Lockheed says makes breakthrough on Fusion Energy project

A decade?

Here is a diagram for a working Hydrogen core.

The secret to making it stable and working is that you need binary cores. That simple.

How about building one now?

I have a diagram for one that could fit in the boot of a car and produce enough power for a super-car.

And to think electric cars were used in late 1800's, i think they could have come up with this much sooner.

originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: FormOfTheLord

So can anyone think of the any ways this might benifit our civilization?

The thread is full of what you asked for. You want everyone to repeat it for you?

Are you a bot?

You sound like one, with your curt remarks. Instead of your multitude of very short posts mostly criticising others in one way or another, maybe it would be an idea if you posted something constructive and in keeping with the thread and focus less on critiquing your fellow members once in a while.

Try it, you may like it.

Something like..it will save millions of lives..it will clean up our environment...it will make resource based wars obsolete...it will enable greater space exploration...open up and make accessible previously inhospitable areas of this planet for habitation and recreation...it will be beneficial in medical circles...it will free up personal wealth for recreation rather than that wealth going on energy expenditure...

There you go Phage, you can have any or all of those and run with them..or you can just post having a go at another member.

I thought this was an interesting interview with a NASA staff member talking about small cold fusion in every home and car. . . .

Lockheed Martin said they would give a follow-up in February or March, 2015, of the Compact Fusion Reactor progress. Both moths pass by with no follow-up. Then the first half of the year... then the second half. Still nothing.

In an October 2014 speech at MIT, Dr. Thomas McGuire gave more information on the type of device they were constructing. The notes were posted by a blogger that attended the event then a weekly online news article. I found a write up with most of the original Aviationweek article as well (you need a valid email account to view AW content now) that actually has the 2014 MIT speech (have to watch later at home) in nextbigfuture.

Magnetic Confinement with magnetic mirrors and recirculation of losses

Their magnetic confinement concept combined elements from several earlier approaches. The core of the device uses cusp confinement, a sort of magnetic trap in which particles that try to escape are pushed back by rounded, pillowlike magnetic fields. Cusp devices were investigated in the 1960s and 1970s but were largely abandoned because particles leak out through gaps between the various magnetic fields leading to a loss of temperature. McGuire says they get around this problem by encapsulating the cusp device inside a magnetic mirror device, a different sort of confinement technique. Cylindrical in shape, it uses a magnetic field to restrict particles to movement along its axis. Extra-strong fields at the ends of the machine—magnetic mirrors—prevent the particles from escaping. Mirror devices were also extensively studied last century, culminating in the 54-meter-long Mirror Fusion Test Facility B (MFTF-B) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. In 1986, MFTF-B was completed at a cost of $372 million but, for budgetary reasons, was never turned on.

Another technique the team is using to counter particle losses from cusp confinement is recirculation.

Source: Nextbigfuture Lockheed Martin Compact Fusion Reactor Update with Video of Technical Presentation made at Princeton

So it sounds like they (LM) are using several different magnetic confinement strategies together to keep thermal loss down and managed. Meanwhile several other companies are also making progress (the next big future article mentions several). And I can't help but notice MIT made an announcement in late 2015 about upgrading their superconducting magnets to REBCO (which are not only smaller in size and stronger in field strength but only needs cooling with liquid nitrogen). I am sure LM knows about REBCO as MIT is Dr. McGuire's alma mater.

But still no LM updates.

Well, either it worked and they put a Top Secret stamp on it...
Or it didn't work, and they put a Top Secret stamp on it.

WASHINGTON — Lockheed Martin continues to invest in its portable nuclear fusion generator, with that investment recently entering a more advanced stage, according to the head of the company’s Skunk Works division.
...
[Rob] Weiss [Exec. VP, LM] said. “It’s basically at this stage we are increasing the temperature at which the fusion could occur, and our process for containing the reaction, and we will continue to elevate the level of the temperature and testing the containment theory.”

Weiss also confirmed the team has achieved “initial plasma,” an important early step for the reactor.

Source: DefenseNews.com, May 3, 2016 - Lockheed Still Supporting Portable Nuclear Generator

I posted a portion of this report in another thread but it really belongs with this particular thread.

It is "good news" in a sense that work continues (no funding issues) but I would like more technical details (temp, test plasma gas, confinement strategy, magnetic strength, etc). At this point I will take what I can get!

Well it seems that NextBigFuture is keeping up on this story as well!

