thedrive.com/the-war-zone/19652/lockheed-martin-now-has-a-patent-for-its-potentially-world-changing-fusion-reactor >Lockheed Martin has quietly obtained a patent associated with its design for a potentially revolutionary compact fusion reactor, or CFR. If this project has been progressing on schedule, the company could debut a prototype system that size of shipping container, but capable of powering a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier or 80,000 homes, sometime in the next year or so.
>The patent, for a portion of the confinement system, or embodiment, is dated Feb. 15, 2018. The Maryland-headquartered defense contractor had filed a provisional claim on April 3, 2013 and a formal application nearly a year later. Our good friend Stephen Trimble, chief of Flightglobal's Americas Bureau, subsequently spotted it and Tweeted out its basic details. In 2014, the company also made a splash by announcing they were working on the device at all and that it was the responsibility of its Skunk Works advanced projects office in Palmdale, California. At the time, Dr. Thomas McGuire, head of the Skunk Works’ Compact Fusion Project, said the goal was to have a working reactor in five years and production worthy design within 10.
>Since the 1920s, scientists have been working on fusion reactor concepts, but unfortunately most the functional examples have been inefficient and large – typically the size of small building – as well as exceptionally expensive. In the 2014 interview with Aviation Week, McGuire used tokamaks, a magnetic confinement device scientists in the Soviet Union first invented in the 1950s, as an example, stating that they had a low magnetic pressure limit under which they could safely operate.
>“The problem with tokamaks is that “they can only hold so much plasma, and we call that the beta limit,” McGuire says. Measured as the ratio of plasma pressure to the magnetic pressure, the beta limit of the average tokamak is low, or about “5% or so of the confining pressure,” he says. Comparing the torus to a bicycle tire, McGuire adds, ‘if they put too much in, eventually their confining tire will fail and burst—so to operate safely, they don’t go too close to that.’ …
>The CFR will avoid these issues by tackling plasma confinement in a radically different way. Instead of constraining the plasma within tubular rings, a series of superconducting coils will generate a new magnetic-field geometry in which the plasma is held within the broader confines of the entire reaction chamber. Superconducting magnets within the coils will generate a magnetic field around the outer border of the chamber. ‘So for us, instead of a bike tire expanding into air, we have something more like a tube that expands into an ever-stronger wall,’ McGuire says. The system is therefore regulated by a self-tuning feedback mechanism, whereby the farther out the plasma goes, the stronger the magnetic field pushes back to contain it. The CFR is expected to have a beta limit ratio of one. ‘We should be able to go to 100% or beyond,’ he adds.”
>According to the company website on the CFR, the reactor could be powerful enough to run an aircraft carrier, power a plane the size of a C-5 Galaxy airlifter, provide electricity to cities with anywhere from 50 to 100,000 people, and maybe even speed up a trip to Mars. In each case, the compact reactor would take the place of large conventional fuel systems or fission reactors, eliminating weight and bulk. This in turn could create trade space for additional system or carrying capacity in terms of personnel or materiel or potentially allow for a more energy efficient overall shape or design.
Jacob Garcia
Blah, blah, blah. A patent doesn't mean squat anymore.
>Washington cut the United States’ 2017 contribution from a scheduled $105 million to $50 million and had planned to cut its 2018 contribution from a scheduled $120 million to $63 million. But in last-minute talks about the U.S. 2018 budget last week, the U.S. Congress approved a draft Omnibus Spending Bill with a $122 million in-kind contribution for ITER, which President Donald Trump signed into law on Friday, ITER said.
>The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project is a cooperation between Europe, the United States, China, India, Japan, Russia and South Korea to build a prototype fusion reactor to generate electricity in a process similar to the nuclear fusion that powers the sun. With an estimated cost of about 20 billion euros ($25 billion), the project is more than halfway towards the first test of its super-heated plasma by 2025 and first full-power fusion by 2035.
>ITER’s main U.S. supplier is California-based General Atomics, which is building the project’s central solenoid, an 18-metre tall pillar-like magnet that will be one of the first components to be installed by 2020. The United States has given about $1 billion to ITER so far, and had been planning to contribute an additional $500 million through 2025.
I-is it safe? Won't someone please think of the children?
Jaxon Bell
>Superconducting magnets within the coils will generate a magnetic field around the outer border of the chamber. ‘So for us, instead of a bike tire expanding into air, we have something more like a tube that expands into an ever-stronger wall,’ McGuire says. The system is therefore regulated by a self-tuning feedback mechanism, whereby the farther out the plasma goes, the stronger the magnetic field pushes back to contain it.
Jacob Miller
Kim Jong Un just wants to steal US nuclear secrets for China.
