Lockheed’s fabled “Skunk Works,” which notoriously concocted iconic Cold War gadgets like the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes (and probably some satellites and other stuff we don’t know about, and maybe even flying saucers), apparently has been tinkering with fusion power, I assume at Uncle Sam’s request and on his dime, although it’s not clear whether that’s the case.
If we want to break our fossil fuel addiction, the world will have to run on electricity, so squeezing juice from dirt or rocks we don’t have to burn and therefore doesn’t release smoke and CO2 is a great big deal. The Skunk Works engineers issued a press release today saying they’ve made a fusion power “breakthrough.”
“Breakthrough” is a pejorative and subjective term that doesn’t tell you any more than what they want us to know. In fact, it probably was scripted by a press flack, not project engineers; most companies don’t trust their engineers to generate excitement and peddle enthusiasm when they’re trying to raise investment money for a new product; they hire PR people for that. We don’t know anything about this except what Lockheed’s press release says, and it’s not useful to channel-flip through the news outlets, because they’re all running identical stories written from the same press release. This is what Lockheed shared with the world this morning:
“Lockheed Martin Corp. said on Wednesday it had made a technological breakthrough in developing a power source based on nuclear fusion, and the first reactors, small enough to fit on the back of a truck, could be ready in a decade. … Initial work demonstrated the feasibility of building a 100-megawatt reactor measuring 7 feet by 10 feet, which could fit on the back of a large truck and is about 10 times smaller than current reactors.”
Now maybe some technical types out there can tell us whether this is earth-shaking or history-changing or whatever pejorative terminology you prefer. I don’t know, so don’t look at me, I’m a lawyer not a physicist or engineer or battery expert. We’ve known for a long time how to get more energy than is put out by dozens of conventional CO2-emitting power plants from inert metal stuffed into a garbage can shaped like a traffic cone. The presence of more than 1,000 glowing craters in the Nevada desert floor attests the idea works.
These power sources consist of a hollow ball and solid rod of plutonium surrounded by styrofoam inside a bell jar of uranium, nowadays shaped like a peanut, with no moving parts. They’re very efficient for their intended purpose, which is to terminate the human species and every other living thing except possibly algae and insects, but non-suicidal applications the trick is getting their immense latent energy in a steady trickle instead of all at once. I presume that’s what Lockheed is tinkering with.
The stocks of both Lockheed and Tesla are down this morning, along with the rest of the stock market, so I can report that Wall Street isn’t going ape over this, and they’re usually on top of things better than most people. Make of it what you will, and post what you think in the comments. By all means, share your thoughts; I’m curious what this means, or whether it means anything more than a corporate press office banging on a garbage can lid to get our attention for an announcement that, somewhere down the road, likely involves our tax money in some fashion
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(Full Disclosure: I own 100 shares of Lockheed stock, which isn’t enough for me to get rich by posting this article, and isn’t why I posted it. As I said above, I’m merely curious whether this means anything, and I’m throwing it out for other people’s input on that question.)