New record for fusion

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

The reason the lockheed design is so heavy, is they are using a depleted U sheilding/casing? Not sure but they are use some super dense metal. Otherwise it would be in the 20t range

a reply to: punkinworks10

Part of the problem is Lockheed hasn't said. I bet the guy on the T4 article went with lead as a shield. Which is kind of the simplest solution but you will need lithium in there as well. They guessed at how much shielding LM would need.

The demo T4 device is stainless steel. They have made a plasma as the CEO stated in a funding announcement. Stainless is fine up to a certain point when temperatures increase it will deform. The fission reactors use tungsten materials. That is also fine but if plasma touches the reactor wall tiny particles are blasted off the surface causing contamination problems. The best idea so far is to use liquid metal as a "first wall" material. That solves a couple problems by keeping fast neutrinos from hitting the reactor wall. If you use lithium, that actually steadies the plasma; which also keeps shielding size down around the entire reactor.

The problem the T4B article is trying to state is the reactor will be big. But they did not run a study at the original specifications Lockheed made their announcement at.

When you double your magnetic field strength there is 16 fold increase in power. What the article did was decrease the power of the magnets from 15 T down to 5 T. Which means increase in size to get the same the same power out which they also increased by 100%. They went in the wrong direction! So of course it is going to be way bigger!

For comparison: ITER's magnets weigh 3,400 tons. They are 5 Tesla. They want to make 500 MW of power (Wikipedia).

MIT is also looking at "new" superconducting magnets. That shrinks the whole size down. In this article they go into some explanations of what they have in mind. The shielding is the problem. After this article, MIT is thinking along the lines of LM and having many distributed, smaller reactors. Their new fusion reactor is SPARC. It is not this huge power plant size device.

MIT news - A small, modular, efficient fusion plant.

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

Teot,
The reference i saw for the heavy metal shielding was on one of your links in tnis thread, a little bit back.
I noticed it because the because the weight would make it somewhat impractical

a reply to: punkinworks10

Ok. But lead is the first thing that they would use. spent uranium is down on the list. Cheaper materials to create your device is the break even point.

I understand that cheap energy can be used to make weapons. My dreams are that you realize it is not worth it. We need to leave the surface of the planet. And fusion makes that easier.

Again, the article is trying to make LM look bad because they haven't released any specs on their device.

Thanks for the question. I just want to keep this in front of people. I think that they figured this out and it has been kept dark until their announcement in 2014.

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

Hi all,
First off, i am not pooping on this thread, TEOT's threads are always great to read, informative & give food for thought


But i would like to say something about fusion reactors.
This talk of magnets, i am aware of the Tokamak design which i saw developing in the NewScientist in the 80's, the ITER i have tons of documents on, as well as more esoteric reactors that may or may not have been built, secret military stuff going back to the 60's or even before.We were testing fusion powered aircraft carrying a 7 ton lump of neodymium as the core back in the late 60's

The magnets are not needed,nor are the lasers, i will try to explain why.

Plasma, being ionised gas, responds very well to magnetic fields, it can also carry a current like a wire does.
Only the energy density is extremely high, you can pump 1000's of amps of current through a plasma beam much less than 1mm in diameter. This in turn creates an extremely dense magnetic field.

In order to 'pinch' the plasma into a near-fusion state you need a very dense magnetic field, this can be done with a massive coil around the plasma tube.

Once you have pinched ('acceleration' is also not necessary, this is done as a 'standing wave' oscillation) to fusion, it will try to expand, as it does so it creates a very dense magnetic flux that is picked up by the coil and stored in a capacitor. The plasma cools, contracts, and at that moment it is compressed still further by the capacitors discharging through the coil. The process repeats.

For any 'qualified scientists' who happen to be reading this, quantum tunelling takes place at a much lower energy level than you think, at 10^-9 metres, and the pressure on a micron sized plasma filament is 10^10 Pascals, or so i have been told.
initial tests required a high vacuum (i bet NASA tried, having easy access to a vacuum LOL)but it now seems you can run these at higher pressures, i can't talk about that....

