The "Now" implication of Fusion Power

[Cikomyr]

I am extremely fanboyish about the possibility of the arrival of Fusion Power in our age. I know a lot of people here have had reservations about Lockheed Martin Skunkwork's announcement back in October, but i try to be optimist!

However, what i want to talk about is the "now" appication of the arrival of relatively safe, reliable and pocket size fusion reactors in our economy.

I know some dreamers would immediately say stuff like "we could have electric cars for everyone!!", whereas i realize that our energy distribution infrastructure for vehicle is based on a liquid. Converting everything to a pure electric base would require billions, hundred of billions of dollars in investment.

Same with all the people in the world that uses Gas appliances or heating. They wont be able to convert overnight to the cheap fusion-powered electricity.

So... With the admission that we might eventually phase out fossil fuel infrastructures with time and progress, what do you think would be the immediate effect?

Is it possible to synthetise gasoline, for example? If we have nearly unlimited electricty, synthetic gasoline might become a viable mean of storing energy for our vehicle fleet...

I guess many places in the world would be happy to have access to pentiful energy, especially for atmospheric capture of water for irrigation purpose.

...what other impact on the world do you think qe would get to see within, say, 5-10 years of economically viable Fusion Power?

[Tev]

I used to be fusion fanboy too. Then I actually grasped how much stuff like ITER costs and realized it's not going to be economically viable in our century.

Only chance for something sooner is some breakthrough in projects like LPP - aneutronic fusion and completely skipping the "heat -> electricity" part. THAT might bring very cheap energy . . . if we can handle conditions ten times worse than those in classic tokamaks.

Overall engineering challenge of fusion has made me very sceptical of every PR statement about "we'll have fusion in x years". Skunkworks is no exception, I've not heard any real details about their progress but maybe it's just side-effect of the overblown hype.


With that in mind . . .


What comes "after economically viable fusion" depends how you picture that fusion to work. If we're really lucky with aneutronic fusion we actually can have power plants and large transportable "compact reactors " in 10-20 years after initial breakthrough. And that will really be usable everywhere, so there might be actual energy revolution you speak about.

If the mainstream (tokamaks) method manages to actually produce electricity with some usable efficiency we can start using large reactors in 30 years after that, so we'll have maybe a little cheaper electricity (building them will be even more expensive than today's fission reactors), but with quite a bit radioactive waste. Breeder fission reactors or something else to process that waste will be necessary to actually make it more "green" than current fission power plants.

Overall, I don't think fusion will significantly change anything in this century. But with so many people researching it we might luck out and make it practical somehow. But media won't be able to tell difference between that and random PR hype, so best bet to recognize it is educating yourself and ignoring whatever people say in the tv / on the internet.

[Flickerdart]

There was some process the military developed a few months back that could create liquid fuel out of saltwater, meant to be used by nuclear carriers. From what I recall, the process was a net energy loss (though the Navy doesn't care - converting ship fuel into plane fuel is very useful anyway) but if we had fusion, we would probably harness enough energy that it wouldn't matter, so we could produce liquid fuel for cars that way.

[avr]

If vast quantities of fusion power cost vast quantities of money to build (very likely) then you could have plenty of time to change the infrastructure for personal transport.

If it is a lot cheaper than other electrical power plants, then likely the fossil fuel burning power plants will be replaced first, the price of oil/gas will drop like a stone and there'll be little financial incentive to build more plants to make gasoline.

[Yora]

I think car engines and cooking on fire a pretty minor things when it comes to global energy consumption. The biggest impact would be on coal and nuclear power plants. Even if it would take decades to switch to electric cars, the impact of no longer requiring nuclear fuel (and reducing waste to almost nothing) and using coal only in steel making would be much bigger much sooner. Yes, early fusion reactors would be fantastically expensive, but you would no longer have to mine, transport, and burn all that coal or make, transport, and store fuel rods. And these all are already fantastically expensive.

Synthesizing oil would be pretty pointless, though. There are still huge amounts readily available and switching infrastructure to electric will probably happen faster than synthetic oil being commercially viable.

[factotum]

However, what i want to talk about is the "now" appication of the arrival of relatively safe, reliable and pocket size fusion reactors in our economy.


Hold on, wind back a bit--"pocket size"? Isn't that a bit of a "run before you can walk" thing? Let's get all our coal, oil and nuclear power plants replaced with fusion ones before we try to shrink a reactor small enough to fit in someone's pocket--that would be plenty enough of a quantum leap over what we have, methinks; you'd be a situation where generating electricity really would be so cheap that it costs the company more to pay meter readers etc. than they can realistically charge, so you just get it for free!

For that matter, I'm not sure they would even bother trying to shrink the technology that small anyway. There's enough negative publicity when somebody's laptop battery overheats and catches fire, can you imagine the headlines if something similar happened with a fusion reactor? Shrinking them small enough to use in vehicles is about as far as I can see them practically wanting to take it.

[Flickerdart]

you'd be a situation where generating electricity really would be so cheap that it costs the company more to pay meter readers etc. than they can realistically charge, so you just get it for free!
That's very optimistic - nothing stops the power companies from simply dialing down the frequency of meter readings. Call them audits instead, do them every 6 months or something, and if how much has been paid doesn't match up with how much is owed, then you get a letter in an envelope marked Urgent.

Besides, only a fraction of your power bill is the actual electricity. About half of it (here in New York, anyway) will come from infrastructure charges. You pay for using the company's cables for every Watt you pull, in addition to paying for that Watt. Even if I paid nothing for the electricity I consume, I'd still drop about $25-40 a month on just infrastructure charges.

[Madcrafter]

For that matter, I'm not sure they would even bother trying to shrink the technology that small anyway. There's enough negative publicity when somebody's laptop battery overheats and catches fire, can you imagine the headlines if something similar happened with a fusion reactor? Shrinking them small enough to use in vehicles is about as far as I can see them practically wanting to take it.Military will. And the consumers will want them too then so a company will make them. If they get sued out of existence after a few people die will remain to be seen, but I don't doubt that people are going to try and shrink them as small as they possibly can.

[Lord Torath]

Military will. And the consumers will want them too then so a company will make them. If they get sued out of existence after a few people die will remain to be seen, but I don't doubt that people are going to try and shrink them as small as they possibly can.I don't know. Is the military currently looking into pocket-sized fission plants? Probably not. I'm sure they'd love more efficient battery storage, though. Better batteries could have a bigger (and quicker) impact on power supplies than viable fusion plants. We could start storing solar and wind energy, allowing us to better match fluctuating power demand.

[Tyndmyr]

Military will. And the consumers will want them too then so a company will make them. If they get sued out of existence after a few people die will remain to be seen, but I don't doubt that people are going to try and shrink them as small as they possibly can.

Extremely high energy density is inherently dangerous. Be it batteries, gasoline, or wallet sized power plants, something goes wrong, everything goes boom.

So, that's an issue, even ignoring the ludicrous economic/tech challenges that make the whole scenario highly unlikely.

But if it did exist, then Iron Man suits, etc are reasonable.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Hold on, wind back a bit--"pocket size"? Isn't that a bit of a "run before you can walk" thing?

Not literally pocket-size, but figuratively so when compared to actual electrical plants. If Lockheed Martin is to be believed, they might have successfully designed an energy-positve fusion in a reactor the size of a lorry (link to an article about it (http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals-compact-fusion-reactor-details), google to find others (https://www.google.com/search?q=Lockheed+Martin+Skunkwork&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8#q=lockheed+martin+skunkworks+fusion+reactor)), which I would not nit-pick to be called pocket size. The OP asked "what if lockheed martin is correct - what are the economic implications", so I won't comment on how realistic the announcement is, just assume for the purposes of this thread that they are telling the truth.

Grey Wolf

[Madcrafter]

I don't know. Is the military currently looking into pocket-sized fission plants? Probably not. I'm sure they'd love more efficient battery storage, though. Better batteries could have a bigger (and quicker) impact on power supplies than viable fusion plants. We could start storing solar and wind energy, allowing us to better match fluctuating power demand.I wouldn't think so, since for fission there is always a certain minimum mass/size needed to be critical. Better storage would be an easy method to improve energy; it's not solving the exact same problem, but it would still work.


Extremely high energy density is inherently dangerous. Be it batteries, gasoline, or wallet sized power plants, something goes wrong, everything goes boom.

