So, That Skunk Works Fusion Reactor...

[Admiral Valdemar]

Didn't see a thread on it here, unless I'm blind. The end of last month, Lockheed had a guy give a talk at Google's Solve For X convention, and he was talking about D-T fusion using what I surmise was a Polywell design, as opposed to the now traditional tokamak topology. A 100 MW prototype could be ready by 2017, with commercial designs, able to fit on articulated lorries, being ready by the early 2020s.

The actual presentation is here and is a 14 primer on fusion and their design.

I've been reading up on reactions elsewhere, but would love to have SDN input too.

[madd0ct0r]

you mean it's only 10 years away!

it's an improvement on the 20 it's been for the last fifty years.

[Admiral Valdemar]

The jokes have been flying about that date change. I'm pretty sure though that Lockheed won't be pouring cash into a black hole with no possible ROI. Least, that's one reason I'm hoping this is different, if they're personally having a stake in it, rather than the pork barrel megaproject that is the F-35.

[Simon_Jester]

If you look at the "N years away" timeline, it's really more like a logarithmic: we were 20 years away in 1950, 15 years away in 1980, 10 years away in 2010...

Seriously though, the big factor is that people in the '50s through the '80s grossly underestimated how hard it would be to do the plasma physics and solve the technical problems. The biggest obstacle has been computer technology; we couldn't model plasmas well enough until... oh, some time in the past ten years. So everything had to be done by trial and error, which means lots of unexpected delays when we discover the next problem and have to rebuild the prototype from scratch.

With simulations, you can find ten problems at once and solve all of them in parallel in two years. Without simulations, you find the problems one at a time, and each one still takes two years to solve... you do the math.

[TimothyC]

I think it would be great to see a race between Skunk Works and EMC2* to try and see who can get it to work first.

*The team that had been led by the late Dr. Bussard, they get funded by the USN.

[Guardsman Bass]

I'm just happy that they're experimenting with a different way to get to fusion than using the Tokamak set-up, which has proven far more difficult and expensive than we thought it would be. A commercial design by the early 2020s would be fantastic.

[Zaune]

I'll believe it when they're selling them on the open market, or as open a market as the US government lets them have. I'm sorry, but we've been here way too many times before.

[Darth Tanner]

Until they can demonstrate it generating more than it consumes by a sufficient margin to be economically viable compared to existing technology then I laugh in their faces at any target date for commercial units to be ready for sale - how can they even give such spiel with a straight face considering the delays the technology has already experienced.

Working fusion would be the holy grail for the energy market... but wake me when it actually works, I've got a feeling I might be approaching retirement by the time it is.

[salm]

how can they even give such spiel with a straight face considering the delays the technology has already experienced.

You usually give out some vague date so that project and financial managers can write something in their time table. Everybody knows that it´s bullshit but they have to write something there because somebody above them wants a number. It´s not relevant if it´s accurate it just has to be there.

[Sky Captain]

I will believe this when they will have working prototype in operation. 100 MW in truck mobile package sounds too good to be true. I think currently there are no truck mobile gas turbine or diesel engine powered generators over few MW output. Yet those fusion guys claim they could put 100 MW in such package without whole thing melting down from overheating.

[Sea Skimmer]

I'm pretty sure this is why more about telling stock markets, look diversification! then anything else. Lockheed has been trying to move into the energy sector for a while but has failed to come up with anything exciting and headline grabbing, which isn't surprising because most energy research is incremental improvement, and most project they've worked on are aimed at portable military use and are not that cost effective in civilian applications when nobody is trying to blowup your power lines.

I will believe this when they will have working prototype in operation. 100 MW in truck mobile package sounds too good to be true. I think currently there are no truck mobile gas turbine or diesel engine powered generators over few MW output. Yet those fusion guys claim they could put 100 MW in such package without whole thing melting down from overheating.