The apparatus itself is childishly simple and is 99.5% efficient, turning matter into electric current directly, no steam no lithium no turbines and above all, very little radiation. And none at all when it is switched off, which can be done in a microsecond.
Radiation comes in the form of fast neutrons exiting the tube, these can even be partly recycled (sorry trade secret) and the rest are easily scattered so even at a short distance the amount of neutrons hitting you will be quite small.

I once had the idea for making a plasma transformer that would be way more efficient than our copper wire/ferrite ones, and i was flabbergasted when i found the concept has been around for decades, possibly going back to Tesla himself, and it was not a transformer but a simple thermonuclear reactor.

These things are scaleable, like the secret military ones are, the difference is these are safer and don't use helium-3 for fuel, which means you don't have to stop by the moon every few months, simply pick up a few gallons from the ocean every month or so. The space-bound ones kick out lethal amounts of neutron radiation, but are way more powerful than these, but being in space (or buried somewhere on the moon or mars) the radiation isn't a problem. You can shut them off by remote & safely work on them when they are cold.

I wrote to one of the scientists involved in ITER & told him this, needless to say i didn't get e reply.

This is not my invention, i am simply researching it for the inventor, but i can tell you it's 100% feasable even with minimal funding, god knows how far you could go given the 'cart blanche' that peeps like Lockheed get.
I, like all of you, love these new advances in technology but we are being misled into re-discovering the wheel, because the real truth about fusion would cause society to collapse.

We the peeps are ready for it, but we the oil-driven society isn't.

Like all great things, this needs to be continued in secret, until some massive event forces us to use it. A collapse of the oil/money industry is the only way, and the new tech has to be ready to jump in the breach, as it were.

This requires exact timing, and a superhuman effort.

(being superman isn't all it's cracked up to be, it's bloody hard work!)

Sorry rant over, let's get back to the techy bits....

a reply to: playswithmachines

HI PWM!

Nah, come on in and do some 'splaining!!

First off, have you seen delbertlarson's Eco Fusion? He is a member here on ATS is thinking along the same lines of "current in plasma." Says it is simpler than what main stream (lol!) science says with hot plasma and superconducting magnets. At PPPL, they did away with the tokamak's inner solenoid to kick start a current in their fusion plasma. Everybody else has one and it takes up space. They induced a current by magnetic pumping (I think) and got rid of their solenoid. It took less than six months to go from paper to computer model to actually working in their tokamak. Which for fusion sciences is a world record, lol! "It is always 30 years away," being the standard joke about nuclear fusion.

Second, this...

I, like all of you, love these new advances in technology but we are being misled into re-discovering the wheel, because the real truth about fusion would cause society to collapse.

We the peeps are ready for it, but we the oil-driven society isn't.

Is spot on! I'm not sure if anybody noticed. October 2014, Lockheed Martin Skunkworks announced they would make a compact fusion reactor. That November, the Rockefeller Foundation quietly (like just before Thanksgiving!) announced they were dropping all their oil holdings and investing in green technologies including energy storage. Hum? Just coincidence or did they get the message earlier at some CFR or some such not meeting? *aside* Hey! Somebody tell the gubner of Alaska that hydrocarbon's life is on the short list!

Hey, I honestly don't care how it is done! If a supercapacitor fueled magnetic pump in a current charged plasma is what works... I'm all for it!!

Thanks for the hints and info!



PS - I will continue to update progress from the whitecoat wearing plasma physicists!

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

THANK you for your work...I wish they had a civlian SCIENTIFIC branch ,like the military and equally as funded..SOMEONE needs to watchdog our country for facts not money or politics.
TOO INCLUDE MEDICAL(Talk about NEEDING scientific THEORY construction..)...but I'M weird...

a reply to: cavtrooper7

Man, would love to be a researcher for Lockheed! Get my grubby hands on their files and ready for prime time unpatented tech. I am certain they already have some of the stuff that is reported about today like 10 years (or longer!) ago. The field of metamaterials is amazing. And if it has anything to do with radar or visible light I'm certain LM already has "been there and done that" like they said back in the 1990s!