So, that's an issue, even ignoring the ludicrous economic/tech challenges that make the whole scenario highly unlikely.Since when has something being dangerous ever stopped humanity? :smallamused:

[Cikomyr]

Hold on, wind back a bit--"pocket size"? Isn't that a bit of a "run before you can walk" thing? Let's get all our coal, oil and nuclear power plants replaced with fusion ones before we try to shrink a reactor small enough to fit in someone's pocket--that would be plenty enough of a quantum leap over what we have, methinks; you'd be a situation where generating electricity really would be so cheap that it costs the company more to pay meter readers etc. than they can realistically charge, so you just get it for free!

For that matter, I'm not sure they would even bother trying to shrink the technology that small anyway. There's enough negative publicity when somebody's laptop battery overheats and catches fire, can you imagine the headlines if something similar happened with a fusion reactor? Shrinking them small enough to use in vehicles is about as far as I can see them practically wanting to take it.

What Grey Wolf said. The point is made about the Lockheed Martin truck-sized 100MW reactor. For a 100MW generator, it is effectively pocket sized.

The engineering advantage for LM is that they build new itterations of the thing extremely quickly rather than spend 10 years on a test.

Think of how it could change the world if you could jump-start the energy production of any country by 10 GW with a single freighter transporting them.

Makes them mobile. Makes them easy to build.

[thorgrim29]

And they're designing it to be easily integrated into existing power grids and even facilities, the guy in the presentation said he saw them replacing the burners in a gas or coal plant with his reactor.

Don't know how realistic this all is but if even if we say it takes them 15 more years then they think it's still a huge gamechanger

[BannedInSchool]

And then I start thinking about the space ship thread and wondering if the next big problem will be heat pollution from making and using cheap fusion power.

[Yora]

Thorium really is just an alternative to uranium. It has some advantages, but you're still dealing with a boiling radioactive acid, which is a bit difficult to control.


Extremely high energy density is inherently dangerous. Be it batteries, gasoline, or wallet sized power plants, something goes wrong, everything goes boom.
That's the wonderful thing about fusion reactors. They can't really explode, overheat, meltdown, or anything like that. If you have them connected to a steam generator, the pressurised steam tanks might explode, but I don't see that being used in consumer appliances.
Fusion reactors rely on a near vacuum. As soon as anything goes wrong and there is the tinyest leak anywhere, the reaction breaks down and stops. Inside the reactor, there's only a very small amount of deuterium, which can't do anything dangerous. The more serious problem is that the inside of the reactor gets highly radioactive during the fusion process, so it's not safe to crack open your reactor and put your fingers inside it.
Worst case scenario, the steam vessels rupture and the pressure wave rips the reactor to pieces and throws the fragments everywhere. But it's only the debris of the reactor that is radioactive, there's no fuel or waste to get blown into the atmosphere.

[Tyndmyr]

Thorium really is just an alternative to uranium. It has some advantages, but you're still dealing with a boiling radioactive acid, which is a bit difficult to control.


That's the wonderful thing about fusion reactors. They can't really explode, overheat, meltdown, or anything like that. If you have them connected to a steam generator, the pressurised steam tanks might explode, but I don't see that being used in consumer appliances.
Fusion reactors rely on a near vacuum. As soon as anything goes wrong and there is the tinyest leak anywhere, the reaction breaks down and stops. Inside the reactor, there's only a very small amount of deuterium, which can't do anything dangerous. The more serious problem is that the inside of the reactor gets highly radioactive during the fusion process, so it's not safe to crack open your reactor and put your fingers inside it.
Worst case scenario, the steam vessels rupture and the pressure wave rips the reactor to pieces and throws the fragments everywhere. But it's only the debris of the reactor that is radioactive, there's no fuel or waste to get blown into the atmosphere.

Jumping a car wrong can make a battery go boom. Wait until someone fails to hook their Portable Fusion Machine up correctly to something. And SOMEBODY will.

Then you get a boom. A boom that, if it breaks containment, tosses around some chunks of radioactive bits for everyone to freak out about.

[Max™]

Fusion reactors don't have the same sort of radioactivity problems as fission ones do, and even with fission reactors it takes pretty severe lack of oversight combined with persistent and major error to get serious excursions like Chernobyl. Fukushima was just gas releases, Chernobyl actually went boom and sprayed radioactive material everywhere for a long period of time, like actual chunks of reactor core containment material laying in the parking lot bad.

A pocket fission reactor wouldn't do that, much less a pocket fusion reactor.

You stick light elements together and make heavier ones and release energy, that means you're working with stuff like hydrogen and heavy water.

We ended up getting more dramatic yields from the later generation fusion bombs but a big part of the push for fusion bombs was to reduce the tendency fission bombs had of spraying radioactive material everywhere. Fusion bombs still did some, but compared to the yield it was negligible if you look at what would have come out of the same number of fission bombs.

Getting rid of coal will do a lot though, that is the nastiest most dangerous stuff around, honestly, I worked in a powered down plant for a week, cleaning dust hoppers, sometimes I still get coughing fits and the pores in my nose probably still have traces of coal dust in them. I left the bathtub black for a month after I quit.

Shutting down and decomissioning coal plants would be my hopeful outcome of widespread fusion adoption, get those poor bastards out of the deathtraps and put them somewhere nice and safe with lower radioactivity like a nuclear waste cleanup facility or something.

[Gnoman]

If Lockheed's CFR project works, and can be made at a tolerable price, several things would happen. The coal industry would die (well, mostly, it would still be useful as a carbon source unless we managed to find a workable means of trapping atmospheric CO2 for the purpose), practically overnight. Smog would become a thing of the past, especially since a fusion reactor can not be used to make nuclear weapons - meaning that there's a significant national security reason to give them to everyone. Every conflict over oil would cease - oil would no longer be valuable enough to fight over. Sea traffic would drop significantly, as there would no longer be a need for oil supertankers. This would also mean no more oil spills. Global warming would end - not only would the amount of greenhouse gasses going into the atmosphere plummet, but there's already several possible methods of removing them - these would just create more pollution than they'd remove with current technology.

[Cikomyr]

Each reactors will apparently require 20 kilos of Deuterium per year for 100MW of production
Silly question: how much deuterium is there on Earth? I see the 126/Million proportion of atoms, but not sure how.it converts

[Cikomyr]

Yes, it would do some remarkable stuff. Let's hope they're not just blowing smoke.

Lets be fair a minute. This isnt some random research group trying to milk a subvention.

This is Lockheed Martin's Skunkwork. The creators of fantastic achievements previously thought impossible, and it is running on reputation. Failing to deliver would be a serious blow to their credibility.

[gomipile]

There was some process the military developed a few months back that could create liquid fuel out of saltwater, meant to be used by nuclear carriers. From what I recall, the process was a net energy loss (though the Navy doesn't care - converting ship fuel into plane fuel is very useful anyway) but if we had fusion, we would probably harness enough energy that it wouldn't matter, so we could produce liquid fuel for cars that way.

Technically, the process creates fuel grade hydrocarbons from the carbon dioxide dissolved in seawater. Yeah, if electrical power was essentially free other than facilities and infrastructure, something like that would be the way to go until batteries meet or exceed gasoline car ranges after regenerative braking, etc. is accounted for.

[DavidSh]

How much deuterium is there on Earth?
Here is a rough ballpark figure, trusting in Wikipedia.
The world's oceans mass about 1.4 x 10^21 kg.
The salt content of the ocean is about 35g / kg of water, so can be ignored.
Most water is made up of H_1 and O_16, so water has a molecular weight of 18, hence about 1/9 of the mass of water is hydrogen.
The ratio of deuterium to ordinary hydrogen in typical ocean water is 1/6420 by mole, or 1/3210 by mass.
So the oceans contain (1.4 x 10^21) x (1/9) x (1/3210) = 4.8 x 10^16 kg of deuterium.

I'm not saying this is easy to get at, though.

[Douglas]

Each reactors will apparently require 20 kilos of Deuterium per year for 100MW of production
Silly question: how much deuterium is there on Earth? I see the 126/Million proportion of atoms, but not sure how.it converts
I'm calculating approximately 46670029480835149 kg of deuterium in the oceans. I'm sure that's way too many significant figures, but let me count the digits...

Somewhere around 50 quadrillion kilograms of deuterium, considering only the amount in water. I don't think we're in danger of running out any time soon.


Every conflict over oil would cease - oil would no longer be valuable enough to fight over. Sea traffic would drop significantly, as there would no longer be a need for oil supertankers. This would also mean no more oil spills.
I don't know about coal, but oil is used for a lot of things other than burning it for power production.

