Science/Engineering/Technical forums

Lockheed claims breakthrough on fusion reactor.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/ ... EM20141015

A lot of big but carefully worded claims, a very flashy video, nice pictures of beautiful vacuum chamber, but no real description of the supposed reactor, no results, no description of the theory of why this thing will work. Also the chief investigator sounds more like a car salesman than a scientist.

A couple of real problems with their design: superconducting magnets inside the neutron flux. I'm pretty sure there are not any SC materials currently available that could survive that for long. First wall problem. ITER has a major first wall problem with no road map to a solution. The Lockheed design is making claims of ten times the power density so one assumes a similar increase in the first wall problem.

Having seen real results of Lockheed as an engineering contractor, I'm unimpressed.

Entirely prepared to eat crow if they publish positive results that get replicated.

Currently thinking Doug is more likely to produce real results, and at least he will let us know, positive or negative results.

Lockheed seems to be working on a magnetic mirror device; the most energetic particles escape through the centerline. The third, larger coil I presume to be a pinch coil, to push the plasma into the center harmonically. The power takeoff would be from the energetic plasma streams from the centerline, the energy can be harvested in a number of ways without being used as a teakettle. The issue with old style magnetic mirror devices was the constant flow out of the centerline, preventing self-heating and sustained ignition. I would say a pulsed device with high density would allow the energy rate they want; magnetic mirrors are excellent at preventing contact with the mirror magnets; furthermore, its obvious they have a shielding on the coils, which is likely biased against the expected ion voltage.

I am incredibly interested in this if it comes to fruition. A company like LM would not make such a boast without a legitimate breakthrough. Fusion is such a "hands off" topic because of all the snakoil salesmen in recent history, and a company that big would be unwise to venture down that path. I REALLY hope this is real.

I suppose I should step in here and comment. First, here's something that's out there on the topic.
You'd have to ignore many of the "commentards" because it's obvious most of them don't understand exponential notation, making comments like "jet engines make 100MW themselves, so it's do-able. I was unaware of >100k horsepower engines, so maybe that's just my ignorance. The article does point out that "Lockheed Martin had revenues of $45bn last year, and profits of $2.9bn, so why are they seeking external funding, he asked. "That's like Barack Obama asking me for a loan." So they aren't willing to put their own money where their mouth is? On something that would be "that profitable"? Sure, tells all, in my "skeptical, follow the money stock trader" voice. We already know magnetic linear bottles don't work, as they've been tried.
We also know that DT fuel can't work because of the high energy neutrons knocking things out of the lattice of any conceivable construction material - especially those that require lattice uniformity to work, you know, like superconducting magnets.

One of the commentors points out it'd be a little difficult to pull 100MWT out of that small a space. He's right. They also don't have a plan for what to do with all the neutrons after thermalization. At around 1 million neutrons/second/microwatt...They are talking 108 more.that's a lot of neutrons (edit, oopsm, my bad in haste - it's 1014 more - uW vs W). Capture gammas in whatever slows them down are gonna be fierce indeed...and even lead is nearly transparent in the one from H capturing a neutron, around 2 MeV. It's a problem we're already fighting here in my dinky lab, and I've already experienced what happens if you fail (see Mayday run on youtube - I was bedridden for 6 weeks...our safeties failed due to geiger and other counters just putting out DC when overloaded by our latest, as yet only replicated for 2 seconds, breakthrough. The 2 seconds is because 20 seconds almost killed me). Fusion, even DD, makes a lot more neutrons/watt than fission, FWIW.

To me, this is just another faker, saying the old line, "give me a few tens of billions and a decade or more and we'll give you this amazing thing". We never seem to learn, despite the number of times governments have fallen for that one...

Really, I hope this works - I hope someone gets it, but of course I hope that's me. But for now, I'd have to put it in the same category as Rossi's E-Cat and other boondoggles. This is one of a few reasons I never ask for money - it gets you painted with that brush, and I don't keep secrets, at least past things I've not replicated so far. Divulging unreplicated results is basically dishonest in my moral universe. Here, there aren't even any to divulge, just a promise to give you something if you fund Lockheed for the rest of my working life. After that, I of course don't care what happens to the company or shareholders.

Double your IQ or no money back? Sounds great! I'm often getting the feeling the world around me is going crazy. This isn't helping.

