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The Front-Runners In Fusion Energy
Submitted by Michael McDonald via OilPrice.com,
Fusion power has been something of a holy grail in the energy field for decades. The idea of harnessing the same energy that powers the sun naturally excites many. At the same time, despite decades of research, fusion energy has yet to come close to being a reality. The only significant practical advance in fusion reactions has been the development of thermonuclear weapons like the hydrogen bomb which, for all intents and purposes, serve the same purpose as conventional nuclear weapons.
Still, even today billions of dollars continues to be poured into fusion research at research labs around the world. And in the last decade, there has been a proliferation of interest in fusion power from commercial sources. The largest company doing work in fusion power is probably Lockheed Martin. Lockheed claims that it will have a prototype reactor in a just a few years’ time and that a commercial product could be coming within a decade.
If that occurs it would be enormously exciting – fusion power offers the potential for vastly more energy production than traditional nuclear energy with virtually no nuclear waste and no greenhouse gases. It is also practically limitless, as its fuel source comes from materials already found abundantly around the world.
But, many have rightly expressed skepticism about Lockheed’s claims, given fusion’s long history of near-breakthroughs that don’t come to pass. Thus the onus is very much on the company to show that it has a working product.
Lockheed’s not the only one in the space though. There are several start-ups, backed in many cases by vast investments, which are working toward the goal of commercially viable fusion power. Tri-Alpha, based near Irvine CA, Helion Energy in Redmond, WA, and Lawrenceville Plasma Physics of Middlesex, NJ are all taking serious runs at developing prototype reactors. If one of the firms does manage to come up with a breakthrough design, then the implication would be enormous.
The problem with fusion power is one of engineering, not science. The main hold up is the struggle to contain the plasma and keep it suspended in mid-air away from the sides of the reactor vessel, then heat that matter up to the point that the reaction takes place in earnest. This all requires an enormous amount of energy.
In fact, in 60 years of trying, no one has been able to consistently demonstrate a process that would let a fusion reactor create more energy than it consumes. All previous fusion reactors have used more energy than they produce. Unfortunately, this is a problem which has stumped many of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, and the problem may prove insurmountable.
There is some hope for the technology though. Tri-Alpha, in particular, has done some innovative things with its reactor designs, which have resulted in much longer-lived fusion reactions than others have previously demonstrated. Tri-Alpha is backed by a massive pile of cash but has been secretive about its work to date.
From an investors point of view though, fusion power remains very far from being an investable technology. The work required to make a commercially viable product at this stage is just too great for the vast majority of investors. Add to that the lack of good pure-play investing vehicles, and fusion power for now looks like it is still more science fiction than investment opportunity.
For small investors who are truly excited about the space, Lockheed Martin is a reasonable investment though. The company may or may not have gotten ahead of itself in its recent claims about prototype reactors, but given the size and scale of the firm, there is more than enough diversification to offset any set-backs on the fusion front.
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Lockheed also "hinted" some time ago when they mused about their fusion (reasonably compact, too) power units, that they were on the cusp of a time warp drive system to bend the time-space fabric, etc....
Exciting stuff ito fight off the Grays, Annanuki, Tall Blondes, Reptilains, etc. Screw the war on terror, this will be HUGE!
How is Mr Noory these days?
Boris is love Coast-to-Coast-AM! Is frequent tune in by Shortwave radio. Boris is remember 1989 when is Cold Fusion by Ponns-Fleishman. Amazing is Russia scientist is repeat experiment in one week with better result! French scientist is also repeat! Then when methodological flaw is spot, everyone is just to go away... Cold Fusion R.I.P.
... so sad!
WTF!! FUSION!!??
What about a much more viable and proven technology like oh say..
THORIUM MOLTEN SALT REACTORS YOU MOOKS!
DUHHH!!
MUST WATCH VIDEO; watch how cops operate in a legit business . the new norm in AMRIKA
Santa Ana pot shop raid sparks investigation:watch cops destroying cams , they forgot onehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTKTfUHfeKM
Solar panel makers claim they have already perfected fusion energy. It's just the damned clouds and this stupid spinning planet that's the problem.