Their magnetic confinement concept combined elements from several earlier approaches. The core of the device uses cusp confinement, a sort of magnetic trap in which particles that try to escape are pushed back by rounded, pillowlike magnetic fields. Cusp devices were investigated in the 1960s and 1970s but were largely abandoned because particles leak out through gaps between the various magnetic fields leading to a loss of temperature. McGuire says they get around this problem by encapsulating the cusp device inside a magnetic mirror device, a different sort of confinement technique. Cylindrical in shape, it uses a magnetic field to restrict particles to movement along its axis. Extra-strong fields at the ends of the machine—magnetic mirrors—prevent the particles from escaping.
...
Another technique the team is using to counter particle losses from cusp confinement is recirculation.
...
* The magnetic field increases the farther that you go out, which pushes the plasma back in.
* It also has very few open field lines (very few paths for the plasma to leak out)
* Very good arch curvature of the field lines
* The Lockheed system has a beta of about 1.

Source: nextbigfuture.com, May 3, 2016 - Lockheed Portable Fusion project still making progress

Finally, the LM CFR confinement is explained. They nest one type, cusp, inside another, magnetic mirror. The plasma that follows that line is recirculated by yet another strategy. This is very different than either tokomaks or the fully optimized stellarator, Wendelstein 7-X.

And from the funding post they have achieved a plasma in their CFR device!

Measuring in at 800 meters, the massive ship is powered by a compact atomic fusion reactor capable of producing 400 megawatts of energy to drive a turbine. Enough to get across entire seas in a clean safe way at 40 knots.

Source: Yankodesign.com, July 26,2016 - Autonomous Ships of the Future.

Complete vaporware seeing as Lockheed's T-4 compact fusion reactor is not even complete but the design sure is shiny and neat! And there are more pictures than words at the site! Their idea is to have no people on board! All completely computer controlled and autonomous. The small blurb mentions "AI". I do not think 400 MW is necessary. It is actually overkill. Original design for T4 CFR was 100 MW that could provide power 80,000 homes! And they want a reactor 4 times that for a ship? But I guess the conceptual drawings look cool so I will give them that much.

Wow, the Wikipedia entry has expanded on the High Beta Fusion Reactor (the type of reactor that Lockheed Skunkworks Compact Fusion Reactor, T-4 actually is).


By WikiHelper2134 at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, commons.wikimedia.org...
Wikipedia: High Beta Fusion Reactor.

That is quiet the complex magnetic confinement scheme! What is not shown is the end reflectors and the entire set of coils are also surrounded by magnets. The green arrows get reflected back towards the center (I think). And everything that goes over the edges of the magnetic coils are also guided back towards where the green arrows point (that is my understanding, but may completely be off the mark). The entire plasma ends up surrounding the magnetic coils but gets pushed back towards the center. So, if you take the middle coil and make it a cylinder surrounding the other coils that would be my understanding of the confinement scheme. As fast as the plasma expands it is pushed back into the center in a constant circulation.

a reply to: mbkennel

Update on LPPfusion. Had this in another thread that was way too old (dead links). This is only other one I found while searching. The other thread was really bare, so sorry if it sounds too 'teacherish'.

On November 14, 2008, Lerner received funding for continued research, to test the scientific feasibility of Focus Fusion. On October 15, 2009, the DPF device "Focus Fusion-1" achieved its first pinch. On January 28, 2011, LPP published initial results including experimental shots with considerably higher fusion yields than the historical DPF trend. In March, 2012, the company announced that it had achieved temperatures of 1.8 billion degrees, beating the old record of 1.1 billion that had survived since 1978. In 2016 the company announced that it had achieved a fusion yield of .25 joules.

Nextbigfuture, Aug. 15, 2016 - LPP Fusion August 15 update.

Website: LPPFusion.

This is aneutronic fusion which requires a lot more engineering up front to reach the higher temperatures (8 billion °C) for boron-proton nuclear fusion to occur. The device is known as Dense Plasma Focus (DPF) that uses electromagnets to 'pinch' the plasma in an electrode (kind of like a huge spark plug).