I think around 20mw is the limit for a installation contained totally on one semi trailer, but sets that can do ~100 megawatts only need a couple trucks. A lot of equipment is needed for the intake and exhaust trunking to make it acceptable noise/FOD and emissions wise; if you took that away and just fired up a turbine in the open it'd be plausible to get it on one truck. Putting 'this won't work ever' aside, I doubt they really actually mean a complete plant on one truck anyway. More like just the reactor core itself does not have to come apart to go on one truck. Everything else would just be hoses and cables, no big deal to connect up.

[Dave]

I'm with Sky Captain, I'll believe it when the general media comes out with stories of"working multi MW output reactor with >1000 hours of continuous operation" etc.

I'm also glad it's a "mini star in a vacuum jar" variant, as opposed to these "piston powered fusion" or claims of NASA's LENR (cold fusion) project things that peg my bullshit detector.

[Singular Intellect]

And in the meantime, we'll continue to install dozens of gigawatts of worth of fusion power harvesting worldwide annually, with explosive growth starting to happen across the industry as the costs reductions start obviously shitting all over the competition. Even major utility CEOs are now admitting the nuclear chapter is now closed and it's time to invest in renewables.

[Darth Tanner]

A single nuclear plant brought online would generate twenty times more than every solar panel installed in the UK despite them having a 200% subsidy on their export.

Your own article is also only talking about politics and is actually quite damming of a renewable future (do you even read your own articles?) of course companies like RWE don't want to get into nuclear when governments are throwing money at renewables and forcing nuclear plants to shut. The article even goes on to say that RWE is actually all about coal burning these days, renewables are just a legally required sideline for their generation business to meet government targets and an easy route to pick up a pile of subsidy. Also it hardly helps your point when the Spiegel is attacking RWE for insufficient investment in renewable despite their massive subsidy.

I know you love solar like its jam on toast but seriously there are some technologies that are simply better.

[Irbis]

A single nuclear plant brought online would generate twenty times more than every solar panel installed in the UK despite them having a 200% subsidy on their export.

Not only this, had Nuclear power had anywhere near Solar power subsidies and complete lack of environmental protection it would be order of magnitude cheaper than everything. But hey, who cares swimming in rivers next to solar panel factories in China is far more dangerous than swimming in lake right next to Chernobyl, at least it's not radioactive and only kills fish and people in some backward region where we can't see them.

Also, I find Australia example cute. One country with least dense population on Earth and plenty of deserts you can pave with solar panels (at least it will destroy barren environment, not wildlife like in Europe...) is supposed to be indicator of success how? France, with cheapest and cleanest energy in Europe, doesn't bother with renewable snake oil and unlike Australia, is a model that can be used elsewhere.

[Irbis]

And another example of wishful renewable thinking right from the link of its proponent:

Terium: Yes, because government levies for new, renewable forms of energy, electricity grids and storage facilities drive up the price of electricity.

Yeah, dumb investments into renewables are kicking the price of German electricity up (which leads to ironic imports of electricity, nuclear-generated, of course, from neighbours...) and ruining German economy - once they do the same calculations of renewable/nuclear cost ratio as Japan did, it will be bye, bye panels, come back, reactors.

Oh, and look, he in fact doesn't propose to replace reactors with panels, he says existing, old rectors are in fact better than modern panels:

Terium: But it's a completely different situation with our existing nuclear power plants. We've invested billions in them. Under current laws, they are absolutely safe and have passed the stress tests. If policymakers have them shut down in the short term for other reasons, they also have to pay for the resulting losses.

So, yeah, even links that are supposed to convince us solar is good, say that bad, obsolete reactors are even better

Also, how renewables are good for environment:

Terium: The warnings are coming from the Federal Network Agency (ed's note: the German government agency responsible for regulating the energy industry). Things were especially tight last winter. The system was almost brought to its knees during the week of Feb. 9. There was little wind, little sun and we hardly had any reserves. Some oil-fired power plants in Austria had to be connected to the grid to guarantee the security of supply. Shutting down nuclear power plants is going to be a step backwards for climate protection.

Build panels, burn oil once sky is little cloudy!

SPIEGEL: Now RWE wants to invest in solar. Your predecessor Grossmann still rails that generating solar electricity in Germany makes about as much sense as "growing pineapples in Alaska." Why are you entering the pineapple farming business?