Like vvvvvv

phys.org, May 5, 2017 - Physicists demonstrate photonic hypercrystals for control of light-matter interaction.

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

...Don't you love your FAMILY and want to SEE them someday?

I am thrilled /terrified at the ideas of combining all this new tech.
I saw an article on magnetically levitated mechanical parts on a page and I am waiting for gas to die off.

a reply to: cavtrooper7

Family? *meh*

Hyper cool tech. H3lz yeah!

The frog magnetically levitated started my thinking of "that's cool... but now what?" Which stayed put until Lockheed made their announcement. My mind started racing. "Oh, replace the frog with gas. Then heat the blob up!" Then I realized they had probably already done that. Then I sat down and it hit me. The world is about to change. Drastically change. Oil will soon die and what will replace it? Well, they just announced it! LM even gave a timeline.

Everything I look at is kind of an indication one way or another it is coming. That induction hot plate on TV that they are giving away with the power pressure cooker? Brought to you by none other than Fusion Power. And they both run on electricity. Car names, restaurants, appliances, nearly everywhere you turn, the word "fusion" is being used. We are being conditioned so it wont surprise you when it happens.

From my view point you are going to need "energy storage" and "more efficient" power lines before a fusion reactor comes on line (TEOT's best guess). Then you get full benefit of energy creation, distribution, and storage. Guess what else Lockheed is doing? Energy storage. Hum?

Gas on the other hand may stick around. Oil is not needed in the near future. But natural gas can be used cleanly in a closed burn system. Just like there are coal, gas, and nuclear living side by side, gas will probably stick around for a while.

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

Maybe as an industrial application, gas wise.

a reply to: cavtrooper7

There will always be a market for gas fuels, and as the carbon burden of large scale generation is lifted by fusion, we will see blossoming of clean gas technologies.
My ex was the general contractor/chief engineer for an experimental fuel cell installation about 15 years ago. It runs on natural gas, I think it was built by Mitsubishi, for sure a japanese firm. It's foot print is similar to that of the proposed fusion plant.
She is a ME, and was working for a mechanical contractor at the time, they got the job for the install at a 1920's office building restoration.
It supplies hot and cold water and all the electricity that the 15 floor building, plus the whole block of buildings its on, and still have an excess to sell back on to the grid.
The hot and cold water provide not only running water but heating and cooling as well.
The natural gas is catalytically cracked before the fuel cell itself
Carbon and another solid by product are periodically collected.
And one thing we are starting to see in the natural gas fields here is well head generation. There is a small gas turbine generator at each well head, and it just so happens that these old gas fields lie beneath several of the states major hi tension lines. You find new well heads clustered near transformer stations, where there is a minimum distance of wire to be laid to hook into the grid.
I think the real future in energy is diversification, the fusion plant wont be right for every economy or location or application, but it will take over for the giant fossil fuel power plants, as Teot has mentioned , all you do to convert is change the heat source.
But for that small community in remote alaska, or the congo, only accessable by air or water, a fusion plant weighing even 200 tons would not be practical to install in a remote location.
But,if they lie over or near a gas field, they can utilize well head generation, those can be flown in by heli.
And like fusion you would put generation as close to use, to minimize transmision loss and transmision network upkeep.

Even as cool as fusion is I still think complete diversification is the future, unless we make progress into the realm of serious sci fi.
Our portion of the universe is awash in energy, its just a matter of capturing it.
Wind, waves, solar, hydro, geo-thermal, geo-electrical can all be taken advantage of.
Teot, you mentioned storage technologies need addresses to make the most of fusion, I absolutely agree. And so many new storage techniques; thermal, kinetic, electrical and electro-chemical.
In last few months I have seen papers on liquid salt and liquid metal thermal storage techniques that have proven quite effcient. There has been talk in the av forum of solid heat storage and heat transfer technologies possibly used in black aircraft.
A solid heat sink that can absorb a tremendous amount of heat, yet still be cool to the touch. When the material has reached saturation, it will store that energy like a heat battery. Discharge is then electricly initiated at a later time.
Imagine capturing even more of the heat energy of the fusion reactor, and storing it as heat. Along with generating electricity at the plant, you could run a heat battety recharge service.
You use your heat battery to run a small closed loop super critical fluid turbine generator.
And imagine if the rumors of direct heat to electricity are true, and you what they are somewhat true.
That is the significance of that new photo voltaic material that generates electricity from the infra red.
Eliminating the mechanical cycle makes things so much simpler.