[Madcrafter]

Also consider we already produce hundreds of tonnes of heavy water for other nuclear purposes every year, enough to supply several hundred of these generators. This number could probably be increased very easily, considering the number of plants there used to be and the availability of water in most places.

[ace rooster]

20 kilos of dueterium exhausts about 130 tons of the sea water. To put that in perspective, if every reactor had a footprint of 10m by 6.5m, and we literally covered the entire ocean with them (for a combined output of 10,000,000TW), they would take about 6000 years to run the ocean dry of dueterium. Alternatively, if we decided that we wanted to outshine the sun, we would have fuel for a bit over half an hour.

As for all the people saying that the world would be sunshine and happy, I have to say that I am more pessimistic. Any aneutronic fusion device could probably easily be adapted to produce neutrons, and while this does not make weapons manufacture trivial it does make it considerably easier. One current limitation is that most weapons materials need neutrons to produce, and neutrons need enrichment to produce, which is hard. A fusion reactor could short circuit that. This is even assuming that fusion is not achieved with some radically different scheme that can be weaponised directly, which is possible.

The economic landscape would be radically altered by effective fusion*, and I don't see this happening peacefully. Many wealthy people will be made considerably poorer, but still wealthy enough to fight the changes. Conflict regions where one side gets their hands on the tech would flare, and any regions that do not get the tech would turn to terror style attacks on the source. Even unilaterally giving it out would probably spark conflicts due to one side being able to consolidate their power better.

I'm not saying that it should not be pushed for, simply that I would expect the fallout to be messier than most people think. But, as someone once said, growth is always painful.

* By effective I mean viable to the point that oil is obscelete.

Edit: Numbers slightly off.

[Flickerdart]

How about liquid fluoride thorium reactors? Are they a bit more realistic, or do they have the same smell of boondoggle about them?
There were a few experimental ones in the US; IIRC the program was shut down because they wouldn't produce material for nuclear weapons.

[Gnoman]

I don't know about coal, but oil is used for a lot of things other than burning it for power production.

Energy production accounts for the vast majority of oil used. It would remain viable for other uses (although many of those already have alternate sources) such as plastics, pharmaceuticals, and fertilizer, but without being a staple energy source, the value would drop drastically, bulk transport of oil would become unprofitable (it would be easier to refine the smaller amounts used into the chemicals you want very near to the production site, then just move the semi-refined chemicals), and the industry would suffer a massive setback.

[factotum]

We ended up getting more dramatic yields from the later generation fusion bombs but a big part of the push for fusion bombs was to reduce the tendency fission bombs had of spraying radioactive material everywhere. Fusion bombs still did some, but compared to the yield it was negligible if you look at what would have come out of the same number of fission bombs.


I'm pretty sure that fusion bombs were developed to make a bigger bang than was possible with fission devices, not to reduce the fallout problems. A lot of the early ones got most of their power from fast fission of their uranium tamper caused by the massive release of neutrons from the fusion stage, so they were very dirty indeed--the Castle Bravo test is the main reason Bikini Atoll remains uninhabited to this day, for instance. That's not to say that relatively clean fusion devices don't exist--in fact, the most powerful bomb ever set off (the Russian Tsar Bomba) was a very clean one indeed.

[Brother Oni]

It would remain viable for other uses (although many of those already have alternate sources) such as plastics, pharmaceuticals, and fertilizer, but without being a staple energy source, the value would drop drastically, bulk transport of oil would become unprofitable (it would be easier to refine the smaller amounts used into the chemicals you want very near to the production site, then just move the semi-refined chemicals), and the industry would suffer a massive setback.

As an example of this, a few years ago when various motor vehicle production plants shut down due to lack of demand, the pharmaceutical industry ran into supply problems well. This is because a byproduct of vehicle production (acetonitrile) is a very commonly used solvent in that industry and given the sensitivity and specificity of analytical methods, redesigning them to not use ACN would be a lot work, not give as good results, or even not technically possible.

[Yora]

There were a few experimental ones in the US; IIRC the program was shut down because they wouldn't produce material for nuclear weapons.

Partly. They figured out that with investing into uranium research, they could get nuclear energy and nuclear weapons at the same time. If you develop thorium reactors, you still need to do all the uranium research anyway for weapon development. It was just economically cheaper to focus completely on uranium and shelf thorium.

[avr]

On the 'fusion fuel isn't radioactive' point - note that tritium is, and even a reactor which is designed to run primarily on deuterium will likely use some tritium to make the initial ignition temperature lower. If the reactor cycles fuel pellets as some proposed designs do then it'll use some tritium every time.

[Cikomyr]

I do know the LM pocket reactor will use Tritium, but it will also produce the majority it needs.

Hiw radioactive is the stuff?

[thorgrim29]

Lockheed were talking about first generation reactors producing some radioactive waste, but not as bad as current-gen fission reactors, mainly because of used parts from what I remember.

Anyway, it's not like radioactive waste is anywhere near the same kind of problem global warming and air pollution are. It's sad to say but the biggest impact of Chernobyl and Fukushima (which as I understand is close to 0 for Fukushima) wasn't the people who actually died directly because of them but the hundreds of thousands of people who have and will die from lung cancer because of coal plants that weren't replaced and the victims of famine global warming will create in the next few decades.

Finally, about Lockheed's credibility. I don't know nearly enough about the tech to make a judgement call on it, but I do know a bit about business and strategy. It seemed to me like the video and press coverage had 2 objectives. First they're at the point where they need more people and were trying to reach grad students and experts who might want to work on the project. Second, Lockheed is in the military hardware business, not the civilian energy business. No reason for them to try and commercialize their reactors when/if they are ready alone if they can create a joint venture with for example GE, spread out the R&D investment (which is probably about to ramp up considerably) and have access to their contacts and know-how when the time comes.

That doesn't seem to me like the move of a company that's pushing a long shot and agitating for media chatter, more like a company that has a promising product and is at the point where they need more resources to finish it.

[avr]

Tritium has a 6 day(12 year, I misremembered) half life IIRC so it's really quite radioactive. There's no way it can be mined (& storage losses are significant) so it has to be made specifically for the purpose it'll be used for.

At a guess Lockheed's reactor is designed to include a heavy water blanket; some of the stray neutrons emitted will be absorbed by a deuterium nucleus & will convert it to tritium. A leak of stored tritium or of partially converted heavy water could pose a danger beyond the immediate area, but not a long lasting one (6 day half life, remember.) - well, not as much as an accident with a fission reactor. For that you'd need some sort of accident which sends bits of irradiated metal everywhere.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Tritium has a 6 day(12 year, I misremembered) half life IIRC so it's really quite radioactive. There's no way it can be mined (& storage losses are significant) so it has to be made specifically for the purpose it'll be used for.

At a guess Lockheed's reactor is designed to include a heavy water blanket; some of the stray neutrons emitted will be absorbed by a deuterium nucleus & will convert it to tritium. A leak of stored tritium or of partially converted heavy water could pose a danger beyond the immediate area, but not a long lasting one (6 day half life, remember.) - well, not as much as an accident with a fission reactor. For that you'd need some sort of accident which sends bits of irradiated metal everywhere.

What does tritium decompose into, and how many steps before it reaches a non-radiactive atom? I know that one of the problems with the leftover radioactive crap of fission is the fact that it will go through like 6 different radioactive elements before finally decomposing into stable lead, some with very long half-lives (containment issue) and some with very short ones (health issue)

Also, while 12 years is bad, the amounts matter. To hear LM tell, it will require tiny amounts of tritium ("There is a very minimal amount of radioactive tritium—it’s on the order of grams"), so if we are talking 1 kg of irradiated tritium per generator per year, how bad would it be?

Thanks,

Grey Wolf

[Closet_Skeleton]

Fusion reactors don't have the same sort of radioactivity problems as fission ones do,

No, they're a lot worse.

Fusion power is not clean power. Fusion may not create the radioactive waste that fission does but it produces a lot more radiation. Even if you could make a internal combustion engine sized fusion reactor, it would need so much shielding that you couldn't make a fusion powered car with it.

I wouldn't want a fusion reactor any where near me.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

No, they're a lot worse.

Fusion power is not clean power. Fusion may not create the radioactive waste that fission does but it produces a lot more radiation. Even if you could make a internal combustion engine sized fusion reactor, it would need so much shielding that you couldn't make a fusion powered car with it.

I wouldn't want a fusion reactor any where near me.

[citation needed]

GW

[gomipile]

I'm pretty sure that fusion bombs were developed to make a bigger bang than was possible with fission devices, not to reduce the fallout problems.

