PALMDALE, Calif., Oct. 15, 2014 – The Lockheed Martin [NYSE: LMT] Skunk Works® team is working on a new compact fusion reactor (CFR) that can be developed and deployed in as little as ten years. Currently, there are several patents pending that cover their approach. 
 
 
 
 While fusion itself is not new, the Skunk Works has built on more than 60 years of fusion research and investment to develop an approach that offers a significant reduction in size compared to mainstream efforts. 
 
 
 
 “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,” said Tom McGuire, compact fusion lead for the Skunk Works’ Revolutionary Technology Programs. “The smaller size will allow us to design, build and test the CFR in less than a year.” 
 
 
 
 After completing several of these design-build-test cycles, the team anticipates being able to produce a prototype in five years. As they gain confidence and progress technically with each experiment, they will also be searching for partners to help further the technology. 
 
 
 
 Headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, Lockheed Martin is a global security and aerospace company that employs approximately 113,000 people worldwide and is principally engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture, integration and sustainment of advanced technology systems, products and services. The Corporation’s net sales for 2013 were $45.4 billion. 
 
 

 The magnetic coils inside the compact fusion experiment pictured in an undated photo provided by Lockheed Martin. 
 
 WASHINGTON 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 for use in a decade. 
 
 Tom McGuire, who heads the project, said he and a small team had been working on fusion energy at Lockheed's secretive Skunk Works for about four years, but were now going public to find potential partners in industry and government for their work. 
 
 Initial work demonstrated the feasibility of building a 100-megawatt reactor measuring seven feet by 10 feet, which could fit on the back of a large truck, and is about 10 times smaller than current reactors, McGuire told reporters. 
 
 In a statement, the company, the Pentagon's largest supplier, said it would build and test a compact fusion reactor in less than a year, and build a prototype in five years. 
 
 In recent years, Lockheed has gotten increasingly involved in a variety of alternate energy projects, including several ocean energy projects, as it looks to offset a decline in U.S. and European military spending. 
 
 Lockheed's work on fusion energy could help in developing new power sources amid increasing global conflicts over energy, and as projections show there will be a 40 percent to 50 percent increase in energy use over the next generation, McGuire said. 
 
 If it proves feasible, Lockheed's work would mark a key breakthrough in a field that scientists have long eyed as promising, but which has not yet yielded viable power systems. The effort seeks to harness the energy released during nuclear fusion, when atoms combine into more stable forms. 
 
 "We can make a big difference on the energy front," McGuire said, noting Lockheed's 60 years of research on nuclear fusion as a potential energy source that is safer and more efficient than current reactors based on nuclear fission. 
 
 Lockheed sees the project as part of a comprehensive approach to solving global energy and climate change problems. 
 
 Compact nuclear fusion would produce far less waste than coal-powered plants since it would use deuterium-tritium fuel, which can generate nearly 10 million times more energy than the same amount of fossil fuels, the company said. 
 
 Ultra-dense deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen, is found in the earth's oceans, and tritium is made from natural lithium deposits. 
 
 It said future reactors could use a different fuel and eliminate radioactive waste completely. 
 
 McGuire said the company had several patents pending for the work and was looking for partners in academia, industry and among government laboratories to advance the work. 
 
 Lockheed said it had shown it could complete a design, build and test it in as little as a year, which should produce an operational reactor in 10 years, McGuire said. A small reactor could power a U.S. Navy warship, and eliminate the need for other fuel sources that pose logistical challenges. 
 
 U.S. submarines and aircraft carriers run on nuclear power, but they have large fission reactors on board that have to be replaced on a regular cycle. 
 
 "What makes our project really interesting and feasible is that timeline as a potential solution," McGuire said. 
 
 Lockheed shares fell 0.6 percent to $175.02 amid a broad market selloff. 
 
 (Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe) 

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 The internet lit up this morning. The world was about to change dramatically for the better, all because of a major technological breakthrough: clean, abundant energy from nuclear fusion. “Lockheed Martin’s new fusion reactor can change humanity forever,” claims the headline in Gizmodo. A “potentially paradigm-shifting development in global energy,” says Aviation Week. Lockheed’s own promotional video for the Compact Fusion Reactor claims the company is “restarting the atomic age.” 
 
 Here are the key bits from the Reuters report Wednesday morning to bring you up to speed: 
 
 Tom McGuire, who heads the project, said he and a small team had been working on fusion energy at Lockheed’s secretive Skunk Works for about four years, but were now going public to find potential partners in industry and government for their work. Initial work demonstrated the feasibility of building a 100-megawatt reactor measuring seven feet by 10 feet, which could fit on the back of a large truck, and is about 10 times smaller than current reactors, McGuire told reporters. In a statement, the company, the Pentagon’s largest supplier, said it would build and test a compact fusion reactor in less than a year, and build a prototype in five years. 
 
