Short version: details matter, Thomas McGuire is a smart guy who knows enough to avoid the obvious mistakes, Lockheed Martin is a commercial company taking a commercial route to technology development, so they are disengaged from the scientific community.
Will it work? They only reasonable answer is: "Maybe." We'll know better in five or ten years.
To be fair to LM if they get this right and it works, they will assume a large portion of all the world's wealth rather quickly.
Also surely we need a Manhatten project for nuclear fusion. Indeed it is possible it the the fault of the Manhatten project that Fusion wasn't pursued at the time
haha yeah-- not saying it's an easy problem or anything, but you'd think that we'd have about as good a chance as humanity could ever hope for if you ask while Oppenheimer, Fermi, Feynman, Bohr et alia are all working together... ON THE SAME PROJECT. And this is ignoring the fact that we wouldn't even give Einstein security clearance...
If this works, and the global demand for fossil fuels significantly reduces or disappears, imagine the impact it will have on the countries whose economies are largely dependant on exporting oil, gas or coal. A large part of the Middle East, or even countries lie Russia or Venezuela could be in for a very bad few decades.
Surely cheap energy for all would help any country raise it's standard of living. I think you could as easy argue that we'd see less turbulence since nearly all resource constraints would be relaxed. Salt-water can be desalinated cheaply and pumped anywhere. Factories powered. Homes heated or cooled. Travel would be inexpensive. CO2 could be extracted from the air and buried.
This would be particularly exciting. Ships, trains and physically large forms of transport (maybe even aircraft/spacecraft?!?) could have fusion reactors built in.
Electric cars charged by cheap power from local, neighbourhood fusion reactors. The power grid is decentralised with reliable baseload power sources, that are clean, reliable (no intermittent problems with weather with renewables) and safe. Power sources can be located where they are needed, whether it's in a basement, on a roof of an urban building or on Mars.
Don't get too starry-eyed; this is deuterium-tritium or deuterium-deuterium fusion they're talking about. It produces neutron radiation so you still need shielding, and it really complicates the materials engineering. All the properties of the material you're using to do some job depend on what kind of atoms are in it, and all those neutrons are busy transmuting those same atoms. The first working fusion reactor will probably have crazy maintenance requirements. (It's already a bit of a problem with fission plants, but with the simpler fusion reactions as much as 80% of the energy is produced in the form of neutrons.)
The holy grail that you're thinking of is aneutronic fusion, usually deuterium-helium3 or deuterium-lithium6. He3 is super rare though, so a D-He3 reactor using it might need to get the He3 from a bigger fusion reactor using D-D fusion, which produces it (and that pesky neutron).
Even better still might be proton-boron fusion; it needs temperatures an order of magnitude higher than D-D fusion (and magnetic confinement two or three orders of magnitude stronger), but produces far fewer neutrons (there are fewer undesirable side reactions). Alas, this route will produce four orders of magnitude less energy than the much simpler D-D reaction.
Given the scale of the engineering problems, we could even end up harnessing fusion power by building dyson spheres; a star might be the only feasible, stable way to build a fusion reactor. Hopefully our universe was set on an easier difficulty setting than that when it was instantiated.
Thanks for the information. I was thinking of the implications of the dream scenario, not that I think it's actually plausible. From what you've said it really sounds like a compact, low maintenance fusion reactor is still way, way off, perhaps a century or more (if it's feasible at all.) Maybe we need a working quantum computer to run simulations to build a fusion reactor, another dream project that is also constantly a decade away, or a super intelligent AI to tackle the problem ;)
Enough to counter the disappearance of the 85% of export income Saudi Arabia gets from oil?
Enough to counter the fact that Russia gets 52% of its federal revenue from oil and gas?
I find it hard to believe that making desalination a little cheaper, or transport a little less expensive will even come close to counter balancing those sort of percentages.
And even if it did, the relative importance of nations will change. Nations that were important because they had fossil fuels will become less important, and nations that were held back by lack of resources could become more powerful.
