WUWT reader Paul Ostergaard tips us to this article from Aviation Week and Space Technology – video follows
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.
![Compact%20Fusion%20Reactor%20Diagram_0[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/compact20fusion20reactor20diagram_01.png?quality=75)
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I’m a bit surprised L-M is looking for partners. If this was as close to being ready as they say, and the performance was as they claim, then this is a huge gold mine and it’s all theirs. So why look for investors? L-M clearly has the ability to fund a project like this internally…
> L-M clearly has the ability to fund a project like this internally…
Really? How much, in your estimation, will a commercial prototype cost to develop? Take your time …
Even if it’s a billion dollars, L-M has access to the money. If it’s what they say, it’s not at the “billion dollar” level but the tens to hundreds of million dollar level. Any expertise they don’t have (say, in power plants) they know contractors who do (like GE). If it’s more than a billion dollars, then it’s not nearly as simple as they say, nor is it as attractive. Something here doesn’t make sense…
dean1230 – Where did they call it “simple”? What they did call it was “high risk, high reward”. Working out technical challenges and developing prototypes could easily take a boatload of cash – the F-22 program cost about $1.4 billion per year not including actual aircraft production, and I doubt this is an order of magnitude easier. I’m sure you understand that this isn’t Lockheed’s only R&D project, so if they were to fund this internally, something else would have to wait on outside funds – and as a defense and intelligence contractor they’ve undoubtedly got a lot of stuff where that’s just not an option for security reasons.
Back in the 1980s we spent 1.2 Billion dollars at Northrop on the F-20.
chump change.
If LM have plans to put this in an aircraft ( dude mentioned that ) then the IR&D or some portion of it
is an allowable charge and is wrapped into what the government pays them for other programs.
LM is a Defense company, which means that someone else pays for the work and they provide the workers. Unlike a commercial company, where one provides a prototype to investors LM provides a plan.
Lets just hope the cooling system is robust and reliable. That much energy confined in that small a space on a mobile transport vehicle suffering a coolant loss and … boom (not nuclear of course, but simply a thermal explosion).
I sure WISH it were true…
unfortunately, the current (both AC AND DC) REALITY is this:
BUT, KEEP ON TRYING, O True Scientists of the World!
It would be sooo COOL (seriously :)).
Wait…
“nuclear energy concept they believe has the potential to meet, if not eventually decrease, the world’s insatiable demand for power.”
So if it can’t meet the energy demand it will decrease it? Is there a switch on the side for Generator/Bomb?
lol — HAS to be! I raised my eyebrows at that line, too.
” Is there a switch on the side for Generator/Bomb?”
It doesn’t need a switch for that. It has a processor that decides about that when the need arises.
Macroeconomics. If the Supply increases enough, it will outpace Demand. An overabundance of available energy great enough that all our power needs are exceeded would decrease demand. Thus making the cost of electricity dirt cheap.
http://www.iter.org. Somehow I think this project might be worth looking at.
And let’s be clear the tokamak and laser implosion ignition designs (NIF) are hopelessly complex and far too expensive in design, even if they can achieve break-even power generation, they need a 1000 fold improvement in output:input to be economically viable. Those designs are just big toys.
LPP Fusion in Lawrenceville NJ is a small (5 MW), aneutronic non-tokomak reactor design that envisions direct electromagnetic power generation without turbines and boilers. The device already has met two of three of the Lawson Criteria and is now closing in on the last, plasma density.
Both “Science” and “Nature” featured LPP in August articles and editorials. This device is on a very short development timeline. By early December they’ll have a very good idea about the viability for near-term breakeven fusion energy.
http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/
PS: Here’s a link to a google search-results page on the CFR:
http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=compact+fusion+reactor+lockheed&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
Amazing, isn’t it? It’s like they’ve said, “ok, we’ve made the video. Now let’s find the most annoying piece of music we can get our hands on, and overlay it on the narrative.” Sheer stupidity. Why oh why are so many videos made with needless music – and truly awful music at that? Never fails to amaze me.
