
The Navy's Patent for a Compact Nuclear Fusion Reactor - ryan_j_naughton
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a29427713/navy-compact-fusion-reactor/
======
jacques_chester
The patent in question:
[https://patents.google.com/patent/US20190295733A1/](https://patents.google.com/patent/US20190295733A1/)

It doesn't seem to have been examined yet.

Only a single inventor is listed, Salvatore Pais[0]. He's also listed as
inventor for a "Laser augmented turbojet propulsion system", "Craft using an
inertial mass reduction device", "high frequency gravitational wave generator"
(which was granted) and "piezoelectricity-induced room temperature
superconductor".

All of which would be massive technological breakthroughs. Meaning he's either
the 21st century's most brilliant physicist or a crank.

[0]
[https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Salvatore+Pais](https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Salvatore+Pais)

~~~
NamTaf
Alternatively, could this name be a pseudonym for the research group writ
large? It assigns the patent to the whole group to avoid giving any particular
team member the credit, and it also avoids identifying any individual who may
be regularly dealing with classified information.

I’ve no idea if this is actually possible within the rules of the patent
system, though.

~~~
desdiv
This link[0] seems to suggest that filing under a pseudonym is not possible.
Full legal name, residence, and citizenship of each inventor must be provided.

And there are criminal penalties for knowingly supplying the patent office
with false information[1]:

>1) All statements made therein of the party’s own knowledge are true, all
statements made therein on information and belief are believed to be true, and
all statements made therein are made with the knowledge that whoever, in any
matter within the jurisdiction of the Office, knowingly and willfully
falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material
fact, or knowingly and willfully makes any false, fictitious, or fraudulent
statements or representations, or knowingly and willfully makes or uses any
false writing or document knowing the same to contain any false, fictitious,
or fraudulent statement or entry, shall be subject to the penalties set forth
under 18 U.S.C. 1001 and any other applicable criminal statute, and violations
of the provisions of this section may jeopardize the probative value of the
paper; and ...

[0] [https://www.dhuelaw.com/blog/2017/february/is-it-possible-
to...](https://www.dhuelaw.com/blog/2017/february/is-it-possible-to-file-a-
patent-application-usin/)

[1]
[https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s410.html](https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s410.html)

~~~
mr_overalls
Remember that the NSA has illegally spied on US citizens for decades. I think
the Navy could easily swing a waiver from the Patent Office under the
rationale of "national security."

~~~
camel_Snake
Why would anonymizing the actual inventor be a matter of national security
when they could easily have prevented the patent from being disclosed in the
first place:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act)

------
colechristensen
There are a lot of skeptics that think this is conspiracy theory nonsense, but
Lockheed has been open about working on fusion for a while and maybe some
others too.

The tech could have been operational for twenty years and this is how they’re
declassifying it.

Maybe they think world security will be better with this public, maybe the
secret is already leaked, maybe they think a bigger advantage will come from
having this commercially available, maybe this is useless for defense because
it is trivially detectable, or maybe they’re filing patents to mislead
adversaries on operational details and delay them, or maybe knowing how it
works is unimportant because there is some impossible to acquire secret sauce
. There are lots of ways to think about it, and obsessive grabs on technology
secrets is not the only one.

[https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-
fusion...](https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion.html)

~~~
Accujack
>The tech could have been operational for twenty years and this is how they’re
declassifying it.

Uh, no. Even a horrifically expensive to build but working fusion reactor
would have been released in that time frame. The military in the US is
secretive, but not that much... there's a strategic advantage to having more
advanced tech than your enemies, but there's a much bigger one from your whole
country having large amounts of cheap, clean power.

Not to mention that such a discovery would have been worth trillions of
dollars to the energy industry, and the Navy has plenty of civilian firms
working with them that would have pushed hard for this tech to be exclusively
licensed to them if it worked.

AND it's unlikely that the tech wouldn't have been stolen in that time frame.
It would be a major, major coup for whatever country got it, and in the past
20 years almost every secret military tech the US has created has ended up in
the hands of the Chinese or others... the US military just isn't that good at
security, and you can't keep all the docs needed for development of something
like this offline or in paper form.

~~~
dangerface
> Uh, no. Even a horrifically expensive to build but working fusion reactor
> would have been released in that time frame. The military in the US is
> secretive, but not that much...