Those sorts of changes in power balances would cause a lot of turbulence.
Saudi Arabia has 27 million people; Norway has 5 million; Canada has 30 million.
The massive leap forward that goes with any new breakthrough in energy supply or cost, is without question worth the potentially negative effects those countries will suffer. Saudi Arabia can find other ways to build economy, as so many other countries that lack oil have to do.
Russia is the only one on the list that worries me, because of what a truly destabilized Russia might cause.
Venezuela might even benefit from their oil system going to zero. It'll force their leadership and people to move to a functional political system, and away from the oil welfare bribery that Chavez used which has crippled the nation.
Countries care about relative standing compared to its neighbors as much as (if not more than) absolute standings. How is a country that uses the promise of cheap gas and oil as a carrot to keep its neighbors in line going to react when its carrot is taken away and all it has left is a stick?
Furthermore many oil rich countries have shown much more interest in using their wealth to increase the wealth and power of the elite and to oppress and control the population at large. How will they react when they face a very real risk of losing power? How will the oppressed people react when they start seeing the wealth (and the power that comes with it) slipping out of the hands of the elite?
That's still pretty damn expensive. Ever leave a pot on the stove boiling and let it run out, the amount of precipitate is surprising. Do that on millions of gallons of water and you end up with a lot of material that needs cleaned often and isn't easy to get off.
Given that fossil fuels are a non-renewable resource and the urgent need to reduce/eliminate dependence on fossil fuels due to climate change, will this not happen regardless though? I would hope these countries have the sensibilities to see the writing on the wall.
"Turbulent times" but at much lower stakes. If you take oil off the table as an incitement to resource wars, there is much less chance of US, Russian, or Chinese adventurism. That's a tradeoff I'd take.
Having to get serious about building open modern secular self-sustaining economies would not be a bad influence on that region either.
That kind of assumes no country would just copy it. Which they simply would unless LM sold these devices or licenses to them at very reasonable prices.
One way or another, if a successful fusion reactor is actually built, the design will eventually get out and be reverse engineered and copied. It's too important for it to not happen.
Knowing something is definitely feasible is very, very different to trying to invent the first working prototype.
i.e. knowing that a particular design of plane does actually fly, means you can make very different assumptions about information you get from looking at it's shape.
well that and Lockheed's proposal doesn't involve the tens of billions of dollars the other more headline grabbing one does, hence it can't be good, can it?
The issue I see is this, no one has done it yet, produce sustainable fusion power so I say, let them all try their theories and we all benefit. If Lockheed's experiment is fractionally as expensive as the big guys on the street then why not. Governments sure piss away enough as it is on lesser adventures.
There's that famous rule of thumb: if it sounds too good to be true, then maybe it is. Lockheed Martin's cheap, compact fusion reactor does sound too good to be true. Then again, if it works, that's enormous. And the massive, expensive ITER can't possibly have the same kind of impact on our energy. I want Lockheed Martin to be correct.
But are they? If this approach has been tried before without success, and no fusion scientist considers this likely to work, then I wonder why Lockheed is even trying this. On the one hand I think Lockheed must be on to something. On the other hand, if they don't have any good data to share (or are unwilling to share it), then why are they going public with this at all? If it makes sense to keep it secret because it's a secret, commercial, profit driven project, then why not just keep it secret?
Why seek publicity when they don't want to share anything real? Is the share price down? Do they need extra funding?
It's almost certainly a portable black hole for funding applications.
Last time this was discussed here the most common problem cited was the emission of fast neutrons, which move fast and break things, especially including the superconductors which are supposed to be part of the magnetic containment.
Regardless of the success of this particular experiment, you've got to hand it to the US when it comes to fusion research.
US is :
Funding ITER (founding member of ITER)
Funding Z-Pinch
Funding Polywell
Funding steam-based fusion (yes, really)
Funding laser fusion
Funding this new approach by Lockheed Martin Skunkworks
Funding 3 other inertial containment fusion approaches
Over 30 small scale experiments that don't appear to currently justify bigger investment.