This is true, but people forget that it is possible to make a much smaller bang with a fusion bomb than with a fission bomb as well. Look at the 50 pound W54 warhead used in the Davy Crockett recoilless rifle, for example. The W54 has an adjustable yield from 10 tons to 1 kiloton TNT equivalent, made possible by its fusion design.

Also, the W54 was developed in 1961, so it didn't take terribly long to go from earth shattering megaton kabooms to tiny(for nuclear devices,) highly efficient warheads. This is only 9 years after the Ivy Mike test of an impractical liquid cryogenic fueled fusion device of approximately 10.4 megatons yield.

[avr]

Tritium decays via beta decay, which means it emits a proton, an electron and an antineutrino all at once and turns into deuterium. The electron isn't as high energy as many radioactive decay products can be, and the main danger is if you drink tritiated water and it decays inside you. Deuterium doesn't decay further, nor do protons or electrons.

Deuterium is poisonous in sufficient quantity (it messes up proteins it's incorporated into) but you'd have to really work at it to kill yourself that way, it's not something that could happen by accident.

A gram of tritium is actually a hell of a lot of radioactive material if it's in one place. On the order of a million curies if I haven't dropped a decimal place in my mental arithmetic. As water dropped into a river or the sea it would get diluted really really quickly though. That it was possible to detect a leak from Fukushima on the Californian coast is a tribute to the power of detection techniques, not an actual danger.

The neutrons and deuterons emitted by a working fusion reactor are a larger potential problem; you can't make the reactor out of elements which absorb these nicely* given the high power magnets and high temperature structural elements required (fission reactors are a little more forgiving that way). So the structure becomes radioactive over time. Also, the structure becomes brittle over time as atoms get displaced or changed by radiation and it will need to be replaced eventually.

* = edit: well, maybe if you work with incredibly pure, hence incredibly expensive materials. Not practical for something that needs to be economically workable.

[ace rooster]

D-T fusion produces far more neutrons per joule outputed than fission, and they are very fast. This means that if you build a reactor out of any old scraps you have there is a very good chance that it will get transmuted into something radioactive, possibly problematically so. This does not mean that you cannot build a reactor that remains non radioactive, simply that you have to be very careful of the elements that you use to build it. Even if tokamok fusion does not prove to be the way forward, the work ITER and similar experiments have done is valuable research on reactor construction materials for any D-T design. On the plus side those same fast neutrons can transmute some problematic elements into less problematic ones.

Generally tritium is produced by bombarding lithium with neutrons. Originally it was thought that only lithium 6 was good for this, but then castle bravo happened and they discovered that lithium 7 works just as well if not better, which is how they got the yield so wrong. Hydrogen bombs typically produce their tritium from lithium as they detonate, which is how they avoid the half life problem.

I think the davy crockett was a standard boosted fission device. Fission devices typically have an air gap as part of the design, and there is no good reason not to fill that with fusion fuel. The yield can be adjusted by changing the amount of fusion fuel in this gap. Worth noting is that in this design the fusion reactions do not provide a significant boost to the energy, instead rapidly increasing the neutron population which makes much more fission occur. At the 10ton yield the weapon was acting as a pure fission bomb, with no boost at all. It's relation to fusion tech is that in a thermonuclear bomb you need a fission bomb to start the fusion, and there is no point making this first stage larger than it has to be. This pushed research towards looking for the smallest bomb possible. The 'tiny' yield is because it only just goes super critical, rather than any fusion occuring.

[Tev]

Lets be fair a minute. This isnt some random research group trying to milk a subvention.

This is Lockheed Martin's Skunkwork. The creators of fantastic achievements previously thought impossible, and it is running on reputation. Failing to deliver would be a serious blow to their credibility.

Tbh they're acting like any other high-tech company that needs some more investor money. Make as many claims as possible about the use of it and then say "we're close to making that tech!". They never tell you how close they actually are. And since fusion is one of the hardest engineering challenges we are trying to beat, it's not unreasonable to assume they're not much further than anyone else. They just have better PR department.



And how exactly are we going to get "cheap" fusion? You know that uranium for reactors is quite cheap already? It's the reactor and building around it what's so expensive. I don't get why is everyone assuming fusion plants will be cheaper - you might not be needing so many safety measures, but because of more intense neutron bombardement you'll either will replace parts in the reactor often or it will have short (relatively to fission) working life. And all those superconductors cooled with helium are crazy expensive . . . You just can't overlook context. It's similar to dreaming about renewable energy - sunlight and wind are free, right? So making electricity from it will be also cheap!
Wrong.

[Gray Mage]

And how exactly are we going to get "cheap" fusion? You know that uranium for reactors is quite cheap already? It's the reactor and building around it what's so expensive. I don't get why is everyone assuming fusion plants will be cheaper - you might not be needing so many safety measures, but because of more intense neutron bombardement you'll either will replace parts in the reactor often or it will have short (relatively to fission) working life. And all those superconductors cooled with helium are crazy expensive . . . You just can't overlook context. It's similar to dreaming about renewable energy - sunlight and wind are free, right? So making electricity from it will be also cheap!
Wrong.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think fusion'd have a higher power output than fission, making each MW produced cheaper. This'd also be why solar and wind are more expensive, lower outputs and inconsistencies in production.

[Cikomyr]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think fusion'd have a higher power output than fission, making each MW produced cheaper. This'd also be why solar and wind are more expensive, lower outputs and inconsistencies in production.

Plus, dependant on environmental conditions, constant exposure to the environment which causes accelerated wearing out...

[Gray Mage]

Plus, dependant on environmental conditions, constant exposure to the environment which causes accelerated wearing out...

Yeah, offshore wind plants have a higher cost than inland ones.

[Max™]

I'm pretty sure that fusion bombs were developed to make a bigger bang than was possible with fission devices, not to reduce the fallout problems. A lot of the early ones got most of their power from fast fission of their uranium tamper caused by the massive release of neutrons from the fusion stage, so they were very dirty indeed--the Castle Bravo test is the main reason Bikini Atoll remains uninhabited to this day, for instance. That's not to say that relatively clean fusion devices don't exist--in fact, the most powerful bomb ever set off (the Russian Tsar Bomba) was a very clean one indeed.

Castle Bravo was far more powerful than expected, conducted under questionable wind conditions, and despite those factors it was still far cleaner than if you had produced the same yield with fission warheads. Bravo filled most of a building, but I'm pretty sure it would have been a football stadium full of fission warheads.

Bravo had a uranium tamper and fissionable material in the primary which contributed to the blast, but the radioactive tritium and lithium isotopes and such, while nasty, aren't the same as spraying uranium and plutonium around everywhere. A lot of the material making up the island was injected into the atmosphere and fell on the surroundings after being made radioactive.

Tsar Bomba was much cleaner because it was an airburst high enough that the fireball just barely got reflected off the ground, and because it wasn't spraying massive amounts of heavy radioactive elements everywhere.


A fusion reactor can turn the casing and such radioactive and that can pose problems but these can be dealt with, it isn't the same as carrying around a lump of plutonium or such.

[Closet_Skeleton]

A fusion reactor can turn the casing and such radioactive and that can pose problems but these can be dealt with, it isn't the same as carrying around a lump of plutonium or such.

Its not the same because its a different problem, not because its so much easier/safer to deal with.

[Tev]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think fusion'd have a higher power output than fission, making each MW produced cheaper. This'd also be why solar and wind are more expensive, lower outputs and inconsistencies in production.

Yeah if we manage to make it much more effective then it's potential output will be higher than fission . . . but that will also make radiation conditions worse, bringing need for more shielding, making construction and maintenance more expensive. I still don't see why it's so often assumed fusion will be cheaper.

That doesn't apply for aneutronic experiments, but nobody seems close to making them work.

[Flickerdart]

How practical would it be to pop down a few dirty but powerful fusion reactors somewhere nobody cares about like the Moon, and then ferry some of the power they produce back to Earth using the rest of the power they produce?

[factotum]

Transmitting power over a distance like that would have its own problems. For instance, the most likely form the power would take is in the form of microwaves beamed down to the planet. Some of those will be absorbed by the atmosphere above the receiving station and cause problems in that way, and if the beam is not perfectly aligned you'll fry everyone who lives nearby. Plus there's the whole problem of getting all that heavy power generation stuff up into space in the first place, and also maintaining it.

