Lockheed Martin’s “Skunk Works” announced plans to construct a nuclear fusion power plant within the next decade. Although nuclear fusion has been unsuccessfully pursued as a source of power since the early Cold War era, Lockheed’s project outlines a plan to generate electricity from fusion effectively. Nuclear fusion can also produce greater energy efficiency than nuclear fission, which is currently used. From the article:

So in part, it’s the feasibility of the new Lockheed project that makes it so compelling. Much smaller than traditional fusion attempts, the compact fusion reactor uses a cylinder, not a ring, which makes for a stronger magnetic containment field and leaves fewer points where the energy could escape. This could make for a reactor that’s small enough for a truck to transport and still robust enough to generate power for 100,000 homes. Lockheed hopes to have a test model available by 2017, and scale up to regular production by 2022.

To read the full article, click here.

The video of Lockheed’s presentation at the “Solve for X” conference:

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