"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
...

On Fri, 24 Oct 2014 12:42:10 -0500, F. George McDuffee
wrote:

On Thu, 23 Oct 2014 19:38:49 -0700, Larry Jaques
wrote:

snip

They're usually quite large and heavy. I hope it drops, though. I'd
truly love to see fusion (and the resultant near free utilities) in my
lifetime. Right, not holding my breath.

If anything beyond "cold fusion" http://tinyurl.com/2mj7q
NIST should test, and if any real potential, a new Manhattan
Project or Project Apollo to develop and deploy should be
undertaken ASAP.

As you know, magnetic-containment fusion projects have been going on
for a long time. When I co-owned a job shop in Princeton Junction, NJ
(1973 - 1980), just under half of our income came from making copper
connectors and titanium parts for the Tokamak research reactor at
Princeton Plasma Physics. That was part of Stage Two of the project,
financed in part by a $350 million federal grant.

In the time since, billions have been poured into Tokamak projects and
laser-implosion projects. A great deal of data has been accumulated,
including a lot of "unknown unknowns" that cropped up during the trial
runs of those projects.

For Lockheed to be saying now that they've combined several
containment ideas into one small vessel, and that they're confident it
will work, suggests that the accumulated test data is paying off. They
don't shoot off at the mouth over Skunk Works projects. I'm very
hopeful that they have something going.

--
Ed Huntress
================================================== ===========

I am hopeful but skeptical. As plasma physicists have progressed from a
simple glow discharge towards a plasma that is both dense enough and hot
enough, for long enough to allow significant numbers of fusion events to
occur for some level of breakeven, not to mention actual useful power
production, there has been a steady stream of: "we tried turning it up a
little more and something totally unexpected has gone wrong". This then
required a new generation of study and development work to get under
control, so that they could turn it up a little bit more and repeat the
cycle. If Lockheed had said that they had data showing sufficient density
and temperature with hydrogen, and now they just needed to put in deuterium
or deuterium and tritium, then I would be celebrating. What they seem to
have said is that they have contained some unspecified but presumably low
number of ions in a new configuration to demonstrate that that geometry
could act as a container, and that that geometry may on paper include the
solutions to the problems that have cropped up with other geometries, but
with a clean sheet as far as any unexpected problems that may be specific to
this new geometry as they begin the process of "turning it up just a little
bit more" however many times are needed to get to fusion breakeven. I
eagerly await more data, and remain hopeful but skeptical.

-----
Regards,
Carl Ijames