
Skunk Works Reveals Compact Fusion Reactor Details (2014) - vpj
http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals-compact-fusion-reactor-details
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waterlesscloud
I haven't come across any meaningful news on this project since the article
linked here. I search every month or so. I do that with several projects that
had a moment of hype.

I've thought about setting up a small site for it. Tracking promising sci/tech
stories with unknown likelihood to ever actually come about. It's the kind of
thing I have a natural interest in, as I think it's where the cool things
happen.

Is there such a site? Dedicated to tracking the status of these kinds of
things on an ongoing basis?

~~~
x5n1
That's the thing with these type of hyped things. General Fusion is another
company that was going to do something 5-7 years ago and has received much
funding from energy companies and has yet to put out anything substantial.

[http://www.burnabynow.com/news/27-million-for-general-
fusion...](http://www.burnabynow.com/news/27-million-for-general-
fusion-1.1949072)

~~~
bottled_poe
Perhaps the funding has produced exactly what was asked for.

~~~
x5n1
I am not a conspiracy nut, I don't think they actually have anything yet.
There was a 90s Keanu Reeves movie called Chain Reaction that had that exact
plot but I don't think this is the case here. The opportunity is too big to
just sit back because if it can be cracked, someone will crack it soon.

~~~
haspoken
There does exist such a thing as the Invention Secrecy Act to suppress patents
that the government wants to keep secret.

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

Quite a few patents every year, and certainly a small fusion generator would
be of interest to the government.

~~~
x5n1
As I said, if someone can crack it they will. If the US wants to sit on the
technology they can do so at a great cost to themselves and the world. We need
cheap, safe energy for the world. It has the ability to literally save the
world.

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XorNot
When it was invented the Tokamak was talked about in similar ways - and a
half-dozen more schemes after it. Only the Tokamak is still here, with the
finicky details still being worked out and bigger machines necessary to bring
it together.

The reason ITER is huge is because it's a lot easier to confine a big plasma
then it is to confine a small one - all your path lengths mean your field
strengths keep fast moving ions inside the vacuum chamber. Building compact
reactors invites a whole new world of confinement problems and there's some
hard limits on how much magnet you can get from materials science at the
moment.

I want them to succeed but the odds are against them that they don't run into
the usual crunch of balancing problems which most "otherwise stable"
confinement schemes do.

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leephillips
But probably won't.

[http://lee-phillips.org/lockheedFusionAgain/](http://lee-
phillips.org/lockheedFusionAgain/)

~~~
petergatsby
Jury is out. I wouldn't bet against research 75 years in the making. Anyway,
Phillips isn't.

~~~
ijk
I think Lee Phillips is probably a good judge of Lee Philips' current
opinions. But maybe that's just me.

------
ajays
> The team acknowledges that the project is in its earliest stages, and many
> key challenges remain before a viable prototype can be built.

There you go. Fusion be a harsh mistress.

I would put my money on Thorium reactors, to be honest.

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drjesusphd
As far as I can tell, this is just a magnetic mirror with neutral beam
injection.

The problem with mirror devices has and always will be plasma squirting out of
the sides. Sure, at any given moment, that may represent a small fraction of
the plasma (only particles that have a certain velocity will exit). But
collisions eventually change particles' velocity, eventually dooming them to
the path outward.

It looks like they're relying upon the neutral beams to replenish particles
that leave. That takes energy, and is one of the primary heating mechanisms in
tokamaks. Whether they can break even with such a scheme is entirely unknown
since they're not providing details.

More power to them, but I remain skeptical until they _actually_ release
details (this hardly counts). If it's secret, it's not science.

~~~
marktangotango
He talks about recirculation, maybe they figured out a way to plug the ends?
Ie if the plasma is positive charge, then would placing negative chargs at the
sides seal it? I don't know if this was ever tried.

~~~
drjesusphd
Plasma is almost always quasi-neutral. It's very hard to separate positive and
negative charges, especially along the field line. Electrons move very quickly
to cancel out any excess charge.

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Everhusk
While it's probably true that increasing the iteration time on design will get
you to a stable tokamak design faster, comparing the time it took to get to
ITER is not really a fair comparison.

With large scale mechanical engineering projects, scaling the size down will
create a world of new problems that ITER never ran into. They will need to
solve these all in house, whereas the tokamak design for ITER had the best
researchers all over the world working on it.

I'm actually more surprised that skunk works makes youtube videos now. I can
almost feel the engineers cringing when PR came to them with this idea...

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ijk
Lockheed Martin has at least managed to gum up the Google search for "Fusion
in 10 years".

~~~
marktangotango
Putting my aluminum foil hat on, and tying into your 'information obscuration'
idea, I speculate the Lockheed announcement may have been diversion for some
other activity they have previously or currently working on in secret.

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monochromatic
This is a lot of talk and hype for something that hasn't been built yet.

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Animats
No new news since October 2014? Lockheed's own site hasn't changed. That's not
good. They were going to have a new prototype each year.

~~~
dm2
The first public announcement was in October 2014.

They estimated they could build a test reactor within one year (by October
2015) and the prototype within 5 years.

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

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Ixiaus
Spheromaks, specifically the Dynomak, look much more promising than this.

------
dang
Url changed from [http://sploid.gizmodo.com/lockheed-martins-new-fusion-
reacto...](http://sploid.gizmodo.com/lockheed-martins-new-fusion-reactor-
might-change-humani-1646578094), which points to this.

