
Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works Shooting for 100 MW Fusion Prototype by 2017 - mactitan
http://www.e-catworld.com/2013/02/lockheed-martins-skunk-works-shooting-for-100-mw-fusion-prototype-by-2017/
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picklefish
Should probably get rid of whatever crap site this is... but here is the
direct youtube video. He basically talks about a new kind of fusion reactor
they've been working on in skunkworks and how it's different from the reactor
people have been trying to build forever.

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAsRFVbcyUY>

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allerratio
Do we really want to give traffic to such a fringe site? (It's mainly about
the E-Cat scam [http://psiram.com/en/index.php/Focardi-Rossi_Energy-
Catalyze...](http://psiram.com/en/index.php/Focardi-Rossi_Energy-Catalyzer) )

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mactitan
sorry, but how the heck is skunkworks being associated? maybe it's a lie. But
this popping up elsewhere:
[http://americansecurityproject.org/blog/2013/lockheed-
martin...](http://americansecurityproject.org/blog/2013/lockheed-martin-
outlines-plans-for-nuclear-fusion-reactor/)

~~~
allerratio
The problem isn't the video itself. It's the rest of the site. You could have
posted a direct link to the video:

[https://www.solveforx.com/moonshots/ahJzfmdvb2dsZS1zb2x2ZWZv...](https://www.solveforx.com/moonshots/ahJzfmdvb2dsZS1zb2x2ZWZvcnhyEAsSCE1vb25zaG90GNKGAww/solve-
for-x-charles-chase-on-energy-for-everyone)

or <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAsRFVbcyUY>

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hvs
Just a decade away from commercial applications? Hmmm, isn't "the next big
breakthrough" _always_ a decade away?

A good rule of thumb: unless the technology has been proven to work and they
are _just_ working on commercializing it, "a decade" always means, "we have no
idea when we will have anything, if ever."

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mactitan
Just out of curiosity: what if fusion was perfected? what are the
consequences? massive economic growth & population? Does the earth become an
heat sink?

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ChuckMcM
The world changes in a very significant way. Three things become true:

1) Oil no longer has to be dug out of the ground, various long chain
hydrocarbons can be created with the CO2 in the air and water.

2) Fresh water no longer becomes an issue because arbitrary amounts of sea
water can be converted into fresh water.

3) Generally food becomes easier to produce as both more land is available for
it (irrigate with desalinated water) and 'food products' like corn aren't used
in energy products.

The other two fusion science experiments go under the monikers of 'polywell
fusion' and 'focus fusion'. That stays away from the various "low energy
nuclear" type devices which are currently considered hoax material (and
popular on the e-cat site) by most scientists.

The discovery of a practical fusion system is one of the 'good' things that
could happen in the next 50 years which would change the world in mostly
'good' ways (mostly because economies that depend on oil exports would lose
pricing authority on oil and slowly collapse, leaving behind angry and often
dysfunctional nation-states)

~~~
dalke
I suspect you haven't worked out the feasibility of large-scale desalinization
for food crops in the US. It doesn't seem economically reasonable, at least
not until food is an order of magnitude more expensive than now.

We pull out ~30 cubic km of water from the Ogallala Aquifer per year. Let's
estimate how much power is needed to replace this with seawater.

At 2780 J/liter, this requires about 3 gigawatts, assuming perfect efficiency.
Realistically it's more like 15 GW. Okay, that's doable. The US generates
about 1TW of electric power, so 1% would go to desalinization.

Next, you need to pump it to the midwest. The second Los Angeles Aqueduct cost
$90 million in 1965 dollars to carry water 137 miles. That's about $500
million in 2013 dollars. The entire Aqueduct transports about 0.4 cubic
kilometers of water per year. You'll need about 10x the length to get from the
Gulf to the aquifer, and 8x the volume. You'll also need a distribution
network, which is likely another 4x to the cost, and you'll need to pump it
uphill, which means there's more expensive upkeep.

This sets a low estimate of 300*$5 billion = $1.50 trillion in construction
costs, and that's deliberately low-balling the estimate. The Ogallala produces
about $20 billion in agriculture each year. I don't think it's financially
reasonable.

Also, where do you dump the brine with all of the salt that you've extracted?
Back into the Gulf? That's going to seriously affect the marine life. Or do
you fully dry out the salt and use it in place of salt mining? I calculate
this as 1 gigaton of salt/year, or about 5x the current world production of
salt.

