Lockheed's on its 5th Iteration of its Fusion Reactor Prototype

Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works is building a new, more capable test reactor as it continues to move ahead with its ambitious Compact Fusion Reactor program, or CFR. Despite slower than expected progress, the company remains confident the project can produce practical results, which would completely transform how power gets generated for both military and civilian purposes.

Aviation Week was first to report the updates on the CFR program, including that Lockheed Martin is in the process of constructing its newest experimental reactor, known as the T5, on July 19, 2019. The company's legendary California-based Skunk Works advanced projects office is in charge of the effort and had already built four different test reactor designs, as well as a number of subvariants, since the program first became public knowledge in 2014. The War Zone has been following news of this potentially revolutionary program very closely in recent years.

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US Omnibus Budget Bill Doubled Funding for ITER, Avoiding Reactor Prototype Delays

The United States has agreed to double its planned 2018 budget contribution to the ITER project to build a prototype nuclear fusion reactor, avoiding delays to the international project this year, its director said on Monday.

Washington cut the United States’ 2017 contribution from a scheduled $105 million to $50 million and had planned to cut its 2018 contribution from a scheduled $120 million to $63 million.

But in last-minute talks about the U.S. 2018 budget last week, the U.S. Congress approved a draft Omnibus Spending Bill with a $122 million in-kind contribution for ITER, which President Donald Trump signed into law on Friday, ITER said.

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MIT, Private Company Plan Fusion Reactor by 2033

Progress toward the long-sought dream of fusion power — potentially an inexhaustible and zero-carbon source of energy — could be about to take a dramatic leap forward.

Development of this carbon-free, combustion-free source of energy is now on a faster track toward realization, thanks to a collaboration between MIT and a new private company, Commonwealth Fusion Systems. CFS will join with MIT to carry out rapid, staged research leading to a new generation of fusion experiments and power plants based on advances in high-temperature superconductors — work made possible by decades of federal government funding for basic research.

CFS is announcing today that it has attracted an investment of $50 million in support of this effort from the Italian energy company Eni. In addition, CFS continues to seek the support of additional investors. CFS will fund fusion research at MIT as part of this collaboration, with an ultimate goal of rapidly commercializing fusion energy and establishing a new industry.

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Lockheed Got a Patent for its Fusion Design

Lockheed Martin has quietly obtained a patent associated with its design for a potentially revolutionary compact fusion reactor, or CFR. If this project has been progressing on schedule, the company could debut a prototype system that size of shipping container, but capable of powering a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier or 80,000 homes, sometime in the next year or so.

The patent, for a portion of the confinement system, or embodiment, is dated Feb. 15, 2018. The Maryland-headquartered defense contractor had filed a provisional claim on April 3, 2013 and a formal application nearly a year later. Our good friend Stephen Trimble, chief of Flightglobal's Americas Bureau, subsequently spotted it and Tweeted out its basic details.

In 2014, the company also made a splash by announcing they were working on the device at all and that it was the responsibility of its Skunk Works advanced projects office in Palmdale, California. At the time, Dr. Thomas McGuire, head of the Skunk Works’ Compact Fusion Project, said the goal was to have a working reactor in five years and production worthy design within 10.

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China is Building 2 Molten Salt Thorium Reactors

The cash is to develop two “molten salt” reactors in the Gobi Desert in northern China. 

Researchers hope that if they can solve a number of technical problems the reactors will lead to a range of applications, including nuclear-powered warships and drones.

The technology, in theory, can create more heat and power than existing forms of nuclear reactors that use uranium, while producing only one thousandth of the radioactive waste. 

It also has the advantage for China of using thorium as its main fuel. China has some of the world’s largest reserves of the metal.

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Asimov's Nuclear Batteries?

New technology has been developed that uses nuclear waste to generate electricity in a nuclear-powered battery. A team of physicists and chemists from the University of Bristol have grown a man-made diamond that, when placed in a radioactive field, is able to generate a small electrical current. The development could solve some of the problems of nuclear waste, clean electricity generation and battery life.

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Should Europe Cover the Sahara With Solar Panels for Power?

Could one solution to climate change be to harvest the power of sunlight where it shines brightest on the planet? Should we solar panel the Sahara desert?

Four experts discuss the radical proposal with the BBC World Service Inquiry programme.

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Iranians Hacked a (VERY) Small Dam in New York

Iranian hackers breached the control system of a dam near New York City in 2013, an infiltration that raised concerns about the security of the country's infrastructure, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, citing former and current U.S. officials.

