Lockheed says makes breakthrough on Fusion Energy project

a reply to: ScientificRailgun

Wish granted.
13 ft mech

They call it Kuratas and it only 1.4 million plus the cost of implanting the fusion drive and weapons. Say 30 million for development, sell em to the us for 15 million a pop...retire with umbrella drinks and butt naked freaks.

a so last year

www.popsci.com... on-power-could-happen-sooner-you-think

originally posted by: MystikMushroom
Well the in Star Trek, The USS Enterprise (Galaxy Glass) uses fusion reactors to power it's impulse engines for sub-light speeds. We may someday be using some kind of fusion reactor ourselves.

The scientist behind the Lockheed announcement was directly inspired by Star Trek.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering at Pennsylvania State University, McGuire obtained a Ph.D. in aeronautical and astronautical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He says his original inspiration to study aerospace engineering came from watching “Star Trek” movies with his mother and father.

Good job Star Trek, good job science fiction!

The nice thing about fusion reactors is they can be small and power towns

Less grid power lines to build around the country.

Right now there are millions of tons of aluminum hanging from towers crossing the US just to run power from towns to cities.

The power losses from all these grid lines is about 10% of the power generated in the US.

Interesting that this shows up only 5 days after the E-Cat announcement.

Like the stealth when it was revealed, I'd bet they already had this for at least a decade. There were two or three companies subcontracting on this stuff since the late 1990s. (At least by what I could find by digging on the internet, and going on the most plausible information sources.)

I knew this would be coming. I said it in the other posts about the fancy new lasers that the "special sauce" wasn't the physics behind the lasing, but the power supply. You can't push the watts needed to cut through a foot of metal in a few seconds and do so repeatedly while having it portable unless you come up with something better than internal combustion (needs lots of fuel) or existing nuclear fission technologies (just doesn't package well when scaling down).

So they actually revealed the "ace"? If implemented fully it puts the US/NATO ahead again in the arms race. With the lasers they're talking about, missiles could be sweeped from the sky. Now that such news is out, I wonder what Russia and China are doing to catch up? (Or did this news get released because we found out they're already doing so?)

a reply to: Nicorette

One of my bestest most favorite birthday gifts ever was a Star Trek Next Gen Phaser TV remote. Complete with authentic Lights and sounds, it inspired me to change commercials often.

Just saying.

Can I get one of these for my Delorean?

Depending on how long they have had these reactors, they were probably developed at the Idaho Falls secure testing site.
Apparently the "lithium" technology can't be easily reverse engineered into a weapon.
It probably doesn't use your uncle Bobs centrifuge design from the 60's.

a reply to: Thorneblood

All. Of. My. Want.

The threat of thread drifting aside, if Lockheed really has a fusion reactor in the works, this could change the world in all the ways we've already discussed and more.

Maybe build a few hundred of them, wire them in series and make the most powerful electro magnet ever?!

I wonder if that would distort space time?

a reply to: MystikMushroom

Stand too close it'd suck the iron right out of your blood.

a reply to: ANNED

Definitely. It says in the article they see their prototype reactor as being able to provide enough juice for 80,000 people which is most counties, small cities, or towns in the US. To say nothing of remote places where it is hard to get electricity, like Nepal or the Andes.

Theres a production facility/ assembly line already being built in VA!(fact) told from someone who was in/down there working on it . said about the size of a SUV Cold nuclear reactors this is why theres a balance of power struggle in various Countries and ebola in the US(fact) pay attention to the Material suppliers for this project thier stocks about to go thru the roof .


SIT UP STRAIGHT AND PAY ATTENTION.

This is fantastic news and a real game changer. This is the kind of renewable energy that will definitely be released. It keeps everybody dependent on the system and while continuing to make energy corporations massive profits. But, we get clean, renewable energy which makes me extremely happy.

There's no chance on earth this will be allowed to power private vehicles though. It'll indirectly power our vehicles by recharging the vehicles main battery, that's it. No way does it make sense to have everyday citizens driving around with a nuclear reaction under the hood lol!

Battery technology will continue to improve too.