Ha ha, brother I am with you 100%! What slays me are the TV commercials with music so loud you cannot hear the sales pitch. I mean, isn’t the idea of the advert to impart information about a product? Half the time I have no idea what the ad was even trying to sell. Wait, I guess that’s by design – I must not be in the target demographic. Never mind.
What about cost? No mention of that anywhere. The greenwashing also makes me suspicious.
So maybe they should have said something like “We don’t buy into the whole AGW thing, and we don’t believe there is a thing dirty about carbon-based energy, and we feel there is enough fossil fuel to support the world for ever and ever, but we just thought we’d develop this alternative technology anyway, just in case anyone might need it some day, and we need you big investors to offset the enormous tab.” Something like that?
In the diagram, “Neutral Beam Injectors” or “Neutron Beam Injectors”?
Maybe I can’t understand the simplistic diagram. If it’s all that well understood what is holding up the prototype?
Seriously, what are the issues that are holding up the prototype?
Neutral is correct.
The plasma in the fusion chamber is of course ionized hydrogen-deuterium. It has a charge which the magnetic rings contain and compress. To force fuel into that reaction, it has to be neutral, i.e. no charge. The magnetic confinement creates heating and ionizes the incoming fuel.
To my simple mind, it seems it will have to work in cycles of injection, magnetic heating, fusion, and energy release (but very fast). Like a pulse jet engine. I can’t see how a continuous energy out – fuel in flow system could be engineered, without some sort of staging of a flow. like a turbine engine with compressor stages separated from a energy extraction stage(s) I.e something analogous to hot gas turbines. As the outflowing plasma would be charged and moving fast. That fast flow plasma could be routed through a helically expanding plenum, embedded within a stationary magnetic field and a transformer-like Wire wound stator to couple the electrical energy to.
Further, I can see how incoming neutrally-charged fuel would be ionized and compressed once the contraption was at ionization operating temperature, one key technical hurdle is how to get it started from a cold-start. Some sort of plasma injector-compression cycle build-up would have to be used to get it started in a slow build up to fusion ignition temperature-pressure and then ramp up to a productive energy output level. I.e. that implies a somewhat long (many minutes to hours) startup phase.
In the cartoon diagram, the “neutron absorption to breed fuel” is a clear reference to Lithium-6 neutron capture. For a continous operating system, that 6Li is presumably in some form of gaseous state that feeds into the injection system. Lithium-6 deuteride, a solid at normal temps and pressure, is the stuff in a hydrogen bomb that absorbs fast fission neutrons, creates copious amounts of tritium, which is an even better fusion fuel than deuterium.
No, you’d start out with a neutral gas and strike a glow in the chamber as part of the bring up. Doesn’t really matter how you do it but presumably you’d just strike it with a large voltage to generate breakdown. Once you have that you’ve got plenty of ions and electrons that you can inductively couple and push around to ionize fresh, neutral gas.
The “batteries” are capacitors, presumably for a “pinch” field, a high power magnetic “compression” that momentarily boosts the density. They don’t appear to even have a bottle made yet. And there are a few materials issues to work out as well…
No one wants this to work more than I do, being an industry plasma physicist, but there have been a lot of high beta designs that don’t work. I hope that the skunk works has more up their sleeve here than PR.
Money?
I’m skeptical.
Even if it succeeds in production of useful power, all those neutrons will induce radioactivity in the structure of the reactor itself. The TFTR in Princeton back in the ’80’s was a radioactive black hole which had to be sealed off for several years to “cool down” radioactively before it could be safely dismantled. This reactor ran for a total of minutes over its roughly 10 year operational lifespan. Yes, that was minutes.
Imagine how radioactive a constantly operating neutron emitting fusion reactor will get after months or years of operation.
The beauty of fusion is the lack of long lived radionuclides, like a fission reaction produces (as you describe).
The primary long term radiation effects would arise from the fast neutrons. The gamma and xrays could be contained within a larger shield. The desire would be for the plasma-exiting fast neutrons to be absorbed by a precursor fuel stock, i.e. Lithium 6 (which transmutes to helium and tritium) which is circulating within a zirconium alloy casing. The main reactor casing would almost tainly have to be some high tech zirconium alloy (with some Sn, Cr, or Fe. Zirconium is used in fission reactor fuel rod cladding becasue it has avery low neutron capture cross section. Cooling and heat extraction would be critical design criteria to keep the casing within safe operating temps.