Two people familiar with the breach told the newspaper it occurred at the Bowman Avenue Dam in Rye, New York. The small structure about 20 miles from New York City is used for flood control.

The hackers gained access to the dam through a cellular modem, the Journal said, citing an unclassified Department of Homeland Security summary of the incident that did not specify the type of infrastructure.

The dam is a 20-foot-tall concrete slab across Blind Brook, about five miles from Long Island Sound.

"It's very, very small," Rye City Manager Marcus Serrano told the newspaper. He said FBI agents visited in 2013 to ask the city's information-technology manager about a hacking incident.

The dam breach was difficult to pin down, and federal investigators at first thought the target was a much larger dam in Oregon, the Journal said.

The breach came as hackers linked to the Iranian government were attacking U.S. bank websites after American spies damaged an Iranian nuclear facility with the Stuxnet computer worm.

It illustrated concerns about many of the old computers controlling industrial systems, and the White House was notified of the infiltration, the Journal said.

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Now THAT'S Green Power: a Fuel Cell Using Cyanobacteria Respiration and Photosynthesis

Researchers from Concordia University in Montreal are looking to tap into what may be the most plentiful yet overlooked source of power in the world. The group has invented a power cell that harnesses the electricity created during the natural processes of photosynthesis and respiration in blue-green algae.

The microorganisms, also known as cyanobacteria, can be found in just about any ecosystem on the planet, across all latitudes, with respiration and photosynthesis taking place in the organism's cells both involving electron transfer chains.

"By taking advantage of a process that is constantly occurring all over the world, we've created a new and scalable technology that could lead to cheaper ways of generating carbon-free energy," says Concordia engineering professor Muthukumaran Packirisamy.

We've seen algae put to similar use in a building in Germany, and on a smaller scale in algae-powered lamps, but algae is probably better know for its potential to produce energy as a biodiesel feedstock.

The Concordia group's prototype photosynthetic power cell is currently small scale, with the algae being placed in an anode chamber, alongside the cathode and proton exchange membrane that make up the unit. An external load connected to the device extracts the electrons released by the algae to the electrode surface.

According to the paper, the team was able to measure open-circuit voltage as high as 993 millivolts, while a peak power of 175 microwatts was obtained under an external load of 850 ohms. The team claims its Micro Photosynthetic Power Cell (μPSC) could produce a power density of 36.23 microwatts/cm2, a voltage density of 80 millivolts/cm2, and a current density of 93.38 microamps/cm2 under test conditions.

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Britain to Close Last Coal Power Plant by 2025

The UK's remaining coal-fired power stations will be shut by 2025 with their use restricted by 2023, Energy Secretary Amber Rudd has proposed.

Ms Rudd wants more gas-fired stations to be built since relying on "polluting" coal is "perverse".

Only if gas-fuelled power can fill the void created by closing coal-powered stations would coal plants be shut, she said.

Environmentalists are concerned little is being done to promote renewables.

Announcing the consultation, Ms Rudd said: "Frankly, it cannot be satisfactory for an advanced economy like the UK to be relying on polluting, carbon-intensive 50-year-old coal-fired power stations.

"Let me be clear: this is not the future.

"We need to build a new energy infrastructure, fit for the 21st century."

Former US vice president Al Gore, an active campaigner for clean energy, described the announcement as an "excellent and inspiring precedent".

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We're Doomed: Coal Demand Remains High in Asia, Preferred Over Natural Gas?

The shine is coming off once bright prospects for natural gas as the future fossil fuel of choice in Asia as power companies in India and Southeast Asia tap abundant and cheap domestic coal resources to generate electricity.

Asian loyalty to coal is shrinking the space available for natural gas just as supplies are ramping up after massive investments in U.S. and Australian output. Demand growth for natural gas is also slowing in top energy consumer China, further dampening the fuel's prospects.

While much attention has been given to a potential peak in China's coal demand and worries about emissions, in Asia alone this year power companies are building more than 500 coal-fired plants, with at least a thousand more on planning boards. Coal is not only cheaper than natural gas, it is often available locally and has no heavy import costs.

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A Call for a Carbon Tax

Literally putting a price on carbon pollution and other greenhouse gasses is the best approach for nurturing the rapid growth of renewable energy and reducing emissions.

While prospects for a comprehensive carbon price are dim, especially in the U.S., many other policy approaches can spur the renewables revolution, according to a new policy article published in Nature.