The Glomar Explorer is an example of the US Military doing exactly that, they
made a boat specifically for recovering a sunk sub and told every one it was a
research vessel they kept it a secret for over 20 years.

There are countless other examples of this like the black bird.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer)

~~~
eesmith
You omitted the "... but there's a much bigger one from your whole country
having large amounts of cheap, clean power"

There's no corresponding big advantage to the US for having the Glomar
Explorer be public.

BTW, the CIA has paramilitary forces, but is not formally part of the
military/armed forces.

~~~
ryanmercer
>You omitted the "... but there's a much bigger one from your whole country
having large amounts of cheap, clean power"

Not to go tinfoil hat here but... if we had a relatively small fusion reactor,
lobbyists would do all they could to make sure they never became operational
for connection to the grid.

\- Fossil fuel lobbyists

\- Power company lobbyists

\- Fossil fuel worker union lobbyists

\- Ship, train and semi industry/union lobbyists (that transport the insane
amounts of coal and oil-related products)

You'd also possibly see the unions that cover anyone working with power lines
as you'd be able to set up a bunch of independent grids and stop
servicing/repairing, and start removing, high transmission lines that blanket
the country which also could get various metal worker unions lobbying against
it as production of these massive amounts of cable (if done domestically)
would drastically be reduced as why bother crossing vast stretches of land
when you can just drop a reactor in a rural area and just serve the region.

When/if we develop fusion reactors that are economically viable, you will
remove thousands to hundreds of thousands of jobs in a relatively short period
in the United States alone. Voters aren't too found of losing their jobs and
the lobbyists of their industries have lots of money to burn fighting such
changes (this is why you'll never see the IRS thrown out in exchange for
something like a federal income tax only, it would cut 75,000 federal jobs
over night and their union + the voting power of them and ever tax preparer,
CPA etc would fight hard to prevent it).

\---

AS far as secrets, there are very few people that know where the United States
keeps any of it's various strategic stock piles. Those remain extremely
closely guarded secrets where a very small number of people know at any given
time where that stuff is stored/warehoused, how much, what variety etc. That's
not conspiracy, that's just cold hard fact, and that's stuff like
vaccines/medicine/fuel etc.

\---

A hypothetical stretgic use:

The strategic value of keeping such a reactor/technology secret. If you can
power your known underground bases/alleged DUMBs (deep underground military
base), without needing any energy input from the surface you'd want to keep
that very hush hush because it gives you far longer backup power capabilities
than generators and fossil fuels stored onsite could provide.

Having such a technology also allows you to actually create DUMBs. You can
make an electrically powdered tunnel boring machine, go to something like a
known cave or mine site, point it in a direction and go for mile after mile if
you felt so inclined. If you're doing this in an area with known caverns/an
old mine you never even need to bring what you bore out up to the surface, you
just fill caverns/mine shafts. Such tunnels and bases have been alleged to
exist since the cold war days and they may or may not exist, but if you had a
compact fusion reactor technology that was classified from the start, the
longer you keep it a secret the longer you have to exploit it for such
hypothetical situations as this.

\---

Edit: Previous HN comment about him/his work

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19229721](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19229721)

Looks like he's previously worked on systems for 'Hybrid Aerospace-Undersea
Craft' for something to operate both underwater and as an aircraft a compact
fusion reactor would probably be what took it from being a novelty (like the
various goofy boat-cars and car-planes) to an effective vehicle.

That's an interesting idea on its own. You could travel fast distances,
presumably quite rapidly, through the air and drop below radar, slow down to
enter the water and submerge, then proceed to whatever. Or you could act as a
sub, if you're detected launch out of the water and accelerate away in the
seconds of confusion you create when you suddenly go from a water target to an
air target.

Similarly, it could simply be an awesome power source for a rather large
seaplane. Rapid troop/cargo transport, even better if you could submerge for
travelling in deep water then pop up in coastal water and seaplane in the rest
of the way.