The EU (which has ~20% more GDP than the US):
Funds ITER ...
Funds 2 other tokamaks (exactly the same approach as ITER, but smaller scale, and they're being defunded, most people claim because of ITER)
... that's it
Japan
Also supports a number of fusion research paths.
China
Funded a single Tokamak that is reportedly decommissioned by now. One might add that the organization that built it is suspected of forging their results. The end.
Most fusion approaches, including ITER, can only work if our current physics theories are flawed. Polywell, to a lesser extent Z-Pinch and several others, for example depend on the ability to keep a gas non-thermalized for a relatively long time (meaning molecules in a single volume of gas having different temperatures for longer than it takes them to move from one side of the gas volume to the other). Violates thermodynamics as it currently exists. If ITER generates the Neutron pressure it is predicted to generate, it will collapse in a matter of hours at best (which is were most sources got the "fast neutrons destroy matter" criticism. And yes, it's of course true for all fusion approaches. BUT it only matters if it destroys matter fast enough. For example, cosmic radiation destroys any kind of matter a lot better than even the worst fusion reactor. And you're exposed right now ! Nothing can stop them ! Run for the hills, except that even hills don't stop all of them. However, the rate of damage is so low, it would take millions of years to destabilize the head of a needle. The same is true for small fusion reactors).
The reason I mention this is that this is the criticism against a lot of the fusion approaches. Z-pinch cannot work because it violates ... Polywells can't work because gases thermalize whether or not you have big electrical fields fooling around ... of course, similar (and "equally" valid, in other words, with an unknown level of validity since we haven't tried) criticism exists against ITER. ITER is simply the bet that what you might call "the scientific community of physics" feels most comfortable with.
When I was taking philosophy, one remark stayed with me. On many occasions in history the scientific community has rallied around certain theories. Generally "the next theory" (e.g. relativity versus Newtonian physics) was available for decades before it became popular. Every single time the scientific community rallied around one of the theories and not once, not one single time, did they rally around the right theory (why ? Because almost every single time they rallied around the old theory, even in the presence of known flaws like the black body paradox. Scientists are no different from the rest of us : if possible, they'd like everything to neatly stay just the way it already is).
Given that, the US and to a lesser extent Japanese approach to fusion appears to be the right one. Maybe they should do more, but not by increasing ITER's funding. Frankly, if there is a good way to do fusion, the US deserves to find it, and frankly, the EU does not.
> Most fusion approaches, including ITER, can only work if our current physics theories are flawed.
Yeah this isn't true at all. Moreover, the US isn't funding fusion well at all - it has repeatedly threatened to pull out of ITER, was late to come on board, and has thrown only token amounts of cash at other projects. The Z-Pinch also is not a fusion device, and NIF was built to study atomic weaponry implosion physics, with inertial confinement thrown in for good publicity more then anything else.
Moreover, ITER will work perfectly well, and Q > 1 fusion has been demonstrated in previous, smaller tokamaks (it is just not a practical power source). Engineering problems are very different to "fundamental physics", and there's no particular reason to think that we can't build a suitable neutron absorber for a tokamak, just that it's tricky.
All reasonable points, and there is plenty of good reason to be skeptical. On the other hand, Lockheed Martin is one of the largest defense and aerospace contractors out there, with a solid track record for bringing to market sophisticated aerospace solutions. They also made ~$3B in profit last year, so they are probably ok on the money front. At the least they deserve a bit more benefit of the doubt than, say that Italian guy running around claiming cold fusion.
But they continued that with e.g. the F-117 stealth fighter(-bomber), after Kelly Johnson was no longer running the show. The story of the prototype's development is stunning, see e.g. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316743003/
Absolutely. Had it been anyone else, it'd probably have been written off right away. But it's Lockheed Martin, so everybody assumes there's something to it.