 Lockheed Martin, one of the biggest military supply companies in the United States, says the technology could be deployed in as little as ten years. The company promoted the news with fanfare: 
 
 Being small is a big deal. See how compact fusion #energy will power the future: http://t.co/NCNREOYrv8 #fusionenergy pic.twitter.com/Ei9fQuG1PK — Lockheed Martin (@LockheedMartin) October 15, 2014 
 
 Rosi Reed, an assistant professor of physics at Wayne State University, and a researcher at the Large Hadron Collider, run by European Organization for Nuclear Research, said that the most impressive part of the breakthrough was the increase in energy output—ten times greater than that of previous reactors. “So this means that this reactor can be a lot smaller,” she said. 
 
 Of course, Reed said, while it’s exciting news, the promise is all theoretical at this stage. Should we believe the hype? 
 
 If there was a genuine breakthrough, said one nuclear physicist, “we’d be screaming from the treetops.” 
 
 First, let’s start with the basics. What is fusion? Stars—like our very own sun—create power in their cores using nuclear fusion. The conditions in the core of a star are very extreme—high pressures, temperatures, and densities. But “when we want to reproduce those conditions on Earth, we are at a great disadvantage,” says Dr. Swadesh M. Mahajan, a thermonuclear plasma physicist at the University of Texas. That’s because we don’t have the same immense mass as the sun. Our planet is far too small to produce the kind of gravity necessary for large scale fusion. The challenge, essentially, is putting the sun in a box. That box, in theory, is packed full of charged particles, moving at great speeds, constrained by a strong magnetic field that enhances the probability that the particles slam into each other. With enough pressure, the particles stop resisting, and finally fuse, let off an amazing amount of energy. 
 
 The problem, says Reed, is that usually it takes just as much energy to power that controlling magnetic field as the power you get from fusion, hence the current size of the reactors. Lockheed claims to be able to harness that energy at a more efficient rate, so it can then make the reactors smaller. 
 
 But there are a lot of reasons to be skeptical about Lockheed’s announcement, says Mahajan, who, with a team of scientists, designed a new way to reduce waste from nuclear reactors in 2009. First, fusion reactors right now are pretty big*. Mahajan says making them smaller is extremely hard to do—you need a very confined space, with loads of material at extremely high densities, and then you need to get that power out of the reactor to be used. “So it’s both the physics and the engineering which are extremely, extremely daunting,” he said. “We know of no materials that would be able to handle anywhere near that amount of heat.” 
 
 Mahajan called Lockheed’s announcement “poppycock.” He said, “Getting net energy from fusion is such a goddamn difficult undertaking,” he said. “We’re all aware that there’s always a finite chance of some breakthrough which is beyond the powers of imagination.” But if there was a genuine breakthrough, he said, “we’d be screaming from the treetops.” 
 
 Correction: An earlier version of this article wrongly said fusion reactors power some aircraft carriers and submarines. They are in fact “fission” reactors.
– Lockheed Martin announced yesterday that it has made what Reuters calls a "technological breakthrough" in the area of compact nuclear fusion. The upshot is that reactors "small enough to fit on the back of a truck" could be here within 10 years. As Forbes explains, nuclear fusion combines two atoms into one, creating as much as quadruple the energy as nuclear fission (when an atom is split in two), and it does so without producing radiation. Project head Tom McGuire says Lockheed has been working on its compact fusion concept secretly for four years, but it's now looking for industry and government partners. "The smaller size will allow us to design, build, and test the compact fusion reactor in less than a year," says McGuire, with a prototype coming in five years. But some are skeptical: At Ars Technica, John Timmer points out that "details as to what the breakthrough is are missing." Timmer writes that an original version of Lockheed's press release, which has apparently since been taken down, said something along the lines of "If everything goes well, the design could 'be developed and deployed in as little as ten years.'" Timmer calls that "if" a "big one." The version of the press release that's currently available drops the "if." Mother Jones notes that the media is losing its mind over the news, using headline words like "paradigm-shifting." But a researcher for the Large Hadron Collider points out that the promise of a compact reactor is currently theoretical, and a thermonuclear plasma physicist goes even further, calling Lockheed's announcement "poppycock." As he explains, it's very difficult to make fusion reactors that small, because you need an extremely small space plus lots of very dense material, and "we know of no materials that would be able to handle anywhere near that amount of heat." So what's going on? Timmer suspects Lockheed is doing a "publicity offensive" because Lockheed needs commercial partners to help fund all the research that comes next. The Reuters article and press release are joined by a technical article in Aviation Week, though even that acknowledges that "many key challenges remain before a viable prototype can be built." Timmer's take: "By making the developments sound inevitable, the company increases its chances of attracting someone to share the risk."