Defense contractor, Lockheed Martin, announced a design breakthrough in nuclear fusion reactors that would revolutionize energy production on planet Earth.

Small enough to fit on the back of a truck, this reactor will mimic our Sun in fusing two hydrogen atoms into a single helium atom, releasing ten times more energy per mass as our regular old fission reactors. And they produce almost 20% of America’s electricity today.

Project leader Tom McGuire told Reuters that his team at Lockheed’s Skunk Works decided to go public with the news to recruit additional partners in industry and government to support their work.

Superconducting magnetic coils inside a compact fusion reactor. Source: Lockheed Martin
Superconducting magnetic coils inside a compact fusion reactor. Source: Lockheed Martin

Unlimited fresh water, carbon-free power to all cities, no nuclear waste, spacecraft that can get to Mars in one month, aircraft carriers that can stay at sea forever, unlimited power with no waste (not true but sounds good), this would indeed be Star Trek come to life.

According to McGuire, the key breakthrough involves using a small “magnetic bottle” to contain the hundreds of millions of degrees created by the nuclear fusion reactions.


No danger there!

Unfortunately, the magnetic bottle was abandoned in the 1950s when it was found that plasma hits the wall at the ends and is quenched due to heat conduction. That’s why we came up with the stellarator design, using a mag-bottle shaped like a figure-8 racetrack.

We’re still trying to make that one work.

Containing this level of heat and pressure has always been the issue for nuclear fusion. It is literally the Sun. And no one has been successful in dealing with it. Nothing reported from Lockheed Martin LMT +0.41% indicates they have solved it either.

We discussed this announcement at the National Nuclear Science Week at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle, Washington. The gradient of the magnetic field in this bottle would increase as it goes towards the wall, i.e., it points inward, and would be huge in such a small bottle.

Indeed, the fundamental questions supposedly solved by this design would certainly earn a few Nobel prizes.

Lockheed’s approach has superconducting magnets operating without any significant neutron or radiation shielding. This is not plausible. If they have solved this problem by bringing superconducting magnets very close to a high-density, burning fusion plasma, then I’ll eat my tokamak.

It’s really hard to shield neutron and gamma radiation in the real world and their design does not even mention this.

Lockheed said in a statement that it would build a pilot fusion reactor in the next year, and promised a working reactor by 2017.

They should have waited for this announcement until they actually had a working pilot reactor. I will be very surprised if they build one in the next year. Or the next ten.

So don’t go out and sell your natural gas stock just yet.