Lockheed Martin Pursuing Compact Nuclear Fusion Reactor Concept

[Johan]

I am an EE and worked on various control systems and designed custom instrumentation. I got to deal with systems as high as 200,000 volts, and 500,000 amps (not at the same time). Lots of weird things happen at those extremes. At these high current levels the magnetic forces often tore really heavy wires off their connections. Spent much of my time with something called Neutral Beam Injection which was one of the many methods used to heat the plasma to light off the fusion reaction (that plus lasers, strong RF and microwave). For the main tokamak energy was stored in 100+ ton flywheels spun up over several minutes with all the energy pulled out within a few seconds to run the pulse for the experiment. Without the mechanical energy storage the lab would dim the lights from NY to Philadelphia. The lab is still operating today but with more smaller experiments to work the physics, the older large machines are decommissioned. The big Tokamak multi national lab, ITER, is now in Cadarache, southern France.

Very cool! So there were no large capacitors back then to store energy for the pulses. Have you had any time to have a look in to the fusion approach suggested by LPP (Eric Lerner's group)? It involves a dense plasma focus, no magnetic confinement, Boron based fuel, aneutronic fusion without the need for thermal generation but instead direct electricity generation through partly induction and partly converting emitted x-rays to electricity. I will post an update on progress in the LPP thread later today if I get the time...

 

[Kbsilver]

Very cool! So there were no large capacitors back then to store energy for the pulses.

Sure there were lots of capacitors used at the site, often a small building full of them (3KV oil filled, this was used to develop the 500,000 amp pulse using ignitrons as the switch into a bitter coil to squeeze a laser beam). But these were mostly on ancillary physics experiments, not the main tokamak. For one experiment I had racks of hundreds of 400 volt electrolytic cans wired together in 1 Farad banks. When one would fail all the energy of the others would dump into it causing it to literally shoot across the room. The resulting foil that came out was more than would fit in a garbage can. I have not given much thought to the LPP proposal (that is more for a physicist). Remember that cold fusion 'breakthrough' a few decades ago? (for those who are reading, no, it did not work, it was all fake)

 

[ggr]

Remember that cold fusion 'breakthrough' a few decades ago? (for those who are reading, no, it did not work, it was all fake)

LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Fusion) research continues, and only last week I read some article about it claiming that was definitely working. They just changed the name. But I agree, it definitely doesn't "work" yet, if ever.

 

[Reykjavik]

I'm still hopeful for fusion mostly because of all the failed attempts. Throughout all of these, we've made little bits of scientific progress, and have not yet found anything to derail the whole endeavor. In principle, fusion could provide energy at the scales and costs needed with minimal environmental impacts. The principles that say that it is potentially possible have held up through all of these tests.

We've found a lot of ways not to make fusion reactors. We only need one way to actually do it.