A conspiracy theorist might conclude that they already have a working version in the basement and are just covering their tracks as to why they didn’t go public twenty years ago.
Not holding my breath… although it would be lovely to be wrong. I am curious beyond measure as to why they would announce this, though, at least 5 years before they could possibly build one. That is incredibly stupid as far as the patent is concerned. Indeed, I’m guessing that they are filing the patents today as well as announcing it, because if they don’t they basically just gave them away, especially if somebody else takes their publicly expressed ideas and runs with them.
rgb
Who knows what their patent situation is? But a typical approach would be already to have filed applications directed to the new concepts they’ve revealed, possibly as well at to some others, and then file further applications directed to the solutions to those rubber-meets-the-road problems they haven’t encountered yet but inevitably will as development continues.
It’s not clear to me that such an approach would be “incredibly stupid,” but I’m open to hearing the reason why it is.
Publishing “anything at all” eliminates any chance of an international patent. Publishing the diagram above might well eliminate even the chance at a domestic patent, especially if there is either competition or a patent troll lurking. Sure, they could have some secret up their sleeve that is the key to any hope of success — they’d better have, since magnetic bottles have only been tried forever and forever failed. But if they do, just announcing that they are going to be building a bottle system and that they’re going to make it work lets lots of other folks know that they think it can work, think it to the point where they’re willing to sink serious money into it. This, in turn, makes them enormously vulnerable. In most of these sorts of things it is just the knowledge that a solution exists that matters — the culling of the zillion dead ends that one otherwise has to explore. It seriously increases the probability that somebody else will say “Hmmm, maybe we should take another look at our bottle confinement system that we already have built and played with and see if we can’t discover what has them so excited first…”
It is interesting, though, that there are so many claims of “fusion is (finally) just around the corner”, from quite disparate groups. It makes one wonder if one or more of them really IS just around the corner from success, and the others are making the best claims that they can in hopes that they can get there too, maybe with a more efficient design, if they can avoid losing funding instantly once the problem is “solved” at an economically efficient level.
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Agree on the patents. Thomas John McGuire now has 3 published provisional patents.
The key physics statements I saw in the article are:
Key developments:
Whether publishing bars issuance of a patent depends on when the patent application was filed. I would counsel against making judgments about a patent strategy without knowing what the developers have already filed for.
“Publishing the diagram above might well eliminate even the chance at a domestic patent, especially if there is either competition or a patent troll lurking. ”
No. You have a year after first publication to file for a patent. I don’t know if it offers you any protection in the new first to file regime if someone else happens to file your idea after you publish but before you submit your paperwork.
If you file for a patent all the details become public. That’s why Coke and Pepsi do not have patents on their formulas. So perhaps there is not need to file at this time and reveal all your hard earned knowledge. But I suspect L-M is simply looking for government money, and lots of it. Why spend your own money if taxpayers will foot the bill.
Candu reactors can also burn thorium. Likely first in China.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/with-thorium-we-could-have-safe-nuclear-power/article625549/
Please! You are getting your nuclear physics from a high school dropout.
Einstein?
Neil Reynolds
With thorium, we could have safe nuclear power
Neil Reynolds
Special to The Globe and Mail
========================
Wikipedia:
“Born in Kingston, Ontario in 1940,[1] Reynolds dropped out of high school and became a journalist.[2]”
Whoops. I see from Wikipedia that Einstein dropping out is a myth. He just changed schools because he didn’t get along well at the one and wanted to rejoin his family who had moved to Italy.
So is Edward Snowden. So was financier Sir James Goldsmith, who tried to warn Congress about GATT in 1994 and predicted consequences for the US that came true a decade later. Reynolds is a journalist, not a nuclear physicist.
You should have read further:
— city editor of the Toronto Star
— editor-in-chief of the Kingston Whig-Standard
— editor-in-chief of the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal and Saint John Times-Globe
— editor-in-chief of the Ottawa Citizen (Canada’s Washington Post)
— editor-in-chief of the Vancouver Sun
— owner, publisher of Diplomat & International Canada
— editor-at-Large of three daily newspapers owned by Brunswick News Inc
— columnist for the Report on Business section of the Globe and Mail (Canada’s NYT)
Died 2012 of cancer at age 72.
sorry for the repeats, thought I lost first post.
