A Breakthrough In American Energy Dominance? U.S. Navy Patents Compact Fusion Reactor

a reply to: dfnj2015

The US air force built a 2.5-megawatt molten salt reactor in the 1950s as part of a program to develop nuclear-powered aircraft engines. The reactors use molten salt rather than water as a coolant, allowing them to create temperatures of over 800 degrees Celsius, nearly three times the temperature of a commercial pressure water nuclear plant. The superhot air had the potential to drive turbines and jet engines and in theory keep a bomber flying at supersonic speed for days. Yan Long, a researcher involved in the Chinese project at the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics, said the Gansu facility might eventually help China develop a thorium-powered warship or aircraft.

from your link perhaps we spend less because we have been ahead of them for 50 years ,us and the EU also have molten salt reactors

en.wikipedia.org... and having a head start it building nuclear bombs and reactors we have a much larger surplus of the nuclear waste they can burn (see yucca mountian etc) and it is a reactor that as far as i know does not produce the stuff they make nuclear weapons out of so is good as far as proliferation is concerned

a reply to: BomSquad

Several years ago LM said they had solved it. So it's no longer in the 30 years scenario, it's in the about to be here scenario.

a reply to: OccamsRazor04

I remember when they made that announcement....and all I've heard since was crickets...

originally posted by: dfnj2015
a reply to: BomSquad

How could the article not mention the German Stellerator.

The problem is if you do not have a proven containment field then the plasma will instantly melt a hole to through the bottom of any Navy ship.

Physicists confirm the precision of magnetic fields in the most advanced stellarator in the world

The best thing about the German Wendelstein 7-X, besides it was created by socialism, is that is has the very best precision and fidelity of keeping the plasma contained as proven by experiments.

Anyone can get a patent. Let's see some papers on how well it performs.

Oh FFS. The Stellarator has NOTHING to do with socialism. It was built by capitalist Germany

"W7-X, for which PPPL is the leading U.S. collaborator, is the largest and most sophisticated stellarator in the world. Built by the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald, it was completed in 2015 as the vanguard of the stellarator design."

Germany is a free market economy, lead by the CDU, a center-right party

The former DDR, which was socialist, ended in failure with the 1990 fall of the Berlin wall and was part of the largest open-air prison on the planet.

Get off your hobby horse - Socialism always ends in failure and human misery.

originally posted by: dfnj2015
The best thing about the German Wendelstein 7-X, besides it was created by in spite of socialism,

There, fixed that for ya...

originally posted by: OccamsRazor04
a reply to: BomSquad

Several years ago LM said they had solved it. So it's no longer in the 30 years scenario, it's in the about to be here scenario.

originally posted by: BomSquad
a reply to: OccamsRazor04

I remember when they made that announcement....and all I've heard since was crickets...

I can pass an update along to you but the TLDR is, the big commercial reactors are always 30 years away from becoming practical.

What's changed with lockheed's compact reactor is it's always about 8 years away from being practical. So the timelines slide for their compact reactor just like with the big ones, but the cycle is closer to 8 years away than 30 years away.

Originally Lockheed said their reactor would be practical to use this year or next. Then in 2017 they said about 8 years away, in mid 2020's. Now they are building the 5th prototype for test purposes and testing will start later this year, but they won't even confirm the mid-2020's date anymore, they won't even give a date since they apparently realized they are only destroying their credibility by continuing to give dates that are never met.

Lockheed Compact Reactor design is 100 times worse than initial claims

Lockheed Martin Building compact fusion reactor testing prototype #5

Unfortunately, despite the progress that Skunk Works has made, many questions remain about whether its new reactor concept will be able to succeed whether other designs have failed. Lockheed Martin has initially suggested it might have a viable prototype ready this year (2019) or the next (2020).

By 2017, that schedule had gotten pushed back to sometime in the mid-2020s. In his interview with Aviation Week, Babione did not offer any more of a specific timeline for when a practical reactor, which the company refers to as TX, might be ready.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Is the holdup how to make it practical or how to make it work though? It seems they are saying they have cracked how to make it work, it's the making it practical for actual use that is going to take time. That's how I understand it at least.

a reply to: OccamsRazor04
I don't know if it's that easy to differentiate the two.

In concept you just put a sun in a bottle and it will make fusion and release energy.

Lockheed says they have a better way to put the sun in a bottle, and maybe they do, but they still face some of the same problems as the commercial reactors. Even if Lockheed's method works better, putting the sun in a bottle is still a hard thing to do.

If you read between the lines on their #5 prototype test reactor, it doesn't sound very close to being practical.

As for working, we have had "working" reactors for years that could briefly create fusion energy, but the problem was they couldn't do it for long and energy input was always greater than energy output.

You may want to read this article that scientists are skeptical about Lockheed's claims. This isn't to say we'll never develop fusion, we probably will, but it's a significant challenge to do so and I think Lockheed underestimated the difficulty, well obviously they did since they said they would have a working reactor this year, and they are nowhere close.

Scientists Skeptical of Lockheed's Fusion Breakthrough

McGuire goes on: "Ten years, we have great military vehicles. Twenty years, we have clean power for the world."

Others were less optimistic. After all, creating a fusion reaction in a controlled environment that produces more energy than it consumes has challenged physicists since the dawn of the Atomic Age.

"I'm surprised that a company like this would release something that doesn't have much context," said Steven Cowley, a professor in plasma physics at the Imperial College London, director of the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire, United Kingdom, and a leading expert in magnetic fusion energy.

"Normally, if someone says they're doing well in fusion, they would quote some data, 'We got a temperature of x and a confinement of y,'" he said, referring to how long a reactor can hold the heat of a reaction before it escapes. "There's no such information."
...
Earlier this year, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California reported a breakthrough by generating a fusion reaction that created more energy than it started with. But the experiment didn't produce enough power to have practical implications.

What's more, it required far more energy to get the reaction going. (Scientists concentrated 192 lasers on a pellet of hydrogen fuel to compress it and trigger a fusion of the isotopes deuterium and tritium.

So it's kind of hard to even figure out exactly where Lockheed Martin's design is at if they aren't releasing hard data on their test results like other fusion research projects. If you want to find out details of other fusion research projects you can, but I haven't seen details like that from Lockheed, so it's hard to say how close or how far they are. But the Lockheed project leader acknowledged they weren't necessarily close to success I think with this admission:

Yet even McGuire suggests the idea isn't exactly a reality. "This is a high-risk, high-payoff endeavor," he said. "That's what we're doing here, is testing that concept out to see if it really holds the promise that it appears to."

He said that back when he said something about delivering a working reactor in 2019, and now he's nowhere close from what I can tell, without seeing his data, but the machine he's finishing up now will definitely not be a practical model, it's only for more testing.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

My cynical side says, “Because LM is still trying to figure out how to make money”...

And that is the part where everyone overlooks the “software” side of their patent. They want their control software to be the only game in town. Then all customers are locked (hehe...) in to the fusion supplier of choice... Lockheed.

If Nat Mag Lab keeps going and we hit 100 Tesla magnetic field superconducting magnets then nuclear fusion is a lock (heed... they write themselves!). But I think it will happen... even if after a while money becomes meaningless.

Until then we sit and wait.