems have used a plasma control device called a tokamak, invented in the 1950s by physicists in the Soviet Union. The tokamak uses a magnetic field to hold the plasma in the shape of a torus, or ring, and maintains the reaction by inducing a current inside the plasma itself with a second set of electromagnets. The challenge with this approach is that the resulting energy generated is almost the same as the amount required to maintain the self-sustaining fusion reaction.

The CFR will avoid these issues by tackling plasma confinement in a radically different way. Instead of constraining the plasma within tubular rings, a series of superconducting coils will generate a new magnetic-field geometry in which the plasma is held within the broader confines of the entire reaction chamber. Superconducting magnets within the coils will generate a magnetic field around the outer border of the chamber. “So for us, instead of a bike tire expanding into air, we have something more like a tube that expands into an ever-stronger wall,” McGuire says. The system is therefore regulated by a self-tuning feedback mechanism, whereby the farther out the plasma goes, the stronger the magnetic field pushes back to contain it."

[flatandy]

We appear to have hit another vital landmark. Lawrence Livermore's NIF now appears to have had a net-positive fusion reaction:

www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/12/11/fusion-nuclear-energy-breakthrough/

Obviously, they've not actually harnessed it properly yet. Let alone scaled it. So, as has been true all my life we're still "three decades away" from fusion power stations (you know we'd be a lot closer if we took a wartime tech approach of just trying loads of things and not worrying if they exploded accidentally). But it's progress.

[mids]

Good.

[mids]

Fucking brilliant.

"Omar Hurricane, the chief scientist of the LLNL project"

[perrykneeham]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-63950962

I wonder if this is why the building of new nuclear power stations is so slow. If this is a runner, it's world-changingly important. Consider the geopolitical implications.

[flatandy]

There's a reason it's taken multiple countries to invest only a few billion to get this far. There are way too many vested interest who would like this to take a while longer to happen.

As I said a few posts ago, if we invested the kind of money this warrants, and allowed some trial and error in building power stations that might explode rather than being incredibly risk-averse, I think we could have a power station on stream by 2030 or 2035. Instead it's at least 2050 and probably longer away.

[mids]

Big Green is totally against it.

[mids]

Big Sun. Big Wave. Big Wind. Etc.

[rick49]

can't scoff at skunk works. making large technological leaps is a habit for them. big everything wouldn't like it at all.

[flatandy]

I imagine Big Sun and Big Wind is against fusion. But the worst is the parts of Big Green that opposes this because either

(a) it uses the word nuclear, and the bombardment of alpha particles in the containment chamber creates radioactive waste, and therefore they think it’s evil and polluting and is basically Chernobyl waiting to happen again

and/or

(b) it doesn’t make us learn properly to conserve our resources and planet, and allows us instead to continue actually having an enjoyable life of plenty while not doing harm. When really the important thing would be to stop eating bacon and stops wearing clothes and stop living in heated houses and stop enjoying ourselves as modern consumers with stuff and to abandon capitalist consumerism and agriculture and industry.

And both factions definitely exist. Faction 2 rarely says this explicitly, but they’ve very much out there as you can tell in the other things they say.

[moggyonspeed]

a) is essentially wrong. Fusion does indeed create nuclear waste, but it is typically recyclable in the tens of years rather tens (or hundreds) of thousands. Its carbon footprint once critical is also practically zero but then, of course, the green lobby goes very hard (as they do) on the footprint of the capital equipment employed in plant production.

b) is pointless if we, as a species, do not learn how to properly control our own urges to procreate. In fairness, many experts view the global population as growing between now and the 2050s/2060s, after which they expect it to stabilise and then possibly even fall but, I fear, the continued damage we do to our environment in the interim may be pretty much irreversible by then.