Edward Snowden was a high school dropout. So was financier Sir James Goldsmith, who tried to warn Congress about GATT in 1994.
What’s your point? He was a journalist.
Read further:
• city editor of the Toronto Star
• editor-in-chief of the Kingston Whig-Standard
• editor-in-chief of the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal and Saint John Times-Globe in 1992.
• editor-in-chief of the Ottawa Citizen (Canada’s Washington Post)
• editor-in-chief at the Vancouver Sun
• Owner and publisher of Diplomat & International Canada, a magazine published in Ottawa.
• editor-at-Large of three daily newspapers owned by Brunswick News Inc, including the Telegraph-Journal and its two sister publications, the Times & Transcript and The Daily Gleaner.
• columnist for the Report on Business section of the Globe and Mail (Canada’s NYT)
Died 2012.
Reynolds’ nuclear physics is all wrong. He adds to it a giant conspiracy to keep thorium from being used. His report is awful.
But exactly what would be expected from a high school drop-out.
My warning, “Please! You are getting your nuclear physics from a high school dropout” was a public service.
Still comes down to the ability to turn water into steam and releasing it into the atmosphere.
As a heat source, it is ground breaking. However, they are only re-engineering the heat source, not how they turn the turbine. I’m twice as interested in changes in turning the turbine or even a Sci-Fi’ish replacement for turning the turbine.
” I’m twice as interested in changes in turning the turbine or even a Sci-Fi’ish replacement for turning the turbine.” Why? The steam turbine is by far the best machine we have for converting heat to electric power, nothing else comes close. It is creating the heat that is the problem.
Sam
Re: “Steam turbine . . .best machine”.
That depends on whether you are converting heat or using fuels.
Steam turbine technology is increasing to Ultra Super Critical temperatures of about 760deg C with efficiencies approaching 45% HHV. Gas turbines are working towards about 1600degC with efficiencies > 61.5%, then to 1700degC.
Tell me again how this is substantively different from one of those stock trading schemes advertised on the radio/tv that will make me (and everybody else) rich? A working prototype is surely the minimum needed.
It isn’t just Lockheed working on the problem. There are several startups doing R&D on small-scale fusion. Some of them are quite well-funded (funding sources include NASA, the Navy, the Canadian government and various VCs), and some include former DOE lab scientists as founders or in senior technical positions. Their approaches are all different. I remain skeptical of all of them until something is clearly demonstrated and replicated, but there is increasing interest in the idea that fusion can be achieved without a gazillion-dollar tokamak or similar equipment. Some names for you to Google:
Lawrenceville Plasma Physics / Focus Fusion
General Fusion (funded to the tune of $55 million)
EMC2 Fusion
Tri Alpha Energy (very heavily funded, apparently $100 million +)
Helion Energy
Muon Fusion / Star Scientific
I sit on the board of a poorly-funded fusion startup that has its own unique approach with a plausible theoretical foundation based on supersonic collapse of a cavitionally-induced bubble of a specific gas inside a heavy liquid. I’ve always thought that the chances of a commercially viable product resulting from its efforts are low, 5% or less. Even if the theory proves to be sound, it’s a big jump from a lab demo to commercial reality. But the investment required (couple of million or less) to confirm or refute the concept is ridiculously low in comparison to the money that’s been spent on “big fusion” yet all our grant applications are routinely denied, so we’re left trying to garner interest from angel or VC investors . Please note that I am NOT soliciting any sort of investment from anyone here and therefore haven’t included my startup’s name on the list. Every company listed above is a competitor of ours.
