Fusion Power Is Almost Ready

I can’t say enough about the announcement by the Lockheed Skunkworks about their breakthrough fusion reactor. There are a lot of things I want to say about it, but it is hard to compare it to anything we have, because we do not know what we have. If we knew what were in the secret projects we might be able to make an intelligent comparison to what we have now and even if we have something akin to fusion power or even better, but with the information we have now, we can’t so I will just assume we have nothing better and proceed. First of all the atomic power we have now is fission and very dangerous. It is dangerous for several reasons, one of which is long term contamination if something goes wrong with the reactors as did in Japan and Russia. Another reason they are dangerous is the fact the reactor fuel is highly contaminated and stays that way for hundreds of thousands of years, so it needs to be isolated somehow but in truth there is no way to do that for so long because our planet is dynamic and everything changes over time. The reactors which power cities are relatively very large and require a safety dome.

Fusion is the fusion of atoms together. One of the things which makes fusion so attractive is the waste products including even the core will remain dangerously radioactive for only about 150 years. The other thing about the announcement by Lockheed is they claim they can produce a reactor which will be only the size of a truck and yet be able to power a small city. It has been calculated that if we took the same amount of fuel a fossil fuel generating plant would burn to produce a certain amount of energy and we took the same amount of fuel and used a fusion reactor, it would produce about ten million times more energy. The fuel it could use would be deuterium from seawater and tritium from lithium.

An article I read recently spoke to the fact if we had enough cheap or free energy we could solve most of the world’s problems. It spoke about many of the problems I speak about regularly. A problem which is growing and needs to be resolved immediately is the lack of drinking water in the world. If we had fusion reactors we could use their power to desalinize sea water creating plenty of water to drink. It could also be used to pump the recently found water under the oceans to the surface and even to desalinize it, if necessary. Food shortage would become a thing of the past since we could use fusion power to irrigate the deserts of the world creating plenty of food for everyone. Before I go any further I would hope we all realize we would be fought every step of the way by the big multinational corporations who control food and water and want to keep things the way they are. That is the shame of things.

I am now going to assume again. This assumption is we do not have interplanetary capabilities for human spaceflight. I really think we do, but if we don’t small fusion plants could power our spaceships and we could zip around the solar system. Zip is a relative term since a trip to Mars in a fusion powered spaceship is estimated to take about ninety days. This is still faster than we could do it today, supposedly. Jupiter would take about 14.2 times longer, Saturn 35 times longer and so on, so you can see even fusion power in spaceships is certainly not fast enough, but it is a start.

There have been a lot of announcements about fusion power, but until now it took more energy to run a fusion reactor than it produced. None of the announcements held water, but since Lockheed is publicly held it wouldn’t dare announce something like this unless it could follow through. Another fact to consider is the reactor was developed in the super secret division of Lockheed, the Skunkworks which sends me a signal and the signal is they probably had this baby for years and it might already be powering some of our spaceships and even our fighter craft in small versions. If this was true one might ask why would Lockheed announce this? The answer seems simple to me, either other countries have already found out about it, or it will be too expensive for Lockheed to build alone so they need financial supporters to share the load, after all they are a company on the stock exchange.

When the commercial models of this reactor are built it may become practical to build even smaller ones to power individual buildings such as the skyscrapers in cities like New York, thus getting them off the electrical grid. I am sure it will also make it possible to take the military instillations off the grid. We will probably never see one cheap and small enough to power a private home or automobile. Solar power is the best idea for home owners to get them off the grid along with electric cars.

There are plenty of uses for fusion power which I have not discussed. One might be the generation of a magnetic field powerful enough to protect a spaceship from small meteor hits. There is also talk of finding an even more powerful fuel for a fusion reactor than the one mentioned above. I am not privy to the facts on how the internals of the Lockheed fusion reactor will work, but one of the more successful fusion experiments used a laser to hit a pellet and cause a reaction. Perhaps this is the way it will work. There are many other methods being studied.

One thing I know for sure is fusion power could save the earth right now and as technology improves even that could give way to super-efficient solar cells in the distant future. There are some scientists who are now claiming they have perfected cold fusion, using a device in the lab at room temperature, but that is yet to be shown consistently. With the announcement by Lockheed, the future had become a lot brighter for the people of this planet as long as the discovery isn’t hogged by the companies and outrageous fees charged because this would defeat everything about it.