The current price of carbon - which is below zero, once fossil-fuel subsidies are taken into account - is far too low given the hidden environmental, health and societal costs of burning coal and oil.

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Nuclear Fusion Startup Tri Alpha Energy Claims Plasma Containment, Sustainment Breakthrough

In a suburban industrial park south of Los Angeles, researchers have taken a significant step toward mastering nuclear fusion—a process that could provide abundant, cheap, and clean energy. A privately funded company called Tri Alpha Energy has built a machine that forms a ball of superheated gas—at about 10 million degrees Celsius—and holds it steady for 5 milliseconds without decaying away. That may seem a mere blink of an eye, but it is far longer than other efforts with the technique and shows for the first time that it is possible to hold the gas in a steady state—the researchers stopped only when their machine ran out of juice.

“They’ve succeeded finally in achieving a lifetime limited only by the power available to the system,” says particle physicist Burton Richter of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who sits on a board of advisers to Tri Alpha. If the company’s scientists can scale the technique up to longer times and higher temperatures, they will reach a stage at which atomic nuclei in the gas collide forcefully enough to fuse together, releasing energy.

“Until you learn to control and tame [the hot gas], it’s never going to work. In that regard, it’s a big deal. They seem to have found a way to tame it,” says Jaeyong Park, head of the rival fusion startup Energy/Matter Conversion Corporation in San Diego. “The next question is how well can you confine [heat in the gas]. I give them the benefit of the doubt. I want to watch them for the next 2 or 3 years.”

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First noticed them in June.

China Claims to be Working on Combined Fission/Fusion Reactor

China will build a new hybrid reactor that can burn nuclear waste via a combined fusion-fission method by 2030.

This could give a potentially dramatic boost to China's attempt to switch to more environmentally friendly energy production methods, by recycling the waste produced by traditional nuclear plants into more electricity.

Traditional nuclear power plants produce large amounts of waste, the primary component in which is uranium-238, which cannot be used by current fissile-based reactors. The proposed hybrid reactor will use nuclear fusion to burn u-238 and could in theory recycle the waste from traditional reactors into new fuel.

The project is being developed at the Chinese Academy of Engineering Physics in Sichuan, a top secret military research facility where China's nuclear weapons are developed.

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What is Fusion Energy Startup Tri Alpha Doing?

Of the handful of startup companies trying to achieve fusion energy via nontraditional methods, Tri Alpha Energy Inc. has always been the enigma. Publishing little and with no website, but apparently sitting on a cash pile in the hundreds of millions, the Foothill Ranch, California–based company has been the subject of intense curiosity and speculation. But last month Tri Alpha lifted the veil slightly with two papers revealing that its device, dubbed the colliding beam fusion reactor, has shown a 10-fold improvement in its ability to contain the hot particles needed for fusion over earlier devices at U.S. universities and national labs.

“They’ve improved things greatly and are moving in a direction that is quite promising,” says plasma physicist John Santarius of the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Fusion energy seeks to replicate the power source of the sun and stars: heating atoms to enormous temperatures so that their nuclei slam together with enough force to overcome their mutual repulsion and fuse, releasing energy. The challenge on Earth is to confine plasma—an ionized gas, with electrons and nuclei separated—at high temperatures (greater than 150 million degrees Celsius) long enough for fusion reactions to occur. Most effort over the past 60 years of fusion research has focused on tokamaks—huge doughnut-shaped vessels that confine plasma with powerful magnets—and laser fusion, which uses high-energy laser pulses to squeeze tiny capsules of fuel. But between these low-density and high-density extremes there is a range of other approaches that have received little government funding. Now, startup companies are moving into that vacuum.

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CELF Process: a Novel Pretreatment Could cut Costs for Biofuels by 30%

Researchers at the University of California, Riverside have invented a novel pretreatment technology that could cut the cost of biofuels production by about 30 percent or more by dramatically reducing the amount of enzymes needed to breakdown the raw materials that form biofuels.

As partners in the BioEnergy Science Center (BESC), the team from the Bourns College of Engineering Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering and Center for Environmental Research and Technology (CE-CERT) have shown that this new operation called Co-solvent Enhanced Lignocellulosic Fractionation (CELF) could eliminate about 90 percent of the enzymes needed for biological conversion of lignocellulosic biomass to fuels compared to prior practice. This development could mean reducing enzyme costs from about $1 per gallon of ethanol to about 10 cents or less.

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How Will Fracking, Climate Change Impact American National Security?

