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Lockheed Claims Breakthrough on Fusion Energy


SiGiL

Paranormal Maven
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Lockheed Martin Corp said on Wednesday it had made a technological breakthrough in developing a power source based on nuclear fusion, and the first reactors, small enough to fit on the back of a truck, could be ready in a decade.

Tom McGuire, who heads the project, said he and a small team had been working on fusion energy at Lockheed's secretive Skunk Works for about four years, but were now going public to find potential partners in industry and government for their work.

Initial work demonstrated the feasibility of building a 100-megawatt reactor measuring seven feet by 10 feet, which could fit on the back of a large truck, and is about 10 times smaller than current reactors, McGuire said.

In recent years, Lockheed, the Pentagon's top supplier, has been increasingly involved in a variety of alternate energy projects, including several ocean energy projects, as it looks to offset a decline in U.S. and European military spending.

Lockheed's fusion energy project could help in developing new power sources amid increasing global conflicts over energy, and as projections show there will be a 40 percent to 50 percent increase in energy use over the next generation, McGuire told reporters.

If it proves feasible, Lockheed's work would mark a key breakthrough in a field that scientists have long eyed as promising, but which has not yet yielded viable power systems. The effort seeks to harness the energy released during nuclear fusion, when atoms combine into more stable forms.

"We can make a big difference on the energy front," McGuire said, noting Lockheed's 60 years of research on nuclear fusion as a potential energy source that is safer and more efficient than current reactors based on nuclear fission.

Lockheed sees the project as part of a comprehensive approach to solving global energy and climate change problems. Compact nuclear fusion would also produce far less waste than coal-powered plants, and future reactors could eliminate radioactive waste completely, the company said.

McGuire said the company had several patents pending for the work and was looking for partners in academia, industry and among government laboratories to advance the work.

Lockheed said it had shown it could complete a design, build and test it in as little as a year, which should produce an operational reactor in 10 years, McGuire said. A small reactor could power a U.S. Navy warship, and eliminate the need for other fuel sources that pose logistical challenges.

U.S. submarines and aircraft carriers run on nuclear power, but they have large fusion reactors on board that have to be replaced on a regular cycle.

"What makes our project really interesting and feasible is that timeline as a potential solution," McGuire said.

Lockheed Claims Breakthrough on Fusion Energy - Scientific American
 
U.S. submarines and aircraft carriers run on nuclear power, but they have large fusion reactors on board that have to be replaced on a regular cycle.

Well that at least is big news. Most of us thought that the navy used fission reactors that had to be refueled every few years. In fact, as far as I know, a functioning fusion reactor is still somewhere off in the fuzzy future. Anyway, I would have expected more of Scientific American. Have they decided to outsource their stories or something? Is the job title Proofreader now in the same category as Compositor? If I can find half a dozen glaring errors in an article about nuclear reactors, something is terribly wrong.

Interesting if Lockheed is in fact working on something approximately similar to what was sort of described here. No mention of Mr. Fusion though. I doubt if I live long enough to be able to get one of those. Oh well, I don't have a DeLorean anyway.
 
I wonder: If Lockheed is ready to roll with fusion power in the public arena, do they already have a working fusion powerplant in the classified realm? Is fusion energy powering some of those big triangles that glide over Illinois and Texas . . . and Phoenix?
 
If I can find half a dozen glaring errors in an article about nuclear reactors, something is terribly wrong.

Yeah, I noticed that too. Aviation week has another take on what the skunk works is making.

I wonder: If Lockheed is ready to roll with fusion power in the public arena, do they already have a working fusion powerplant in the classified realm? Is fusion energy powering some of those big triangles that glide over Illinois and Texas . . . and Phoenix?

I was thinking the same thing. I wonder what tech they are hiding from public that we don't know of.

Skunk Works Reveals Compact Fusion Reactor Details | Technology content from Aviation Week
 

Some great comments after the article. :)

Like this comment: "With the Advance of Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR) field seems to have accelerated things in the "hot" nuclear fusion space. The Big Boys realize that they may become obsolete (with the Billions they've invested) if they don't get a move on. Andrea Rossi's E-cat (Industrial Heat) . Randell Mills of Blacklight Power, and Solar Hydrogen Trends, have kicked off a mad scramble what will be defined as the "New Energy Race" Trillions of dollars are at stake. In the next year we will see how abundant our Energy Options actually are. Pay attention. The fight has just begun."
 
