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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Lockheed's Fusion Reactor Research has First Plasma

Lockheed Martin continues to invest in its portable nuclear fusion generator, with that investment recently entering a more advanced stage, according to the head of the company’s Skunk Works division.

Rob Weiss told an audience at the Atlantic Council that Lockheed is “about four months into a little bit more significant investment” into the technology, which was first revealed around two years ago.

At the time of the initial announcement, Lockheed said it was aiming for a 100 megawatt device which could fit on the back of a large truck. Such a reactor, the company claims, could power a city of up to 100,000 people.

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ITER Woes Continue: French Based International Fusion Power Plant Prototype Delayed Six Years

The multibillion-dollar ITER fusion project will take another 6 years to build beyond the—now widely discredited—official schedule, a meeting of the governing council was told this week. ITER management has also asked the seven international partners backing the project for additional funding to finish the job.

It remains unclear whether the project will get what it wants: Delegations from the partners—China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the United States—concluded the council meeting today by announcing the council would conduct its own review of the schedule and funding to look for ways to tighten them up. In the meantime, the council approved the proposed schedule for 2016 and 2017, set out milestones for the project to reach in that time, and agreed to make available extra resources to help achieve it. After consulting their governments, the delegations committed themselves to agreeing on a final schedule at the next council meeting, in June 2016.

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Mining Helium-3 on the Moon is Nonsensical

In recent years the subject of sending humans back to the Moon has largely gone mute, initially overwhelmed by talk of NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission, and more recently by the agency’s media drumbeat about sending humans to Mars. Because of this, there is also subsequently very little talk about a weird bit of magical thinking that often accompanies discussions of humans on the Moon: mining the Moon for helium-3 to power nonexistent fusion reactors. But that magical thinking still lurks, like a small burning ember in a burned-down house, waiting for a chance to flare up again. Last month at the Mars Society convention in Washington, DC, the subject of helium-3 briefly sparked once more, brought up by one of its longtime proponents, Apollo astronaut Harrison Schmitt.

Schmitt is probably the smartest astronaut who walked on the Moon, and certainly the most educated. He is a Harvard-trained geologist who NASA admitted to the Apollo program under pressure from Congress, and his presence undoubtedly increased the scientific return of his Apollo 17 mission as well as the entire program considering his role in training astronauts on earlier missions. Schmitt can still deliver graduate-level geology lectures if given the opportunity. But he also embraces the dubious scientific and engineering idea of mining helium-3 on the Moon for use in fusion reactors.

The last big flurry of articles and publications, and even a congressional hearing, about helium-3 fusion occurred in 2007, when NASA was still planning to send humans to the Moon. NASA did not drive that discussion then, but rather Schmitt and a few others. But even eight years later helium-3 still pollutes the environment of discussions about human spaceflight, despite its very nebulous assumptions.

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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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Boeing Just Patented a Laser Fusion Jet Turbine

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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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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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More on Lockheed's Fusion Reactor From Aviation Week

Hidden away in the secret depths of the Skunk Works, a Lockheed Martin research team has been working quietly on a nuclear energy concept they believe has the potential to meet, if not eventually decrease, the world’s insatiable demand for power.

Dubbed the compact fusion reactor (CFR), the device is conceptually safer, cleaner and more powerful than much larger, current nuclear systems that rely on fission, the process of splitting atoms to release energy. Crucially, by being “compact,” Lockheed believes its scalable concept will also be small and practical enough for applications ranging from interplanetary spacecraft and commercial ships to city power stations. It may even revive the concept of large, nuclear-powered aircraft that virtually never require refueling—ideas of which were largely abandoned more than 50 years ago because of the dangers and complexities involved with nuclear fission reactors.

Yet the idea of nuclear fusion, in which atoms combine into more stable forms and release excess energy in the process, is not new. Ever since the 1920s, when it was postulated that fusion powers the stars, scientists have struggled to develop a truly practical means of harnessing this form of energy. Other research institutions, laboratories and companies around the world are also pursuing ideas for fusion power, but none have gone beyond the experimental stage. With just such a “Holy Grail” breakthrough seemingly within its grasp, and to help achieve a potentially paradigm-shifting development in global energy, Lockheed has made public its project with the aim of attracting partners, resources and additional researchers.

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Lockheed Skunkworks Claims Fusion Power Breakthrough

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 in a decade.

Tom McGuire, who heads the project, said he and a small team had been working on fusion energy at Lockheed's secretive Skunk Works for about four years, but were now going public to find potential partners in industry and government for their work.