Even with free power, it doesn't seem that desalinization could replace the
supply that we currently get from the Ogallala Aquifer. At least, not without
having much higher food prices.

Instead, you'll have to relocate farming to some place closer to the sea which
is also water restricted. In the US, this is ... where? More of the Central
Valley? Where is the Nebraska-sized chunk of land by the coast that lacks only
water in order to flourish?

Or we import more food from Australia, which seems the prime candidate for
this approach.

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ChuckMcM
Have you considered the ramifications of moving where farming is possible? The
combination of desalinization and the ability to make long chain hydrocarbons
(like fertilizer) means you can farm the San Fernando valley with seawater and
take a tremendous load off of the California aqueduct system. Places in Mexico
become targets for new farms. All freshwater in the southeastern part of Texas
can come from the Gulf of Mexico. It is an interest experiment to look at a
map of coastal areas with arid or desert climates, and think about those
becoming farmland.

The brine issue is non-existent, as both Qatar and Saudi Arabia have
demonstrated with their desalination plants you can pump a lot of sea water
through them with the output water having only slightly more salinity than the
input water.

That and the fact that fusion power is initially additive to the total power
output rather than replacement power. The challenge is of course the numbers.
The original Nuclear energy projection of power 'too cheap to measure' was
based on an assumption that once nuclear power regulatory structures were in
place, the cost to build a plant would converge to something close to the
capital costs. That assumption turned out to be false. If it turns out to be
false for fusion as well then we'll have different effects.

~~~
dalke
"like fertilizer" - fertilizer by definition contains elements besides
hydrogen, carbons, and oxygens. It is not a "long chain hydrocarbon."

The brine issue is not non-existent. [http://www.thenational.ae/news/uae-
news/environment/desalina...](http://www.thenational.ae/news/uae-
news/environment/desalination-threat-to-the-growing-gulf) "Between the
tankers, pollution from urban centres and the brine disposed from desalination
plants, the Gulf is almost dead."

Well, I guess if it's almost dead then the effect of the brine has a less
overall impact. What would the effect be on the shrimp industry in the Gulf?

Saudi Arabia produces 450 million liters per day. That's 5.2 m3/second or 0.16
cubic kilometers/year, or about 1/20th what the Ogallala Aquifer provides. I
found that Qatar produces 1.5 million m3/day = 17 m3/second.

<http://www.cvwd.org/about/agricultural.php> says that the "Coachella Valley
Water District delivers 280,000 acre-feet annually ... to irrigate nearly
60,000 acres of farmland." That's 11 m3/second on average, so about the same
order of magnitude. Also, "Overall crop production exceeds half a billion
dollars a year."

By comparison, Israel has about 460,000 acres of farmland and California has 9
million acres of irrigated land.

Now, how much will the infrastructure cost to build the desalination plants,
and the canals, and the pumps needed to make the entire system work against
gravity? Even if you assume the power cost is free, there's a lot of
maintenance overhead, and the system is more fragile then a gravity fed
aqueduct.

I'm definitely not saying that it isn't possible. I pointed out that Australia
would be an excellent place for this. That's why I said that it wouldn't be
that useful in the US. While you're correct about Texas, that's still only a
small percentage of the US farmland, and Texas doesn't have the same weather
that makes California so successful.

But using desalinated water for irrigation isn't free/cheap by far, and the
cost of power is not the only constraint in making it successful. Any analysis
which doesn't include the costs of moving water uphill and delivering it is
necessarily incomplete and inadequate.

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ChuckMcM
'fertilizer' -> Ammonium Nitrate -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonium_nitrate> (NH4NO3) Nothing more than air
(using the Nitrogen) and Water normally the Haber-Bosch process used natural
gas as its source of H2 however it is also easily produced by splitting water
if the energy is "free".

~~~
dalke
So? NH4NO3 is not a hydrocarbon. There's not even a carbon in it.