 _loses the rest of his afternoon to daydreaming about a compact fusion
reactor_.

~~~
eesmith
How would those lobbyists find out, if it were so secret?

We can look at other projects, like Bussard's Polywell. Either all of these
lobbyists could figure out that it wouldn't work out, so didn't fight the
development, or there isn't a major lobbyist effort as you describe it. I
strongly suspect the latter.

Or, consider nuclear power during the 1950s, when the fossil fuel worker union
was far more powerful than now. What lobbying effort was there, and it doesn't
seem that effective.

Or, consider whale oil, which once a major industrial oil. Despite the number
of people involved in whaling, and the money involved, it was replaced with
other oils. (Wikipedia says it was used in transmission oil until the 1970s!)

The strategic effort you mentioned are essentially the same as those used in
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_Nuclear_Power_Program](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_Nuclear_Power_Program)
. Mining requires more than just electricity - look at how much work the
Gotthard Base Tunnel took, and those were all electrically powered. Where do
the spoils go? Where are the ventilation shafts?

As for "there are very few people that know where the United States keeps any
of it's various strategic stock piles" \- what are you talking about? The
strategic oil reserve locations are located at
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Petroleum_Reserve_(U...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Petroleum_Reserve_\(United_States\))
, the National Helium Reserve is listed at
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve)
with lat/long even.

Again, the benefits of secrecy you mention are far, far outweighed by the
benefits of it being public.

~~~
ryanmercer
>How would those lobbyists find out, if it were so secret?

In a situations here this is rolled out for use to replace power plants and
not for classified military applications, thus the various civilian industries
and their lobbyists mentioned. I thought this was pretty obvious given I
mention a laundry list of civilian industries that the bulk of which are
comprised of private and publicly traded companies that are not defense
related industries.

>As for "there are very few people that know where the United States keeps any
of it's various strategic stock piles" \- what are you talking about?

Stuff like the SNS which is 1 (more likely than not there are multiple
locations with only public acknowledgement that 1 warehouse exists given a
natural disaster or nuclear attack to a single region could effectively
destroy the only stockpile) plain, unmarked, warehouse that the location to is
a closely guarded secret due to the fact that someone simply driving a tanker
full of a flammable material, then igniting it, through one of the doors of
the warehouse could destroy the government's strategic stockpile of
antibiotics, vaccines, chemical antidotes, antitoxins, PPE equipment,
respirators and other critical medical supplies making it a highly valuable
target to both foreign governments and terrorists.

And the things that simply aren't public knowledge at all.

I mean, every few years someone stumbles upon Cold War stockpiles that had
been forgotten like back in 2006 when stockpiles of rations and medical
supplies were found in the foundations of the Brooklyn Bridge.

But I'm happy for you that you can google 'strategic stockpile' and link me to
a helium supply that the government has already order shut down and sold off
(which has been covered by podcasts like Planet Money this year).

~~~
eesmith
No, it's not obvious. dangerface was talking about highly secretive projects.

Your statement was only "if we had a relatively small fusion reactor".

Nothing in what you wrote marked the transition from having a highly secretive
small fusion reactor to one which was being 'rolled out for use to replace
power plants'.

Please don't be so snide. I'm not completely ignorant.

I mentioned those strategic stockpiles because they were the ones I knew
about, from years ago. I also know about Quebec's maple syrup reserves because
of the theft a few years back.

And, the "any" in your statement "any of it's various strategic stock piles"
typically means _all_ of them, not _some_ of them. Which is why I asked for
clarification. And the National Helium Reserve _is_ still around, making it is
a valid example.

------
jtbayly
> Current reactors are approximately the size of a building; a relatively
> portable compact fusion reactor, one designed to power relatively small
> vehicles, would be a game-changer.

Ummm... Isn't it more important to say that current reactors don't even work
(at least not yet)? A _working_ one would be a game-changer, never mind how
big or small it was.

~~~
davedx
They kind of work, longest fusion reaction is 70 seconds. The two main issues
are:

* Keeping the reaction going indefinitely in a controlled way

* Doing so without the system power input being greater than the power output

~~~
PBnFlash
They work as in produce fusion.

They don't work as in produce power.

Teenagers build "working" fusion reactors.

No one has built a fusion reactor that produces useful power.

------
xibalba
If the military has developed several breakthrough technologies, why in the
world would they patent them, thereby making them public? Given a
revolutionary new tech, no foreign government would respect a U.S. patent, nor
would it be enforceable in the first place.

It's amazing to me that the ET/UFO cranks would take the publication of these
patents at face value.

As others have posited, likely another explanation is warranted: 1) luring
foreign militaries down blind alley's of expensive research, 2) putting out
these patents to only later debunk them and thereby possibly muddying the
waters for some legitimate revelations, 3) a simple prank, etc. etc.

Is it possible to verify that the filer is legitimately the U.S. Navy, or
could anyone just file a patent and list the Navy as the assignee?