Initial work demonstrated the feasibility of building a 100-megawatt reactor measuring seven feet by 10 feet, which could fit on the back of a large truck, and is about 10 times smaller than current reactors, McGuire said.

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Related video from a year and a half ago.

U Washington's Dynomak Fusion Reactor Design: a Derived Spheromak

Fusion energy almost sounds too good to be true – zero greenhouse gas emissions, no long-lived radioactive waste, a nearly unlimited fuel supply.

Perhaps the biggest roadblock to adopting fusion energy is that the economics haven’t penciled out. Fusion power designs aren’t cheap enough to outperform systems that use fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas.

University of Washington engineers hope to change that. They have designed a concept for a fusion reactor that, when scaled up to the size of a large electrical power plant, would rival costs for a new coal-fired plant with similar electrical output.

The team published its reactor design and cost-analysis findings last spring and will present results Oct. 17 at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Fusion Energy Conference in St. Petersburg, Russia.

“Right now, this design has the greatest potential of producing economical fusion power of any current concept,” said Thomas Jarboe, a UW professor of aeronautics and astronautics and an adjunct professor in physics.

The UW’s reactor, called the dynomak, started as a class project taught by Jarboe two years ago. After the class ended, Jarboe and doctoral student Derek Sutherland – who previously worked on a reactor design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – continued to develop and refine the concept.

The design builds on existing technology and creates a magnetic field within a closed space to hold plasma in place long enough for fusion to occur, allowing the hot plasma to react and burn. The reactor itself would be largely self-sustaining, meaning it would continuously heat the plasma to maintain thermonuclear conditions. Heat generated from the reactor would heat up a coolant that is used to spin a turbine and generate electricity, similar to how a typical power reactor works.

“This is a much more elegant solution because the medium in which you generate fusion is the medium in which you’re also driving all the current required to confine it,” Sutherland said.

There are several ways to create a magnetic field, which is crucial to keeping a fusion reactor going. The UW’s design is known as a spheromak, meaning it generates the majority of magnetic fields by driving electrical currents into the plasma itself. This reduces the amount of required materials and actually allows researchers to shrink the overall size of the reactor.

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A "Low Power" Fusion Drive

A direct fusion drive for rocket propulsion

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Razin et al

Abstract:

The Direct Fusion Drive (DFD), a compact, anuetronic fusion engine, will enable more challenging exploration missions in the solar system. The engine proposed here uses a deuterium–helium-3 reaction to produce fusion energy by employing a novel field-reversed configuration (FRC) for magnetic confinement. The FRC has a simple linear solenoid coil geometry yet generates higher plasma pressure, hence higher fusion power density, for a given magnetic field strength than other magnetic-confinement plasma devices. Waste heat generated from the plasma׳s Bremsstrahlung and synchrotron radiation is recycled to maintain the fusion temperature. The charged reaction products, augmented by additional propellant, are exhausted through a magnetic nozzle. A 1 MW DFD is presented in the context of a mission to deploy the James Webb Space Telescope (6200 kg) from GPS orbit to a Sun–Earth L2 halo orbit in 37 days using just 353 kg of propellant and about half a kilogram of 3He. The engine is designed to produce 40 N of thrust with an exhaust velocity of 56.5 km/s and has a specific power of 0.18 kW/kg.

Two Concepts for Fusion Drives

Two generic concepts for space propulsion based on thermal nuclear fusion

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Gabrielli et al

Abstract:

In the present work, two different concepts for fusion based space propulsion are compared. While the first concept is based solely on propulsion by hypothetic ejection of fusion products and hence may be called ash drive, the second one uses an additional coolant for thrust enhancement. Since this coolant was initially assumed to be gaseous and since it is doing most of the propulsion work, the name of “working gas drive” has been proposed. Propulsive characteristics for both types are evaluated for four fusion reactant couples (D–T; D–3He; 3He–3He; 11B–p). In working gas drives, only hydrogen is considered as coolant due to its exceptionally good caloric and propulsive properties.

The results of comparative studies show that while ash drives excel working gas drives in terms of specific impulse the latter yield considerably more thrust than ash drives. Another major drawback of the ash drives is relatively small thrust efficiencies. The plasma power has to be disposed of nearly entirely as waste heat leading to prohibitive radiator masses.

