Mr. Fusion from Back to the Future?

[media-credit name=”Universal Pictures- joshblackman.com” align=”alignnone” width=”300″][/media-credit]Lockheed Martin, an American global aerospace, defense, security and advanced
technology company, recently announced that their “Skunk Works” team are ten years
away from powering Doc Brown’s’ time traveling Delorean. Well… not quite.
On October 20th, Dr. Thomas McGuire, a spokesman for the project, stated, “Our
compact fusion concept combines several alternative magnetic confinement
approaches, taking the best parts of each, and offers a 90 percent size reduction over
previous concepts.”

Imagine hydrogen gas being super heated and compressed by a strong electromagnetic
field. The fused gas atoms give off massive amounts of heat that in turn heat water that
spins turbines, creating electricity. Their method squeezes a lot more plasma (the
super-heated gas) into one space. This means that instead of a reactor occupying a
hundred-thousand square foot building, they could have a reactor that fits on the back of a semi.

If the technology does indeed become publicly available in 20 years, how will it change the way we live? Imagine inexpensive power and water for the masses, taking a trip to Mars in sixth of the time, or aircraft that can stay aloft for a year. Energy restraints would be virtually non-existent, spurring advances in scientific research. We might even get a USS Enterprise!

Are there any risks? “You can’t make a bomb from it, and it has no meltdown risk. It’s
very different from nuclear fission reactors,” stated Charles Chase, leader of the project. Unlike fission, where atoms are split, fusion involves squishing two atoms together, a process that creates virtually no emissions or by-products.

Though years from becoming available, this upcoming tech is likely to make almost
anyone drool. So get your puffer vest on and call up your local mad scientist, because,
thanks to new scientific development, we are going… Back to the Future!

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Steele Kreis

Steele is an INTJ Scorpio who enjoys long walks in the mountains, taking prolonged sips of grape juice from a wine-glass and serenading the silence around him with his violin. When he's not ensuring that his parents do not break their computers, he takes every chance he gets to scour the internet for each exhilarating development in the scientific world.