~~~
JulianMorrison
It's not so out of character. Consider the recent disclosure that certain
famous UFO video clips are genuine and show unidentified phenomena. Why would
they disclose _that_ when shutting up would work and was working?

The answer is they _want to_.

There are factions within the US government and it seems that the "tell them,
but take it real slow" faction is presently in the ascendant.

~~~
xibalba
The military verified that, yes, those were videos captured by the them.
However, the videos themselves are inconclusive. As Neil DeGrasse Tyson said
(paraphrasing), "the 'O' in UFO is highly non-specific". Others have suggested
explanations such as: equipment malfunction or misinterpretation,
misinterpretation of known natural phenomena, or classified US gov tech.
Further, these too could be an intentional ploy by the military/gov for
unknown but rational and non-ET related motives. These are just a sampling of
possible explanations.

You seem to be leaning toward an extraterrestrial explanation. I'm not saying
you are definitely wrong, but it seems like a very low probability explanation
and one that defies the principle of parsimony.

~~~
JulianMorrison
The videos are subsets of what they have, supposedly (say people who have
watched them) the full video has even more amazing things. It's not an
accident that the inconclusive part is what got released. _It was chosen._

They have been sitting on this stuff. They still are sitting on 99.9999% of
it, is a reasonable assumption. They are choosing, deliberately, to gradually
change attitudes. Part of the gradualness is maintaining intentional levels of
ambiguity that can be slowly, slowly dialled down.

All of this is kind of orthogonal to _what_ they are sitting on. Doesn't have
to be ET.

~~~
xibalba
> (say people who have watched them) the full video has even more amazing
> things

Link? Who are these people? Are they credible? Do they seem rational,
reasonable, and (highly) skeptical?

> They still are sitting on 99.9999% of it, is a reasonable assumption

There is nothing reasonable about this assumption.

> All of this is kind of orthogonal to what they are sitting on

Huh? How? Why?

This is all veering into conspiracy-theorist-cum-crackpot territory. You are
doing some extreme extrapolation from very thin and inconclusive evidence.

~~~
JulianMorrison
The people in TTSA on their show Unidentified, said it, if my memory is
correct. I forget exactly who but probably Luis Elizondo. TTSA is composed of
ex-intelligence-insiders with clearances to see more than they are cleared to
reveal.

~~~
xibalba
Just so we're all clear, the TTSA you're referring to is "To the Stars Academy
of Arts & Sciences", an org founded by former Blink-182 band member Tom
DeLonge and staffed by kooks and wackadoos, right?

------
calebclark
Why is the government filing patents? The research is paid for by our tax
dollars. Patenting it doesn’t seem right.

~~~
onion2k
To stop someone else patenting it and then trying to claim license fees from
the Navy.

~~~
tamizhar
> To stop someone else patenting it

prior art.

~~~
simonh
Prior art is very difficult to prove and patent reviewers often miss obvious
examples. They can't so easily ignore a pre-existing patent. It also protects
the invention from exploitation by foreign competitors, in jurisdictions with
reciprocal patent protection.

~~~
bloak
It depends, obviously. Prior art is easy to prove by pointing at an existing
patent. It is also easy to prove by pointing at an article in a mainstream
publication in the local language. So "protective publication" or "defensive
disclosure" is a reasonable alternative to getting a patent (and perhaps
letting it expire at the first opportunity).

Prior art is only difficult to prove if you're relying on something along the
lines of folk knowledge among the indigenous peoples of the lands where the
Jumblies live.

It's non-obviousness that is notoriously difficult to prove.

------
blakesterz
"Current [fusion] reactors are approximately the size of a building"

I was under the impression there isn't a fusion reactor of any size anywhere
yet, am I wrong?

~~~
ryanwaggoner
There are many fusion reactors, just none that produce more energy than they
consume.

