Posted on 10/15/2014 5:42:41 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Lockheed Martin, the aerospace and defense conglomerate based in Bethesda, Md., is claiming to have made a major breakthrough in nuclear fusion, which could lead to development of reactors small enough to fit on the back of a truck within a decade.
In the simplest terms, nuclear fission breaks a single atom into two whereas nuclear fusion combines two atoms into one.
Fusion, the holy grail of nuclear power, creates three to four times as much energy as fission. More importantly, fusion’s key advantage over fission is that it does not produce cancer-causing radioactive waste.
(VIDEO-AT-LINK)
Tom McGuire, who heads the project, told Reuters that his team had been working on fusion energy at Lockheed’s Skunk Works program for the past four years, but decided to go public with the news now to recruit additional partners in industry and government to support their work....
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
To be fair, the Navy’s been funding a lot of people looking into fusion, so they can power their next generation warships and have more railguns mounted.
They are asking other companies for backing? They claim to be able - depending on when you listen to them, within a year or within 20 years - to be able to make a 18-wheeler sized fusion power plant capable of powering a small city, and thus to be able to power a huge aircraft at hypersonic speeds with indefinite range and loiter capability. And they can’t submit an unsolicited proposal to the government but have to have support from other companies???Nobody has come close to break-even on continuous fusion power - and they casually talk of going into production within the decade???
Every time I read these articles, ten years from happening is the standard development forecast...Except I have been reading these types of articles for 40 years...
“Lockheed is promising an operational unit by 2017”
Of course, Blacklight Power has been promising an operational
Hydrino device within two years for the last 15 years.
Yeah, like Obama and his handlers will permit that. They have too much invested in collapsing the US economy to allow some company that hasn't contributed enough to the DNC to make that much of a change to the system.
I say that from experience.
Over the decades I’ve watched ideas like this, ideas that will ‘overturn the apple cart’, whether it be a cancer cure, or a new energy source, blaze brightly for a few moments, and then die out, never to be heard from again.
The adds are 1000 to 1 that this will be the same, and that’s unfortunate, as I do believe that there is more than a little truth to the announcement.
Recent history shows that in fact this happens only until society reaches a position of real "comfort" and then the rate of growth turns negative.
That's the first thought that occurred to me, using fusion for railguns on naval ships. As for me, I'd like to have a fusion-powered railgun on my pickup truck. Just to plink bottles or something.
I've got some old Popular Science magazines and other old magazines from the 1950s. Yup, fun to look back and see all the predictions of stuff that was to come in a few years but never happened.
Some of the ideas, and this fusion idea may be one of them, are not so much fun to read about.
I do believe they have something, but the ‘it’s going to upset the apple cart’ angle is going to be its doom. Really big ideas which will displace tens of millions of people, drain the wealth of many more, don’t have a chance of fast fruition.
This is going to take decades, maybe a hundred years, before fusion is going to be accepted by those who are in a position to hold it back.
Heartbreaking.
They should save their money and talk to Rossi
...
Maybe they did talk to him. Their press release reminds me a lot of the Rossi scam.
I’d settle for the unmetered grid power that was also promised.
...
My power company itemizes their bills. For my last one the fuel charge was close to 25%.
And Fairy dust, you forgot the Fairy dust! OH shi+, now I'm going to get that damn luddite lecture again!
“And the next Marxist president will sneak it to the Chinese.”
Why bother? They already got it for themselves.
“The adds are 1000 to 1 that this will be the same, and that’s unfortunate, as I do believe that there is more than a little truth to the announcement.”
I, too have been disappointed over and over again, with fusion power being 10 years away for the last 50 years. But consider the source here. Seems to me that the organization involved has a pretty good track record of doing “atomic rocket science” that produces real tangible, breakthrough results - and those are only the results that we know about.
I want to learn more about this. IF IT IS REAL, the planet might just have been saved from humanity, at least for the next several hundred years. A heck of a lot of socio-economic problems go away with cheap and plentiful energy.
I STILL believe that Farnsworth’s Fusor could be made to work in an energy-positive manner without blowing itself up, it SEEMS like a maddeningly simple mechanical problem, but no one smart enough to solve the problem has applied themselves to it. I suspect that it will eventually be solved, and millions of armchair engineers will kick themselves for not thinking of it first.
“That’s the first thought that occurred to me, using fusion for railguns on naval ships. As for me, I’d like to have a fusion-powered railgun on my pickup truck. Just to plink bottles or something.”
I’d rather have an infrared semiconductor laser in the low megawatt range. That would be a very quick end to the Drone Era :).
If you believe this I have a carburater to sell, get your car to 1000 mpg.
So is CONfusion!!!
That, you can make right now. Plenty of YouTube how-to-do-it videos on how to modify low-powered lasers and boost the output, enough to burn holes in stuff. Portable power is a problem, so megawatt lasers would be a tough project. Your utility bill will be a shocker.
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