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Lockheed Martin has quietly obtained a patent associated with its design for a potentially revolutionary compact fusion reactor, or CFR. If this project has been progressing on schedule, the company could debut a prototype system that size of shipping container, but capable of powering a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier or 80,000 homes, sometime in the next year or so.
The patent, for a portion of the confinement system, or embodiment, is dated Feb. 15, 2018. The Maryland-headquartered defense contractor had filed a provisional claim on April 3, 2013 and a formal application nearly a year later. Our good friend Stephen Trimble, chief of Flightglobal's Americas Bureau, subsequently spotted it and Tweeted out its basic details.
In 2014, the company also made a splash by announcing they were working on the device at all and that it was the responsibility of its Skunk Works advanced projects office in Palmdale, California. At the time, Dr. Thomas McGuire, head of the Skunk Works’ Compact Fusion Project, said the goal was to have a working reactor in five years and production worthy design within 10.
[...] Considering the five year timeline Dr. McGuire put out in 2014 for achieving a workable prototype, maybe we’re due for another big announcement from Lockheed Martin in the near future.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Wednesday March 28 2018, @04:38AM (17 children)
You aren't supposed to be able to patent something that can't be demonstrated to actually work.
There have been many working demonstrations of small scale fission reactors demonstrated around the world. http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-power-reactors/small-nuclear-power-reactors.aspx [world-nuclear.org]
Some of these are as small as semi trailer.
I suppose some of these are patented. But how do you patent something that doesn't work?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Wednesday March 28 2018, @04:52AM (2 children)
Do you really think the patent office actually demands to see a working prototype? It's easy to patent something that doesn't work: write up a patent and file it. It's been done countless times. It's a key feature in the business model of patent trolls in fact.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @06:45AM
In this case it's a business model of stock market trolls. Troll the investors "we haz fusion in container"
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday March 28 2018, @12:59PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @04:53AM
This patent appears to describe some form of magnetic confinement device. I am not an expert in the subject of magnetic confinement so I am not sure if the invention is reasonable, or worthy of a patent. That being said, magnetic confinement is very popular in fusion research and several well-known designs use it, such as the tokamak and the stellarator.
What makes you think this new invention "can't be demonstrated to actually work"?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday March 28 2018, @05:01AM (6 children)
High [nationalgeographic.com] school [wired.com] students [theguardian.com] have made fusion work.
What you meant to say is that nobody has made fusion power commercially viable yet. And before you can do that, you have to demonstrate it. Which is exactly what Lockheed Martin is doing. But it has nothing to do with a patent for a confinement system, of which there have been many working examples.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by istartedi on Wednesday March 28 2018, @05:55AM (4 children)
Semantics. Without even following your links, I'm going to
assume that you've linked to some students building a Farnsworth Fusor
or similar device. It does create neutrons via fusion. Low energy
neutrons, and at rates so low AFAIK they aren't even a regulatory
concern. This is not what people mean when they say "make fusion work".
What they mean is "get more energy out of the fuel than you put
in to start the reaction, and do so in a controlled manor".
We have made H-bombs which are over-unity. We have made fusion
reactors which are under-unity. We haven't made any kind of over-unity
fusion reactor that you would want to share a city with while it's operating.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @07:21AM (3 children)
That would be a commercially viable fusion reactor. And yes, that's probably what most people mean when they say "working", but when it comes to patents, there is no requirements that the prototype be commercially viable.
Just like there was no requirements that the first car be faster than a horse. A car slower than a horse was pretty useless, but it still demonstrated that building a car was possible. Gradual improvements over time took the car from something interesting only to enthusiasts to being what it is today.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Wednesday March 28 2018, @01:02PM (2 children)
That's going too far. It's entirely reasonable for an over-unity fusion reactor instance to be non-viable commercially. It could have a very limited lifetime; it could use means to initiate the reaction that are not reliable; it could suffer from containment problems such as erosion or deterioration of the containment chamber(s); it might work fine, but simply produce so little power compared to its cost that it isn't commercially viable.
A commercially viable fusion reactor has to meet the same kind of metrics any other power source does. It has to be maintainable; it has to have a positive ROA, which in turn implies a decent operating lifetime as combined with a reasonably priced billable power output and low enough maintenance costs that the maintenance doesn't raise operating costs unacceptably; it has to be both safe and easy to operate; it has to be reliable; and it has to fail safely. There are probably many other metrics I've missed, and very few of these apply to an R&D level fusion design at all.
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Wednesday March 28 2018, @02:29PM (1 child)
And there's the fuzzy in between of military power sources. Surely the cheapest source of watts today is a nuclear reactor, but the Army delivered lots of $50/gallon diesel to the middle of nowhere in the middle east because you can't really build a PWR in the desert for a FOB. Or the cheapest way to propel a large boat is a diesel engine but for military task purposes nukes are very popular even if oil burning would be cheaper. Even if in theory if might be cheaper to burn oil, the idea of a shipping container sized nuke must be enticing to shipping container transport boats, ship one non-profit container in exchange for ripping out all that diesel engine and tankage and paying those fuel bills all around the world etc, just one little container and a huge extension cord is all the boat needs...