The biggest issue with that whole idea, though, is why go to all that trouble to put fusion reactors in space when we have the biggest fusion reactor for light-years in any direction already pumping out power up there? Just intercept the energy coming from the Sun and beam it back to Earth in usable form and be done with it.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Just intercept the energy coming from the Sun and beam it back to Earth in usable form and be done with it.

IIRC, the "Microwave" power stations in Sim City 2000 where this technology - put a bunch of solar panels in geostationary orbit (where the atmosphere is not in the way, making them far more efficient) or even in a polar orbit high enough they are seldom in Earth's Shadow and then beam the resulting energy down to your city. Occasionally, the beam would miss and leave a hot trail of death by burning. Fun times. As I understand it, the concept is sound (the atmosphere and nighttime are the two biggest obstacles to solar power), but maintenance would be painful.

Once we have built a space elevator, though, a lot of these concepts will be a lot more plausible. Of course, a real space elevator is even further into the future than commercial fusion power.

BTW, I'm still a tad confused about the whole radiation angle. Is the main concern that the truck-sized casing would become radioactive, or the water in the boiler attached to it used to generate the actual energy? Or both? And how do nuclear ships and submarines deal with the problem these days (I'm assuming that if fusion has the problem, fission has it too - is that not the case?).

Thanks,

Grey Wolf

[Gray Mage]

IIRC, the "Microwave" power stations in Sim City 2000 where this technology - put a bunch of solar panels in geostationary orbit (where the atmosphere is not in the way, making them far more efficient) or even in a polar orbit high enough they are seldom in Earth's Shadow and then beam the resulting energy down to your city. Occasionally, the beam would miss and leave a hot trail of death by burning. Fun times. As I understand it, the concept is sound (the atmosphere and nighttime are the two biggest obstacles to solar power), but maintenance would be painful.

Once we have built a space elevator, though, a lot of these concepts will be a lot more plausible. Of course, a real space elevator is even further into the future than commercial fusion power.

BTW, I'm still a tad confused about the whole radiation angle. Is the main concern that the truck-sized casing would become radioactive, or the water in the boiler attached to it used to generate the actual energy? Or both? And how do nuclear ships and submarines deal with the problem these days (I'm assuming that if fusion has the problem, fission has it too - is that not the case?).

Thanks,

Grey Wolf

Well, the gist as I understant it is that the residue of Fission reactors decay by alpha decay (emitting a completely ionized Hellium atom) while the byproduct of Fusion reactors would decay by beta decay (emiting an electro and an electron antineutrino, or on beta+ decays, the positive charge equivalent). Due to it's size, alpha decays interact more with the enviorment, and thus have low penetrating power, while beta decays can go much further and even pass through the physical barriers, something that alpha decays are incapable (or at least very, very unlikely) to do.

[Tev]

At this point we probably need someone who made real research on tokamaks and / or military HEU reactors (or at least read a few studies about them), because comparing real numbers and how hard is shielding, etc. in practice will make these questions answerable. Otherwise we will have to just wait and see how ITER plays out (or whichever finally-working alternative path) and what will be final parameters of using optimised fusion.

edit: I'm still betting that someone somewhere will decide to strip down classic fission reactors of overdone safety crap OR ignore weapons treaties and start using HEU reactors en masse for civilian use and we will see how cheap can fission actually be.

[gomipile]

BTW, I'm still a tad confused about the whole radiation angle. Is the main concern that the truck-sized casing would become radioactive, or the water in the boiler attached to it used to generate the actual energy? Or both? And how do nuclear ships and submarines deal with the problem these days (I'm assuming that if fusion has the problem, fission has it too - is that not the case?).


The U.S. Navy uses pressurized water reactors(PWR) rather than boiling water reactors(BWR.) In a PWR, the amount of metal exposed to radiation is vastly less, since the reactor water is in a closed cycle between just the reactor and the heat exchanger. In a BWR, by contrast, the entire steam turbine assembly is exposed to radioactive water.

The reason we use BWRs at all is that they are much cheaper to set up initially, making it easier to get loans for the initial capital investment. PWRs are significantly cheaper to maintain in the long term, because their turbines are essentially just as safe to work on as the turbines in any steam power plant.

[ace rooster]

Well you just have to ask xkcd (https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/) about how hard shielding is to discover that actually shielding is really easy on earth. You only have a problem if what is supposed to be inside the shielding escapes. Fission is difficult to manage the radioactivity of because it produces two daughter isotopes with far too many neutrons between them, and so are probably unstable. They can be a huge range of different isotopes with varying chemical and nuclear properties and there is very little you can do to influence which are produced. They are not nearly as heavy as the parent nucleus, but they are not light, making isotope seperation difficult after chemical seperation. Many of the products are very good at stopping your reactor working well, meaning that your fuel burnup rate is very low without reprocessing, which in turn means that you produce a lot of medium level waste rather than a little high level waste. This is before you consider the range of transuranics that can be produced when a fission event does not occur.

These complications are inherent to fission, and cannot be avoided. With fusion the problem is neutron activation of the reactor. The reactor can be made of whatever we like, so we can influence how this occurs. For example, if we build it entirely out of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and silicon, which could be possible, then the same atom has to capture two neutrons before any radioactivity occurs, and even when this does happen we only have to deal with a small range of radioisotopes. If an element is problematic under neutron bombardment we can just avoid it, so there are no inherent problems (though that won't stop us making some).

HEU reactors are used by the military because they can be made much smaller than a conventional reactor, with the down side being that you have to enrich the uranium to a much higher degree. This makes them far more expensive to run.

The safety thing is a bit overblown but actually not that much of a problem for fission. Public squemishness is a stumbling block, but the lack of a good solution to the waste is the real biggy. Personally I think we should fuse it all into silica and then put it in a big pile on top of a deep salt lake. Let it get hot, and melt it's way down, then install water pipes to use it as for geothermal power to offset the cost of fusing it into silica. It might take a few hundred years, but we should be able to recover all the cost of disposal that way. It should be pretty safe too, with the salt melting and convecting if it overheats, and there being no water for miles. That might just be the mad scientist in me though. :smallredface:

[Cikomyr]

Tbh they're acting like any other high-tech company that needs some more investor money. Make as many claims as possible about the use of it and then say "we're close to making that tech!". They never tell you how close they actually are. And since fusion is one of the hardest engineering challenges we are trying to beat, it's not unreasonable to assume they're not much further than anyone else. They just have better PR department.

They are not " any other tech-like company". Its Lockheed Martin skunkwork. Their resume of doing what was thought impossible is.. Respectable, to say the least.

And you do realize that even if they do want to do this to find new partners to share the investment book, they will have to share the degree of their progress beforehand? Investing millions of dollars into a venture like that is not exactly like buying a used car. You get your own experts to study and assess the feasability of the project.

Which means LM feels confident enough in that project.



And how exactly are we going to get "cheap" fusion? You know that uranium for reactors is quite cheap already? It's the reactor and building around it what's so expensive. I don't get why is everyone assuming fusion plants will be cheaper - you might not be needing so many safety measures, but because of more intense neutron bombardement you'll either will replace parts in the reactor often or it will have short (relatively to fission) working life. And all those superconductors cooled with helium are crazy expensive . . . You just can't overlook context. It's similar to dreaming about renewable energy - sunlight and wind are free, right? So making electricity from it will be also cheap!
Wrong.

Its all a varying degree of "cheap", obviously.

Cheap in that case is a theoretical 5-meter generator that is technically mobile. It can be assembled in a dedicated factory and shipped where it needs to go. As the manufactoring progress can be chained like an automobile, manufacturing cost will be WAAY down compared to a current nuclear power plant, which requires years to build and each are technically fairly unique.

I just read that a fission power plant's operational costs is consisted of its initial capital outlay at a degree of 74%. That's a massive investment for any government or corporation. Plus, once its built, you are stuck with it.

A (technically) mobile Fusion plant.. Could be rented. You dont want it anymore? The Lockheed Martin truck will come pick it up. Sure, its not as simple as picking up a simple car, but its degrees of magnitude simpler than disposing of a fission power plant.

Material costs of a truck-sized plant are risible. The most costly aspect of it all will be Lockheed Martin's royalties every time you build a baby like that. But with time, the cost will diminish.

I dont think the Energy lobby will do anything to refrain from its use; as they will be stuck in a prisonner's dilemma. First one to start effectively use the Fusion reactors will put the others out of business. Thats capitalism for you. This is too big of a competitive advantage not to leverage. If you can afford to sell your energy at a permanent 10% discount, why not do it? Your additional sales will more than makeup for the diminished margin.