The basic point is that the age of fossil fuels will end only when a technology comes along that can genuinely compete with it on an economic basis, and there are at least glimmers of such tech on the horizon. I agree that fusion’s been 30 years away for 60 years, but I believe that in the next five years or so someone will confirm whether fusion is possible at small scales. The debacle over Cold Fusion crippled research in this field for decades (even though most of these companies are researching “hot” fusion, just at small scales). The way that the mainstream physics community responded to the concept was shameful in many regards and has eerie parallels to the way that climate “scientists” respond to skeptics.
it is good that there is at least some funding going to what would have to be the future of energy production.
i thought skunk works were on the same path as EMC2 company with the fusor design being the starting point and the polywell being the last attempt –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell
it seems the EMC2 company has run into funding problems, and skunk works have changed direction a bit.
wonder of Lockheed is about to go before a budget committee in order to garner funds for research. This could be one of the sales pitches.
The thing that makes me the most skeptical is that, as someone else mentioned, they are giving press releases about a project that is just in the preliminary stages. Why not wait till they are in the second or third generation design when they will have some hard data to back up the pie-in-the-sky claims.
Mind you, I’ve long been a fan of the idea of a Nuclear powered train, which this could pull off.
Not that any such thing would ever get planning permission.
Thanks to Lockheed, this announcement may very well push the other countries Like Japan. South Korea, Israel, Eurozone and Russia to also “go public” with their advances. Let the race begin – rock on fusion…
A report on testing of the e-cat was released just 5 days ago. The results look quite promising:
http://www.e-catworld.com/2014/10/08/e-cat-report-released/
I think due to LENR having made some news of late, then it comes down to squeaky wheels looking to grab funding for hot fusion vs that of cold fusion.
Rossi claims that a 1 MW plant is at a customer site now and will be operation soon.
The simple issue is LENR does seem to work – it just a question of how close such a technology is to commercialization.
While HOT fusion is not able to produce more energy in then out (at least practically), it looks that LENR likely will win this race, and do so with much less effort and funding.
Regards,
Albert k
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-03/acs-fr031709.php
SALT LAKE CITY, March 23, 2009 — Researchers are reporting compelling new scientific evidence for the existence of low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR), the process once called “cold fusion” that may promise a new source of energy. One group of scientists, for instance, describes what it terms the first clear visual evidence that LENR devices can produce neutrons, subatomic particles that scientists view as tell-tale signs that nuclear reactions are occurring…
Low-energy nuclear reactions could potentially provide 21st Century society a limitless and environmentally-clean energy source for generating electricity, researchers say. The report, which injects new life into this controversial field, will be presented here today at the American Chemical Society’s 237th National Meeting. It is among 30 papers on the topic that will be presented during a four-day symposium, “New Energy Technology,” March 22-25, in conjunction with the 20th anniversary of the first description of cold fusion.
“Our finding is very significant,” says study co-author and analytical chemist Pamela Mosier-Boss, Ph.D., of the U.S. Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) in San Diego, Calif. “To our knowledge, this is the first scientific report of the production of highly energetic neutrons from an LENR device.”
In the new study, Mosier-Boss and colleagues inserted an electrode composed of nickel or gold wire into a solution of palladium chloride mixed with deuterium or “heavy water” in a process called co-deposition. A single atom of deuterium contains one neutron and one proton in its nucleus.
Researchers passed electric current through the solution, causing a reaction within seconds. The scientists then used a special plastic, CR-39, to capture and track any high-energy particles that may have been emitted during reactions, including any neutrons emitted during the fusion of deuterium atoms.
At the end of the experiment, they examined the plastic with a microscope and discovered patterns of “triple tracks,” tiny-clusters of three adjacent pits that appear to split apart from a single point. The researchers say that the track marks were made by subatomic particles released when neutrons smashed into the plastic. Importantly, Mosier-Boss and colleagues believe that the neutrons originated in nuclear reactions, perhaps from the combining or fusing deuterium nuclei.
“People have always asked ‘Where’s the neutrons?'” Mosier-Boss says. “If you have fusion going on, then you have to have neutrons. We now have evidence that there are neutrons present in these LENR reactions.”
They cited other evidence for nuclear reactions including X-rays, tritium (another form of hydrogen), and excess heat. Meanwhile, Mosier-Boss and colleagues are continuing to explore the phenomenon to get a better understanding of exactly how LENR works, which is key to being able to control it for practical purposes.