The Nextbigfuture article has a chart showing they have done 1,000 shots and can reach 1.8 billion °C. They said if they reach their goals they can generate clean electricity at 0.3 cents/kwh. Right now they are cleaning the upgraded tungsten electrode by firing plasma (called 'shots') and after cleaning they think they can demonstrate 10 Joules of power (it is taking about 60 J to fire a shot, so it has a ways to go for net energy out) and get further funding. That is a higher temp than any tokamak or the W7-X stellarator in Germany (which is deuterium-tritium reactions that generates a neutrino but a lower temperature, a mere 100 million °C). The teams line of research is to reduce the energy used to create the magnet fields and hook back up more electric capacitors. The article also said they need 3-d modeling help with pulsed power circuits. And a beryllium electrode upgrade.

Cool news and glad to see progress with this line of nuclear fusion research!

SPAM removed by admin

UPDATE: March 2018

patents.google.com, Feb. 15, 2018 - Encapsulating Magnetic Fields for Plasma Confinement.

The patent was quietly released and was only reported yesterday.

thedrive.com, March 26, 2018 - Lockheed Martin Now Has a Patent For Its Potentially World Changing Fusion Reactor.

The external coils from my above post are called "encapsulating coils" in the patent. They are of a weaker strength than the interior coils. The above magnetic diagram has changed a bit. The patent has two coils (and the possibility of configuring multiple of 2 coils, x4, x6, etc). Each interior coil has an encapsulating coil on either side. There is a center encapsulating coil between the two interior coils. There is a diagram of the cusp and mirror magnetic field scheme to demonstrate that nobody else is doing this.

It is not huge news in the patent but they go into some detail about computer systems and how they can be networked. I think Lockheed's vision is to have a distributed grid system, probably grid-level storage, all auto-switching around load balances. That would be a major upgrade to The Grid.

Only 3.5 years later!

How it works.

There are two versions of hydrogen called deuterium and lithium which have different numbers of neutrons in their nucleus. The electrons are in the lowest state shells that they can be in. The hydrogen gasses are heated to the point that the electrons are blown off the surface of the atoms... that state of matter is called a plasma. The neutrons and protons race around the magnetic trap always ending back in the center. Some of these overcome the forces keeping them together and fuse to create helium.

That fusion releases heat and a high speed alpha particle called a high speed neutron. When you reach a self sustaing state between heat, fuel, and pressure, you get a fusion reaction. Hundreds of millions of these particles fly around in the reactor.

There is a lithium-6 barrier that is on the inside. The neutrons hit the barrier and either make tritium (the fuel for the next fusion reaction), or they heat the lithium up.

That heat is transferred to the molten salt (FLiBe, or fluoride, lithium, beryllium (I think)), which heats up. When it reaches a certain temperature, it is pumped off to a heat exchanger. New, cold salt is pumped in. The heated FLiBe in turn will be used to heat water to make steam, to turn a turbine (there is more efficient fluids to turn a turbine like supercritical CO2, which heats carbon dioxide, under pressure, to turn it into a half gas, half fluid, which is way more efficient at turning a turbine! Smaller, less parts, and a known technology... it is how they make decaffeinated coffee beans!).

That is how a CFR makes electricity (according to the patents). And here is how it can be better. Liquid lithium would make the CFR even better instead of just a heat exchange blanket. And there are better magnets out there which might make the design smaller. Like the size of a pickup truck!

The networked controls are really what you should pay attention to. It is that level of control that they want.

Cool stuff nonetheless! Answered some of my questions.

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

This is really cool. Thanks for keeping us posted.

Happy to see they are still progressing. Past research efforts have usually ended before this point.

Go man go!

This says it was released in 2017 but I never saw it in all the years searching for "compact fusion reactor".

arpa-e.energy.gov, Aug. 28, 2017 - Compact Fusion Reactor - CFR: Overview, Status, And Development Plan. (PDF)

This was written by none other than Dr. Thomas McGuire himself!

There are color depictions of the CFR and a timeline of sorts where he spells out which model will investigate which property of nuclear fusion. T4 is what they had when original announcement was made. T5 will demo high density plasma, neutral beam heating, sheath size, and heat loss. T6 specifically mentions magnetic shielding and field design. This is interesting because that leaves room for high temperature superconductor magnets to improve in magnetic field strength. Those improvements could spell success or an "Epic fail" for the Skunkworks team.

T7 will demo deuterium-deuterium (D-D) plasma at heat and confinement pressures. T8 will demo D-T (tritium) with alpha particle generation.

TX is the actual reactor stage with all the regulatory sign-off and deployment.

There are no specific dates associated with any of the T5-8 reactors and TX is given as sometime in the 2020s.

