Skunk Works Reveals Compact Fusion Reactor Details (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Skunk Works Reveals Compact Fusion Reactor Details (2014)

aviationweek.com

93 pointsvpj47 comments

I haven't come across any meaningful news on this project since the article linked here. I search every month or so. I do that with several projects that had a moment of hype.

I've thought about setting up a small site for it. Tracking promising sci/tech stories with unknown likelihood to ever actually come about. It's the kind of thing I have a natural interest in, as I think it's where the cool things happen.

Is there such a site? Dedicated to tracking the status of these kinds of things on an ongoing basis?

This sounds like a great idea. I'll check back on you in a month to see if you've actually developed it. ;)

I use the google alerts service.

So do I it's actually a pretty useful service that I have incorporated into my regular news consumption way too late :) I currently have an Alert for "Magic Leap" for example.

That's the thing with these type of hyped things. General Fusion is another company that was going to do something 5-7 years ago and has received much funding from energy companies and has yet to put out anything substantial.

http://www.burnabynow.com/news/27-million-for-general-fusion...

Perhaps the funding has produced exactly what was asked for.

I am not a conspiracy nut, I don't think they actually have anything yet. There was a 90s Keanu Reeves movie called Chain Reaction that had that exact plot but I don't think this is the case here. The opportunity is too big to just sit back because if it can be cracked, someone will crack it soon.

There does exist such a thing as the Invention Secrecy Act to suppress patents that the government wants to keep secret.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act

Quite a few patents every year, and certainly a small fusion generator would be of interest to the government.

You just need to warn other countries that may be trying it.

Once there is a way things get invented, especially things that don't need a structure around them to be sustainable (like cell phones, for example)

As I said, if someone can crack it they will. If the US wants to sit on the technology they can do so at a great cost to themselves and the world. We need cheap, safe energy for the world. It has the ability to literally save the world.

I was lucky enough to get a tour of their facility last June. One half was assembling and testing the most colossal plasma injection guns, driven by the biggest capacitor bank I have ever seen in my life.

The other half of the facility contained the anemone-shaped plasma compression chamber from all their promotional images. (And far more impressive than the dinky prototype from the article above.) They had a shelf full of cracked steel pistons, and I'm still not sure how they plan to solve that problem when the full-scale machine uses 200 of them instead of just a dozen or so.

(An aside, if anyone from General Fusion is reading this: my inventor friend suggested shooting slugs of molten lead into the molten lead core, instead of using the current steel-piston approach.)

I guess I'm just saying that between the facilities, and what our host (one of the project managers) was talking about, I'm satisfied that they're not dawdling. These are just some inherently hard problems they're working on.

The site would be awesome. On a more immediate note, have any of the project you're tracking ever taken off or turned out to live up to the hype?

That's a good question. Nothing comes to mind, but then things that live up to early promise probably just seem "obvious" in retrospect. Actively tracking the status over time might make it easier to remember those cases.

There are some things, like Amazon delivery drones, that are seeming a lot more plausible than they were initially given credit for.

It might be interesting, beyond basic news tracking for these topics to do some sort of "plausibility survey" along the way was well. See how people's opinions shift. Obviously that's a lot more work to do it right, but it could also be a lot more useful in the long run.

The successes seem to require the leadership having both incredible competency AND ironclad personal belief that the problem should be solved at almost any cost.

These mega-problems are hard. And, even down a road to eventual success, there are likely to be a lot of "we have to lay off the entire team for 6 months because we have no funding" or "everything about this current situation makes exiting and cutting our losses the smarter move" moments.

I can't imagine that gets any easier when you're talking about physical artifacts that require a much higher minimum feasible investment to even try.

SpaceX; I started following them at about Falcon-1 launch attempt 2, I'd say they've lived up to the hype.

I was kind of hoping for EMC2's Polywell to succeed.

If you're into building such site, one thing missing from most technology stories is an in-depth explanations(or even smart analysis by the right bloggers) about the technology and how it works, and not the watered-down stuff that usually goes around.

I'm sure the community here would love such a site, i know i would.

And you don't have to write it , just aggregate stuff, and i'm sure users would be happy to share.

I constantly think about a set of adult learning course for science things such as "math you need to know to understand relativity properly", be great to see this for other areas as well...

Most of the problem is that a lot of the *Weekly type of aggregator sites that report this kind of material seem to have an editorial aversion to linking off-site.

I'm curious how many news sites actually have a "stories can only include hyperlinks to content our own site" policy.

(Note: BBC News seems to be an exception, but still fails to include an obvious link a lot of the time)

> I've thought about setting up a small site for it. Tracking promising sci/tech stories with unknown likelihood to ever actually come about.

In case anyone is interested I recently came across zeef.com.

It is (in my view) a place to make more ot less authorative pages on subjects; you can collect links, make automatic collections from RSS feeds etc.

I've long had a soft spot for low probability, high-return science.

I've looked around the net also, but not recently.