I am old enough to remember Elmo Bumpy Torus.
Fusion power is only 10 years away, and has been for 50 years. Hello? Is this thing on?
Fusion power as we know it will never happen, as all fusion in nature is electrically powered from it's surroundings.
The sun is an anode, the temperature is actually higher on the outside than on the inside. Fusion is but a side effect of the energy transfer from the surroundings into the sun.
FAIL
Perhaps you could descibe what fails. I believe the comment to be accurate, as do a couple hundered thousand other followers of the Electric Sun model.
Not just the electric sun, but the whole of the electric universe.
While we now realize that fusion will never be an energy source, we gain something even better, the ability to derive energy from the enviroment, without fusion.
Empty space does not conduct electricity.
So what's the cathode?
STFW
While yer waiting, windmill tech. moves forward...
I thought they actually did get over unity with that.
The only way to keep the plasma from leaking out of the magnetic bottle, was to bend the ends around so they meet, like a donut.
Pure genius.
Maybe putting one at the north pole, and one at the south pole, would give it a little boost from the natural magnetism present.
The only way to keep the plasma from leaking out of the magnetic bottle, was to bend the ends around so they meet, like a donut.
Pure genius.
I always thought so too.
Solar energy delivered on site, everyday, for free. You gellin?
amazing, huh - saw an article on it at reason
http://reason.com/blog/2015/06/12/cops-raid-marijuana-dispensary-destroy-s
Will they be prosecuted for property damage and theft? How about ingesting a controlled substance? Where's the DOJ?
Well that's akward. Kinda like wearing the same suit to the same party...
Boris is small stockpile of ThCl4. You are wishing for small purchase?
(Warning: Do no store ThCl4 in refrigeration unit on balcony of apartment. Risk of melenoma, sterilization, and hair loss. Do not transporting in family vehicle with child present.)
Fuck, fusion is easy. You just need the equivalent gravity of a star. I'm surprised no company has the nerve to patend this. We all could be paying them a royalty every time we go outside.
I love you Boris, please post more often.
Boris is love you! (but not in pansy way, but is manly Russia way, like is give kiss on both side of face, but not is kiss lip of male counterpart). Neighbor wi-fi is very slow and how are you saying, "spotty"? But Boris is try very frequent visit of Zero Hedge more often.
lockheed has benn claiming breakthrough in fusion tech for past many years . But this is bullish !
Some interesting projects here:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Main_Page
Not so much big companies but hobby guys and smaller entrepreneurs.
How Focus Fusion Works
Pretty funny, Boris, but the problem with cold fusion was actually that the terminology was wrong and there was was a misunderstanding of the science----it turns out the cold fusion phenomenon was really LENR--Low Energy Nuclear Reactions.
Here's a link to a slideset that explains it clearly and completely:
http://www.slideshare.net/lewisglarsen?utm_campaign=profiletracking&utm_...
Lattice Energy LLC - US Government Labs Reported Clear-cut Neutron Capture Data from P&F Cells in Oct 1989 - May 13 2015
What methodological flaw?
The experiment has been repeated many times by many teams of researchers.
https://thinkpatriot.wordpress.com/2015/05/29/straight-from-the-horses-ass/
Too cheap to meter!!
Nothing's too cheap to tax. Take carbon, for instance.
Never the same since Art Bell hung it up. Noory's guests are the same, but he just never struck me as being anywhere near as convincing as Bell.
There is a law attributed to an expert in fusion power. I can't remember his name. It goes something like:
20 years ago commercial fusion power generation was 20 years in the future.
Right now commercail fusion power generation is still 20 years in the future.
At any given time commercail fusion power generation will ALWAYS be 20 years in the future.
I can simplify that for you: Fusion: Power of the Future!
