Shouldn't you be thankful that your pristine country is protected from Yankee cultural rot and contamination?
I'd mod this up but I already posted, dammit
At the recent Google “Solve for X” conference on February 7, Lockheed Martin's long-term R&D department (“Skunk Works”) announced they are working on a compact fusion reactor. With what seems a 4th generation prototype called "T4", the aerospace giant says to have developed a high beta configuration, which allows a compact reactor design and faster development timeline.
Public reactions describe the announcement of their activities on nuclear fusion remarkable, because Lockheed Martin doesn't usually make public announcements about Skunkwork projects unless they have a high degree of confidence in their chances of success. The developement timeline indicates plans to have a prototype 100-megawatt nuclear fusion machine of Lockheed Martin tested in 2017, and that a fully operational machine should be grid-ready ten years from now.
Some of the properties reported from the presentation:
- A self-tuning feedback mechanism whereby the magnetic field increases the farther out that the plasma goes
- Novel magnetic field configuration that has very few open field lines compared to tokamak design
- Very "good arch curvature" of the field lines The system has a beta of about 1
- System is working with D-T fuel
Although the presentation is short on details, Lockheed Skunk Words has a phenomenal track record, and they are putting their reputation of the line when they make this kind of announcement at a high profile Google event. A video of the presentation is here.
You will have many recoverable tape errors.