Most fission plants operate in the range of 10^16 n/cm^2/s; the high DPA materials needed to survive in such spaces have been worked out, its the same stuff we use for reactor pressure vessels now: a wall of stainless, with a backing of low-carbon steel. Reactor pressure vessels have a service life of about 30 years, and, in fact, the pressure a fusion device is under is literally 1/100th.

In the video the engineer talks about a "high beta" plasma - what this means is the plasma pressure (sum of nkT) is a significant portion of the magnetic field pressure (B*2/2 mu). Beta is limited by the physics to <1. Now in a magnetic mirror, the pressure varies (at steady state) with the area; density is constant along a line of force. I'll run some numbers later, have to go right now.

Not sure where to begin on this questionable set of statements. Work out the ratio of neutrons/watt in fission vs fusion. Hint - tiny number, and vastly different spectrum if T is used. Did you notice superconducting magnets are in the flux, and their sensitivity to this kind of lattice dislocation? Are those "high DPA"? Do you actually know how fission reactors are designed? I do. Are you aware of the Windscale fire? My guess is they're talking about some kind of periodic motion going on in there re the high beta - something we are also working on here. It's the only credible statement they make - and the only detail, if you can call it that. The money? I think the non-response to that says it all. They could afford to make one with their spare change. But they want external money.

Ions have both polarities. Which polarity will it be biased to repel? We have electrons too.

My original points still stand - all of them. This is just yet another attempt to suck gov teat. They have no results at all. Their theory? Go build one and then get back to use when you've made net energy, or even a milliwatt -much less 100 megawatts. It's obviously simple...didn't he say so? And the size - if size doesn't matter (surface area to volume ratio) then why are all other thermal fusion devices getting bigger and bigger on each biillion/decade/revision?

Yeah, so I went back and watched that video by the used car salesman, saying what we all know - cheap/free energy is neat as a goal. Zero details on how, a lot of banks of batteries (hmmm), an obvious attempt at a spherical IEC machine, and magnets with no thermal or neutron shielding, with no mention of what to do with the neutrons, and no mention of the "inner wall problem" (which doesn't exist for fission) or the "6 degrees of freedom" problem that plague all the other attempts at thermal-magnetic fusion (those that even work at all...Please explain why even Bussard, with all that stuff - couldn't afford even one good neutron detector? Couldn't be a scam, now could it?).
Where do I sign? /sarc If I believed that would work - I could build that with my own money. They need how much? I'd need a hell of a lot less. Sorry, but as a pro trader, I've learned to detect scams rather well...and follow the money.
This was a sales pitch, not a revelation.

A defense company wants energy for the world? Or the US...only. Gimme a break.
Can't weaponize an enormous high energy neutron flux? Puleese.
At least Rossi has learned how to burn hydrogen efficiently with a nickel catalyst. Or something like that - it's not fusion. If and when he finally delivers the long-promised (next year, promised now for a decade) to NASA to rip apart - we'll find out how much of a scam that is too. Others, good workers, on fusor.net have duped Rossi's work, except all they got is the energy of burning H. Funny...

I want fusion to work, whoever gets there first, though I'd hope it'd be someone who would actually share it with the world, which these guys don't exactly have a good track record on. I'd still be happy if they make it. But I'm not holding my breath either.

BTW, with thermal, it's actually worse than 6 degrees of freedom if you take into account things like conservation laws on CPT and spin as Pauli and others mentioned in the '30s....that's why we're working with more or less coherent technique here.
We have fewer degrees of freedom to avoid the need for as much input energy. Temperature is meaningless in our approach. Does a bullet have to be hot to kill you? No, it only has to be moving fast, relatively, just like D and D.

Yes, Doug, I agree with your points. I wasn't trying to argue - I was trying to expound.
I'm currently designing a fission plant. I am a Nuclear Engineering grad student, and I'm aware of the issues neutrons - including 14.1 MeV D-T fusion neutrons - create.

Fission produces 200 MeV/fission but the flux which causes fissions is a small fraction (~1%) of the total flux. D-T Fusion (the easiest to achieve, and when they talk of a breed blanket, they're putting in Lithium so it can break into tritium) produces 17.6 MeV for each fission. 100 MW would be 3.5e19 D-T fusions/sec; at 10 cm we'd be talking a flux of 2.8e20 n/s. But, fast neutrons must hit something to interact, either scattering or being absorbed, and fast cross sections are often 100-1000 times smaller than thermal cross sections.

