
Will Lockheed Martin Change the World with Its New Fusion Reactor? - airstrike
https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielcohen/2018/08/01/will-lockheed-martin-change-the-world-with-its-new-fusion-reactor/#42e870184c49
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bediger4000
Why do aerospace companies have a fascination with fusion reactors? I worked
at McDonnell Douglas Astronautics in the mid 1980s. One of their projects at
the time was a fusion reactor based on the "ELMO Bumpy Torus" of the 1970s.

Fusion reactors seem a bit out of LockMart's wheelhouse, if you take my
meaning.

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JoeAltmaier
Don't they make jet engines? Their design is similar to that

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bediger4000
GE and Rolls Royce make jet engines. It's a very specialized sort of thing to
make, single-crystal impeller blades, exotic high temperature alloys,
computational fluid dynamics combined with combustion analysis. Lockheed
Martin does not make jet engines. Also, a fusion reactor has very little in
common with a jet engine. Yes, I said "high temperature alloys", and a fusion
reactor is very hot, but they also typically have a lot of magnetism involved.
Now,we're talking non-magnetic, high temperature alloys. Jet engine designers
do not need to worry about magnetic properties.

Plasma flows are not going to work like just-sub-sonic airflows either, so any
CFD expertise is effectively negated. Fusion is not chemical combustion, so
any expertise there is also superfluous.

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JoeAltmaier
Well, in as much as Engineering with complex exotic systems is a specialty,
then they are already operating in that domain. Sure its not the same; but
both are light-years distant from IoT widgets, household appliances and cars.

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pfdietz
After they revised the size of the machine its volume increased by two orders
of magnitude and its power density fell to 0.5 MW/m^3. This is 40x worse than
the power density of a PWR primary reactor vessel (and 200x worse than the
power density of the PWR core proper.)

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simonblack
NO.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

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PhilWright
TL;DR

They are going to start trying to build an idea and they have proven nothing
so far. Check back in 5 years.