Terium: Because the government subsidizes growing pineapples in Germany. As a taxpayer, I can be upset about the fact that it's a waste of money. Spain has twice as many hours of sunshine as Germany. For the same amount of invested capital, twice as much energy could be generated there.

QED

[K. A. Pital]

Good lord, I never knew they were so radically dumb about electricity generation in Germany. I thought solar was super-good for Algeria, which could be turned into a solar farm to power up all of Europe, but that...

As for the OP, I think that ITER will be up and running before the other design matures enough to be useful. But let's wait and see. Thermonuclear is extremely necessary to build a supercivilization, and we're not here for anything less than that.

[madd0ct0r]

sounds like he advocates nuclear baseload and solar (specifically his company) to generate air-con power over the summer?

[Sky Captain]

So far solar energy is widely implemented only in countries with subsidies. Even in very favourable places like Australia solar power is deployed relatively little when compared for example with Germany which have massive subsidies. If solar energy without subsidies were cost competitive with coal then I would expect it would be taking over Australia long before it become economically viable in cloudy Western Europe. However reality is solar is only being widely deployed where it recieves large subsidies

[Stark]

In Australia, coal is super abundant. Its of high quality and doesn't need to be imported. Regardless, suburban housing takes up solar power (with subsidised encouragement initially) anyway. Some people are net power generators over a quarter.

To be honest I'm not sure you understand why subsidies are used in this case.

[Zaune]

So far solar energy is widely implemented only in countries with subsidies. Even in very favourable places like Australia solar power is deployed relatively little when compared for example with Germany which have massive subsidies. If solar energy without subsidies were cost competitive with coal then I would expect it would be taking over Australia long before it become economically viable in cloudy Western Europe. However reality is solar is only being widely deployed where it recieves large subsidies

That's probably to do with the initial cost of installing it; I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of the expense is from the equipment needed to manage the flow of current to and from the grid, and/or the backup batteries, rather than the cells themselves.

[Sky Captain]

So far solar energy is widely implemented only in countries with subsidies. Even in very favourable places like Australia solar power is deployed relatively little when compared for example with Germany which have massive subsidies. If solar energy without subsidies were cost competitive with coal then I would expect it would be taking over Australia long before it become economically viable in cloudy Western Europe. However reality is solar is only being widely deployed where it recieves large subsidies

That's probably to do with the initial cost of installing it; I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of the expense is from the equipment needed to manage the flow of current to and from the grid, and/or the backup batteries, rather than the cells themselves.

That's most likely correct. IIRC here in other thread it was mentioned solar cells themselves make up only 1/3 of a price of a complete solar power station. Everything else is installation costs and additional equipment to interface the station with existing power grid. If you also counted the costs of energy storage (the really hard and expensive part) to smooth out the intemittency the costs of solar cells would make even less fraction of total costs of the system.

[Irbis]

Here's a piece of reality. To not be accused of bias, let's compare nuclear and solar power in one country, getting plenty of sunlight, and with solar receiving generous subsidies:

In first corner, Les Mees solar power plant, 31 MW. Planned lifetime: 20 years. Take a look, it's virtual glass desert covering 75 hectares of land that after 20 years will take decades to replenish to its natural state. Oh, and it can barely power a few thousand homes, despite being located in very south of France, to get anywhere near useful generation you'd need to pave all the beautiful hills in the background, too.

In the other corner, Flamanville NPP #3. This is pretty much the entirety of it. Not only it takes fraction of the space, it's expected to work for 50-60 years and generate 1650 MW. That is 55x times the energy of solar one, and even this is assuming day happens to be cloudless - because even light rain or goddess-save-us a storm makes NPP generate hundreds or thousands as much as diminished solar output, easily. Rare disaster known as 'fall-winter period' only adds another orders of magnitude to NPP's side.

So, yes, I care greatly about environment, and every time I see photo of any solar plant in Europe I ask myself why people responsible for this harmful atrocity weren't jailed yet