SKUNK WORKS FUSION REACTOR TO PLAY DAVID TO ITER’S GOLIATH

Jet-Engine Sized Reactor Could Produce As Much Power as the Gigantic ITER

Skunk Works, the experimental division of aerospatial giant Lockheed Martin claims that it will have a fully operative nuclear fusion reactor in ten years; and it will only be the size of a jet engine! But, the real thing that makes you sit up and listen, is that the system will have the same power output as the ITER International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (not expected to be operational until the 2020s), which is ten times the size of Skunk Works’ compact fusion reactor.

The team at Skunk Works led by Dr. Thomas McGuire say they are able to achieve this size-to-power effciency by adopting a radically different approach to creating nuclear fusion power. They have by-passed the soviet tokamak design and instead invented a new tube-like reactor that avoids the soviet system’s limitations; [The traditional tokamak designs] can only hold so much plasma, and we call that the beta limit. [Their plasma ratio is] 5% or so of the confining pressure. […] We should be able to go to 100% or beyond.