Joking aside, Fusion is already here, and in most neighborhoods. You can buy fusion just about everywhere and its commerical sucess. I am sure by now you think I am crazy. But the truth is that you buy fusion at your local Ford dealer. It even comes with power windows and A/C (optional) :)
The future isn't what it used to be.
What if I could give you unlimited free energy?
I've seen a lot of false scientific statements in my days, like:
"Pertual Motion Machines are impossible." - Machio Kaku
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43kB20bHsTU
I've found a better way & it's incredibly cheap & infinitely more powerful!!
http://galeinnes.blogspot.com/2015/06/asking-for-help.html
(Being a programmer helped me find it, along with having over 90 jobs in my days. :)
Do not watch this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJJjOKmwl6s
What about thorium-salt nuclear power? It's been around since the 40s. Probably canned because it can't be used to build weapons.
I've often dreamed of a backyard fusion reactor to power my home, but TPTB will never allow widespread independance from the grid.
Yes, if the grid is a metaphore for the gov.
They've outlawed living off the grid in some states already... (Smelling like a Fascist Corporatocracy to me!)
Anyway, I have the answer, self running smaller products...
(Fuck the titanic, let it sink, we'll defeat it with pure GENIUS!)
Let the Japanese give it a shot
There is a big, free to use fusion reactor about 93 million miles away - near enough to enable and to provide for life on Earth yet far enough away to be safe.
In a million years time The Sun will still be there and so will the Earth but men and their delusions of God like powers will all be dust.
Harness the ionosphere and power the earth longer than humans will exist on it. The sun recharges our ionosphere. The population needed to actually start draining all that energy would not fit on our planet.
Ah shit I forgot, you can't charge people monthly bill if we have a wireless global system of electricity..
SUN TAX?!
FUSION ROFL!!
What a fucking joke. Good thing JP Morgan defunded Nikola Tesla. We wouldn't want to give the plebs free access to worldwide wireless electricity.
It will create a black hole that will swallow the galaxy, or create some comic book mutant heroes.
Or, make a bunch of scientists a good living for decades, and the corporations rich.
What good is a fusion reactor if Back to the Future is Biff's World?
You nailed it in your 2nd paragraph.
These institutional careerists and funding scammers have been 10 years away for at least 30 years, cause I remember visiting one such facility at the U of Rochester in the early 80s.
What this world needs, is not more people and sheeple, moar Debt or more Tech, but more Wisdom. Desperately. Now.
I'm still waiting for my damn Moller flying car. That POS has been "almost" ready since the 60s!
There might be some room for "stylish innovations...!"
Around 750 of these were actually made...
What everyone is looking for...
Can you imagine the FAA issuing flying car licenses to idjuts that don't always use their turn signals?
Better 'Fusion' than the absolutely WORN OUT Anthropogenic Global Warming SCAM...
Uh wouldn't it be easier to reflect the fusion energy from the sun and microwave it to earth? That's what we did back on Q99X2. I guess then anybody could do it so it wouldn't be worth that much.
There's nobody here that we can trust with such a potential weapon.
All it would take is a mirror slightly out of alignment to fry a city. But of course that could never happen. Brought to you by tepco, the geniuses of fukushima.
Wernstrom did that on Futurama.
'Fusion Energy'. Discuss.
"Is that, like, Pamela Anderson and, like, Tommy Lee?" would be the typical reaction on TMZ, or most Talk Shows these days.
There is more than enough geothermal to power the planet but they won't let us until they sold all the oil
fusion snake oil claims are a dime/dozen but lockheed's a pretty damn credible company to be puting their name behind it. less we forget this company actually DID create the mach 3+ sr-71, the stelth f-117 before letting the pentagon have its cake & eat it too w/the mach 2+ stealth f-22. they are very, VERY good at mechanical engineerin (of which aerospace is just a subspecialty). I'm certainly not betting my house on them pulling it off but they are FAR from an obscure post-doc looking to raise their profile and/or grant $...
Their executives have stock options just like everyone else's. Bonus plans dissolve ethics everywhere. Guarantee their stock goes up a bit every time they roll this shit out.