If I was Elon Musk, I'd be getting in touch with Electron Power Systems (blatantly had their reactor prototype on the web), EMC2 Inc. (also working on reactors, but one I'd consider less optimal - the related tech/knowhow would still be very useful though), and the third which I can't recall but I think was a spinoff of Zenith. (Company that did test bench equipment and CRT power supplies, but some other stuff in high-power switching and industrial transformers. May have prior work with Fermilab too, as they were close geographically.) If they can come up with a more compact reactor, Tesla would have the ideal chassis and power management system to run off of it. May not be a time-traveling Delorean, but it'd be an achievement to have a very-clean fusion powered supercar that doesn't really need any refill but once a year.

BTW, those are the 3 which I've did some occasional reading on and thought they were fairly legit. Guys running them had backgrounds that checked out and stuff like Arxiv papers if you wanted to dig. Combine their work under one roof, and I don't see why they wouldn't be able to make fusion work. Also they contracted to DOD/DOE and both Lockheed and Grumman to varying degrees. I'd think that should be a reasonable clue for this kind of thing.

So no big jump when Lockheed was working with 3 companies strong in this stuff, and likely cherry-picked or cross-trained people with them for Skunkworks.

There was some other stuff I glanced across in the past, but it was either too sketchy, stayed tangental (ball lightning/Tesla stuff), or 404'd (no longer on web). But a lot of the fusion stuff does go back to the 1990s at least. I wasn't exactly doing hard research on this, but had an occasional curiousity bug as I think fusion would be achievable with the right approach.

No hacks finding that info btw. All stuff was browsable through search engines. Just going down 10 pages, or following links, being peculiar with search terms, etc. Then cross checking college alumni sites, research sites, etc. (Good way to filter out most charlatans and hucksters.)

Still, I doubt we'll see much of this on the civilian side for a long time unless some non-U.S. companies are also on the right track and showing signs of pushing it into production.

Tell me how far away I need to be when there's a containment breach, and I'm on board.

Hopefully this will be exponentially better than nuclear, but let's not delude ourselves about the risks that come with any energy source. A contained sun shouldn't be taken lightly.

originally posted by: AugustusMasonicus

Can I get one of these for my Delorean?

The old one used a PEPC for the flux capacitor god knows what the new design uses?

a reply to: dava6711

Agreed. A "consumer" grade nuclear reactor will likely never be sold or produced. Although I'd love to have one for myself. I would be a heck of a start to my secret underground supervillain lair! It would be the centerpiece of my "abandoned missile silo turned villain hideout". Just throw up some rope lights, you know, jazz the place up.

A wild tangent appears! Where did you come from? Let's continue.

With the ever increasing research into better battery technology, the implications of a viable, compact fusion reactor could lead to a second technological revolution.

originally posted by: Psynic
A vehicle with it's own fusion reactor would still need to have it's own electrical generating system and batteries as well as an electric motor for propulsion.

A vehicle with its own fusion reactor would still be a strong neutron emitter with lethal dosages close up, unless they got preposterously good confinement that they could do p-B11.

It won't be any smaller than current applications of fission reactors, namely ships.

Note that there are a number of non-tokamak fusion startups:

* Tri-Alpha Energy
* Helion Energy
* Lawrenceville Plasma Physics
* EMC2
* General Fusion

Tri-Alpha, Helion and Lockheed are somewhat similar in having variants of 'mirror' or field-reversed configuration machines with tricks for confinement. Helion works in a non-stationary cyclic mode, shooting I guess sort of a plasma-blob collider. Tri Alpha Energy patent: www.google.com...


LPP (the lowest funded, pretty much a one man operation) uses some electrostatic focusing.

EMC2 is a Polywell machine; the Lockheed device has some similarities as well.

General Fusion is a really off the wall proposal, using literally sound waves in molten lead for compression.


If you follow the money, it seems that Tri-Alpha has the most input into it, though that may be a result of the charisma and influence of the founders more than technology. Each one of these has identified a trick or tweak to ameliorate the problems of known, open, conventional techniques. Some of the concepts might be usefully combined.

I'd say that Tri-Alpha, Helion, EMC2 and Lockheed are the most compatible and closer to the mainstream of magnetic fusion--and have the highest chance of working.