Lockheed Martin Skunk Works believes a new compact fusion reactor (CFR) can be developed and deployed in under a decade.
Skunk Works, which works on advanced development programmes, says it is building on over 60 years of fusion research to develop an approach that offers a significant reduction in size compared to mainstream efforts. Furthermore, several patents are pending that covers its approach.
‘Our compact fusion concept combines several alternative magnetic confinement approaches, taking the best parts of each, and offers a 90 per cent size reduction over previous concepts,’ said Tom McGuire, compact fusion lead for the Skunk Works’ Revolutionary Technology Programs. ‘The smaller size will allow us to design, build and test the CFR in less than a year.’
After completing several of these design-build-test cycles, the team anticipates being able to produce a prototype in five years and will seek partners as the technology evolves.
Fusion reactions take place in the sun and are responsible for the energy it generates.
For a number of years, engineers and scientists have attempted to replicate this in order to create significant amounts of thermal energy from a relatively small amount of fuel that is made up of deuterium, which can be extracted from water, and tritium that is produced from lithium.
According to the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, one kilogram of fusion fuel can provide the same amount of energy as 10 million kilograms of fossil fuel.
In the fusion process itself, a gas is heated up and separated into its ions and electrons. When the ions get hot enough, they can overcome their mutual repulsion and collide, fusing together and releasing energy that is around one million times more powerful than a chemical reaction and 3-4 times more powerful than a fission reaction.
Lockheed Martin says that to mimic the energy created by the sun and control it here on earth, it’s creating a concept that can be contained using a magnetic bottle.
It adds: ‘The bottle is able to handle extremely hot temperatures, reaching hundreds of millions of degrees. By containing this reaction, we can release it in a controlled fashion to create energy we can use.’
The heat energy created by the compact fusion reactor could have a myriad of uses, such as driving turbine generators by replacing the combustion chambers with simple heat exchangers. In turn, the turbines will then generate electricity or the propulsive power for a number of applications.
Two European projects are hoping to pave the way for commercially viable power generation using nuclear fusion – a breakthrough that could make a massive contribution to our energy and climate change worries. We put your questions to the scientists and engineers working on these ambitious and fascinating schemes. Click here to read more.
There have been a number of recent claims to this type of technology from ‘believable’ institutions. Maybe technology has moved on far enough to work on an industrial scale. Its always been just a matter of time, just how much time!
Ambitious, sounds confident doesn’t he?
Hmmm
Nuclear heat exchanger “powering” a gas turbine. That’s one hell of a heat exchanger. I’m not sure nuclear physicists even had much grip on mechanical engineering tho. (The air resistance alone on the heat exchanger boggles the mind, should be a nice laminar flow right, right?)
But here’s hoping he is correct and I’m an idiot.
Because an ISO container sized fusion plant we can all have in our garden sound pretty cool, and after all if anything went wrong, at least you wouldn’t have to apologise to the neighbours
Beno
Will the waste heat from the fusion process and the heat generated by the use of the energy produced, raise global temperatures?
All proposed fusion reactors depend on using traditional heat exchangers somewhere in the system to generate steam and run a turbine.
But it is easy to see who someone might get confused by their description:
“…driving turbine generators by replacing the combustion chambers with simple heat exchangers. In turn, the turbines will then generate electricity or the propulsive power for a number of applications.”
That could mean anything. What does “driving turbine generators” mean? Probably just creating steam.
Traditional designs for fusion reactors trap neutrons in a blanket of liquid lithium, which heats the lithium and breeds tritium to fuel the thing. Thanks to a series of heat-exchange loops, the captured energy heats the usual “kettle” that drives a common or garden turbine.
By the way, the idea that fusion reactors can’t explode is dangerous. Liquid lithium can go bang quite nicely in the right conditions. Maybe Lockheed avoids this bit of the cycle.
Sigh___. It would be good to read of engineering advances such as this without the idiot comments. If you can boil water and use the steam to move a paddled wheel you can generate electricity. Given the utterances of a failed politician today and yesterday that the “Lights will go out in the UK” because we don’t have sufficient power generation without poisoning the globe, a project such as Lockheed’s should be given a decent airing and they wouldn’t be spending this amount of time and money without some idea that it is feasible.
Trevor Best.
I hesitate to say it (or do I?) but it does seem that the PR departments and their pals in the ‘meja’ -have once again overstepped the bounds of English Usage? in describing a technical-based matter. Like their fellow-word-smiths -the patent agents- trying to describe in words that mean to same to two patent agents, let alone the Engineers who might have to make some sense of their attempt.
Surely the equations that define the processes -immediately understandable to those trained in the art!- are the definitive explanation?
Mike B
60 years of Fusion research and it’s always c.5 years away from developing a ‘commercial’ product…. This ‘research’ is sounding like the search for perpetual motion or the myth of Wind Power. So, just another company chasing grants or a genuine breakthrough? I know where I’d place my bet.
If nothing else is clear, what is clear is that Lockheed Martin stands to gain a lot of funds to support this research, and will pocket the funds smiling, whether it succeeds or not!
Really, it is a good investment doing some spent on nuclear fusion because it is the only source of energy that can be at the same time clean and dense. http://youtu.be/u8n7j5k-_G8
Looks like “Mr Fusion” is here just in time. Looks like Mr Zemeckis is truely precient. Where is my Hoverboard?
Seriously though, if true and feasible, perhaps we are on the downward slope from “Just 20 years away”
Deuterium+tritium pruduce a lot of neutron. Not you nor you neighbour would like to under continues neutron bombardment. Why not use Deutrium+Deutrium ? This D+D does not produce neutron and thus does not require thick shelding.
The road to fusion is littered with plasma instabilities and failures. The road to extraction of more power than consumed is yet to be started.