
A technology has been developed to achieve a stable fusion reaction
At the Solve for X conference, which suits Google to collaborate on global challenges, Charles Chase made a sensational statement that Lockheed has developed a technology for achieving a stable fusion reaction. According to him, this technology will allow within 5 years to create a prototype of a compact thermonuclear power plant, and after 10 years to build an industrial design. If things go uphill, then by 2050 this technology will cover the entire need for human energy.
The representative of Lockheed claims that they managed to create a hot fusion facility in which plasma heated by microwave radiation is held inside the facility by a magnetic trap that does not have “holes” in the magnetic field through which the plasma could leak. They claim that at the installation they reached an equilibrium state between the plasma pressure and the magnetic field strength of the trap in which the plasma is located. Due to all this, such an installation turns out to be very simple from an engineering point of view and compact, plus it does not have all the disadvantages that have tokamaks, and because of which the design of tokamaks is extremely complicated - just problems with plasma confinement and pressure. Their current laboratory setup works with an efficiency of 0.9 - that is, the energy output almost covers the costs of holding and heating the plasma. The full-size engineering sample that they plan to assemble will be about two meters in size, and already with an efficiency of more than 1 and a power output of about 100 megawatts. By 2022, they plan to produce already production models. Only promising slow-wave nuclear reactors can compete more or less in efficiency with such plants.
The representative of Lockheed claims that they managed to create a hot fusion facility in which plasma heated by microwave radiation is held inside the facility by a magnetic trap that does not have “holes” in the magnetic field through which the plasma could leak. They claim that at the installation they reached an equilibrium state between the plasma pressure and the magnetic field strength of the trap in which the plasma is located. Due to all this, such an installation turns out to be very simple from an engineering point of view and compact, plus it does not have all the disadvantages that have tokamaks, and because of which the design of tokamaks is extremely complicated - just problems with plasma confinement and pressure. Their current laboratory setup works with an efficiency of 0.9 - that is, the energy output almost covers the costs of holding and heating the plasma. The full-size engineering sample that they plan to assemble will be about two meters in size, and already with an efficiency of more than 1 and a power output of about 100 megawatts. By 2022, they plan to produce already production models. Only promising slow-wave nuclear reactors can compete more or less in efficiency with such plants.