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

Hi TEOT
I've been away for 4 years LOL but i still like to cruise the forums now & then, i still follow your graphene thread, may it become the longest running thread in ATS history

Never heard of delbertlarson, but i will try to catch up. Yes a plasma may also be thought of as a superconducting wire.
The problem with the Tokamaks wasn't the magnets, i think they were strong enough, it was the kink instability.
That is, if the plasma develops a kink at 0 degrees in the circle, it has to be corrected before it reaches 90 degrees or more, or it will hit the wall & burn through it!. The only way was to have an array of sensors & a central transputer chip that stopped the kink before it got even 1/4 way round (90 deg.)
The electronics of the time was too slow for this, but now it's a piece of cake LOL
Even so, you don't need the magnets, just a mag field. A very dense one i grant you, but nothing that 30.000 turns of wire can't handle.

Hmm i didn't know that about the Rockafellas, i think their energy storage is all the plutonium so-called 'dangerous nuclear waste' that is in fact a highly efficient slow fission material. It's way safer than U238 because you can't get it to fuse fast, but hey it's dangerous waste so lets go sit on a pile of it, i forget the tonnage but the US has enough of that to last 300 years...who needs oil?
And then the race to mine Helium-3 on the Moon, who are they kidding? gram for gram it's worth 18 times more than gold. I'd ship that home on my shuttle, wouldn't you?

Forgive me, but my blood boils when i know there is a safer option than oil, fission, etc. and we can start using it in less than a year. Just add water, LOL
Hey back to the thread, i will get reading, Wordpad on standby for those long answers.

originally posted by: cavtrooper7
a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

THANK you for your work...I wish they had a civlian SCIENTIFIC branch ,like the military and equally as funded..SOMEONE needs to watchdog our country for facts not money or politics.
TOO INCLUDE MEDICAL(Talk about NEEDING scientific THEORY construction..)...but I'M weird...

There IS a civilian branch, it's all those YOOTOOBERS out there who actually do the work, DON'T paste fake vids, and actually question 'established' science. Hats off to you peeps

originally posted by: TEOTWAWKIAIFF
a reply to: cavtrooper7

Man, would love to be a researcher for Lockheed! Get my grubby hands on their files and ready for prime time unpatented tech. I am certain they already have some of the stuff that is reported about today like 10 years (or longer!) ago. The field of metamaterials is amazing. And if it has anything to do with radar or visible light I'm certain LM already has "been there and done that" like they said back in the 1990s!

Like vvvvvv

phys.org, May 5, 2017 - Physicists demonstrate photonic hypercrystals for control of light-matter interaction.

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

Then I realized they had probably already done that. Then I sat down and it hit me. The world is about to change. Drastically change. Oil will soon die and what will replace it? Well, they just announced it! LM even gave a timeline.

Yes.

the word "fusion" is being used. We are being conditioned so it wont surprise you when it happens.

I hope you will buy mine first? available soon......

From my view point you are going to need "energy storage" and "more efficient" power lines before a fusion reactor comes on line (TEOT's best guess). Then you get full benefit of energy creation, distribution, and storage. Guess what else Lockheed is doing? Energy storage. Hum?