[HandofShadows]

They are not " any other tech-like company". Its Lockheed Martin skunkwork. Their resume of doing what was thought impossible is.. Respectable, to say the least.

That's the thing about this that people can't really grasp I think. This is the SKUNK WORKS. The place that created the SR-71, U-2, F-117, Flying Wings (B-1 Bomber). And they far more than plane designers. In order to build the aircraft they need to be experts in a lot of fields including materials technology and physics. You hit it right on the head. They are not "any other tech-like company".

[ace rooster]

That's the thing about this that people can't really grasp I think. This is the SKUNK WORKS. The place that created the SR-71, U-2, F-117, Flying Wings (B-1 Bomber). And they far more than plane designers. In order to build the aircraft they need to be experts in a lot of fields including materials technology and physics. You hit it right on the head. They are not "any other tech-like company".

That was the skunk works, but worth noting is that the first 3 designs (and many more impressive ones) were all designed by Kelly Johnson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Johnson_%28engineer%29). The forth is not a lockheed aircraft (I assume you mean the B2), and flying wings were almost used in the second world war in the Ho229 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horten_Ho_229).

If you had told me that Kelly Johnson thought he could make fusion work then yeah, I would take it seriously, but he has been dead for 25 years. Since then I have not seen anything from them that was not a natural progression of what they had done before.

[HandofShadows]

That was the skunk works, but worth noting is that the first 3 designs (and many more impressive ones) were all designed by Kelly Johnson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Johnson_%28engineer%29). The forth is not a lockheed aircraft (I assume you mean the B2), and flying wings were almost used in the second world war in the Ho229 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horten_Ho_229).

If you had told me that Kelly Johnson thought he could make fusion work then yeah, I would take it seriously, but he has been dead for 25 years. Since then I have not seen anything from them that was not a natural progression of what they had done before.

Yeah, meant B2. And it was Jack Northrop who designed the XB-35 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_YB-35), not Johnson which flew in 1946. But Johnson for all his brilliance, was one man. He needed the support of a great many people to do what he did.

[Douglas]

Something I just realized: Is this company (or department thereof) the origin of the name of the Skunkworks base facility in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri?

[Cikomyr]

Something I just realized: Is this company (or department thereof) the origin of the name of the Skunkworks base facility in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri?

:smallbiggrin:

[Tev]

That's the thing about this that people can't really grasp I think. This is the SKUNK WORKS. The place that created the SR-71, U-2, F-117, Flying Wings (B-1 Bomber). And they far more than plane designers. In order to build the aircraft they need to be experts in a lot of fields including materials technology and physics. You hit it right on the head. They are not "any other tech-like company".

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect

[ace rooster]

Yeah, meant B2. And it was Jack Northrop who designed the XB-35 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_YB-35), not Johnson which flew in 1946. But Johnson for all his brilliance, was one man. He needed the support of a great many people to do what he did.

Well it was Junkers who first patented a flying wing design in 1910, and the Horten brothers were flying glider versions successfully by the early 30s. I don't see why you see the XB-35 as important, by beside the point.

Annoyingly this clip (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtntTvuv8Aw) doesn't quite get to the quote I want, but you know the one I mean. Johnson is the closest real world person I can think of to Tony Stark, and brilliant as the team around him was, they were at all times assisting him. He needed the support of a great many people because somebody needed to work out the wiring routing and the instrumentation details and all the thousands of other small things that need to be done only because he didn't have time (or I imagine the patience) to do them all himself. I am not saying that the skunk works is not full of very smart people, just that every single one of them would have to say "I'm not Kelly Johnson".

[HandofShadows]

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect

You don't prove anything by making a link to Wikipedia unless you can read my mind and know what I am thinking.

[Cikomyr]

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect

Its almost as if people assess past successes to determine your worth!!

Who wouldathought?

[HandofShadows]

Well it was Junkers who first patented a flying wing design in 1910, and the Horten brothers were flying glider versions successfully by the early 30s. I don't see why you see the XB-35 as important, by beside the point.

Annoyingly this clip (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtntTvuv8Aw) doesn't quite get to the quote I want, but you know the one I mean. Johnson is the closest real world person I can think of to Tony Stark, and brilliant as the team around him was, they were at all times assisting him. He needed the support of a great many people because somebody needed to work out the wiring routing and the instrumentation details and all the thousands of other small things that need to be done only because he didn't have time (or I imagine the patience) to do them all himself. I am not saying that the skunk works is not full of very smart people, just that every single one of them would have to say "I'm not Kelly Johnson".

You are correct they would say they are not Kelly Johnson. But they would also say that Kelly Johnson was not the Skunk Works as well. And you are massively underestimating what other people have to do. "work out the wiring routing and the instrumentation details"? Frankly that's almost insulting to people who had to develop new materials that have never been seen, hell imagined before. As well as develop the tech to mass produce such materials. This kind of thing is WAY outside Mr. Johnson's field. Johnson may have put down the specs for Radar Absorbent Material, but he didn't make it. Developing RAM was no small or easy task. LM is into everything from Nanotechnology to Quantum Computing to Robotics. And we really don't know what all they are doing because the stuff is classified.

[Douglas]

I don't think the Halo Effect is quite what's going on here. Halo is "they rate high in X, therefore they rate high in Y", and is fallacious reasoning when X and Y are unrelated. What people are saying here is "they have good past history in X, therefore they will likely have a good future in X".

[ace rooster]

Yes, I'd think that in this case, the "Halo Effect" would be "well, they're the Skunkworks, so of course they can make a perfect omelet, write sonnets to outshine Shakespeare, and create woolly mammoth clones in 2 years from a bit of preserved toenail DNA."

While their success isn't guaranteed, it isn't unreasonable to assign a certain bit of extra weight to their predictions in a field closely related to other technological projects they've handled than would be given, say, to a random bunch of cranks or a funding-hungry startup.

While I'm still a bit skeptical, I figure they have a fair chance of either getting an interesting breakthrough, or at least making a good try that will provide a solid base on which someone else can build more successfully in the fairly near future.

Of course, there's also a slimmer but still real possibility that they will fail embarrassingly.

And how is plasma physics and magnetics related to aviation, metallurgy, or fabrication? They probably have a better chance at the omlette, as at least that is material science. I couldn't say whether the skunkworks is good at plasmas or magnetics, but it is definately way outside of the fields they built their reputation on. Even inside that field it is impossible to say how well they live up to their history, and how much of that history was down to the man who went from his masters to chief research engineer in 5 years.

The pictures I have seen of the design all look like a fairly conventional magnetic mirror setup (though that could be deliberate obvescation), only using superconducting magnets. For me preposing superconductors near the plasma in a final reactor design is an immediate red flag, simply due to the varied high energy radiations that are not good for materials that need to be kept cold and are impurity sensitive. In a research reactor it is fine, but in a commercial reactor that sort of sudden failure mode does not sit well. I also don't trust any design that mentions superconductors used as conductors* early, because the actual specifics of the conductors should not be important, meaning 'superconductor' is being used as a buzzword. Deliberate buzzwords are another red flag for me.

*Superconducting bricks being used for the messnier effect is fine though, as normal conductors don't do that passively. Switching out a brick is probably easier than a coil too, simply because coils go round something.

[thorgrim29]

I'd say that their reputation is more along the line of having the culture and infrastructure needed to bring projects from barely theoretical to working in a surprisingly short time, the fact that the engineers that used to work there were in aeronautics doesn't really matter, you don't have to be an expert in what your team does to lead engineers.

I don't think anyone is saying that it's a sure thing, and the video they released was obviously filled with hyperbole, especially regarding the timeline. But since they have a record of tackling projects of a similar difficulty I tend to think they've earned the benefit of the doubt. More importantly, for a military company like Lockheed their reputation is literally worth billions. If they released the video that means that all of the Lockheed bigwigs are on board with this project, and if you know just how stupidly their stock value and bonuses being driven by quarterly earnings makes corporate types view long term investments that's a big deal.

[HandofShadows]

And how is plasma physics and magnetics related to aviation, metallurgy, or fabrication? They probably have a better chance at the omlette, as at least that is material science. I couldn't say whether the skunkworks is good at plasmas or magnetics, but it is definately way outside of the fields they built their reputation on. Even inside that field it is impossible to say how well they live up to their history, and how much of that history was down to the man who went from his masters to chief research engineer in 5 years.

