Lockheed Martin Compact Fusion Reactor
The CFR chief designer and technical team lead, Thomas McGuire[2] studied fusion as a source of space propulsion in response to a NASA desire to improve travel times to Mars.
[3][4][5] The project began in 2010,[6] and was publicly presented at the Google Solve for X forum on February 7, 2013.
[7] In May 2016, Rob Weiss announced that Lockheed Martin continued to support the project and would increase its investment in it.
The CFR has no net current, which Lockheed claimed eliminates the prime source of plasma instabilities.
The plasma's small volume reduces the energy needed to achieve fusion.
[6] The blanket component that lines the reactor vessel has two functions: it captures the neutrons and transfers their energy to a coolant, and forces the neutrons to collide with lithium atoms, transforming them into tritium to fuel the reactor.
One was an ideal configuration weighing 200 metric tons with 1 meter of cryogenic radiation shielding and 15 tesla magnets.
The other was a conservative configuration weighing 2,000 metric tons, with 2 meters of cryogenic radiation shielding and 5 tesla magnets.
[13] Parameters: Parameters: In July 2019, Jeff Babione – vice president and general manager of Skunk Works[17] – stated: "This year we are constructing another reactor – T5 – which will be a significantly larger and more powerful reactor than our T4, We are current scheduled to have that go online towards the end of this year, so that will be another significant leap in capability and towards demonstrating that the physics underlining our concept works.
According to Cowley, experience building other fusion reactors suggests that when machine size is doubled one achieves 8 times improvement in heat confinement, that is how much of the extremely high temperatures needed for the fusion reaction can be contained without eg.