Still, why go public on this without any data? Not publishing at all because they want their competitive advantage I'd understand. Publishing data I'd also understand. But a spectacular hype story with nothing to back it up? That suggests it'd about something other than just the science or the product.
Maybe it is a glimpse into internal politicking and budget wars. It's harder to cut funding to a project like this if people are beating down your door asking about it. But they'll only do that if they've been given some tantalising details about it.
I try to remind myself that the CFR vs ITER, isn't much different in scale of leap than what Craig Venter pulled vs the government's genome project (in the sense of it being rather breathtaking as a leap forward compared to the backwards prior approach).
That is to say, such leaps over what people commonly think is the required approach, are in fact possible. It reminds me to leave my mind open to something like the CFR being possible.
This is a wildly inappropriate comparison. For one thing, Craig Venter didn't necessarily produce a "good" genome, and his approach wasn't objectively better at the time.
For another, it was hardly a problem of engineering at that point, the basic chemistry was well known and well understood. It was very much a problem of data-processing and logistics to get it all done though.
I got a little suspicious when this came at the exact time a few other bits of news did that were clearly intended to push the price of oil futures down.
I don't see anything to get excited about in the information which has been provided in the press. Hutchinson's comments are about the basic type of design. I presume they have some kind of secret sauce which they see as providing a better solution. I say, good for them for trying it.
Just like some of the other commenters, I suspect that the reason they went public with an information-lite release is due to internal politics at LM. When I was in the fusion research business, we stayed in stealth mode the entire 5 years. We probably could have continued if we had put out press releases like this to attract more funding. We didn't think we had any results worth having a press release about, however, and I didn't want to be that guy.
If I were to jump back into fusion, I probably would go with a linear, mirror-type, high beta device. They are easier to build, cheaper, and have one major design flaw (i.e. problem which needs fixing). I have had some ideas on how to improve the endcaps, which are the real weakness of the design type. I saw that dkirtley had some good things to say about the Budker-style Gas Dynamic Trap design in the last thread about this. I'm not so sure that I buy into that way, but I'm glad that people are following that path.
What the article really tells us is that there is one more group out there who is following a technical path that probably wasn't being followed before. That is good news, because there are many ways to build a fusion reactor that doesn't work, but there may be one or more ways to build one that does. It's good that we have a few more scouts checking the territory.
47 comments
[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadShort version: details matter, Thomas McGuire is a smart guy who knows enough to avoid the obvious mistakes, Lockheed Martin is a commercial company taking a commercial route to technology development, so they are disengaged from the scientific community.
Will it work? They only reasonable answer is: "Maybe." We'll know better in five or ten years.
Also surely we need a Manhatten project for nuclear fusion. Indeed it is possible it the the fault of the Manhatten project that Fusion wasn't pursued at the time
We could be in for turbulent times, if it works.
This would be particularly exciting. Ships, trains and physically large forms of transport (maybe even aircraft/spacecraft?!?) could have fusion reactors built in.
Electric cars charged by cheap power from local, neighbourhood fusion reactors. The power grid is decentralised with reliable baseload power sources, that are clean, reliable (no intermittent problems with weather with renewables) and safe. Power sources can be located where they are needed, whether it's in a basement, on a roof of an urban building or on Mars.
The holy grail that you're thinking of is aneutronic fusion, usually deuterium-helium3 or deuterium-lithium6. He3 is super rare though, so a D-He3 reactor using it might need to get the He3 from a bigger fusion reactor using D-D fusion, which produces it (and that pesky neutron).
Even better still might be proton-boron fusion; it needs temperatures an order of magnitude higher than D-D fusion (and magnetic confinement two or three orders of magnitude stronger), but produces far fewer neutrons (there are fewer undesirable side reactions). Alas, this route will produce four orders of magnitude less energy than the much simpler D-D reaction.
