BI | Researchers at Lockheed Martin Corp.'s Skunk Works, announced on Wednesday their
ongoing work on a new technology that could bring about functional
nuclear reactors powered by fusion in the next 10 years.
But most scientists and science communicators we talked to are skeptical of the claim.
"The nuclear engineering clearly fails to be cost effective," Tom
Jarboe told Business Insider in an email. Jarboe is a professor of
aeronautics and astronautics, an adjunct professor in physics, and a
researcher with the University of Washington's nuclear fusion experiment.
The premise behind Lockheed's 10-year plan is the smaller size of
their device. The scientists are designing an improved version of a
compact fusion reactor. The CFR generates power from nuclear fusion by
extracting energy through the extremely hot plasma contained inside it.
The plasma consists of hydrogen atoms that, when heated to billions
of degrees, fuse together. When this happens they release energy, which
the CFR then extracts and can eventually transfer into electricity.
Traditional containment vessels for these plasmas are called
tokamaks, and they look like hollowed-out doughnuts and are the size of
an average apartment. Lockheed says its new CFR can generate 10 times
more power than a tokamak in a space that could fit on the back of a
large truck, according to Aviation Week. But Jarboe disagrees.
"This design has two doughnuts and a shell so it will be more than four times as bad as a tokamak,"
Jarboe said, adding that, "Our concept [at the University of
Washington] has no coils surrounded by plasma and solves the problem."
Although Lockheed Martin issued a press release
saying it had several pending patents for its approach, the company has
yet to publish any scientific papers on this latest work.
"It's really great that Lockheed has taken an interest in this
important challenge of providing carbon-free energy to the world,"
Michael Zarnstorff, deputy director for research at the Princeton Plasma
Physics Laboratory, told Business Insider in an email. "We haven't seen
any results from the Lockheed experiments but the design is an
interesting concept and it looks like they are at a very early stage of
exploring this configuration."
