Peter Kelly-Detwiler reports that Lockheed Martin is thinking big. The company announced this week that it is on the fast track to developing small nuclear fusion reactors. The methodology is to harness fusion by containing the power of the sun in a small magnetic bottle. Head of the project, Tom McGuire, announced that his team - which has several patents - was going public in order to find potential government and industry partners to support this four-year-old effort to build a 100 megawatt - MW - reactor seven feet wide by ten feet long.
Fusion involves heating up a gas and separating that gas into its ions and electrons. Brought to sufficient temperature, the ions collide at high velocity and fuse, hence fusion. The result is a reaction three to four times more intense than a fission reaction. Until now, the challenge has been how to contain this process, and that has been the focus of much of the fusion-focused research over the past 60 years. The approach to date has been to use a Tokamak, a very large and expensive device utilizing a magnetic field to contain the fusion plasma. The Lockheed innovation has been to utilize what it calls a high beta concept, which uses a high fraction of the magnetic field pressure. This will result in the development of a magnetic bottle which can contain temperatures reaching into the hundreds of millions of degrees. This will allow Lockheed to reduce the size of the devices by a factor of ten.
The company believes it can fit a fusion reactor into the back of a truck.That small size, in turn, should allow the company to advance more quickly through the development cycle, taking a few months to design and build a concept that formerly would have required as long as five years. Quicker iterations allow accelerated progress from concept to prototype. Lockheed indicates it could develop a competed prototype within five years, and hopes to have a commercial application within a decade.
Resource Portal for I2M Clients, Associates, and Geoscientists
Managed & Built by I2M Consulting, LLC | © 2010-
Managed & Built by I2M Consulting, LLC | © 2010-