Looking at http://books.google.com/books?id=j8hidDSEoosC for info on HTS tapes, the structure is layers of different materials; the order seems to be somewhat spontaneous. If it is, then the order will restore naturally under annealing, and the local heat-up of a dislocation might provide self-annealing. Only experimentation will tell. I did find "Stress dependence of the critical currents in neutron irradiated (RE)BCO coated conductors." by Emhofer, J., Eisterer, M., Weber, H. W., but they report "nearly no change was observed in the YBCO/RABiTS conductor" at fluence of 1e22/m^2 (which, of course, 100MW in a tight package will quickly exceed).

Right, as you point out, the cross section (at least for capture, but often for mere scattering too) is much lower at higher neutron energies, so the blanket (or whatever) has to be really thick. My friend at ITER says one reason they are shut down for "materials research" is the effect of the flux on the magnets (as well as the inner wall problem),
Even if they somehow get them to thermal in their size envelope - not likely at all, unless magic - capture gammas are going to be so fierce no one on earth could live in a plane with that as the engine, only part of a wing length away. Inverse sq law only does so much for you. This shows basic ignorance on the part of the presenter for Lockheed, which in turn makes the rest very difficult to believe. The guy clearly does not know what he's talking about...maybe they chose him as a spokesperson or something and kept in in the dark about the truly nasty details of such a thing, were it to work. Which seems pretty unlikely, just IMO, and with actual experience under my belt in several approaches that HAVE produced results, just not the ones I desired, so I'm doing what I'm doing as it shows the best promise at this point - practically and theoretically both. Anything that will make you sick enough to stay in bed 6 weeks from a mere estimated 84mw of fusion will get your attention, as it did mine, and give you more of a feel for the real numbers than I wanted to get - from 10 feet away and in 20 seconds of exposure. In fact, despite the new shielding, the capture gammas coming from my kitchen 20 feet away are still fierce, just from the stray neutrons that thermalize in the air on the way there. So, we've taken a short pause to make this all remote-control from another building on my campus. It's that bad, and at sub-watt (not 108watt) levels.

What is interesting to me is the Farnsworth, Hirsch, and others have reported "anomalous" outputs before, but lacking the data acquisition we have now, had to call them "outliers". They were honest on both sides of that - they reported them, but didn't claim those results as they could not reproduce them. Well, data aq might as well be my middle name, and we catch those, find the actual conditions (some of which aren't available from the original stuff), and reproduce them. In fact, Farnsworth and Hirsch aren't the only reporters, others have also reported this much more recently. No new actual science here if the truth be told. Just better measuring, and taking things like time-dynamics into account, whether accidental or "driven" which is where we're headed now. In hindsight, most all of it makes sense, other than the myth that re-circulation of ions is something that happens by magic. Nope, a spring mass system decays - has finite Q in the electronic sense.

Note - I actually own firearms that, despite things like wind, barrel vibrations, and such, are so accurate that if they fired at one another from 1/3 mile they'd hit 100% or close. At scale, this is like firing golf balls at ~1/2 mile at one another to make them collide.

"In theory"...well a vacuum doesn't have wind, different weights of projectiles, and so on...just saying. There are other problems (mean free path, repulsion and so on) to be sure, but this fact (I should set up a bullet collision demo and sell it to mythbusters, since this is really possible with stuff I have already, other than a high frame rate camera and a lotta wire and two solenoids) makes me willing to keep plugging along making finer focus, better bunching, and so on.

For new science, the closest we seem to come is that the wavefunction of the unbound electron is very unlike that of a bound one. In our case, they seem to spend a lot more time (probability) in close proximity to the various positive charges, in large part neutralizing the Coloumb force till the last instant. Or as they say, the first nanometer is easy, that last femtometer is hard. Well, it seems that it's not so hard in our conditions. Unbound electrons might explain that, but of course, there seems no reasonable way to measure that one at present.

So, while wishing them luck (they will learn if nothing else - and then maybe be as useful as U Wis to real fusion) - I have my doubts. It's too much like this: