There is not much substance in this article. The most interesting part seems to be the slide with the milestones. They seem to be three or four prototypes away from ignition. How many years is that? How many years from the ignition prototype to something that actually produces more energy than it consumes?
Each prototype will be more complex and more expensive than the previous one and it will take longer to build. Current research devices have enormous infrastructure requirements (Wendelstein 7-X and ITER both span a whole campus of several buildings for power supply, plasma heating, cooling etc.). If Lockheed wants to scale up, they will eventually have to build all of that as well.
The Lockheed design is exciting precisely because it offers compact reactor designs. The article talks about power plants the size of shipping containers.
agreed, but they do get to discard the constraint of needing to make money on the energy at market rates. I'm guessing this will go on some eternally loitering aircraft like the nb36 but without the need for the 3 tons of shielding that made it unviable. or maybe that is just me wishing. probably will power haliburton contractor cities in the middle East that were a couple miles outside the existing grid so they "need" a billion dollar generator
A fusion reactor that is operating needs shielding against neutron radiation much the same as a fission reactor does. So a fusion reactor on a manned plane still has the same mass issue even if it were compact enough to fit.
The quite in the article isn't particularly helpful. Thisnis one of the cherry-picked quotes that journalists love to use that sound imagimative and colorful, but explain exactly nothing.
So the field has a self-refulating field containment in the radial direction. This was never a particularly crtitical issue. The issue is building non-leaking mirrors at the end caps where the field needs to separate from the confinement to loop back on itself. You can only shape field gradients there so that they form a potential that particles on escape trajectories have to either overcome or be reflected by. I forgot the exact details, but the issues is that electrons are harder to confine and they gradually build up an electric field that attracts the protons and thus counters the mirror gradient of the magnetic field.
Well, based on the last 50 years of fusion research, the time from 'now' to 'net positive energy production' is quite consistently between 20 and 50 years.
I think everybody knows that joke by now, but also most people know that fusion research has never received the funding necessary to make fast progress. Given the lack of enthusiasm for funding it, it is in fact surprising that ITER is not cancelled yet.
That's kind of a tautology - because there's no substantial progress. The real problem is that every time the fusion community has tried something some unexpected effects and behaviours have emerged derailing the technical approaches and sending the community back to the drawing board.
The problem is that the next device costs a lot more because it has to be much bigger, that is unless you have much stronger magnetic fields. The cube of magnetic field is proportional to the energy gain in a Tokomak. See this video at at 46 minutes to get the equation, watch more to understand why people are now doing this.
Yep, if governments had committed Manhattan project scale funding to Fusion say 30 years ago, it would almost certainly have gone into a technical approach that is now thoroughly obsolete. It simply wouldn’t have worked, because we just didn’t understand the problem domain well enough. IMHO we still don’t.
The pragmatic approach is to fund a variety of research projects enough to keep making progress, but not so much that too many resources get wasted on dead ends. A dead end is fine if we learn from it, but we should only commit the resources needed to learn the lesson, and as little more as possible.
Even if it takes another 50 or 70 years to get there,people should still be pushing for it.I wonder how this would change the political situation across the world when oil,gas and coal wouldn't be required so much anymore...
Yes, it will mark the end of world war 3 because humanity will be able to survive by traveling to a new planet in a different solar system. Deep space exploration becomes viable because we are no longer dependent on solar panels, instead we carry our own mini sun within our spacecraft and simply sail forth!
I lost it, but a physicist who has worked on this stuff posted here once explaining how incredibly over exaggerated progress on fusion is and there is a real liklihood that little will ever come of it.