"In organic chemistry, a hydrocarbon is an organic compound consisting
entirely of hydrogen and carbon" - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrocarbon>

"an organic compound (as acetylene or butane) containing only carbon and
hydrogen and often occurring in petroleum, natural gas, coal, and bitumens " -
<http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hydrocarbon>

(And it looks like I shouldn't have included oxygen.)

~~~
ChuckMcM
Sorry, I misunderstood your point. I thought you were saying that you couldn't
make fertilizer at a desalinization plant being driven by a fusion reactor.

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Gravityloss
Plasma physicist Pekka Janhunen points out in the comments that the losses in
a traditional magnetic trap are high, this is what the Tokamak was invented
for in the first place.

(That's also what the Polywell tries to solve).

Haven't watched the video.

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mslathrop
Nuclear fusion is always only 10 years away from working.

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DennisP
Funny, it used to always be 20 years away. Before that it was always 30. It's
strange how the number keeps decreasing with the passage of time.

~~~
mslathrop
Yes I won't disagree that the technology is getting better and that we are
getting closer to achieving it. But a commercial fusion reactor in ten years
seems very unrealistic with the current regulation and standards set by
current government regulatory bodies.

When I was in school studying nuclear engineering, the running joke was that
fusion will always be N amount of years away from happening. It seems like
every year or so a new company or group of researchers has found a
breakthrough that will allow fusion to happen in N amount of years even though
we have yet to reach breakeven in a research setting.

~~~
DennisP
There'd be some need for regulation but less than with fission. The only
nuclear waste is activated reactor components, not transuranics and fission
products. The reactor turns off like a light switch, with nothing to produce
decay heat, and it has no potential for a runaway reaction. (It's hard enough
to get the reaction going in the first place.) The only potential radiation
release is small amounts of tritium, and there's no concern about fissiles
getting diverted for weapons. Tritium has some weapons use if you're ready to
progress to thermonuclear bombs, but in that case you hardly need fusion
reactors to make it.

If we manage boron fusion, we'll be producing less radiation than burning
equivalent coal, and won't have tritium. It's hard to see how anyone would
justify regulating that for anything other than electrical safety, just like
any other power plant, and for radiation standards on par with medical
equipment.

People bring up that joke in the comments section of every fusion article ever
published. The fact is, fusion has progressed exponentially since about 1970,
about as fast as Moore's Law, despite a level of funding far below what those
early optimistic advocates said we needed.

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cstross
I note that submarine reactors are typically on the order of 50Mw, and surface
ships (CVNs -- aircraft carriers -- typically; also some Russian Arctic ice-
breakers) are up to 100Mw per reactor.

Anyone smell a [Naval] market?

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potatolicious
I doubt it, but my understanding of the topic is limited.

AFAIK nuclear reactors are popular on naval warships because they dramatically
reduce (and in some cases eliminate) the need to refuel. It's one _huge_
factor crossed off of your logistics problems - modern CVNs can go literally
decades without refueling, with the only resupply being jet fuel, munitions,
and life support.

Doesn't fusion demand constant refueling (like most power plants)?

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AnthonyMouse
>Doesn't fusion demand constant refueling (like most power plants)?

I don't think the half-life of deuterium/tritium is particularly long, so even
if you could store it, it might not last decades before use. Though on the
other hand, it's conceivable that you could design the reactor so that it
produces deuterium/tritium on site from hydrogen cracked from seawater.

But realistically the reason we want fusion over fission in the first place is
the proliferation concern. All of the other arguments against fission are
NIMBY nonsense that could be applied equally to a whole swathe of chemical
processing facilities that nobody seems to care anything about because they're
not _OMG nukular_. And there is hardly a major proliferation risk from a
reactor surrounded by military personnel on a vessel designed to securely
carry actual nuclear bombs, so it makes the specifically military application
kind of questionable.

We really need fusion for two reasons. 1) There is a better chance that we can
actually build a large number of reactors without roving gangs of idiots
destroying their cost effectiveness with gratuitous and intentional red tape,
and 2) we can build them in countries we don't trust without making it easier
for them to blow up the world, which will help to fight global warming vs.
those countries continuing to burn oil and coal.

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cstross
Deuterium is stable. Tritium has a half-life of 12.3 years. Like all proposed
fusion reactors, you have to feed fuel in constantly rather than firing it up
with a critical mass in situ, but you could store enough Tritium to run an
aircraft carrier for a year in a smallish liquid gas cannister. (Smallish by
aircraft carrier fuel tank standards.) ((With lead shielding. _Lots_ of lead
shielding. Tritium belts out about 9650 Curies of radiation per gram in the
shape of beta radiation, which is enough to kill you _really_ quick if you get
it on or in you.))

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jordanthoms
Did they actually show a picture of it? I guess there are limits on what they
could reveal

