(Lead photo credit: Bloomberg) – From the people that have brought you some of the gnarliest technological marvels of the last century, including the SR-71, the F-117, and the U-2 spy plane now comes the concept and potential working model for a nuclear reactor that is the size of a pickup truck…or smaller. Why? Because they frigging can. That’s why. Look, this story has nothing to do with cars, trucks, drag racing, autocross, tractor pulling, or any other motorsports activity. It does have something to do with the fact that too many people fall into the “nothing gets made here” anymore idea and they are wrong. Let this story serve as proof. Now, on some level they are right. The crappy clothes basket you bought at the giant box store in your town? We didn’t make that. Nope, that thing was crapped out of some factory in China located in a town with more consonants and vowels jammed up on top of one another we’d sprain a vocal chord trying to get the noise out. This is the kind of stuff we still do here. The kind of stuff that no one else has tackled yet. Why are we doing it? Basically because we can and because it would provide a pretty revolutionary energy source for ships, airplanes, cities, towns, and virtually any other application you can think of. The possibilities here are enormous, but so are the challenges. That being said, the guy pictured in the lead photos above? Yeah, he looks smart enough to pull this off.
We’re not nuclear engineers here so take this with a grain of salt but the FUSION reactor that these boys and girls are working on is different than the typical FISSION reactors used to make electricity these days. How? Well they are more stable, less susceptible to stuff like the Fukashima disaster happening, make far less waste product, and when they are disturbed by something, like a massive Tsunami of water washing over them, they stop reacting. There is no melt down.
Lockheed believes that within 10 years they can have something marketable on their hands. They think that within a year the guys in the lab can have a working model built and running. Within five years they can be testing a prototype that would mirror the actual production piece and go on from there. Obvious concerns are the costs. Will these things be so insanely expensive that no one will want them? Will they actually get to market with a price that will make them viable for use in any number of applications? Time will tell, but the whole thing is pretty awesome in our book.
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If they can pull it off, that would be one of the most important news stories of the century. Good luck to them.
We here in So. Cal. drive by the San Onofre nuclear power plant which will now never produce another watt of power thanks to the Japanese company Mitsubishi building stunning-expensive steam generators that were supposed to last decades and instead were failing within a year. Somebody needs to carry safe/economical nuclear power development forward, and that needs to be the United States. Good for Lockheed.
Fusion will likely be the next great technological development that will revolutionize civilization. Especially if the foot print is that small. Nearly unlimited amounts of power for 45lbs of waste material per year.
Potentials include down scaling size and power for transportation use. 2,000HP in something the size of a suburban (but probably weighs 10,000lbs…), getting fueled up a couple times a year on hydrogen and doesn’t emit anything more than helium that could either be captured or released. The volume would be low.
Aircraft, ships, space crafts, the power potential is huge and can easily replace diesel or fuel oil engines. Many large ships use electric drive motors now days anyways.
I’m optimistic simply because it is Lockheed-martin.
This would be the landmark invention of the 21st century if it can be made competitive with (subsidized, filthy, lethal) coal power.
Think of it. If within ten years they could have a commercial fusion reactor the size of a pickup truck we could see locomotives that depend neither on power grids, diesel nor coal. Tractor trailers that could be more reliable, longer running & more reliable. They wouldn’t even be puking fumes.
Distributed power generation could be more practical as well. Offload a generator from the back of a semi, fire it up & put it on the regular maintenance rounds – no high tension transmission lines needed.
And on. And on.
Awesome.
bull shipt your not physics major relearn the use of our ultiltaryan life.