Given the scale of the engineering problems, we could even end up harnessing fusion power by building dyson spheres; a star might be the only feasible, stable way to build a fusion reactor. Hopefully our universe was set on an easier difficulty setting than that when it was instantiated.
Finally a good reason to go to the moon!
Enough to counter the fact that Russia gets 52% of its federal revenue from oil and gas?
I find it hard to believe that making desalination a little cheaper, or transport a little less expensive will even come close to counter balancing those sort of percentages.
And even if it did, the relative importance of nations will change. Nations that were important because they had fossil fuels will become less important, and nations that were held back by lack of resources could become more powerful.
Those sorts of changes in power balances would cause a lot of turbulence.
The massive leap forward that goes with any new breakthrough in energy supply or cost, is without question worth the potentially negative effects those countries will suffer. Saudi Arabia can find other ways to build economy, as so many other countries that lack oil have to do.
Russia is the only one on the list that worries me, because of what a truly destabilized Russia might cause.
Venezuela might even benefit from their oil system going to zero. It'll force their leadership and people to move to a functional political system, and away from the oil welfare bribery that Chavez used which has crippled the nation.
Furthermore many oil rich countries have shown much more interest in using their wealth to increase the wealth and power of the elite and to oppress and control the population at large. How will they react when they face a very real risk of losing power? How will the oppressed people react when they start seeing the wealth (and the power that comes with it) slipping out of the hands of the elite?
Really? I thought salt water desalination is a rather difficult and expensive thing to do. Can you cite support for this statement?
Having to get serious about building open modern secular self-sustaining economies would not be a bad influence on that region either.
i.e. knowing that a particular design of plane does actually fly, means you can make very different assumptions about information you get from looking at it's shape.
The issue I see is this, no one has done it yet, produce sustainable fusion power so I say, let them all try their theories and we all benefit. If Lockheed's experiment is fractionally as expensive as the big guys on the street then why not. Governments sure piss away enough as it is on lesser adventures.
But are they? If this approach has been tried before without success, and no fusion scientist considers this likely to work, then I wonder why Lockheed is even trying this. On the one hand I think Lockheed must be on to something. On the other hand, if they don't have any good data to share (or are unwilling to share it), then why are they going public with this at all? If it makes sense to keep it secret because it's a secret, commercial, profit driven project, then why not just keep it secret?
Why seek publicity when they don't want to share anything real? Is the share price down? Do they need extra funding?
Last time this was discussed here the most common problem cited was the emission of fast neutrons, which move fast and break things, especially including the superconductors which are supposed to be part of the magnetic containment.
US is :
Funding ITER (founding member of ITER)
Funding Z-Pinch
Funding Polywell
Funding steam-based fusion (yes, really)
Funding laser fusion
Funding this new approach by Lockheed Martin Skunkworks
Funding 3 other inertial containment fusion approaches
Over 30 small scale experiments that don't appear to currently justify bigger investment.
The EU (which has ~20% more GDP than the US):
Funds ITER ...
Funds 2 other tokamaks (exactly the same approach as ITER, but smaller scale, and they're being defunded, most people claim because of ITER)
... that's it
Japan
Also supports a number of fusion research paths.
China
Funded a single Tokamak that is reportedly decommissioned by now. One might add that the organization that built it is suspected of forging their results. The end.
Most fusion approaches, including ITER, can only work if our current physics theories are flawed. Polywell, to a lesser extent Z-Pinch and several others, for example depend on the ability to keep a gas non-thermalized for a relatively long time (meaning molecules in a single volume of gas having different temperatures for longer than it takes them to move from one side of the gas volume to the other). Violates thermodynamics as it currently exists. If ITER generates the Neutron pressure it is predicted to generate, it will collapse in a matter of hours at best (which is were most sources got the "fast neutrons destroy matter" criticism. And yes, it's of course true for all fusion approaches. BUT it only matters if it destroys matter fast enough. For example, cosmic radiation destroys any kind of matter a lot better than even the worst fusion reactor. And you're exposed right now ! Nothing can stop them ! Run for the hills, except that even hills don't stop all of them. However, the rate of damage is so low, it would take millions of years to destabilize the head of a needle. The same is true for small fusion reactors).