And NO company is immune to the disease of increasing shareholder value at all costs.
Yep, you can assume anyone hyping fusion is a fraud. Most likely this will never happen. Not in 100 years.
Yeah, and Big Oil will let it happen with nary a complaint
Lockheed claims that it will have a prototype reactor in a just a few years’ time and that a commercial product could be coming within a decade.
Sounds a lot like the current Greek govt, or the Brazill oil people
Note the date on this article:
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/Cold_Fusion_Ready_for_Commercial_Production.php
But, if you want to buy a unit right now:
http://phys.org/news/2013-11-italian-company-portable-cold-fusion.html
I prefer Cold Beer...
They always bring out fusion in a crisis, engines running on water, stuff like that...
Crisis maybe, but don't put your eggs in the "we'll be saved basket".
Yeah and we'll have a cure for cancer and peace in the ME when this happens.
Fusion would cause peace in the ME. No need for oil.
There already is but it isn't ready for prime time yet. A few years away. It E-cat. It's a LENR device.
Find it at www.e-catworld.com/
I dug into the details about 2-3 years ago.
IF you skim the story at a surface level - it sounds interesting. These folks put together a pretty good tale.
If you DIG deeper, start by asking the $64,000 question. HOW MUCH POWER are you using to create the fusion reaction (which typically only lasts a few moments in time). The true answer is that NONE of these outfits is close to breakeven with energy. They are all pumping in MUCH more energy than they are getting out.
So there is your first "litmus test" about the truth for this technology.
Fusion is supposed to GENERATE energy. So until these folks can get more power out of their "fusion black box" than they are putting into it ... don't throw a lot of cash at it. This research still needs MAJOR Government support!!
Not a lot of cash is thrown at it. A few billions each decade, enough to keep the professors proud and the grad students fed.
Commercial product in 10 years... They've been saying this for 50 years already. No reason to believe they won't still be saying it in another 50 years.
Fusion is well understood. The physics of bomb making were perfected in the 1940's, two life times ago! So why does it still seem so far away as a controlled power source? Well, the same physics that make bombs so powerful. How do you start fusion and control the reaction. Simply put, you are making a mini sun, good luck controlling that and extracting usable power. Years ago I was reading about fusion reactors, and it seemed lasers were being used to compress atoms to get fusion. The plasma must be held in place, hard enough. Even then, how does one extract usable energy from the plasma. The reason it is still a dream is that Physics offers no easy way out, fusion is fusion. A bomb or a sun. A power plant might take more energy to control the plasma and keep the reaction going that you could extract. On the sun, gravity does all the work, in a bomb, conventional shaped charge explosive does the work. I just don't see practical fusin power plants in time to reverse the fast approaching SHTF moment.
You dont know what you are talking about.
Hard to extract the power?
The difficulty lies in keeping the power IN. You want the plasma to STAY HOT! The heat flows out, heats the shields and cools down.
What you want is a stable rate of heat loss. The shields get hot, you cool them with water and get yourself some steam.
We already trap gravity energy in the form of water powered generators at dams. Long ago the water wheel trapped gravity energy. I just believe that if man really put his money behind making use of gravity, we would have the perfect energy source. Gravity of earth an moon are free energy, more should be done to improve on old ways of getting that energy. Any flowing stream is a gravity power generator. Tides as well, come and go, and are gravity turned to energy.
I hope to live long enough to see work done on harnessing quantum gravity as an energy source.
But I think the comparatively cave-man like tech involved in thermeonuclear weapons may set the human race back a few millenia well before that happens.
I hope to live long enough to see work done on harnessing quantum gravity as an energy source.
What is this? The ZH psuedo-science hour or something?
what is 'psuedo-science' and does it have anything at all to do with you not having the first idea about quantum gravity?
"lol"
What do you mean by cave-man?
We already trap gravity energy in the form of water powered generators at dams.
Gravity is a myth . . . . . the Earth really sucks.
you can build your own myth powered light in about half an hour, if so inclined.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-tech/sustainable/gr...