Barring some random research breakthrough by a small team somewhere, ITER is
probably the best bet for reaching positive net energy first:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER)

~~~
XaspR8d
Yeah, in fact many folks have created DIY _fusors_ in their garages. Just hook
any sort of energy harnessing device onto that and you can claim you've got a
fusion reactor too!

[https://makezine.com/projects/make-36-boards/nuclear-
fusor/](https://makezine.com/projects/make-36-boards/nuclear-fusor/)

------
ivanb
It's the patent by Salvatore Cezar Pais. The same guy who patented
gravitational wave generators, room temperature superconductor and "craft
using an inertial mass reduction device".

------
molmalo
Relevant:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21208051](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21208051)

Seems like the HN community expressed scepticism/doubt about the science
behind patents filed by this guy? (Also commented in the posts regarding the
ufo sightings by us navy pilots).

------
driverdan
This is the original article: [https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-
zone/30256/scientist-behind...](https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-
zone/30256/scientist-behind-the-navys-ufo-patents-has-now-filed-one-for-a-
compact-fusion-reactor)

------
ben_w
I can’t quite work out what they’re doing here.

> According to the patent, Pais’ plasma chamber contains several pairs of
> these dynamic fusors, which rapidly spin and vibrate within the chamber in
> order to create a “concentrated magnetic energy flux” that can squish the
> gases together.

If you will excuse the analogy, this sounds a bit like an electromagnetic
equivalent to a Lagrange point. Is that a reasonable comparison for me to
make?

~~~
ShinyRice
They're both points of equilibrium; Lagrange points are both stable (like a
ball rolling in a half-pipe) and unstable (like a pencil standing on its tip)
equilibriums. A stable equilibrium means that when an object in that point is
displaced, it starts oscillating around that point, and unstable means that an
object at that point, when displaced, will uncontrollably move away from it,
unless you push it back onto that point.

Well, the Newtonian gravitational potential is far more simple to deal with
than something like super hot plasma confined by a strong magnetic field. But
yeah, you typically do not want that moving around the place, so I presume
it's a stable equilibrium.

~~~
noodle_face_
Does the reasoning behind it all seem to make sense, or does it seem like
meaningless sci-fi word-salad? I don't understand enough to know.

------
otterley
Source article: [https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/30256/scientist-
behind...](https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/30256/scientist-behind-the-
navys-ufo-patents-has-now-filed-one-for-a-compact-fusion-reactor)

Also, it’s a patent application, not an issued patent.

------
PopeDotNinja
Conspiracy theory... This is not a good reactor design, and therefore they
files a patent for it, hoping to mislead foreign countries into using it.

Another idea is that by filing a patent, Congress could give that kind of
patent extra long protection, extending the amount of time it could only be
used by the US Navy.

------
jabl
From TFA:

> Related Videos XXXXXX YYYY Dash Cam Captures Accident

Seems popularmechanics.com needs to tune their what-is-related algorithm a
bit. Or is it a subtle jab at "yes my boss says I need to publish this even
though it's an obvious crank and it's just clickbait"?

------
zyxzevn
Looks a bit similar to focus fusion.

See Google talk: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhKB-
VxJWpg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhKB-VxJWpg)

------
rpmisms
This looks like someone mashed a wankel engine and a tokamak together.
Interesting, but I'd need to see it in action to believe it.

------
fusure
Pointless, it's already been disrupted. Www.fusure.io

~~~
ninkendo
... This site is a joke, right? You can buy a "fusure core" now, with a 4-week
lead time, for $3000. The description gives some vague hand-wavey stuff about
"thousands of nanoscale tokomaks [sic]", allowing the "Coulomb barrier to
break via quantum tunneling".

Is it just an experiment to see who's dumb enough to give them their credit
card information?

~~~
fusure
It just works. Does not produce net energy. This is our MVP and we want to
ship fast into the hands of hardcore fusion hobbyists called fusioneers.

~~~
FiatLuxDave
Hi, former and possible future fusioneer here, with disposable income. Care to
post any specifications? If I just want some neutrons I can do that myself.

~~~
fusure
Sure, I will email you.

------
currymj
could this not just be a weird dude who happens to be funded by the Navy in
some more mundane capacity, and therefore assigns patents to the Navy?

------
zarro
Highly skeptical of "ground-breaking" innovation emerging from the Navy.

~~~
MS90
Same here. Those idiots have never come up with anything new or revolutionary,
only stupid run of the mill stuff like nuclear submarines and carriers, planet
spanning underwater listening systems, spy subs that can sit on the ocean
floor, drones that can land on carriers, electromagnetic railguns that fire
projectiles at mach 6+, and other worthless crap.