Joshua Russell
For LMT to be open and say this is being worked on at skunk works means a working unit is already in use.
Connor Myers
this there's a solid 75% chance they have a model working and producing energy with a positive net output, this is just making sure they secure it as they make it more efficient
All this tech and money, and we are still just heating up water to spin a magnet really fast.
Zachary Brooks
Also means Boeing & Raytheon already have or will have competing solutions as well. The MIT is a tightly-wound nest.
Easton Anderson
*MIC
Joseph Russell
speak for yourself, brainlet, i went to a very liberal university that cost $200k and now im smart
Anthony Butler
>capable of powering a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier or 80,000 homes god damn, aircraft carriers are insane
Jayden Cruz
why do we waste so much land? like 40% unused just to make irrigation a little easier
Carson Cook
It's a fusion rocket engine with the nozzle plugged up. At least until they get it working and sell it as an engine. This is an amazing design.
Jayden Scott
SAFIRE is better, uses far less energy and has a better output (boils tungsten at 180KV)
Hunter Murphy
>why do we waste so much useless, worthless desert land just so that we can have efficient agriculture?
It wouldn’t be profitable otherwise and that land would be unused desert you fucktard
Ryan Gomez
since when does skunkworks develop civilian tech? Wouldn't this be super classified for military use? This pretty much confirms most of the UFOs seen over the last 20+ years were USAF powered by this or similar design. Germany or China must be close to a breakthrough in their tech and lockheed wants to get the jump on them
Nathan Campbell
this
they've had electrogravitic craft for over 50 years, saw one of those plasma gas covered fuckers float over my head heading towards our harbor. It's the most beautiful and scary fucking you'll ever see.
Michael Davis
Does this mean that the race war will be fought with battlemechs?
Noah Cox
well that 'unused desert' is being used by somebody and if I was a farmer I'd rather grow 100 tons of crops than 60 tons of crops. Year after year all that waste adds up. Surely someone can figure out a better system that provides a reasonable ROI
Owen Hill
This is patent trolling; theorize something close to what will happen then once someone makes it work, pull patent infringement.
Brandon Thompson
>“they can only hold so much plasma, and we call that the beta limit,” McGuire says This new reactor is literally the chad reactor.
Blake Gutierrez
Fusion has already been done, the problem is the efficiency and is it cost effective?
Matthew Butler
The article in op is fake. We know it is fake because they don't talk about the beyond huge neutron flux this thing will have. Turn this machine on and everyone with in 500 yards will die within 30 days...
John Scott
the chinese will have this shit years ahead and waaayyyyy under budget.
Colton Thompson
Sure the "reactor" can be small but now what about the size of the plant? Have they found a better moderator and heat transferring liquid than Water that has a specific heat capacity? Have they found turbines that are powered by better forms of energy than impulse transferring of energy from superheated steam? How will pressure and temperature be controlled? How does a human operator control the exponential changes in nuclear reactions when human reactions are measured in seconds and supercritical or "prompt critical" reactions can be measured in femtoseconds.
Everything is theoretical until proven otherwise. Nothing is wrong with Nuclear fission, at the end of the day we are still just boiling water to spin turbines. Uranium just has way more energy potential per kg than an equivalent kg of coal/gas/oil ect.
Evan Rodriguez
This is Trump rolling out the advanced hidden tech that was kept from the public as he said he would do during his inaugural address.
Andrew Rogers
>the virgin tokamak vs the chad fusion reactor
Ian Wilson
Yeah, this issue with this is... It is gonna have a huge neutron flux. Everyone within 500 yards of it dies. They say they want to put in on aircraft carrier... But... Last I checked there are no good radiation shields for neutrons...
there is photovoltaic and betavoltaics which create electricity differently than a turbine.
but yeah it would be nice to have a way to directly funnel the energy created by a fusion reaction into electricity without having to convert it to thermal energy, then to mechanical energy for generation, then to electrical for transport, then to what the end user needs
fun fact, 10% of the energy consumption on US aircraft carriers is sonograms for expectant female sailors
Justin Stewart
about time, user
Joshua Martinez
I don't buy that for a second.
William Thompson
>Last I checked there are no good radiation shields for neutrons
the fuck are you talking about, fusion doesnt produce neutrons like fission does and fission reactors neutron output can be effeciently moderated via a bunch of different materials
Tyler Wilson
yeah there is a shit ton of free energy just floating around.
the earth is essentially a giant generator, but at this point we'd still need a shit ton of room temp superconducting material to make use of it.
dont even get me started on eventually being able to harness gravitational waves for power, but by that point we may well be beyond electricity anyhow
Dominic Carter
interestingly, the noble committee awarded some egghead types the prize for measuring the gravitational flux created in space-time by circling black holes, one day we may be able to harness and store the enrgy created by that flux in a capacitor, or at least convert it to electricity ehich can be stored in a capacitor
Liam Reyes
you shouldnt, because I made it up
Nathan Diaz
It means there will be no race war...