This isn't quite harnessing quantized gravity... but it's pretty neat anyway.
Lol
Maybe the sun does not work on fusion, thats why it cant be duplicated.......
Maybe we live in an ELECTRIC UNIVERSE..........
Perhaps. Impossible is nothing!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7Kboormk3Y
Sure glad to see that at least one of you gets it. (After years of lurking, this is my first comment)
All you need is a big enough reactor and thermal inertia will let you get away with poor confinement times. Alas reactors hafta be small.
I worked on fusion for about 10 years out of grad school (one of the big natl lab/university places). I was there for the whole cold fusion fiasco (and won many cases of beer from friends who should have known better....my statement "it is either mis-reported muon catalyzed that made a breakthrough, or it is bunk". I finally quit, jumped ship for industry, sold out...whatever you want to call it.... my reasoning, fusion was technically possible eventually, but politically impossible the way DOE and the nat'l labs were managed. I haven't changed my mind in the decades since. I don't keep up with it much anymore....all the labs are doing support work for ITER on vastly reduced budgets. Innovation pretty much outlawed, but there are a few cool exceptions. I read about the Lockheed stuff a couple years ago when they first started talking about it, but at the time it sounded like a PR blurb that was way overstating the case. They hadn't even got far enough to understand what they didn't understand yet.
Someday we'll have fusion, but I probably won't be alive to see it.
You betrayed no one.
I too became convinced neither fusion nor thorium fission nor solar power were being developed due to long term political considerations. I did not spend 10 years in fusion, only a couple, right around the time i took a red pill. IMHO we wont get safe and unlimited energy without first enacting the guidestones.
Watch Dr. Lerner's Google Tech Talk. Lawrenceville Plasma Physics has already achieved fusion, but their goal of creating an ion stream is still a ways off.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrenceville_Plasma_Physics
"Why Is Quantum Gravity So Hard? And Why Did Stalin Execute the Man Who Pioneered the Subject? "
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/why-is-quantum-gravity-so...
little OT, but good, clean nerd fun.
Complete BS. The physics of fusing deuterium and tritium is well known, produces so many neutrons. There are no materials to handle that.
Cold Fusion / Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions is real, and smarter people than these are putting $ into the research, Foreign companies have been doing so for 25 years, during which our High Energy physics establishment has been doing its best to stop it.
https://thinkpatriot.wordpress.com/2015/05/29/straight-from-the-horses-ass/
How can Fusion be ten years out and yet considered feasible? Either the path to it's creation is visable and at least partially known or it isn't. How do they quantify this ten year time frame? Glad billions could be spent on the MIC for a big circle jerk.
The controlled nuclear fusion (hot or cold) is the only revolutionary technology on horizon that has any chance to solve problem of sustainable green energy for millennia to come.
However, during last 50 years it was shamefully underfunded and plagued with scandals, waste and over overblown bureaucracy. We need at least hundred times more funding and tens of thousand educational grants for young talented physicists to deal with the problem in new revolutionary ways since old ways are stuck in the rot for decades.
Part of the reason of the setbacks so far was failure of the theoretical framework of collisional plasma physics, a patchwork of mostly linear mathematical models that only partially fit the specific data and utter absence of general non-linear plasma theory, only partially addressed by plasma simulations.
The instability problems in plasma confinement settings were first discover in 1950-ties and it continue to be Achilles heel of the whole program perhaps indicating lack of deep understanding of fundamental physical micro-processes in unified framework.
An interesting discussion of rarely addressed weaknesses of widely accepted scientific methodologies that after initial success leading often to dead end or to internal, often ignored, inconsistencies I found at:
https://questfornoumenon.wordpress.com/2015/01/21/a-note-on-science-theo...
For controversial discussion about sustainable energy sources in demographic context see:
https://sostratusworks.wordpress.com/2015/02/11/engineering-renewable-de...
I think Tyler stole my avatar to illustrate this piece.