Mr. Fusion?
Posted: Fri May 02, 2014 12:23 am
The promise of fusion power is always 40 years away... but now Lockheed's Skunkworks say they'll have a working prototype in about three years, and a working power plant in ten, 100 MW in a plant the size of a truck trailer:
http://www.dvice.com/2013-2-22/lockheed ... four-years
The article is from 2013, so three years to go.
Interesting video at the link:"Most estimates" do not, apparently, include research being done at Lockheed Martin's secretive advanced development center, Skunk Works. At Google's Solve For X, Charles Chase describes what his team has been working on: a trailer-sized fusion power plant that turns cheap and plentiful hydrogen (deuterium and tritium) into helium plus enough energy to power a small city. It's safe, it's clean, and Lockheed is promising an operational unit by 2017 with assembly line production to follow, enabling everything from unlimited fresh water to engines that take spacecraft to Mars in one month instead of six.
Lockheed's fusion power plant uses radio energy to heat deuterium gas inside tightly controlled magnetic fields, creating a very high temperature plasma that's much more stable and well confined than you'd find in something like a tokamak.
http://www.dvice.com/2013-2-22/lockheed ... four-years
The article is from 2013, so three years to go.