Until someone figures out a way to manufacture antimatter,
fusion is by far the cleanest and most abundant source of power
we can hope to harvest. We've known this for a long time, but
fusion is hard, and it's expensive to build the giant lasers or
toroidal plasma containment systems that are needed to get it to
work. By most estimates, we're something like 40 years away from
an operational fusion power plant. "Most estimates" do not,
apparently, include research being done at Lockheed Martin's
secretive advanced development center, Skunk Works. At Google's
Solve For X, Charles Chase describes what his team has been
working on: a trailer-sized fusion power plant that turns cheap
and plentiful hydrogen (deuterium and tritium) into helium plus
enough energy to power a small city. It's safe, it's clean, and
Lockheed is promising an operational unit by 2017 with assembly
line production to follow, enabling everything from unlimited
fresh water to engines that take spacecraft to Mars in one month
instead of six. L