But I didnt really dislike jews or blacks anyways so I guess im okay with that.
Anthony Allen
Nah,
They didnt have strong enough magnets, or sufficient computer power to calculate the fields.
Im guessing they do now.
Levi Hughes
and 80% is to power their vibrators. i went into female birthing to change out some ballasts and it was like walking into a bee hive. BUZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!
Leo Murphy
I miss space elevator. I miss EFG as well. All the crossboard lulz that were had. I miss my childhood.
Lincoln Sullivan
All these numbers and we're still dead inside.
Oliver Walker
Irrigation is simplest with a circle. The land is plentiful enough that it's not worth the extra cost of using a more complex irrigation system that could cover it all. Sooner or later the aquifers will dry up and it will all turn back into desert anyway.
i'll be the nut then... can they make one small enough to put in a umm let's say a very large, triangular shaped, almost silent aircraft?
Caleb Lee
kek, good luck with that. Half of Sup Forums unironically thinks the earth is flat now. I'm honestly surprised one hasn't already replied to you.
I miss them too, user.
Jaxon Bailey
If LMT is open about it from this stage, it means that it doesn't even remotely work and is basically a publicity stunt. everybody with a brain is watching the MIT ARC proposal to see where it goes.
Also, it isn't a new concept. this is literally a bitch basic magnetic mirror. BUT NOW WITH SUPERCONDUCTORS!!!!!
no wonder it took them 5 years to go to grant on the application, I bet by the end LMT was literally just spamming the examiner's office with letters that read
"WE ARE LOCKHEED MARTIN WE ARE LOCKHEED MARTIN"
until the poor bastard signed off.
Carter Bailey
shame that tesla is one of the most overrated figures at this moment... everyone spitting out "tesla this... tesla that..." without even knowing what ohms law is... BTW just to give you a kick start in electrical study: is the relationship betwen the electrical quantities: potential in volts (V), current in amper(I) and resistance in ohms(R). very simple but powerful, it also encompasses the "energy conservation principal"
we already have "free" energy, anyone can build a small electric plant in their backyard if they REALLY WANTED, theres multiple choices like solar, wind even hydro (if you got the right place)
This technology was stolen from Iraq and was the true purpose of the war. It was developed based on ancient Babylonian artifacts Saddam uncovered.
John Hughes
>Blah, blah, blah. A patent doesn't mean squat anymore. Yeah this is most likely just disinfo. They are trying to cause the oil price to crash so they can buy it up or trying to scare North Korea or Russia. This comes after Russia announced hypersonic nukes remember. Nothing will ever come of this. The very idea of a controlled fusion reaction is just absurd. There's nothing more powerful in the universe, so there's no way to control it.
Jordan Jenkins
>just got a job at Lockheed Not doing anything even close to as cool as this
>All this tech and money, and we are still just heating up water to spin a magnet really fast. This is a weird perspective to have. All energy is energy, just behaving differently. A fusion reaction is just chaos. Boiling water is chaos. By turning a generator, you take all that chaos and funnel it into powering a repeating process, turning a generator, which lets you focus the energy into a one-way current, electricity, so we can actually use it for technology in an orderly way.
Joseph James
>For LMT to be open and say this is being worked on at skunk works means a working unit is already in use.
It will never work. Viable fusion power is impossible.
>Lockeed Martin Patents Fusion Reactor Design I don't know how to break this to you, hippie, but that doesn't mean it WORKS. You clearly don't know shit about patents.
Chase Foster
exactly! thats my point. many people here just jerking off to tesla without even knowing the most basic.
Gabriel Cox
Gee look it's another "every retard on Sup Forums comments on something they have no fucking clue about before the experts get in" epsiode
I work in nuclear fusion science and actually got to talk with the lead scientist McGuire at the APS Division of Plasma Physics conference, we're both MIT alumni.
This thing has a snowball's chance in hell of working. To produce the necessary fields for sufficient fusion confinement they'd need superconducting coils. Which they propose putting in the plasma. Which is heated to hotter than the sun's core. And producing neutrons about 3 times as powerful as those from a fission reaction.
Hopefully all you aspiring rocket scientists can figure out why that's bad.
Also remember this is skunkworks they're talking about, if it worked it wouldn't be public until 20 years from now. They went public because they need more funding and research expertise because Lockheed realized they were being taken for a ride.
Deuterium-Tritium and Deuterium-Deuterium fusion both produce neutrons you mongoloid
