Lockheed’s New Fusion Reactor

A fusion reactor has been the dream of scientists for decades. What is so important about having a fusion reactor, after all we have plenty of fission reactors all over the planet? The reason fusion excites the scientific community is it is more efficient, far cheaper, less dangerous and elimination of dangerous waste. While fusion reactors do not produce the dangerous waste that fission reactors do, they produce a large number of byproducts. Scientists have been looking into nuclear fusion since 1920, way before a nuclear fission reactor was operable. The British physicist Francis William Aston discovered the weight of hydrogen atoms was heavier than helium ones and theorized this might be what powered the stars. People have been thinking about fusion reactions for a long timer. Some scientists think cold fusion is possible and has even been accomplished. That is where a fusion reaction is created at room temperature. There is still a lot of controversy on this subject and some scientists are not 100% sure fusion does power the stars and cite the fact some should have used up their fuel by now if this was true.

You may be wondering by now what I am getting to, let me explain. One of the most secret engineering facilities on the face of the planet is the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works. This is a facility which while secret is very famous for what has come out of it. Let me say we probably don’t even know half of the devices they have invented, but the ones we do know about are incredible. They were responsible for the famous Blackbird or SR-71, a plane which was designed in the late 1950s and first flew in 1964. It still holds many speed records even though it was retired years ago. As it was being designed new materials were created to use in its construction. In 1976 they began building a plane named Have Blue. It was built to demonstrate stealth technology and led to the construction of the F-117 stealth fighter in 1978.Β  Many different planes were built and designed by them, but they were not only building aircraft. They designed and built a stealth ship known as the Sea Shadow and it sailed in 1984. There are all sorts of rumors surrounding the Skunk Works including the construction of anti-gravity engines and work being done on a time machine, of course a lot of this could be only rumors.

When we have a company as famous as Lockheed which has a department as famous as the Skunk Works we have to take notice when they tell us they have built something revolutionary and this is just what happened. Lockheed Skunk Works has announced they have invented a fusion reactor. The announcement is noting not only the fact they did this, but that it is small enough to fit into a fighter plane. The entire reactor is said to be the size of a jet engine. The only hitch is they announced even though it is built they need about 10 years to perfect it. Fusion reactors have been built before, but they have been worthless because they required more energy to power them than we got back. What good would a reactor be which required a ton of energy to produce a half-ton’s worth of power? The answer is simple, it is worthless. These reactors may have inspired Lockheed and the designers of the new fusion reactor may have seen something in them that led to this new device.

Hydrogen is one of the most plentiful things on earth and since a fusion reactor would use hydrogen, there would be no problem finding fuel for it. The Lockheed design was completely different from anything used before and eliminated the tokomak, a torus with magnetic fields confining the fusion reaction because that was one of the places that suck in far too much energy to power other devices. Dr. Thomas McGuire from the Skunk Works said the key to their system is its tube-like design which allows them to reduce its size. Unlike machines using the traditional tokomak design which limits how much plasma the reactor can hold to about a ratio of 5%, the Lockheed reactor should be able to get to 100%. There is even talk the machine might be able to surpass the 100% barrier which is now set. Using their new design the Skunk Works has been able to miniaturize their reactor to about 10% the size of any other reactor putting out the same amount of energy. This is quite an accomplishment.

What does all this mean to us? First of all if we can somehow get past the big energy companies who would love to keep us on oil and coal, we could be generating limitless energy for practically nothing. There would be no more worries about polluting our atmosphere with carbon fuels since this would be a very clean way to generate power. If we would keep generating some electricity by using fission generation eventually we would have nowhere to store the dangerous waste. Nuclear waste from fission generators remains dangerously radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years and truthfully, no matter what you have been told about the benefits of long term storage of such things, it does not work. The earth shifts and things move exposing this stuff. Eventually we could be responsible for destroying future generations of people because of this waste.

Lockheed is saying that their reactor could only need to be 23 X 42 feet to power large cargo ship with 100MW of power and the size will get smaller as we design more of these devices. One putting out the same amount of power in the future could be far smaller if electronics are any indication. They have been shrinking steadily since the transistor was invented. If these reactors go the same way, we might be able to see one the size of a cell phone. By the way the reactor cited above which 100MW could also power 80,000 homes. It would be able to be moved around on a truck to where ever it was needed. This would be a great advancement not only for us, but think what it would do for some of those poor third world nations. It could bring them into the 21st century. Lockheed wants to build one new reactor a year for the next five years to test and says it will be ready in the 2020s to produce the first practical one for the public. Let’s home the company doesn’t get bought out by one of the big energy companies and the reactor shelved as has happened with so much other energy technology.