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Wednesday March 28 2018, @03:01PM
There's that whole cruising range issue, and there's also a peak power issue – nukes can make a lot steam, and very quickly. Subs in particular benefit from being able to go wherever, whenever, without having to refuel. For carriers, since the aircraft need lots of petro-fuels, the advantage is somewhat muted, although still they have the ability to keep the carrier itself on station without refueling, which in turn means fewer tankers going back and forth overall.
No matter what the vessel, unless it is 100% automated, the sailors need to be fed, so resupply eventually becomes an issue no matter what the power source. Carriers have a lot of room for storage, but they also have very large crews...
Essentially unlimited power availability also means that energy weapons are more practical, so lasers, particle beams, railguns, that sort of thing will be better accommodated on vessels with nuclear power sources, fission or otherwise.
Anyway, I agree that dependable, high-output fusion reactor implementations would be of immense value to the navy, even if quite costly. Also to remote science installations, etc.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday March 28 2018, @06:02AM
It may not have to do with the patent, but it does have to do with a workable confinement system. One that can work for seconds has been demonstrate, one that can work in various special circumstances has been demonstrated, but nobody has yet demonstrated one that can maintain a high enough pressure for long enough to be useful for more than a demonstration.
IIUC, LPP is doing something significantly different, boron-hydrogen fusion isn't something I've heard people talking about before, and apparently they need to use a particular isotope of boron to avoid producing radioactive beryllium. That sound weird and interesting, and certainly different. Perhaps Lockheed is doing something equally different, and just being more secretive about it.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday March 28 2018, @05:53AM (3 children)
So, what's the latest on Rossi's E-CAT?
I keep hearing all that PR - BigNameDrops, and secrecy, but so far, anything they have released only demonstrated to me the whole thing is nothing but theater for the investment crowd, not a power generation system in *any* meaning of the word.
I did quite a big writeup on that one over at TheOilDrum.com, you know, a good multipage science rant full of thermodynamic equations backing why I believe the videos shown were bullshit. For some reason, I can't find it through Google, and I have to go recover my login credentials from a decade old computer. Hope that rant is still up. I tried like the dickens to keep rich people from spending their money on something that I could find no scientific credibility of, but all the science I can illustrate is no match for a well-bred marketer with outstretched hand.
( Strongly in Steven Krivet's camp. ).
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday March 28 2018, @02:38PM (2 children)
I miss that site. It was kind of a social experiment where there was some specialist knowledge that was well known in the specialty, then tried to push it out to the general public, but only maybe 1% or less of the general population was smart enough to understand it and see it as obvious when pointed out, while 99% of the population can't understand it and generally speaking only uses the topic for confidence scams and similar manipulation. Its a good display of the cultural problem of hyperspecialization where eventually something vitally important will be too complicated for the public to understand so blunder and collapse is inevitable.
I never had anything to say there, but WRT pushing the concepts to the general public there is at least one long term multi-decade energy financial investor (me) who knew all that stuff and thought it was interesting to see it discussed in public or at least attempted. That site did have fans. From memory the site's founders finally gave up on discussing the topic around 2013 and closed down. They tried hard for a good 8 years.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday March 29 2018, @11:12AM (1 child)
I felt a kindred spirit with the guys of TheOilDrum, being I used to work at Chevron, first the refinery, then at the Oil Field Research division. We talked about that kind of stuff all the time. We were constantly working on how to handle watering out wells, and the geologists were always speculating on just how long the oil companies could keep up with demand, and the hell that was going to break loose when the market said "more", and the Earth said "reservoir is empty".
I had been at Grandpa's farm, and heard him lamenting about the water table, the aquifer, and his pumps. But knowing that when the rains come again, the aquifers will be replenished. However, I understood the oil reservoirs were created in geologic time, and we were depleting them. I invested a lot of my retirement resources in petroleum, as I figured when shit hit the fan, peak oil, I'd much rather be holding oil, backed up with the energy in it, than the American Dollar, instantiated at will by the bankers through fractional reserve banking. I remember studying what has happened to many fiat currencies, and did not want to be left holding the equivalent of lousy toilet paper.
I had no idea fracking would work as well as it apparently does... I thought they were just getting a few last farts out of the Earth - and gas is not nearly as dense as liquid petroleum.
Then I see this Rossi fellow making millions doing what gives all appearances to me as nothing more than a theatrical performance. But the men of the suit and handshake eat it up.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday March 30 2018, @04:07PM
Classic logistics curve thing where higher tech methods after the easy stuff is harvested imply steeper growth implies steeper decline....
(Score: 2) by leftover on Wednesday March 28 2018, @02:31PM
That is another aspect aspect of patents ruined by the move to "first to file". An utterly specious content-free application beats having a working model. IMHO they should be two different documents, with the Concept Description being mostly honorary and the Patent requiring a working model. All so-called Design Patents and Software Patents should actually be 5-year copyrights but that process is fubar too.
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @02:37PM
The rule for having a working model was thrown out years ago.