Energy sources and related commodities have driven national security issues ever since the modern nation-state was born with the Peace of Westphalia. Oak made Spain and England’s stout sailing ships. Water energy and wind drove mills and moved water. Wood and coal moved steamships. Then came the almost magical commodity of oil, packed with energy. World War II brought us the wonder and terror of nuclear energy. Today, America buys much less foreign oil for the first time in decades, largely due to fracking and other technological advances. Wind and solar energy are growing by leaps and bounds. How fundamental are these changes in the world’s energy markets and what is their likely effect on our national security interests? My colleague at Breaking Energy, Jared Anderson, tackles the energy side of the equation. We’ve got the national security side. Read on. The Editor.

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very very important counterpoint or two from Noel.

Crude Oil Dropped Below $80/Barrel, Projected to be Below $70/barrel in 2015

Crude oil just broke $80.

In morning trade on Monday, the price of crude oil fell below $80 a barrel for the first time since mid-2012 as energy prices continue to plummet around the world.

The most recent drop in oil, which has been a bear market since topping out at about $107 during the summer, follows a cut in oil-price expectations from Goldman Sachs' Jeff Currie over the weekend.

Currie took his oil-price forecasts for WTI Crude to $75 a barrel in the first quarter of 2015 and to $70 a barrel in the second quarter of next year.

Longer-term, Currie expects WTI prices to stabilize near $80 a barrel, and Currie said that "uncertainty around the required price to slow down US shale production growth is a key risk to our forecast."

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Oil Prices Should Worry Putin More Than Western Sanctions

This week, as falling oil prices have hammered the Russian economy, President Vladimir Putin has warned repeatedly that his country, a nuclear superpower, must not be "blackmailed." He was talking about economic sanctions, but there is a different lesson he should be drawing right now and it has nothing to do with the U.S. or the European Union.

Putin's response to the sanctions, imposed to dissuade him from further aggression in Ukraine, has been to shore up the big state companies and banks most affected. To compensate these businesses for their losses, as sanctions have squeezed them out of international credit markets, the government has raided the state budget, the pension fund and privately held companies. Smaller businesses are being crushed, accelerating a long-term trend under Putin in which Russia's economy has become ever more concentrated in state hands and reliant on natural resources -- especially oil and natural gas.

When times are good, these resources are a source of immense power and wealth. They were the engine that drove Russia's extraordinary 7 percent average annual growth from 2000 to 2008, cementing Putin's popularity. An abundance of natural gas, in particular, has also allowed Russia to punish or reward other countries by imposing high or low prices, or by simply cutting them off.

That pipelines game continues unabated. On his way to today's talks on the Ukraine crisis in Milan, Putin attended a military parade in Serbia celebrating Belgrade's liberation from German occupation in World War II. He used the occasion to discuss building the South Stream gas pipeline, which the EU has blocked since the Ukraine crisis developed but is popular in Serbia and other countries that would gain by hosting it. He also warned that the European Union may lose its gas supply this winter.

The flipside to all this energy wealth, however, is that Russia's economy has remained too dependent on energy prices: The sector accounts for about half of government revenues and a quarter of gross domestic product.

Russia's annual budget loses about $2 billion for every dollar fall in the price of oil -- a hit that couldn't come at a worse time. Sanctions, a falling ruble, rising inflation and rapid capital flight are already helping to push the economy toward recession. Although Putin himself will survive -- he has $450 billion in reserves and a population thrilled by his annexation of Crimea -- Russia is not getting any stronger. No wonder Finance Minister Anton Siluanov recently said Russia "simply cannot afford" its ambitious $500 billion rearmament program.

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Lockheed Fusion Announcement is Being met With Strong Skepticism by Fusion Community

Experts were skeptical of Lockheed Martin Corp.‘s claims this week that it plans to build a fusion reactor small enough to fit on the back of a truck over the next decade.

The Bethesda, Maryland-based company — the world’s largest defense contractor, known for its stealth fighter jets and guided missiles — on Wednesday announced that it would test a compact fusion reactor in less than a year, build a prototype in five years and deploy the system in 10 years.

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“I’m surprised that a company like this would release something that doesn’t have much context,” said Steven Cowley, a professor in plasma physics at the Imperial College London, director of the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire, United Kingdom, and a leading expert in magnetic fusion energy.

“Normally, if someone says they’re doing well in fusion, they would quote some data, ‘We got a temperature of x and a confinement of y,’” he said, referring to how long a reactor can hold the heat of a reaction before it escapes. “There’s no such information.”

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