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Well that at least is big news. Most of us thought that the navy used fission reactors that had to be refueled every few years. In fact, as far as I know, a functioning fusion reactor is still somewhere off in the fuzzy future. Anyway, I would have expected more of Scientific American. Have they decided to outsource their stories or something? Is the job title Proofreader now in the same category as Compositor? If I can find half a dozen glaring errors in an article about nuclear reactors, something is terribly wrong.

Interesting if Lockheed is in fact working on something approximately similar to what was sort of described here. No mention of Mr. Fusion though. I doubt if I live long enough to be able to get one of those. Oh well, I don't have a DeLorean anyway.


Read some of the comments - posters make similar observations as yours.

Comment that gives some interesting caveats: "Of course, one wonders why this very large company requires investors to create this fusion plant.

"One unintentionally funny (as well as braindead) remark is that their 100MW fusion reactor is "only a tenth of the size of a nuclear reactor." Of course, it also produces less than a tenth of the power a conventional reactor produces !!! and there are compact modular reactors that are not very large that produce a lot more than 100MW. I don't know where they got the idea that shipboard reactors are replaced "regularly." Modern reactors last over 60 years. These claims are also entirely misleading in that they pit their fusion reactor against current conventional reactors. But that's pure BS - in less than 10 years,

"Transatomic Power' molten salt reactors will have made current reactors totally obsolete - THESE are the fission reactors Lockheed will be up against. And they CAN burn nuclear wastes (which the fusion reactor cannot do), they can also operate in a load following capacity; they have near zero fuel costs and essentially unlimited fuel supplies; they are inherently safe, probably safer than the fusion reactor; they are cheap to build and can be sized large or small. Transatomic Powr does not require any 10 years to build one of their reactors - the basic technology is decades old and well understood - Transatomic Power simply came up with new metals and chemicals that make the reactor practical, which was the only obstacle to commercialization years ago. This Lockheed claim has been floating around for years now. I am positive Transatomic Power's molten salt reactors will succeed. Lockheed's claims sound like the ones they had about EESTOR storage devices.

"Very skeptical of anything Lockheed says. Sounds like they want others to risk the money on this device rather than themselves. That shows a strong lack of confidence."
 
E Cat made the news this month too

ECAT News Archives -

getting this stuff to work will be a game changer.

Fusion powered aircraft for example would quickly dominate the airline industry, you could offer fares no gas guzzling competitors planes could hope to match
 
That CNN piece is about this.

The American Reporter Vol. 20, No. 5,080 - October 17, 2014

a long but very enlightening read, i didnt understand all the science, but its easy enough to follow.
But most importantly this is real science at work, this is genuine, and starting to gather momentum.

Basically even with what they have now, they could power up one tube, and power 3 more of it, then 3 more of each of them, now there would be 13 in the loop, and those 13 would be producing enough power to run another 39 tubes, now big the tubes up into power stations, all producing enough power into the grid to power each other, and produce 70% excess power to power a country.

Or power your own home with a suitcase size generator in the garage, or in cupboard.

I think this italian guy is going to be richer, and his contribution to mankind greater than
Bill Gates, in the way live our daily lives.


Look at pages 20/21/22/23 the diagrams and charts, 32 day test, averaged an output of 3.3 x energy in to power the reactor.
And they are just beginning to get an idea about its true potential.

page 25
It must be remarked that the COP values quoted here refer only to the performance of the reactor running at the capacity selected by us, not at its maximum potential, any evaluation of which lies beyond the purposes for which this test was designed.
Awareness of the fact that the test would have lasted a considerable length of time prompted us to keep the reactor running at a level of operation capable of warranting both the stability and the safety of the test.
Therefore, we do not know what the limits of the current technology are, in terms of performance and life span of the charges.
 
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Other projects


Prometheus Fusion Perfection[edit]
Mark Suppes, a web developer, built his own polywell in a warehouse in Brooklyn, New York. He was the first amateur in the world to detect electron trapping using a Langmuir probe inside a polywell. He presented at the 2012 LIFT conference and the 2012 WIRED conference.[88] The project officially ended in July 2013, while the blog would remain online indefinitely.[89]