The problem in the past was 1) sites set up by folks looking to scam people, and 2) people who were emotionally not well and unable to discuss such matters critically without getting into conspiracy theories and emotional-reasoning-based discussions.

Both of those things kill it. If somebody could come up with a way to have reasonable and critical open-minded discussions of things like this? Sign me up.

Not sure if could be very useful in tracking, but I enjoyed reading and refreshing my knowledge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emerging_technologies

I think the problem is that these folks tend to not publicize failure. It caters to cranks after a while, all the promises with no clear acknowledgment of the failure, just that they ran out of money and had to shut it down.

Conversely, I think people have no problem making promises. As a part of that, they could advertise their promises and hopefully glean some sort of accountability by making these promises public.

Transatomic has a page that charts their progress in designing and then building a molten salt reactor.

http://www.transatomicpower.com/whats-next

Thanks for linking this. I was hoping someone was publicly tracking progress on molten salt reactors.

nextbigfuture.com is pretty good in that regard, a little political sometimes and sometimes some things from the edges of science but the admin does a good job on tracking news for emerging tech.

One of the hosts of .NetRocks does a lot of "Geek Outs" where he researches a topic then presents his research on the episode. He's done two or more on this topic. He did one specifically on this release (and other information) http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1145 But I'd suggest you watch the first one he did on this topic.

http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1013

http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1022

http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1037

Also if you are a C# developer you should probably be listening to this show on a regular basis anyway. Because it rocks. And they do cover a pretty wide range outside the .Net stack.

Note: I have no affiliation with the show, I just really like it.

Edit: I think it's a great idea to create a site to centralize all this information. If you do, you might find contacting Richard to be helpful to aggregate data. Sorry that was the point of me posting, but I got rushed and forgot.

Do you mean fusion specifically? I've considered starting something like that, but I'm not sure if there's a wide enough interest.

When it was invented the Tokamak was talked about in similar ways - and a half-dozen more schemes after it. Only the Tokamak is still here, with the finicky details still being worked out and bigger machines necessary to bring it together.

The reason ITER is huge is because it's a lot easier to confine a big plasma then it is to confine a small one - all your path lengths mean your field strengths keep fast moving ions inside the vacuum chamber. Building compact reactors invites a whole new world of confinement problems and there's some hard limits on how much magnet you can get from materials science at the moment.

I want them to succeed but the odds are against them that they don't run into the usual crunch of balancing problems which most "otherwise stable" confinement schemes do.

But probably won't.

http://lee-phillips.org/lockheedFusionAgain/

Jury is out. I wouldn't bet against research 75 years in the making. Anyway, Phillips isn't.

I think Lee Phillips is probably a good judge of Lee Philips' current opinions. But maybe that's just me.

> The team acknowledges that the project is in its earliest stages, and many key challenges remain before a viable prototype can be built.

There you go. Fusion be a harsh mistress.

I would put my money on Thorium reactors, to be honest.

As far as I can tell, this is just a magnetic mirror with neutral beam injection.

The problem with mirror devices has and always will be plasma squirting out of the sides. Sure, at any given moment, that may represent a small fraction of the plasma (only particles that have a certain velocity will exit). But collisions eventually change particles' velocity, eventually dooming them to the path outward.

It looks like they're relying upon the neutral beams to replenish particles that leave. That takes energy, and is one of the primary heating mechanisms in tokamaks. Whether they can break even with such a scheme is entirely unknown since they're not providing details.

More power to them, but I remain skeptical until they actually release details (this hardly counts). If it's secret, it's not science.

He talks about recirculation, maybe they figured out a way to plug the ends? Ie if the plasma is positive charge, then would placing negative chargs at the sides seal it? I don't know if this was ever tried.

Plasma is almost always quasi-neutral. It's very hard to separate positive and negative charges, especially along the field line. Electrons move very quickly to cancel out any excess charge.

While it's probably true that increasing the iteration time on design will get you to a stable tokamak design faster, comparing the time it took to get to ITER is not really a fair comparison.

With large scale mechanical engineering projects, scaling the size down will create a world of new problems that ITER never ran into. They will need to solve these all in house, whereas the tokamak design for ITER had the best researchers all over the world working on it.

I'm actually more surprised that skunk works makes youtube videos now. I can almost feel the engineers cringing when PR came to them with this idea...

Lockheed Martin has at least managed to gum up the Google search for "Fusion in 10 years".

A tall achievement in and of itself.

Putting my aluminum foil hat on, and tying into your 'information obscuration' idea, I speculate the Lockheed announcement may have been diversion for some other activity they have previously or currently working on in secret.

This is a lot of talk and hype for something that hasn't been built yet.

No new news since October 2014? Lockheed's own site hasn't changed. That's not good. They were going to have a new prototype each year.

October 2014 + 1 year = October 2015

The first public announcement was in October 2014.

They estimated they could build a test reactor within one year (by October 2015) and the prototype within 5 years.

http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.htm...

Spheromaks, specifically the Dynomak, look much more promising than this.

Url changed from http://sploid.gizmodo.com/lockheed-martins-new-fusion-reacto..., which points to this.

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