They might have a lot more in common than you think. For instance, plasma is a fluid and who better to deal with fluid than experts in aviation who have to deal with how air, a fluid, flows and can be manipulated. There is more to a fusion plant then magnetic fields as well. There is the containment unit for it. Hypersonic flight (Something the Skunk Works is highly experienced with) requires materials that can withstand huge amounts of pressure and heat. Just the kind of things you would want to contain a fusion reaction, right? So there are things the Skunk Works is already expert in can be applied to the problem of fusion. Now they will have to hire some experts of course in some things of course, but a large part of the infrastructure needed is already there.

[ace rooster]

I'd say that their reputation is more along the line of having the culture and infrastructure needed to bring projects from barely theoretical to working in a surprisingly short time, the fact that the engineers that used to work there were in aeronautics doesn't really matter, you don't have to be an expert in what your team does to lead engineers.


I chat to my engineer friends and family quite frequently, and the biggest gripe they usually have is that the people in charge have no idea what they are doing because they are not expert enough (though the language is usually more floral). The skunk works got it's reputation for being able to deliver quickly because every member of the heirarchy knew exactly what they needed from their underlings and knew precisely what was realistic. At the top of this pyramid was the guy who needed to know everything, and that was Johnson. Maybe they have got some hot shot fusion genius running the project, but I don't see why they would be at skunkworks particularly and they would be just as capable elsewhere.



I don't think anyone is saying that it's a sure thing, and the video they released was obviously filled with hyperbole, especially regarding the timeline. But since they have a record of tackling projects of a similar difficulty I tend to think they've earned the benefit of the doubt. More importantly, for a military company like Lockheed their reputation is literally worth billions. If they released the video that means that all of the Lockheed bigwigs are on board with this project, and if you know just how stupidly their stock value and bonuses being driven by quarterly earnings makes corporate types view long term investments that's a big deal.

I know exactly how stupidly their bonuses work. They are mostly stock options, and if they can sell them at the peak then they are driven by the highest spike in stock value they can get. It is not as if they haven't done it before (http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/20/us-lockheed-settlement-idUSBRE91J0ZH20130220).




They might have a lot more in common than you think. For instance, plasma is a fluid and who better to deal with fluid than experts in aviation who have to deal with how air, a fluid, flows and can be manipulated. There is more to a fusion plant then magnetic fields as well. There is the containment unit for it. Hypersonic flight (Something the Skunk Works is highly experienced with) requires materials that can withstand huge amounts of pressure and heat. Just the kind of things you would want to contain a fusion reaction, right? So there are things the Skunk Works is already expert in can be applied to the problem of fusion. Now they will have to hire some experts of course in some things of course, but a large part of the infrastructure needed is already there.


They are both fluids, but there the similarity ends. I can't find a good analogy to express the differences in complexity, but suffice to say that complete mastery of aerodynamics is not actually that helpful above basic understanding when trying to understand plasmas. As you point out, the skunk works has a particular speciality in supersonic aerodynamics, which is completely useless when dealing with plasmas where information can be transmitted at the speed of light and the speed of sound is vastly higher than any relevant velocities.

The containment system is simple, to the point that a mason jar would be good enough if you had one big enough. The confinement system is entirely magnetic, because any materials exposed to hundred million degree plasma is going to fail no matter how exotic. Heat resistance and pressure resistance are irrelevant. X-ray resistance and neutron resistance are what is important, and as far as I am aware the skunk works has no particular experties on these.


If the skunk works had a demonstration reactor working, I would believe that they could go from there to a commercial reactor faster than anyone, but they need a working scheme first. They have no special advantage with regards to producing a scheme which has elluded the best minds of the rest of the world for 70+ years.

[Tev]

They might have a lot more in common than you think. For instance, plasma is a fluid and who better to deal with fluid than experts in aviation who have to deal with how air, a fluid, flows and can be manipulated. There is more to a fusion plant then magnetic fields as well. There is the containment unit for it. Hypersonic flight (Something the Skunk Works is highly experienced with) requires materials that can withstand huge amounts of pressure and heat. Just the kind of things you would want to contain a fusion reaction, right? So there are things the Skunk Works is already expert in can be applied to the problem of fusion. Now they will have to hire some experts of course in some things of course, but a large part of the infrastructure needed is already there.

Had you at least linked some scramjets I'd think there might be some relation to plasma physics, but you just linked popular military planes, totally unrelated to problems of magnetic containment of plasma.

Honestly, if they announced for example that they somehow made full-size Skylon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_(spacecraft)) prototype and it flew and it worked I would believe them every word. Because making it is closely related to Skunkworks experience.
Containing very hot plasma for at least minutes however isn't. Neither working with superconductors in intense conditions.

Not showing anything tangible and making a lot of noise to pump up hype? Yeah let's jump up and down, fusion is coming tomorrow!
And I don't get the comments about "they wouldn't dare!", nowadays it's kind of common tactic to gain money for research.



So to get this thread back on track:
What do you think will actually bring really cheap fusion? And when?

I think mainstream tokamaks will fail at being anywhere close to economic, but research on ITER should give us a lot more info about plasma behavior, materials needed for plasma reactor vessel and such . . . so it will give better odds at breakthrough with some other path (I'm betting on LPP).
That means after 20-40 years we might get that fusion dream.

EDIT: ace rooster has great points every time. I'd like to hear his opinion on the state of fusion research.

[thorgrim29]

I chat to my engineer friends and family quite frequently, and the biggest gripe they usually have is that the people in charge have no idea what they are doing because they are not expert enough (though the language is usually more floral). The skunk works got it's reputation for being able to deliver quickly because every member of the hierarchy knew exactly what they needed from their underlings and knew precisely what was realistic. At the top of this pyramid was the guy who needed to know everything, and that was Johnson.

In 90+% of cases if the guy is the best in the place at engineering then he has no business managing the teams. Being a good engineer and being a good manager are two totally different skillsets, and despite engineers seemingly all thinking they can do everyone's job better once in a while they need someone to deflate their egos and keep them on target.

Brilliant engineers spending more time managing than actually doing what they're good at kills so many start-ups it isn't funny. A company I worked at a few years ago is a good example. The founder is world renowned in satellite and landing module programming, and was able to charge 2 to 3 times more than his most senior project manager for his work, but he spend more time on finance and HR (which he hated) than on programming. It was an enormous waste.

That doesn't mean that Johnson wasn't able to do it effectively, but as has been mentioned the guy was basically Tony Stark, you don't make policy based on a once-a-century talent. General rule in every book I've read and every company I've heard of is that project managers should absolutely know everything but the person above them doesn't need to because it's not relevant for their job. They should speak the language and not be totally clueless but having your best brain waste his time completing budgets and approving expense reports is a tragedy.

[Tev]

. . . I doubt that anyone will produce a working fusion generator. My optimism blipped upward over a couple of my posts there. Now I'm back to my sadder but perhaps wiser self, and doubt that fusion will be seen in our lifetimes. Probably never. If it was going to work, it would show signs of working. Right now all it is, is "everything will be wonderful, when we manage to do this thing that we have no idea whatsoever how to do and that is probably as big a fantasy as fireballs or faster-than-light travel..."

To be fair, FTL is completely beyond currently accepted physics theory, while efficiently gaining energy from plasma is just an engineering problem.

It might be engineering problem on the level of (almost) self-sustained Mars colony, but we can make it work in a generation or two. And tokamaks do show progress (albeit slow), JET is so close to break-even in terms of energy that (from what we know) ITER is almost guaranteed to be energy-positive. And it will do more useful research . . . so I wouldn't rule alternative approaches (including the Skunworks's one) out as they get more data from general plasma research.

[ace rooster]

To be fair, FTL is completely beyond currently accepted physics theory, while efficiently gaining energy from plasma is just an engineering problem.

It might be engineering problem on the level of (almost) self-sustained Mars colony, but we can make it work in a generation or two. And tokamaks do show progress (albeit slow), JET is so close to break-even in terms of energy that (from what we know) ITER is almost guaranteed to be energy-positive. And it will do more useful research . . . so I wouldn't rule alternative approaches (including the Skunworks's one) out as they get more data from general plasma research.

FTL is completely impossible, getting light to go faster however...
Well not exactly, warping space to reduce the distance. Requires base stations along a scheduled route and energy densities that make the magnetar look puny, but technically possible

Fusion is actually not that hard. Kids (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Wilson) have done it. Economically viable fusion is the hard bit, and if it costs the same as setting up a mars colony to build a reactor, then that reactor design is not useful. Tokamaks have been the focus of research for a long time now, but the initial reason they got the funding that they did was not so much scientific as political. The Soviets looked like they had made a breakthrough, so pretty much all funding was diverted to tokamak research. That research produced one shining result: Tokamaks scale favorably. A positive power fusion reactor is easily possible with current tech, provided you build it big enough. Since then whenever a research council has asked "will this work?", the only group that could say "yes." for certain has been the tokamak guys, despite the shortcomings of the design.