University of Sydney[edit]
The University of Sydney in Australia has been conducting studies and experiments with polywell devices. To date, they have published five papers in Physics of Plasmas on this topic, one in 2010,[90] one in late 2011,[13], two in 2013 [25][30] and one in 2014[91]. They also published one PhD thesis[8] on the subject and presented their work at IEC Fusion conferences.[92][93]
The May 2010 paper discussed experimental work, testing a small device for its ability to capture electrons. The paper posited that the machine had an ideal magnetic field strength which maximized its ability to catch electrons. The paper analyzed magnetic confinement in the polywell using analytical solutions as well as simulations. The work linked the magnetic confinement in the polywell to magnetic mirror theory.[26] This research was presented at the 12th US-Japan Workshop on Inertial Electrostatic Confinement Fusion,[94] and summarized by John Santarius of the University of Wisconsin [95] The 2011 work uses Particle-in-cell simulations to model particle motion in polywells with a small electron population. Electrons behaved in a similar manner to particles in the biconic cusp.[27]
The first 2013 paper, measured a negative voltage inside a 4 inch aluminum polywell.[30] This was performed using pairs of biased Langmuir probes. Several tests were undertaken that included: measuring an internal beam of electrons, comparing the machine with and without a magnetic field, measuring the voltage at different locations and comparing voltage changes to the magnetic and electric field strength.[30]

Iranian Nuclear Science and Technology Research Institute[edit]
In November 2012, Trend News Agency reported that the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran had allocated "$8 million"[96] to inertial electrostatic confinement research and about half had been spent. The funded group published a paper in the Journal of Fusion Energy, which stated that particle-in-cell simulations of a polywell had been conducted. The study suggested that well depths and ion focus control can be achieved by variations of field strength, and referenced older research with traditional fusors. The group had run a fusor in continuous mode at -140 kV and 70 mA of current, with D-D fuel, producing 2×107 neutrons per second.[97]

University of Wisconsin[edit]
Carl Sovinec and his graduate student have performed Vlasov–Poisson, particle-in-cell simulation work on the polywell. This was funded through the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship and was presented at the 2013 American Physical Society conference.[98]

Convergent Scientific, Inc.[edit]
Convergent Scientific, Inc. (CSI) is an American company founded in December 2010 and based in Huntington Beach, California.[99] Their first polywell design, the Model 1, has been tested on steady-state operations from January to late summer 2012. The MaGrid was made of a unique diamond shaped hollow wire, into which an electric current and a liquid coolant are flowing.[100][101][102] They are now making an effort to build a small-scale polywell fusing deuterium.[103][104] The company filed several patents[105][106][107] and in the Fall of 2013, did a series of web-based investor pitches.[108] The presentations mention encountering plasma instabilities including the Diocotron, two stream and Weibel instabilities. The company wants to make and sell Nitrogen-13 for PET scans.[109]
Radiant Matter Research[edit]

Radiant Matter[110] is an organization in the Netherlands which has built a number of fusors and has plans to build a polywell.

Polywell - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Abstract: 56 years ago, Harold Grad and his team at New Your University conjectured (and to some extent calculated) that the confinement properties of a magnetic cusp would be dramatically improved if the confined plasma had sufficiently high pressure to exclude the B-field from the interior. We have carried out an experiment that demonstrates, for the first time in 56 years, that this effect is real. This has dramatic implications for the future of cusp confined fusion.
"SPECIAL PLASMA SEMINAR: Measurement of Enhanced Cusp Confinement at High Beta" | www.physics.uci.edu
 
I dont see anybody rubbishing what he is doing, also i was skeptical, but this guy must have patents, because he is virtually telling all how it works.
 
No dream, fantasy, or pipe dream: the E-Cat is real and works today. A recently released report describing a thirty-two day test of a high temperature E-Cat in Lugano, Switzerland has confirmed both massive excess power generation and isotopic ratio shifts in the fuel that provide hard proof of nuclear reactions.

As this article is being written, Industrial Heat – the company that acquired the E-Cat technology from Andrea Rossi – is continually testing over a hundred reactors that compose a one megawatt plant. This plant is located in the factory of an undisclosed customer. After at least a year of testing has been completed, the customer will share the performance of the plant with the world and allow visits. The E-Cat is in process of going commercial.

Hopefully we will find out one way or the other soon

Regarding the recent third-party test of Andrea Rossi's E-Cat reactor which ran for 32 days in an independent lab in Switzerland, showing high excess heat -- ~3.5 times more out than energy input -- exhibiting a shift in Ni and Li isotopes but with no nuclear radiation, which is a huge mystery. 54-page report by 6 professors lays out the methods and data very convincingly
.

News:E-Cat Fuel Analysis and Validation Paper Posted October 8, 2014 - PESWiki
 
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