Mosier-Boss points out that the field currently gets very little funding and, despite its promise, researchers can’t predict when, or if, LENR may emerge from the lab with practical applications. The U.S. Department of the Navy and JWK International Corporation in Annandale, Va., funded the study.
“Rossi claims that a 1 MW plant is at a customer site now and will be operation soon.”
About ten days ago Rossi said there were problems and that the customer site wouldn’t be receiving visitors for about a year.
Working practical fusion could bring many wonders , of which the Greens total rejection of it and opposite to it will be one. For them the idea of such a ready power supply is a bit of a nightmare as they know their best hopes of a return to the mythic golden pastoral ‘good old days’ is best served through power shortages and high costs that relying on renewable will bring about.
Suggesting civilian ships and planes should use nuclear reactors is a bit naive in my opinion.
its not nuclear in the traditional sense … no radioactive fuel …
Tritium is radio-active. But you are correct; there is none of that.
“””””…..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. …..”””””
Well I beg to differ.
Gravitation powers the stars; and gravity sucks. So nyet on building a gravitational reactor here on earth. They need to be about 860,000 miles in diameter, if mostly hydrogen.
So forget gravity, we have no control over huge amounts of mass.
The strong force and the weak force are both useless, not poking their noses outside the atomic nucleus.
So that leaves electromagnetism; the Coulomb force; and it doesn’t suck; it pushes. So try pushing an H20 truck up a one in 20 grade, with a piece of rope (maybe made out of gelspun polyethylene GSP).
These guys are going to keep their hundreds of millions of degrees of ?? nuclear fuel at thousands of atmospheres of pressure, and basically hold them there indefinitely, to squish the ?? fuel atoms together to make ????
Whoopee ! Well they have to provide a controlled constant supply of ?? fuel atoms, and they also have to get rid of all the ???? garbage effluent, that this thing makes (excuse me; that’s will make.)
The reaction used by the LL laser at the National ignition facility, uses the D-T fuel cycle which goes like : D+T > 4He + n + 17.6 MeV
Well we don’t even have any hydrogen mines, let alone any Tritium mines; and not that pesky (n).
These guys claim their thing is clean. On both counts, it can’t be a D-T process, which I believe is the lowest ignition point reaction
T-T is even worse, as you get T + T > 4He + 2n + 11.3 MeV.
So double the fuel unavailability, and double the pesky neutrons, and much less energy yield.
The D-D looks ok. D + D > T + p + 4.04 MeV
Plenty of D in the top 1/16th of an inch of water in San Francisco Bay, and you get a tritium, which you could collect and put in your D-T reactor. Good luck with that problem.
But no nasty (n)s.
Problem is that the ignition condition is way higher than the D-T reaction, and so far nobody has gotten any usable energy out of that. I think they all have the DTs.
Well I think I can last another 5 years, maybe even 10. I’ll drink a toast when they fly the first one in a future Boeing Air liner. Well maybe LM will no longer be in the aero-plane business then with this new business.
Well I’m always hopeful, so I wish them good fortune. If Northrup, can stabilize a B2 flying wing, I’m sure LM can stabilize an EM field indefinitely despite the fact that Earnshaw’s theorem says that is impossible.
Maybe it takes dark energy to do controlled thermo-nuclear fusion.
But the energy of the sun, made here on earth; that ain’t going to happen. Because gravity is the weakest force in the universe.
I’m way out of my depth, but where is the cooling system for the superconducting magnets ?
Not at all out of your depth. See my post above on fundamental engineering challenges. BTW ITER has the same superconducting magnet challenge, and has over $20 billion of committed government funding. So maybe there are answers that we just don’t ‘get’. And maybe not.
Well it’s right there at about maybe 100 K, if you’re lucky, and just a few inches (in their pocket flashlight one) away from the several hundred million K plasma. Wish for a truly remarkable heat trapping material.
What the hell am I saying ?? We have one already; it’s carbon dioxide !!
Once that thing is running, dealing with the waste heat from the SCmagnets is trivial compared to the heating of the reactor vessel. Yes the whole thing need one big robust, reliable, fail safe cooling mechanism.
Last I heard SC’s aren’t, at temperatures much above absolute zero.
So yes, lots of cooling needed, I guess.