OMG!

We finally hear news on Lockheed's compact fusion reactor (CFR)!!

The Drive has news and it is semi-official. For the TL;DR crowd, the next prototype, T5, is being built. This is the last stepping stone to the TX which will be the power demo reactor. This version is to be capable of fusion regime running which is 100 million degrees Celsius. Anyway, enough my talk, lets hear what the Drive has to report...

"The work we have done today verifies our models and shows that the physics we are talking about – the basis of what we are trying to do – is sound," Jeff Babione, Skunk Works Vice President and General Manager, told Aviation Week. "This year we are constructing another reactor – T5 – which will be a significantly larger and more powerful reactor than our T4."

The T5's main job will be to further test whether Skunk Work's basic reactor design can handle the heat and pressure from the highly energized plasma inside, which is central to how the system works. In a nuclear fusion reaction, a gaseous fuel gets heated up to a point where the pressure is so intense that its very atomic structure gets disrupted and certain particles fuse together into a heavier nucleus. This process also involves the release of a massive amount of energy, which, in principle, could be used to run a traditional thermal power generator.

thedrive.com, July 19, 2019 - Skunk Works' Exotic Fusion Reactor Program Moves Forward With Larger, More Powerful Design.

The last update said, T5 then TX, but it looks like they have added more versions so my previous statement was wrong. It looks like they are going T5 through T8 before doing the demo plant TX (LM's PP card explaining what their direction is with the CFR).

Unfortunately, despite the progress that Skunk Works has made, many questions remain about whether its new reactor concept will be able to succeed whether other designs have failed. Lockheed Martin has initially suggested it might have a viable prototype ready this year or the next.

By 2017, that schedule had gotten pushed back to sometime in the mid-2020s. In his interview with Aviation Week, Babione did not offer any more of a specific timeline for when a practical reactor, which the company refers to as TX, might be ready.

Again, no dates are attached to any of Lockheed's announcement. It looks like they hit a reality wall with how they have slowed their timeline down (or extended their amount of time building and testing versions of their reactor before committing to the TX demo plant).

So how does it work? There are a series of superconducting magnetic coils within the CFR that line up and shove the plasma down the center line of the reactor. There is another series of coils on the outside that are stronger than the inner coils. At the ends, there is a configuration called a "reverse Z-pinch" that reflect the plasma that has hit the outer confining fields back down the center line. It took me a while to "get it" but they have a "loss-y" confinement magnetic pattern which they make up for by redirecting it back down the center line at the ends. Instead of a tokamak where there is one field confinement which can only take so much, the CFR is re-circulating the plasma between a couple different magnetic field configurations. In fact, they want the plasma to hit the outer confinement to recirculate it so there is more chances for fusion reactions to take place.

T5 Goal: show plasma heating and inflation,
measure sheathes and losses
* Demo high density plasma source
* Demo neutral beam capture/confinement
* Measure sheath size, cusp losses
* Characterize kinetic and fluid instabilities
T6 High temperature experiment
* Magnetic shielding of stalks
* High field superconducting coil desing
T7 DD reactor conditions demonstration
* Full power and size
T8 DT ignited reactor demonstration
* Alpha product confinement/stability

TX reactor development
* Modular, survivable blanket
* Tritium breeding and processing
* Robust subsystem development
* Regulatory regime and deployment

The "DD" is "deuterium - deuterium" fuels source and "D-T" is the "real fusion" of deuterium-tritium that everyone is shooting for.

Nice to finally hear some news from Lockheed!! It seems they are still being funded and continue to make progress on what has become a harder than expected reactor build. By the time T6 comes around, we should have 40T coils ready which would make the whole thing sail right along! I hope they do the right thing by using a liquid lithium limiter (an inner wall of liquid lithium smooshed up against the reactor walls) as it protects the vessel walls it also breeds tritium. You pull it out, clean it, pass it through a heat exchange, and pump it back into the reactor. The reactor lasts longer and your plasma works more efficiently as you keep a constant temperature from edge to center.

2020 is only next year...

“We are currently scheduled to have that [the T5] go online towards the end of this year," Babione said. "So that will be another significant leap in capability and towards demonstrating that the physics underlining our concept works."

(same source)

I forgot to add the more important part! T5 by the end of the year.

Every time I read an update, I can't help thinking to myself, "Okay, that's where they say they are in the process, but how far along are they really?"