Lockheed Martin Develops Compact Fusion Reactor

Oct 16, 2014 08:53

According to Reuters, "Lockheed says makes breakthrough on fusion energy project," by Andrea Shalai,

Lockheed Martin Corp said on Wednesday it had made a technological breakthrough in developing a power source based on nuclear fusion, and the first reactors, small enough to fit on the back of a truck, could be ready for use in a decade.

Tom McGuire ( Read more... )

energy, nuclear fusion, technology

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prester_scott October 16 2014, 17:10:51 UTC
Some years ago I visited the power plant closest to where I live. It's a coal plant. I was allowed onto a high enough floor of the main building to be able to see the whole property out the windows. Acres of coal piled up. Conveyance systems. Sprinkler systems (the piles will catch fire if left to themselves). Train tracks leading off in all directions. And what I saw represented, oh, maybe two weeks' worth of fuel. Two weeks? So if the trains stop rolling for even a few days, they're at risk of having to shut down?

Tangent: there are very similar transmission problems with respect to water treatment, and they are just as severe, as there is a whole lot of aging pipeline and undocumented leakage. But there are also efforts on foot to develop modular water treatment facilities that can serve neighborhoods and eliminate a lot of those problems.

Modularity also facilitates installation of all this stuff in the third world. Notice how their cellular communication networks are miles ahead of their land-line networks? That's because you can erect cell towers just about anywhere, cheaply and with minimal infrastructure. So too these mini-plants. The total transformation of people's lives for the better when they have reliable power and clean water is hard to overstate.

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jordan179 October 16 2014, 18:30:13 UTC
And nuclear fusion is an inherently safe technology -- if the reaction runs hot and breaches magnetic containment, it dies out almost instantly. You'd at worst get a flare of plasma which might destroy the reactor chamber and start conventional fires. Tritium is seriously radioactive, but it's a light gas, and one which would either escape into space or combine with oxygen to make tritiated water -- the tiny amounts of tritiated water which could be released into the ecosystem would be rather rapidly diluted to harmlessness. A simple double-layered containment shell around the reactor vessel, designed to be far enough away that the plasma torch would cool before touching it, would provide enough safety for commercial purposes. There are no heavy metals involved to get stuck in the local soil.

And there's no good way of making a bomb with the reactor, though if you otherwise make an H-Bomb you could combine the deuterium component of the fuel with lithium-6 to make lithium-six-deuteride, the fusible used in hydrogen bombs. But the hard part of making a hydrogen bomb isn't obtaining lithium-6-deuteride, it's making the detonator (a shaped-charge fission bomb which in turn is triggered by a shaped-charge chemical bomb, and requires U-235 or plutonium to manufacture).

So it's safe to export to the Third World.

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the_mcp October 20 2014, 18:28:59 UTC
The beta particles emitted by tritium's decay are also fairly low-energy, as such things go; they can only propagate about 6mm in air, and can't penetrate past the outermost later (the stratum corneum) of the skin, which consists of dead cells anyway. So even if the stuff did escape, it's several orders of magnitude less dangerous than anything a fission reactor puts out.

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