Lockheed Martin’s Compact Fusion technology has the potential to revolutionize life as we know it. Maybe. If it works.
After years of development at the company’s legendary Skunkworks facility, Lockheed is coming forward now to find partners in the public and private sector. The main breakthrough is having shrunk the size of the reactor into something about the size of a shipping container.
Here’s the deal, and why it could be really cool.
Unlike nuclear fission (the splitting of atoms, like current nuclear reactors), fusion does as its name suggests, it fuses atoms together. This is what our sun does to create sunburns and life and stuff.
Fission is messy, and leaves all sorts of nastiness behind (i.e. radioactive waste that’s untouchable for, well let’s just say effectively forever). Fusion power, on the other hand, is much cleaner. In the case of the current version of Lockheed’s Compact Fusion tech, they’re using deuterium (found in seawater), and tritium (found in lithium, found in the ground). This fuel mix can result in “10 million times more energy than the same amount of fossil fuels.” Future versions could use different fuel.
via cnet