Got it in one, freind. But unlike them we are free to release those secrets anytime, and anyone with a bit of machinery can make one. Realise this; if we the peeps can go offline, still have our power, food, comms, then they are fooked.
We can do it and we will do it......

originally posted by: punkinworks10
a reply to: cavtrooper7

There will always be a market for gas fuels, and as the carbon burden of large scale generation is lifted by fusion, we will see blossoming of clean gas technologies.
My ex was the general contractor/chief engineer for an experimental fuel cell installation about 15 years ago. It runs on natural gas, I think it was built by Mitsubishi, for sure a japanese firm. It's foot print is similar to that of the proposed fusion plant.
She is a ME, and was working for a mechanical contractor at the time, they got the job for the install at a 1920's office building restoration.
It supplies hot and cold water and all the electricity that the 15 floor building, plus the whole block of buildings its on, and still have an excess to sell back on to the grid.
The hot and cold water provide not only running water but heating and cooling as well.
The natural gas is catalytically cracked before the fuel cell itself
Carbon and another solid by product are periodically collected.
And one thing we are starting to see in the natural gas fields here is well head generation. There is a small gas turbine generator at each well head, and it just so happens that these old gas fields lie beneath several of the states major hi tension lines. You find new well heads clustered near transformer stations, where there is a minimum distance of wire to be laid to hook into the grid.
I think the real future in energy is diversification, the fusion plant wont be right for every economy or location or application, but it will take over for the giant fossil fuel power plants, as Teot has mentioned , all you do to convert is change the heat source.
But for that small community in remote alaska, or the congo, only accessable by air or water, a fusion plant weighing even 200 tons would not be practical to install in a remote location.
But,if they lie over or near a gas field, they can utilize well head generation, those can be flown in by heli.
And like fusion you would put generation as close to use, to minimize transmision loss and transmision network upkeep.

Even as cool as fusion is I still think complete diversification is the future, unless we make progress into the realm of serious sci fi.
Our portion of the universe is awash in energy, its just a matter of capturing it.
Wind, waves, solar, hydro, geo-thermal, geo-electrical can all be taken advantage of.
Teot, you mentioned storage technologies need addresses to make the most of fusion, I absolutely agree. And so many new storage techniques; thermal, kinetic, electrical and electro-chemical.
In last few months I have seen papers on liquid salt and liquid metal thermal storage techniques that have proven quite effcient. There has been talk in the av forum of solid heat storage and heat transfer technologies possibly used in black aircraft.
A solid heat sink that can absorb a tremendous amount of heat, yet still be cool to the touch. When the material has reached saturation, it will store that energy like a heat battery. Discharge is then electricly initiated at a later time.
Imagine capturing even more of the heat energy of the fusion reactor, and storing it as heat. Along with generating electricity at the plant, you could run a heat battety recharge service.
You use your heat battery to run a small closed loop super critical fluid turbine generator.
And imagine if the rumors of direct heat to electricity are true, and you what they are somewhat true.
That is the significance of that new photo voltaic material that generates electricity from the infra red.
Eliminating the mechanical cycle makes things so much simpler.

Yes you are right in every line, a fascinating read.
Any engineer who knows his stuff can always take advantage of natural resources, and apply heating/cooling installations. Good work!
Direct heat to elecftricity is costly, direct fusion to electric current is availble in the near future...and it's cheap...

a reply to: punkinworks10

But for that small community in remote alaska, or the congo, only accessable by air or water, a fusion plant weighing even 200 tons would not be practical to install in a remote location.
But,if they lie over or near a gas field, they can utilize well head generation, those can be flown in by heli.

Wait.

You can't get a fusion plant in there but you can get a drilling rig in and complete a natural gas well?

a reply to: D8Tee

A MW fusion plant weighs less than 10 tons, much less if you have advanced materials.

i doubt if they are using them on earth......at least, what we the peeps will hear.....

a reply to: punkinworks10

There is also silicon storage this guy invented Down Under. He uses solar to heat up a solid block of silicon and then exchanges back and forth between electricity and heat as needed. Already cheaper than li-ion. Might be as cheap as flow batteries.

a reply to: D8Tee

They already have them out there. They're as big as a small cabin with the top of the drill sticking out 20-30 feet. Unmanned too. They do not produce a lot but for small communities, enough. Cheaper than flying it in gas.