The reason I mention this is that this is the criticism against a lot of the fusion approaches. Z-pinch cannot work because it violates ... Polywells can't work because gases thermalize whether or not you have big electrical fields fooling around ... of course, similar (and "equally" valid, in other words, with an unknown level of validity since we haven't tried) criticism exists against ITER. ITER is simply the bet that what you might call "the scientific community of physics" feels most comfortable with.
When I was taking philosophy, one remark stayed with me. On many occasions in history the scientific community has rallied around certain theories. Generally "the next theory" (e.g. relativity versus Newtonian physics) was available for decades before it became popular. Every single time the scientific community rallied around one of the theories and not once, not one single time, did they rally around the right theory (why ? Because almost every single time they rallied around the old theory, even in the presence of known flaws like the black body paradox. Scientists are no different from the rest of us : if possible, they'd like everything to neatly stay just the way it already is).
Given that, the US and to a lesser extent Japanese approach to fusion appears to be the right one. Maybe they should do more, but not by increasing ITER's funding. Frankly, if there is a good way to do fusion, the US deserves to find it, and frankly, the EU does not.
Yeah this isn't true at all. Moreover, the US isn't funding fusion well at all - it has repeatedly threatened to pull out of ITER, was late to come on board, and has thrown only token amounts of cash at other projects. The Z-Pinch also is not a fusion device, and NIF was built to study atomic weaponry implosion physics, with inertial confinement thrown in for good publicity more then anything else.
Moreover, ITER will work perfectly well, and Q > 1 fusion has been demonstrated in previous, smaller tokamaks (it is just not a practical power source). Engineering problems are very different to "fundamental physics", and there's no particular reason to think that we can't build a suitable neutron absorber for a tokamak, just that it's tricky.
As for the F-35, the TFX like requirements are its biggest problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Dynamics_F-111_Aardvar... see also The Strategy of Technology if you want the whole picture).
https://medium.com/war-is-boring/fd-how-the-u-s-and-its-alli...
The best thing you can say about the F-35 is that it's a perfect example of design-by-committee.
Still, why go public on this without any data? Not publishing at all because they want their competitive advantage I'd understand. Publishing data I'd also understand. But a spectacular hype story with nothing to back it up? That suggests it'd about something other than just the science or the product.
I still hope it's real, though.
That is to say, such leaps over what people commonly think is the required approach, are in fact possible. It reminds me to leave my mind open to something like the CFR being possible.
For another, it was hardly a problem of engineering at that point, the basic chemistry was well known and well understood. It was very much a problem of data-processing and logistics to get it all done though.
They probably didn't make much progress in the last couple of years, and costs and risks are still to high.
No. It says "If it sounds too good to be true then it probably is." I am very hopeful though.
Just like some of the other commenters, I suspect that the reason they went public with an information-lite release is due to internal politics at LM. When I was in the fusion research business, we stayed in stealth mode the entire 5 years. We probably could have continued if we had put out press releases like this to attract more funding. We didn't think we had any results worth having a press release about, however, and I didn't want to be that guy.
If I were to jump back into fusion, I probably would go with a linear, mirror-type, high beta device. They are easier to build, cheaper, and have one major design flaw (i.e. problem which needs fixing). I have had some ideas on how to improve the endcaps, which are the real weakness of the design type. I saw that dkirtley had some good things to say about the Budker-style Gas Dynamic Trap design in the last thread about this. I'm not so sure that I buy into that way, but I'm glad that people are following that path.
What the article really tells us is that there is one more group out there who is following a technical path that probably wasn't being followed before. That is good news, because there are many ways to build a fusion reactor that doesn't work, but there may be one or more ways to build one that does. It's good that we have a few more scouts checking the territory.