US Costs for ITER Fusion Reactor Grows Enormously

ITER, the international fusion experiment under construction in Cadarache, France, aims to prove that nuclear fusion is a viable power source by creating a "burning plasma" that produces more energy than the machine itself consumes. Although that goal is at least 20 years away, ITER is already burning through money at a prodigious pace. The United States is only a minor partner in the project, which began construction in 2008. But the U.S. contribution to ITER will total $3.9 billion—roughly four times as much as originally estimated—according to a new cost estimate released yesterday. That is about $1.4 billion higher than a 2011 cost estimate, and the numbers are likely to intensify doubts among some members of Congress about continuing the U.S. involvement in the project.

The United States and ITER share a complicated history. The project was first proposed in 1985 as a joint venture with the Soviet Union and Japan. The United States backed out of that effort in 1998, citing concerns over cost and feasibility—only to jump in again in 2003. At the time, ITER was envisioned to cost roughly $5 billion. That estimate had grown to $12 billion by 2006, when the European Union, China, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and United States signed a formal agreement to build the device. The United States agreed, essentially, to build 9% of the parts for the reactor, at whatever price was necessary.

ITER was supposed to start running by 2016. Since then, however, the project has been plagued by delays, cost increases, and management problem. ITER is now expected to cost at least $21 billion and won't turn on until 2020 at the earliest. And a recent review slammed ITER's management.

The cost of the U.S. contribution has increased, too, although by how much has been unclear. Officials with U.S. ITER had not released an updated cost profile for several years, until Ned Sauthoff, project manager for U.S. ITER at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, did so yesterday. Speaking to a meeting of the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee in Rockville, Maryland, Sauthoff reported that the total cost of the U.S. contribution would be $3.9 billion by the time the project is done in 2034. The schedule assumes that ITER won't start running until 2024 or 2025. In comparison, an April 2011 funding profile pegged the cost of U.S. ITER at $2.5 billion.

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ITER Fusion Project Gets Slammed by Review

ITER, the international fusion reactor project in France, is reeling from an assessment that found serious problems with the project’s leadership, management, and governance. The report is so damning, Science has learned, that after a 13 February special session that reviewed and accepted the report’s conclusions and recommendations, the ITER Council—the project’s governing body—restricted its readership to a small number of senior managers and council members. “We feared that if [the assessment] leaked to people who don’t know about the ITER agreement, the project could be interpreted as a major failure, which is not what the management assessor intended,” says nuclear engineer Bob Iotti of the consulting firm CH2M HILL, who chairs that council.

Backed by China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the United States, ITER aims to build a testbed for fusion energy. Under construction at Cadarache in southern France, it is often described as the most complex machine ever built. In its cavernous doughnut-shaped vacuum vessel, the reactor will heat heavy hydrogen to 150 million °C so that the nuclei will fuse to form helium, releasing energy.

Since the project began in earnest in 2006, the expected completion date has slipped from 2016 to 2018 to 2020, the estimated cost has tripled to at least €16 billion, and there’s been a major change of leadership. “ITER had to create a project, a design, a laboratory, and an institutional culture. That’s very many things to create at once,” says Steve Cowley, head of the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in the United Kingdom.

The ITER agreement requires management assessments every 2 years. The previous two were critical, but nothing like the latest, conducted by Bill Madia, former director of the Pacific Northwest and Oak Ridge national laboratories. “It didn’t mince words,” Iotti says. “It could be read as an indictment of the current director general [Osamu Motojima], but one should also look at the obstacles in his path. Some are not under his control.”

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Break Even Energy Output Exceeded Four Times at LLNL's National Ignition Facility Since September

Fuel gain exceeding unity in an inertially confined fusion implosion

Authors:

Hurricane et al

Abstract:

Ignition is needed to make fusion energy a viable alternative energy source, but has yet to be achieved. A key step on the way to ignition is to have the energy generated through fusion reactions in an inertially confined fusion plasma exceed the amount of energy deposited into the deuterium–tritium fusion fuel and hotspot during the implosion process, resulting in a fuel gain greater than unity. Here we report the achievement of fusion fuel gains exceeding unity on the US National Ignition Facility using a ‘high-foot’ implosion method which is a manipulation of the laser pulse shape in a way that reduces instability in the implosion. These experiments show an order-of-magnitude improvement in yield performance over past deuterium–tritium implosion experiments. We also see a significant contribution to the yield from α-particle self-heating and evidence for the ‘bootstrapping’ required to accelerate the deuterium–tritium fusion burn to eventually ‘run away’ and ignite.