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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: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday March 28 2018, @02:20PM (1 child)
Yeah OK, but the real story is the high beta like over 1 claims. How do you get a continuous long term stable beta over 1 anyway? Weird idea conceptually. My guess is its cheaty like x-axis magnet provides 1 unit of pressure and y-axis provides 1 unit of pressure so the net vector force at a 45 degree angle between them is sqrt(2) of pressure or a beta of 140%. Good luck with that. Wikipedia is less pie in they sky and claims a beta of 1, which again, is at least less ridiculous but is still very much "good luck with that". Beta of 1 sounds like zero resistance wiring, spherical cows, 100% efficient carburetors, that kind of stuff. Not controversial they could run above 1% continuously, heroic Nobel Prize to run the plasma above the Troyon limit continuously... maybe. But going for broke and claiming running at precisely 1, come on pull the other leg...
In practice a tokamak gets like 1% beta on a good day. There's an instability limit Troyon or something like that around 4%, where above that oscillations get uncontrollable until the plasma shorts itself out. Now a tokamak is a 60s idea where it was pie in the sky 100% beta value sounds great to me, but it took until 80s to figure out the whole Troyon limit thing. So the life story of the tomamak is "in theory we should be able to turn the dials to 11 and make a shitload of power, but whenever we turn the dials above 1% or so it all blows up and we couldn't figure out why, at all, for 25 years, then over the last 40 years we haven't figured out a way around the problem we finally mathematically defined, so if we can only turn the dial up to 1% this thing is gonna either suck or be super expensive or both" And thats why our Deloreans in our garages don't have a "Mr Fusion" duct taped to the roof today, despite 1980s movie claims to the contrary.
Its hard to piece together the story that lots of hand waving about cusps suddenly makes legacy 1950s magnetic mirror designs work again. The diagrams I've seen imply some interestingly large and invasive internal coils to make those cusps. OK well maybe. Again this is another "good luck with that".
For people too lazy to look up what a plasma physics beta value is, from a certain systems engineering perspective its like the alpha value of a bipolar transistor which is the reciprocal of transistor beta. F-ing inconsistent engineers. So you dump X units of raw electrical (magnetic) power into a gadget and X% of the power does what you want (and this is called the transistor alpha, fusion reactor beta, other stuff in other fields I'm sure) and the rest turns into heat or burns it out if you force it anyway, etc.
I'll separate the uncontested factual stuff above from my hobby of delicious conspiracy theories below.
Note that a commercial power production failure doesn't necessarily mean its a lost cause. Swap in an intentionally dirty fuel and even if it makes no net power at all, it could irradiate the hell out of something for some purpose. Materials science neutron source or some weird industrial thing (food irradiation, or maybe a neutron war weapon that uses no fissile materials?). If you could make it the size of an old fashioned vacuum tube I bet it would make an interesting initiator for small a-bombs, which makes me think this whole idea probably dates to 1940s but has been classified for 80 years only recently "rediscovered" in public much like supposedly happened to a lot of cryptography work was supposedly invented by the NSA in like the 50s but public key crypto didn't exist in public for many more decades. My guess is there's a piece of paper from Los Alamos dated 1944 with this design on it as an atomic bomb neutron source initiator stamped classified and honestly the way this dudes idea slipped public is only because everyone who remembers that '44 design is dead so this design escaped.
A side conspiracy theory is Lockheed Martin was building these little devices on a very small scale of size using compartmentalized intense security as a black lab research source for the last 80 years or whatever strictly as a non-power generating neutron source for (redacted) purposes, and some dude finally noticed the scaling factors such that if you take the vacuum tube sized neutron source and fatten it up to the size of a jet engine and feed it a tastier fuel, the scaling math claims it'll generate net power...
So in summary if you want X units of magnetic pressure on a plasma, historically pragmatically as per actual results you have to build magnet designs for 100X the pressure and only run the plasma up to 1% kinda sorta handwavy and these dudes are claiming they increased efficiency to 1:1 such that X units of stable long term magnetic pressure can come from X units of electricity. Note that I'm not disagreeing with your claim of evolutionary small incremental increase in magnetic field strength; that is true and helpful but this "yeah beta values of 1% used to be good but we run at 100%+" is a bit of a revolutionary claim.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday March 28 2018, @03:18PM
Shoot, you made me RTFA. I see your point. Interesting...