So if a positive power reactor is so easy, why havent we done it? Two main reasons. Firstly, we need to do some work on materials and details, and we should probably do this on smaller models than building a full size experiment for an extra £100 billion that would only be returning £100 million a year, and annoying the national grid because it keeps breaking down unpredictably. Secondly, even if we can build these reactors increadibly cheaply, if they have a minimum output in the multi gigawatt range then a more distributed network of more conventional power stations might work out cheaper. We are getting to the point that it is almost viable, but I don't see this type of reactor revolusionising anything. It effectively just replaces the burner in a conventional station. All the other costs remain static. One plus is that there is absolutely no way you can turn this into a weapon. It is hard enough just getting it to work.

Interestingly the problem with tokamaks is also their biggest strength. They work because they scale. This means that small ones will probably never be viable, which is why we need to look to other approaches for real impact. Any approach which doesn't scale is more binary. It either works or it doesn't, which is why getting funding for them is more tricky. Given the number of false alarms, investors are hard to find. Any approach which does scale is competing directly with tokamaks, and given that bigger is better but also more expensive, splitting the funding is not a good idea. Again, investors are hard to find. This is a problem, because tokamaks work by imposing a configeration on the plasma, which means that they spend their lives beating down the interesting plasma physics. This is not good for understanding.


Electrostatic confinement is fun, and there is a lot of scope for novel designs here. It is entirely possible that we have simply missed something, and somebody somewhere will build some strange setup that works. The recent discovery that the Z machine can use high vacuum as insulation due to it's own magnetic fields trapping electons might make an high current arc work effectively as a negative electrode, for example. I have not seen any work in this direction, and it might work. I haven't seen any direct energy conversion schemes for use with electrostatic confinement, meaning that they would still be based on thermal output. Gas flames are pretty efficient even at small scales, so even if this does not scale I don't see it being used for small scale power generation due to the same limiting factors as gas power. The world would look pretty similar even if this works. This does not look weaponisable, but stranger things have happened.


I like the look of the dense plasma focus, but LPP seem to be convinced that it is a finished design, rather than a stepping stone to an improved design. There are a lot of lessons that can be learned from it, but it was not initially designed as a fusion scheme. Coupled with LPP using an inappropriate power supply and missing some obvious stuff I don't see them being able to realise a working model. Direct energy conversion and small size do mean that this sort of approach would have a much greater impact on the world though. Some variant might be viable, and may even do far more than they suggest. By it's nature the reaction they are preposing is sudden, so it may be weaponisable directly. If you are looking to take over the world this is where you look.


The economic answer to the original question depends on the smallest scale that it is viable at, and whether it is dependent on gas turbines. Large scale or dependent will end up not changing much in terms of the energy market, especially as a strong alternative to fossil fuels can make anti CO2 legislation easier to pass. It may even end up making energy more expensive. Small scale with direct conversion could work out considerably cheaper, and make distributed generation more viable.

The political answer is more interesting, because any system can be a neutron source. This is an awkward truth, as it makes the world more dangerous. For ITER scaled stuff it is less of an issue, because they are difficult to hide, but it is always a concern. Fusion is like fire. It will keep us warm, but it will burn us.

The most interesting point of view to me is the engineering answer. Some of the direct to energy schemes could work out reasonably light but very powerful. If one of these works then electric arc scramjets might be possible. I am not sure what sort of designs would evolve, but I would imagine that we might be able to get on top of the rocket equation. That would be my ambition with it.

[halfeye]

In 90+% of cases if the guy is the best in the place at engineering then he has no business managing the teams. Being a good engineer and being a good manager are two totally different skillsets, and despite engineers seemingly all thinking they can do everyone's job better once in a while they need someone to deflate their egos and keep them on target.

Brilliant engineers spending more time managing than actually doing what they're good at kills so many start-ups it isn't funny. A company I worked at a few years ago is a good example. The founder is world renowned in satellite and landing module programming, and was able to charge 2 to 3 times more than his most senior project manager for his work, but he spend more time on finance and HR (which he hated) than on programming. It was an enormous waste.

That doesn't mean that Johnson wasn't able to do it effectively, but as has been mentioned the guy was basically Tony Stark, you don't make policy based on a once-a-century talent. General rule in every book I've read and every company I've heard of is that project managers should absolutely know everything but the person above them doesn't need to because it's not relevant for their job. They should speak the language and not be totally clueless but having your best brain waste his time completing budgets and approving expense reports is a tragedy.
I take it you don't find Dilbert funny then?

Having clueless idiots manage people who can do the work can be worse than wasting the time of people who do understand the problem.

[thorgrim29]

I think it's funny about half the time... It's fairly representative of the god complex engineers get indoctrinated with at uni, but it does manage to point a lot of things that are wrong with corporate culture, specifically focusing on superficial "results" and buzzwords and people being promoted up to their incompetence threshold.

I don't actually dislike engineers, my brother and a few of my friends are engineers, but they're not all-powerful and better then everybody at everything.

[halfeye]

I think it's funny about half the time... It's fairly representative of the god complex engineers get indoctrinated with at uni, but it does manage to point a lot of things that are wrong with corporate culture, specifically focusing on superficial "results" and buzzwords and people being promoted up to their incompetence threshold.

I don't actually dislike engineers, my brother and a few of my friends are engineers, but they're not all-powerful and better then everybody at everything.
The incompetance threshold of salesmen being when bullshine no longer works? new info: it never worked, ever.

[thorgrim29]

No, incompetence threshold is one of the explanations why there are so many idiot managers out there. It's when someone is good at their job, gets promoted, is good at their job, gets promoted, and suddenly isn't good, but isn't terrible enough to warrant firing. They then start being afraid for their job and only rewarding people who aren't a threat to them, and that's how you get a bad work environment and start hemorrhaging talent.

[halfeye]

No, incompetence threshold is one of the explanations why there are so many idiot managers out there. It's when someone is good at their job, gets promoted, is good at their job, gets promoted, and suddenly isn't good, but isn't terrible enough to warrant firing. They then start being afraid for their job and only rewarding people who aren't a threat to them, and that's how you get a bad work environment and start hemorrhaging talent.
The Peter principle. However, the ability to bullshine annoys the heck out of me, and probably anyone else who doesn't have it in disproportionate amounts, and is what makes salespeople seem qualified to manage even though their lying actually means nothing IMO.

[Tev]

Start new topic for that Dilibert rant.

ace rooster: Didn't know tokamak research is not that valuable for other fusion approaches, that's a shame. Same as LPP getting so closeminded, but I'm glad to hear there really is the potential. Thanks for the summary!

[ace rooster]

Start new topic for that Dilibert rant.

ace rooster: Didn't know tokamak research is not that valuable for other fusion approaches, that's a shame. Same as LPP getting so closeminded, but I'm glad to hear there really is the potential. Thanks for the summary!

Bear in mind that that was heavily coloured by my opinions, and not particularly comprehensive. I didn't mean to badmouth LPP so much, especially since much of my own understanding is based on their research. I wouldn't describe it as closeminded so much as invested. They understand the machine they have, and think that with little incremental improvements they will get it to work, and they may be right. It does look to me that they would be better off taking the lessons learned and starting fresh, even though they would have to do all that initial work again. Scrapping a machine that almost works is difficult though, and a new machine would require an imaginative leap, which I have not seen from them.

Also, the tokamak research is invaluable for developing materials and studying fusion cross sections. A lot of the work on how energy and material transfer across field lines is very useful for most designs too. It only really falls down for studying plasma instabilities. Personally I think that a working design will work based on manipulation of instabilities*, so I regard this as a serious shortcoming.

One of my favorite graphs with regards to the subject is a plot of how close a design comes to the lawson criteria compared to funding. ITER, Polywell, and LPP give a curve that suggests that the effectiveness of a design is inversely preportional to the funding it gets. :smallconfused:

*partly from the LPP work, but mostly from the original Z pinch work. They had to retract their results based on the fact that they were measuring the peak temperature rather than the average. They basically said "Well thats not good, it doesn't work like we wanted it to :smallfrown:", when the response IMO should have been, "Wait, there are regions of the plasma that are an order of magnitude hotter than the rest. Can we use this effect?".